I’m listening to the Kaiser/Families USA/NFIB breakfast with Nancy DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform. Some people think health reform is boring. Au contraire. There’s a lot of sharp gallows humor!
The speaker from Kaiser — I didn’t catch his name — put up a graph tracking the time elapsed between presidents making a go at health care reform. The average was 19.5 years. If we don’t succeed this time, he said, “we may be waiting awhile.” In reply to this, Ron Pollack, director of Families USA, dryly recalled an observation a friend made to him. “Health reform,” the friend said, “is like the cicadas. It comes out every 17 years or so. Makes a lot of noise. And then goes away.”
