The following is from a liberal op-ed by E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, but this part I think is to the point and valid, and deserves to be thought about:



"At the heart of the fight between Republicans and Democrats is an honest disagreement over the role of federal government. The Republicans don't want our national government to play a major role in solving the core problems of our health-care system. They insist that more federal action will simply make things worse. (Although they then turn around and criticize any cuts President Obama proposes in Medicare, which, last I looked, is a federal government program). The GOP's suggestions are small because they don't want government to do much. The party's main health-care proposal would spend $61 billion over 10 years -- in other words, an average of $6 billion a year -- and cover an additional 3 million people, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The amounts they propose are a smidgen compared to the value of the tax cuts the Republicans voted for during the Bush years.

And the truth is that if using the federal government to solve some of the problems in the health-care system had been a priority for Republicans, they could have passed something when they controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. They chose not to.

Obama and the Democrats, on the other hand, believe that the federal government must take large steps to repair a broken health-care system. The proposal the president put on the table this week would spend $950 billion over 10 years to insure 31 million people.

If both sides are honest about this core difference, they probably won't reach agreement, but at least Americans will know why we are having this fight. In fact, it's absurd to expect sudden compromise from two parties so far apart philosophically and so far away from each other in how much they want to do. Does anyone really think they can, say, split the difference between $950 billion and $61 billion? "