Jane:

Scarecrow is the person I look to in order to tell me whether something is going to be workable or not. If he says “this won’t work,” I listen to him.

We want to get something we can build out and achieve single payer. The day that becomes unworkable, and it’s just a ton of money pumped in to reinforce a bad system, that’s when I’m ready to pull the plug.

More health care defeatism from Ezra Klein

Atul Gawande has a nicely turned health reform piece in this week's New Yorker that makes quite a few useful points but ultimately says surprisingly little. His thesis statement is simple enough: Countries do best to build atop what they have. He presents this as a rejection of the single payer utopians on the left and the free market ideologues on the right.

Precisely why is this utopian?

Yahoo News

I have no idea what makes Big Media Matt think that he is a better judge of what is politically practical than the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Chair of the House Finance Committee, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and 90 other members of the House of Representatives to say nothing of hundreds of candidates for office at the state and federal level. But I guess that is the sort of arrogance you need as an apprentice pundit.