There's nothing like the yellow, dying grass on the other side of the fence to make you appreciate what you already have. In that spirit, and with the prospect of Obamacare looming, a new Gallup poll shows that fully 40 percent of Americans now rate their health care as "excellent," the highest tally registered by Gallup in the past decade. And by a margin of greater than 5 to 1 (82 to 16 percent) Americans now rate their health care as "excellent" or "good" rather than "fair" or "poor" (with only 4 percent describing their care as "poor").

One of the great myths about American society is that our lack of a "universal" health plan harms our competitiveness. The masters of this refrain, of course, are the American automakers. Years before driving themselves into bankruptcy and the unwelcoming arms of their new owners, the American taxpayers, they used to claim that they spent up to $1,600 per car on health care. This was more than they spent on steel, and a multiple of what they claimed their foreign competitors spent. Yet we don't hear Mark Zuckerberg complaining that Facebook's health care costs are preventing him from competing against foreign social-media businesses.

Providing a strong indication of how personal, accessible, understandable, user-friendly, customer-service-oriented, and not at all posthuman your health care would be under Obamacare, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has just released a 347-page, 118,072-word "rule" to implement parts of Obamacare affecting Medicare Advantage and the Medicare prescription drug benefit program. In comparison, the entire United States Constitution, including all 27 amendments, contains 7,640 words. So the "rule" is more than 15 times as long as the Constitution.

The recently released draft proposal from the federal debt commission offers some useful ideas for reducing runaway federal spending on health care. Even a committee comprising two-thirds Democrats is suggesting tort reform to curb wasteful malpractice lawsuits (Obamacare would do nothing about these), which the CBO says would save $64 billion in federal spending by the end of 2020 – in addition to what it would save Americans as a whole in lowered health costs, as doctors wouldn't feel so compelled to practice wasteful defensive medicine. And the committee's suggestion to increase nominal Medicaid co-pays would save an estimated $15 billion – and probably more so, as beneficiaries would then have at least some additional skin in the game.

In the summer of 2009, Bill Kristol urged Republicans not to try to improve Obamacare but to "kill it." That advice is equally trenchant today.

The November Kaiser Health Tracking Poll shows that President Obama's health care overhaul has now hit a lower level of popularity than at any previous time in his presidency. Kaiser writes, "Just a quarter of the public (25 percent) now says they expect their own families to be better off under the health reform law, which is the lowest share since KFF [Kaiser Family Foundation] began tracking this question." Kaiser notes that it began tracking the question in February of 2009, just weeks after President Obama's inauguration. 

Does anyone think that homes, cars, groceries, clothing, etc., would be more affordable if the government instituted a “single-payer” system and exercised it’s monopsony power, hiding the actual prices from consumers?

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors has voted to ban toys and similar marketing inducements for kids' menus.