Print edition: 
President Obama's six-hour TV show on health care reform produced no discernible change in the positions of the two parties. But it may have made passage of the Democratic bill by a simple majority more acceptable to voters.
Republicans insist they can make the current system work by national tort reform — which they say will save big money by eliminating large jury awards and defensive medicine — and by interstate sale of health insurance with the magical savings inevitable from competition. Oh, if it were so.
Democrats want to increase the number of Americans with insurance, with all the complications that ensue. Mandates that individuals and employers purchase insurance, government subsidies to help pay premiums, defined benefits and "guaranteed issue" — and all of it to be done by commercial health insurers.
Democrats have found that when they push on the balloon in one place — for example, forcing for-profit insurance companies to insure those with pre-existing conditions — it bulges in another.
So it's a mess and will be until our president and Congress realize that today's advanced medical care should be provided privately but paid for and administered publicly, which every other nation like ours discovered long ago.
Other industrialized democracies have universal coverage, better health and longer lives at about half the price we are paying. According to the World Health Organization, we are 34th, and we are not about to make a move toward better health, only toward producing more health industry multimillionaires and billionaires.
The New York-based Commonwealth Fund tells us where we are in health care expenditures, where we are going, and where we could be if we had passed previously proposed health care reform legislation. The New York Times summarized the findings Sunday.
The "What Might Have Been" chart begins with health care spending at 5 percent of the gross domestic product in 1960. If our health care expenditures had increased at the same rate as the median national health expenses in 30 industrialized nations, they would have been 8.9 percent of GDP in 2005, not the 15.9 percent we spent that year.
If we had passed President Nixon's bill in 1973, which I co-sponsored as a member of Congress, we would be spending 10.7 percent of our GDP this year for universal coverage, not the 17.7 percent we are spending for a system that leaves about 45 million people uninsured.
If we had passed President Clinton's bill just 16 years ago, the Commonwealth study calculates, we would be at 14.2 percent of GDP, about 20 percent or half a trillion dollars less than we are spending today.
Today an average American family's health insurance costs about $13,000, 18 percent of median household income. In 2020, at present rates of increase, families will be spending 24 percent of median household income for health care — leaving little money for anything else.
Obviously, government should act, and Obama and Congress are on the verge of passing major health care legislation. They are succeeding where many others have failed.
How? By validating — not changing — our country's broken health care system, with its uninsured, private insurers, waste, inadequacies, cost-shifting and, above all, its profits.
If you haven't noticed, the health care industry's 4,500 Washington, D.C., lobbyists remain in their offices and clubs. Their work is complete. No law, they win. The Obama law, they win.
