If you read this blog, you probably want to know the true state of play in the health care reform debate.

Well, join the club. After yet another a round of phone calls on Friday, I've become convinced that nobody really knows for sure.

In their letter to President Obama on his proposed health care summit, John Boehner and Eric Cantor ask, Will the President include in this discussion congressional Democrats who have opposed the House and Senate health care bills?

At a fundraiser last night, President Obama laid out his vision for health care reform. This is interesting:

Now that's more like it.

President Obama on Wednesday addressed a meeting of Senate Democrats. It wasn't nearly as dramatic as his visit to a House Republican retreat last week. The question-and-answer period mostly featured vulnerable Democrats, like Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln, who used the opportunity to grandstand about the perils of liberalism and importance of fiscal discipline--or, at least, their own very curious brand of it. But Obama used the occasion to send another strong message about health care reform--and the need to push ahead with comprehensive reform, despite the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat.

You look at an issue right now like health care.  So many of us campaigned on the idea that we were going to change this health care system.  So many of us looked people in the eye who had been denied because of a preexisting condition, or just didn't have health insurance at all, or small business owners in our communities who told us that their premiums had gone up 25 percent or 30 percent.  And we said we were going to change it.
 
Well, here we are with a chance to change it.  And all of you put extraordinary work last year into making serious changes that would not only reform the insurance industry, not only cover 30 million Americans, but would also bend the cost curve, and save a trillion dollars on our deficits, according to the Congressional Budget Office.  There's a direct link between the work that you guys did on that and the reason that you got into public office in the first place.
 
And so as we think about moving forward, I hope we don't lose sight of why we're here.  We've got to finish the job on health care.

Obama was doing more than appealing to the senators' sense of moral obligation, I think.

Mark Penn has a column in the Huffington Post urging -- well, you know the kinds of things Mark Penn urges. Be nice to big business. Focus on tiny, incremental steps. It's another reminder how lucky we are that his candidate lost the primary and this man isn't advising the president. I found this bit of advice especially amusing:

I've been saying for a while now that most of the approve/disapprove polls on health care convey a highly misleading impression, since they combine opposition from the left and right:

Many people think the right has won the health care debate, since polls show that narrow but stable majorities of Americans disapprove of Obama’s health care plan. The problem with this gauge is that it lumps together Obama’s critics from the right with those from the left.

Liberals frustrated with the decision to drop a public option are now attacking a core principle of health care reform: the individual mandate. Greg Sargent and Ben Smith quote Jim Dean, brother of Howard, in an e-mail that just went out to Democracy for America:

Senate leaders are all over Washington claiming they finally have a healthcare reform bill they can pass, as long as they remove the public option. After all, they say that even without a public option, the bill still "covers" 30 million more Americans.

What they are actually talking about is something called the "individual mandate." That's a section of the law that requires every single American buy health insurance or break the law and face penalties and fines. So, the bill doesn't actually "cover" 30 million more Americans--instead it makes them criminals if they don't buy insurance from the same companies that got us into this mess.

Well, ok, I suppose that's true in a technical sense. But the people making (and listening) to this argument should know that it's equally true of several universal coverage systems abroad.

Around midnight on July 16, New York Times chief political correspondent Adam Nagourney received a terse e-mail from Barack Obama’s press office. The campaign was irked by the Times’ latest poll and Nagourney and Megan Thee’s accompanying front-page piece titled “Poll Finds Obama Isn’t Closing Divide on Race,” which was running in the morning’s paper. Nagourney answered the query, the substance of which he says was minor, and went to bed, thinking the matter resolved.