Earlier this year, Dr. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, warned about what she called “the futility of piecemeal tinkering.”

Obama and the Democrats did not heed her warning.

Earlier this week, the most liberal of the Democrats tinkering plans — Senator Kennedy’s — went up in smoke when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the Kennedy plan would cost $1 trillion over ten years and still leave 37 million Americans uninsured.