While politicians hammer out the details of healthcare reform legislation and debate some of the more “controversial issues” (which I put in quotes because they shouldn’t be as controversial as they are) surrounding healthcare reform, the administration is busy doing things that everyone should be able to happy about.  Of course good news doesn’t draw as many readers as doom and gloom so its easy to miss some of these developments if you’re just clicking through a news website or taking in a bit of CNN, so I’ve highlighted a couple of the recent positive developments after the jump.

Key Senator, White House Strike Deal With Drug Industry for Health Coverage

First up is an article from several weeks ago.  And I apologize for using partisan news sources but I’ve got one from each side of the aisle so I guess it balances out.  Basically, Senator Max Baucus was able to negotiate a deal with the Pharmaceutical industry whereby they will eat some of the cost of drug coverage for seniors on medicare who make less than 80-85,000 per year.  They’re expecting to subsidize about 80 billion dollars worth of care over the course of the next ten years.  Not too shabby.

Biden, Hospital Leaders Announce Pact To Help Cover Uninsured

Next up is an article from today.  Joe Biden announced that the nation’s hospitals had agreed to comp 155 billion dollars worth of medicare and medicaid care over the course of the next ten years.  Nice.

These developments, along with the pledge from leaders of the healthcare industry a few months back (Titans of Healthcare Pledge to Reduce Healthcare Costs) are good news for members of congress as they attempt to draft legislation that is “budget neutral”, they’re good news for the country since healthcare costs are the primary drivers of our dismal deficit projections, and its good news for average Americans, who for some time now have been dealing with healthcare costs that are rising at more than three times the rate of their wages.

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Well I’m a little late to the game on this one but for those of you who missed it, here’s Obama’s speech to the joint session of congress delivered tuesday night.  It was a great speech, which I thought was surprisingly informative, with a fair amount of detail.  He struck a more hopeful tone than he has in the past, which is probably what we need, and what we are ready for.  I was surprised at how many of his statements brought the Republican legislators in the room to their feet.  Of course its in the bizarre format of all Presidential speeches to congress, where everyone claps after every other sentence.  If you don’t want to deal with all of that then you can just read the transcript here.   

One thing that struck me during this talk, but which I’d like to develop further in the future, is how similar all of our values are in America.  I think, as much as political pundits like to portray political differences as a war of values, in most cases we all have very similar basic values and goals, just different ideas about how to go about achieving those things.  Obama touched on values a lot in this speech and when he was talking about those things was there really much there for any of us to disagree with?  If there are some conservatives in the audience maybe they can let us know in the comments.

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