The problem with health care is this: Health care is enormously important to people. When you tell them that you’re going to extend health care to people who don’t now have it, they don’t see how you can do that without hurting them. So I think he underestimated, as did Clinton, the sensitivity of people to what they see as an effort to make them share the health care with poor people.
— From the epic New York Magazine interview with Barney Frank. Frank is a complete and total quip machine. The article is even better if you imagine every reply in a strong Boston accent.

A good thing to read on a night where I talked about the Health Care system with Stu for a half hour. There is nothing human involved in the system of insurance. It makes no sense that you need a job to get access to health care when plenty of people don’t have jobs because American jobs can’t afford to pay for employees’ health insurance. It makes no sense that Stu has to pay extra money that isn’t covered by his (very good) insurance (the price we pay to live in this stupid upstate city) since he was in the hospital in Massachusetts at Christmastime. The American Health Care system is like a mad bureaucratic fantasy from the imagination of Terry Gilliam and Tom Stoppard.