“Health care represents one-sixth of the US economy, and some of the most important, personal and private decisions in people’s lives. Reform will affect everything from jobs to what treatments your doctor can prescribe. It will cost well over $1 trillion over the next 10 years, more beyond that, and impose enormous costs on the economy and higher taxes on millions of Americans. If we get health-care reform wrong, it won’t be easy to go back and fix it. Yes, as Chairman Rangel says, lives are at stake. But even if health-care reform passed tomorrow, most provisions of the bill won’t go into effect until 2013. And, if lives are at stake, isn’t that all the more reason why Congress should, say, read the bill? Debate it? Get it right?” (07/27/09)