*New support for Obamacare

Not that good sense should have anything to do with the health care debate, but it just so happens that dozens of prominent health economists and other policy experts, including a bunch from UCLA, have released a letter today that supports President Obama's new proposal.

We commend the President's pursuit of bipartisan solutions. Yet the summit made plain that it is now time to move decisively and quickly to enact comprehensive reform. We believe that the only workable process at this point is to use the President's proposal to finish the job. After long debate, the House and Senate have passed two similar bills that do crucial things to improve U.S. health care.

Alas, those supporting Obama don't need convincing and those opposed are beyond hope (Economix has the full letter). A brief exchange on NPR the other day captured the shameless Republican dishonesty:

Senator LAMAR ALEXANDER (Republican, Tennessee): The White House seems to be obsessed with this idea that a bunch of professors sitting around a table can come up with a comprehensive bill and change one-seventh of the American economy all at once. We're not that smart. We don't do comprehensive that well.

HORSLEY: Uwe Reinhardt admits to being a Princeton College professor. He's also one of the country's leading health care economists.

Professor UWE REINHARDT (Princeton College): What's wrong with professors? They, too, can think, by the way - not only senators.

*Good summation on Thursday's health care summit from the New Yorker's James Surowiecki:

The lack of any real progress was the result of a simple fact: there's an unbridgeable chasm between what Democrats and Republicans want health-insurance reform to do. For Republicans, the current health-insurance system works reasonably well--in their minds, it's a key part of what they kept referring to as "the best health-care system in the world"--and therefore whatever changes need to be should be small. The Republicans kept using the word "incremental" to describe their proposed changes, but this is really a red herring, in the sense that it implies that their ultimate goal is to dramatically revamp the current health-insurance system, and that they simply want to do so more slowly than Democrats. That's not accurate: the Republicans are reasonably satisfied with what's currently in place. The fact that tens of millions of Americans don't have health insurance is not, in their mind, an issue that government should be trying to solve--at least not if it will cost any real money.