Recommended: The Hardest Call

As usual, David Brooks has about as even-handed and dispassionate an assessment of the current health care debate as anyone I can find. His piece The Hardest Call in today's New York Times is an excellent summary of the fundamental pros and cons of passing the current health care bill.

Of course, the bill currently being debated in the Senate is not the real bill. The real bill that will be voted upon will be the "manager's amendment" which Harry Reid and a few others have been working on privately and will present today or tomorrow, and which most of the Senate has not even seen. So in fact all the contentions public debate has been largely a sham, since it hasn't been about the bill that will come up for vote. Moreover, if Reid holds to his schedule of getting a vote next week before Christmas, most of the Senators voting will not have had time to read through the thousand or so pages of the final bill, and will in essence be voting blind.