This was the one low point of the speech for me. Obama threw the thugs a bone. It's not the bone-throwing that bothers me but that he lent legitimacy to a thoroughly bogus claim.

The Republicans have been running with this bullshit argument that malpractice insurance premiums and/or payouts are what have been causing health care costs to rise. In fact, the combined cost of malpractice premiums and malpractice losses (verdicts, settlements, legal fees, etc.) represent less than 2% of the cost of health care in the U.S. And, malpractice premiums have dropped for the last two decades and have stayed below 1% of total health care costs the whole time.

The right thing to do is to tell the Republicans they're wrong, shove some cold hard facts in their faces, and promise them nothing. Playing along with these dimwits is, if nothing else, an unnecessary distraction. And, how will they ever learn anything if you let the dunces get away with this crap?

Since the final bill will undoubtedly contain some Republican ideas, I would like Obama to announce that is sufficiently bipartisan by definition already, and make no further efforts to court actual Republican votes.

The call by the GOP: to start over is totally bogus and they know it. They try and make it sound like they were absent during all the committee debates, which is a lie. Their call to start over is their only hope, but it is a delay tactic and dead on arrival.

As Senator McCaskill (MO)pointed out during August, her state implemented tort reform on malpractice...no reduction in insurance premiums and the most recent statistics I could find are that the spending in Medicare has not decline as a result of this tort reform.

We all see BIG Headlines when a medical malpractice case is resolved at trial, but there is no apparent data to support the idea of tort reform would doing anything but decrease physician costs.