At a recent townhall meeting, Barney Franks slaps the hand of a crazy who had just bumped right up against Godwin's Law.

Health insurance in Massachusetts is looked at as something of a canary for the rest of the country. This New York Times article discusses some of the challenges facing and accomplishments achieved by the 2006 Massachusetts law requiring health insurance for residents.

They want a new payment method that rewards prevention and the effective control of chronic disease, instead of the current system, which pays according to the quantity of care provided.

But...then that would make too much sense, wouldn't it? Get it done, Deval.

So posting for the next couple days will either be light or unintelligible (or possibly just pre-written movie reviews). I doubt my experience will be very novel, but I'm looking forward to a weekend of movies and chocolate vanilla cherry milkshakes (vanilla ice cream, milk, chocolate syrup, cherries, blend, repeat).

I'm going to try to document the experience somehow, though, and I'll let you know if my drugged out ramblings are noteworthy in any way.

Clay Risen makes a point about health care in Tennessee that goes just as well for Rhode Island:

But focusing on Bredesen solely as a slash-and-burn free-marketeer misses the real nature of Tennessee politics and, I think, a strong argument for a national health care system. Tennessee had a great, if bloated, system in need of reform, not gutting. But the sharp rightward turn in state political sentiment in the 1990s--a turn that, amazingly, continues to gain speed today--means that any effort to raise revenue is a non-starter, and that the only acceptable reform is to eviscerate the system. It's a case in point for the downside to state-level experimentation, and evidence that, at least in conservative states, voters are willing to move backwards, not forwards. That's no way to build a better health-care system.