Why is Energy and Commerce in charge of writing health care legislation?

One can only imagine, where would we BE - how much better the country would have been all these years - if we'd passed that bill in 1994?

Incremental is fine.

Step 1) Insure everyone who isn't insured with Medicare.
Step 2) Insure everyone who becomes uninsured.
Step 3) Open plan so employed people with crummy health plans can opt out and join Medicare instead.
Step 4) Private insurance voluntarily realizes they need to revamp as an add-on to Medicare for high cost-low benefit medical treatments and elective options (Laser eye surgery, tooth whitening, chiropractic)

If we did do it that way, would it be so bad?

Why is Energy and Commerce in charge of writing health care legislation?

Titles of committees are convenient names; their job is defined by their jurisdiction. The jurisdiction of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the 111th Congress includes (from the committee website):

(1) National energy policy generally.
(2) Health and health facilities (except health care supported by payroll deductions).
(3) Interstate and foreign commerce generally.
(4) Consumer affairs and consumer protection.
(5) Exploration, production, storage, supply, marketing, pricing, and regulation of energy resources, including all fossil fuels, solar energy, and other unconventional or renewable energy resources.
(6) Interstate energy compacts.
(7) Conservation of energy resources.
(8) Energy information generally.
(9) The generation and marketing of power (except by federally chartered or Federal regional power marketing authorities); reliability and interstate transmission of, and ratemaking for, all power; and siting of generation facilities (except the installation of interconnections between Government waterpower projects).
(10) General management of the Department of Energy and management and all functions of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
(11) Biomedical research and development.
(12) Public health and quarantine.
(13) Regulation of the domestic nuclear energy industry, including regulation of research and development reactors and nuclear regulatory research.
(14) Regulation of interstate and foreign communications.
(15) Travel and tourism.

The committee shall have the same jurisdiction with respect to regulation of nuclear facilities and of use of nuclear energy as it has with respect to regulation of nonnuclear facilities and of use of nonnuclear energy.

Could it be that even the good guys are missing the most important point? All the technical impacts of this or that seem to pale in comparison to the deep, deep sense of pessimism that pervades the economy and confounds typical solutions to generate more spending.

Here's a basic premise: our general sense of economic decline, and the huge secular decline of consumer and investor confidence, has closely tracked the process Jacob Hacker has described as “the Great Risk Shift.� No stimulus package will work satisfactorily for long term improvement unless it creates high confidence that the steps taken will begin fundamentally reversing the Great Risk Shift. The rebates earlier in 2008 had no effect of any significance because it was a one-shot gimmick that obviously would make no dent whatsoever in the Great Risk Shift.

Consumer and investor confidence needs a genuine paradigm shift. Job creation needs to pursue activities with permanent value to society in order to convince people they are likely to last a decade or a generation; tax reductions need to be a fundamental and permanent re-allocation of the tax burden away from ordinary Americans (even if they are relatively modest change such as Obama was proposing in the campaign) because flattening taxes has been a key aspect of the Great Risk Shift; new regulations must be designed to protect permanently whatever wealth ordinary Americans have accumulated from the charlatans who took advantage of de-regulation; labor must be strengthened in fundamental ways, since we now know that weakening labor was a key part of the Great Risk Shift, and workers need to be able to participate in their own betterment to make sure that is actually the result.;

At the core, however, reversing the Great Risk Shift requires a universal health insurance plan that protects all Americans forever and ever against financial catastrophe from a health problem. Health insurance reform is more than a matter of decency and fairness. It is economic policy – a necessary condition for restoring the national confidence eroded (to put it charitably) by the Great Risk Shift.

Efforts to promote more spending will at least partly fall flat unless Americans see that Obama is truly steering the Titanic in another direction. Nobody's going to let loose until confidence indexes stop hovering around 50 or less (less than half of the good Clinton years), and only a strong new direction has a chance of doing that.