Next Tuesday will see the President featuring healthcare in his State of the Union address. He'll be calling for malpractice reform, increased use of HSAs (health savings accounts) and other tax-free health spending, and greater transparency in healthcare pricing. As with anything in politics, it's conjecture as to how much of his proposed agenda will get through.
Raising healthcare is tricky while there are still plenty of teething troubles with the Medicare Part D rollout, but there is clearly a growing appetite in the nation to do something about the healthcare crisis. However, in some ways the Bush administration is running behind America's employers, which have fast been reducing the richness of the benefits they provide to employees, and in many cases have stopped providing those benefits altogether. Fewer than 60 percent of Americans now get insurance from an employer, down dramatically in the last five years. There is certainly no political consensus on how to deal with this, so the healthcare system is going to have to survive in the situation it finds itself in for several more years. - Matthew