Are congressional Democrats overreaching beyond the votes they have in the Senate for health care reform?
I think we have to acknowledge that the way that this debate is going is essentially the way that a democracy like ours has to conduct this kind of debate. Every political party has built in its DNA, when they’ve been in the wilderness for a while, that when they come back, they have to overreach. In 1994, when Republicans had been out of power for a long time, a short time later we shut the government down, and the Democratic Party and many others thought that was overreaching. When [the Democrats] got elected, they piled it all into one basket. There’s really no reason to think they will stop until they’ve been repelled by the public. I think the bills we saw in the House are a reflection of that, and what we’re seeing now is a recalibration. I put the scenarios into four buckets. One extreme would be something like the House bill passing. I’d put that at 5 percent. Another possibility would be nothing happening, and I’d put that at a relatively low number. The third bucket I would d
