First Edition: January 28, 2010

It's the morning after the State of the Union address. What's the state of health reform?

Obama On Health Care: What A Difference A Year Makes In his first State of the Union speech, President Obama called on Congress to get health reform "done." While he acknowledged obstacles, his call for health reform was just as impassioned as his first address to a joint session of Congress 11 months ago. Kaiser Health News provides excerpts from both speeches (Kaiser Health News).

KHN Column: Lessons From Massachusetts: Campaigning Beats Governing Into Submission, Again In this Kaiser Health News column, Austin Frakt and Steve Pizer write: "Legislators should gather together to pass health reform legislation, even with all the structural impediments to governing created by our separation of powers and frequent elections" (Kaiser Health News).

First State Of The Union Speech By President Obama: 'We Face A Deficit Of Trust' President Obama delivered an urgent plea for unity on Wednesday night during his first State of the Union address, seeking to recapture the energy that propelled him into office and to reverse his party's trajectory after a series of recent setbacks (The Washington Post).

Obama Speech Emphasizes Jobs, And The Job He's Done Warning that the nation had developed a "deficit of trust" in government, President Obama on Wednesday promised to put the public's top concerns -- jobs and the economy -- at the center of his second year in office while continuing to press for the rest of his stalled agenda (Lose Angeles Times).

Health Care Gives Way To Economy And Jobs President Obama drew sustained laughter from Congress, especially Democrats, on Wednesday when he declared in his State of the Union speech that "by now it should be fairly obvious that I didn't take on health care because it was good politics" (The New York Times).

Obama Makes Strong Appeal For Major Healthcare Reform In His Address President Barack issued a clear defense of the comprehensive healthcare reform bills pending in Congress, vowing to keep pushing the legislation and asking lawmakers not to abandon the effort (The Hill).

Obama Bucks Up Democrats On Health Care Some congressional Democrats are seizing on President Barack Obama's fresh call for a sweeping health care overhaul as a message to show resolve and get the legislation done. Yet doubters remain (The Associated Press).

State Of Health Reform: Still Grim With Democrats in Congress looking for a way out of the health care impasse, President Barack Obama offered them words of encouragement but little else - no concrete plan to jump-start progress on a bill, no timeline for getting it done and no guidance on what he wants to see in his one-time top legislative initiative (Politico).

Nancy Pelosi Floats Two-Track Health Reform House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday floated the idea of a two-track plan for health care reform — with Congress pursuing easier-to-pass incremental changes now and comprehensive reform later (Politico).

Congress Wants Details About Obama's Healthcare Reform Deals In an unusual bipartisan move, Rep. Henry Waxman (D) of California joined Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce panel Wednesday in a call for the Obama White House to produce documents and details on the deals cut with industry groups on healthcare reform (The Christian Science Monitor).

Analysis: Poor Ratings Persist For 1 In 5 U.S. Nursing Homes More than a quarter-million patients live in homes given another set of low scores within the past year, according to data released today by Medicare, which first released the star ratings of the nation's nursing homes in late 2008 (USA Today).

Louisiana Wins Fight For Hospital Ending one of the longest-running disputes left by Hurricane Katrina, a federal arbitration panel ruled Wednesday that Louisiana would receive $474.8 million — nearly all it had requested — to pay for the replacement of Charity Hospital in New Orleans, which has been closed since the storm (The New York Times).