No one will ever get any positive credit for the economy or the war. Might as well wait for Godot.

Of course there's no mention of single-payer. That would be a death knell for any reform at all. So many people are so vocally opposed to it that having the government touch health care at all sends them into a tizzy, god forbid that the government do something useful in that space. So I chalk that up to simple pragmatism.

The only thing I require from this is that all Americans have basic health insurance. I want them to be able to go to the doctor when they get sick. I want them to not have to worry about whether they can afford medicine or not. If that involves using existing insurance companies, fine. I don't really care. They do a reasonable enough job now for those of us lucky enough to be able to afford it. (Not that there's not room for improvement.)

The rest of the stuff, as far as I'm concerned, is icing. Yeah, I'd prefer to get rid of the administrivia with a single-payer system. I'd certainly like to see some more oversight of insurance so that people aren't rejected for things they should be covered for. I'd like to see an effort to reduce duplicated effort and general waste. I'd like to see doctors be able to practice medicine and not be paper-pushers. And most of those things (barring the single-payer system) are being addressed in the current proposals.

The insurance and pharmaceutical industries are certainly being deferred to to some extent, but those industries employ a lot of people, and the last thing we need to do in this economy is put more people in danger of losing their jobs. I don't relish the idea of the duplicated effort involved in having all these companies doing the same thing, but that duplicated effort does employ people. I'd be happier about it if it were hundreds of small companies rather than a handful of huge ones, but there's still some benefit in having redundancy, as far as employment goes. I also don't relish the thought of lining the pockets of the already superwealthy with taxpayer money, but if that's what it takes to get healthcare to everyone and avoid losing more jobs, tell me who to make my check out to.