To boil it down, it does four things, and I’m putting them in order of importance and power. First, the coverage expansions and subsidies. Second, the insurance market reform. Third, cost containment. And fourth, there's a prevention component. And if you wanted to go a bit more concrete, what it does is cover about 32 million people, reforms insurance and makes a start on cost containment, while, according to CBO, decreasing the deficit and saving a trillion dollars.

There are some things it doesn’t do. It doesn’t cover everyone. It comes reasonably close. It helps an awful lot of people pay their bills, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter the cost curve. Instead, it makes a start on altering that cost curve. It throws most of the best ideas on the table, but we don’t know which will work and which won’t. It doesn’t change how most Americans get their health care now. That was, of course, by design: The lesson of the Clinton effort was that the third rail of health-care reform was people’s current arrangements. And while some of the bill starts soon, some of it doesn’t start for several years. If you go to 15,000 feet, I guess I would say it is centrist legislation leaning a little bit left.