Come on, now. The d and s are adjacent on the keyboard. It was just a typo.

That said . . . I'm have my doubts that the Brown win had much to do with the health care legislation. Massachusetts is still an overwhelmingly liberal state. For a Democrat NOT to win Kennedy's seat, there had to be a deep revulsion to that particular Democrat, and it looks like that became so with Coakley.

The polls repeated show that Pat is right, though. A majority of people believe (or have been convinced) that they don't want nationalized health care. And people have seen through the facade of the currently-proposed legislation which (according to both Newsweek and The Economist) will do next-to-nothing to reduce costs and thus will have to violate Obama's promise to not approve any health care legislation that adds to the deficit.

The tragedy in this is that the USA still spends an outsized portion of its wealth on health care while getting mediocre results.

Pat, the costs that result from this are one of the most significant drags on competitiveness of American business (along with the corporate tax rate). Something has to be done so I don't think Brown's win is anything about which to gloat.

In the end, I think Americans are still to enamored of expensive surgical and high tech medical fixes. Instead, we have to do more preventative care, eat better, exercise more, and (yes) ration some care to seniors unless they can pay. I don't see any other way out.

I'd still like to see some sort of bill that would guarantee universal basic (preventive) health care. That would, I believe, pay for itself.