Health care news and opinion

Politico – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her members Friday to brace themselves for a climactic health care vote as early as next week, warning them to clear their schedules for next weekend and promising to stay in session until the landmark vote, people present said afterwards.

The Atlantic Monthly – When the House voted on health care in November, one Republican, Louisiana Rep. Joseph Cao, supported it. If the House passes health care reform a second time, House Minority Leader John Boehner says, it will be without any support from Republicans.

TPM – President Obama will delay his trip to Indonesia and Australia by several days to see health care reform over the finish line, the White House announced today. An aide confirmed the president won’t leave March 18 as planned and instead will stay with the expectation the House will be voting on the Senate health care bill.

Ezra Klein (The Washington Post) – I’ve been a bit annoyed by the convention of referring to the health-care bill’s 10-year cost rather than its annual cost. We don’t talk about very much in terms of 10-year costs, and so people don’t have much context for it. So I asked crack intern Dylan Matthews to build a crude comparison of what various government programs are projected to cost in 2015 (chosen because health-care reform doesn’t kick off until 2014, and I wanted to give it a year to get up and running). Projections are always iffy, but this is just to get an idea of the relative size of different programs. Ready for it?

Health Insurance Resource Center – As politicians go round and round talking about how health reform legislation will increase or decrease the deficit, or how a win on this bill will help or hurt Democrats, I think it’s worth mentioning again that there’s one really huge number that matters: 62.

MarketWatch – Senate Democrats are planning to use the legislative process known as reconciliation to finish an overhaul of the U.S. health-care system, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told his Republican counterpart on Thursday.

The New York Times – Health reform is back from the dead. Many Democrats have realized that their electoral prospects will be better if they can point to a real accomplishment. Polling on reform – which was never as negative as portrayed – shows signs of improving. And I’ve been really impressed by the passion and energy of this guy Barack Obama. Where was he last year?

US News & World Report – Health insurance is supposed to protect. But what happens when it doesn’t? Carla Sebesta has been finding out the hard way.

The Hill – More than two dozen Democrats are expected to vote against the healthcare reform bill that will hit the House floor in the coming weeks.

Ezra Klein (The Washington Post) – That graph is from Pollster.com. It gets even tighter if you eliminate the conservative-leaning Rasmussen poll, whose founder wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday explaining that the president can’t make health-care reform popular because voters believe all sorts of untrue things about it.