In the latest issue of dead-tree TIME, our colleague Michael Grunwald tells us how the Mayo Clinic manages to offer better health care and spend less money at the same time.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein has gotten hold of an outline of the health care reform bill that the Senate Finance Committee is working on. It gives a clue to their direction, although it is certain to change–perhaps substantially–between now and the time the committee begins formally drafting the bill after the July Fourth recess. [...]

Today’s Pentagon news briefing included a discussion of the influence of social networking in general and Twitter in particular. We learned that the Secretary of Defense doesn’t have a clue how to Tweet, but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs does: H/T: The C-SPAN Video Library (By the way, you can follow Admiral Mullen here.) [...]

Drudge is in a twist. Huffington Post is atwitter. The last president, George W. Bush, we are told, “slams” and “attacks” the current president. Big news, right? Especially big because Bush has been doing such a good job of not pulling a Cheney up to now. But once we click through the headlines, what do [...]

Both the NYT/CBS and Wall Street Journal/NBC polls out today have produced some “honeymoon is over” headlines. But buried in the WSJ/NBC poll is this bit of data that is of interest to those of us following the health care debate. Asked whether a health care overhaul should give people a choice of both private [...]

My reporting from Iran. A note on communications: Several commenters have asked if I was prevented from blogging while I was in Iraq. The answer is yes and no. The problems were mostly technical: the wireless system in my hotel was so slow I was unable to open Word Press. The one time I did [...]

All those promises of speedy action on health care reform legislation are starting to look a lot more dubious in the two Senate committees that have major jurisdiction. This week has been a reality check, thanks to some early estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. Here’s a look at where things stand. UPDATE: At Kaiser [...]

Here’s a story from me about the plethora of G.O.P. alternative health care proposals. As I was about to blog this House Minority Leader John Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steel, having read my story, emailed to remind me that their plans have no less detail than the Dems’ plans at this point. Fair enough — Karen [...]

Forget what the CNBC squawkers tells you. We are not out of the woods yet. Economic measures continue to track remarkably closesly with the downturn in 1929, the start of the Great Depression. These charts, by Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley and Kevin O’Rourke of Trinity College, Dublin, tell the story. [...]