Obama Health Care Reform is at a Tipping Point. For Europe, too. [EN]

The historical struggle in Washington about Health Care Reform went mostly under the horizon of the European mainstream press. 

One understands why. The procedure got stuck, last autumn, in the dark alleyways of US decision-making on the federal level. 
For it is complicated to understand, why a Senate and a House of Representatives, both with a comfortable 50%+ majority of Democrats, cannot agree on a set of arrangements that are, since dozens of years, part of the civilization of most EU countries: Collective insurance, guaranteeing access to health care for every citizen.

Most European countries have adopted a mixed system, where state guarantees and tax measures facilitate commercial insurance companies as well as non-profit co-operatives in providing basic health care to every citizen (and, in many instances: even to non-citizen inhabitants). [...]

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A Wise Man Sets the Course For Europe [EN]

The newly elected European Council President Herman van Rompuy's historical intervention at the Bruges European Academy on March 6 did not get the attention it deserves.

Van Rompuy is very well aware of his powerlessness. He was chosen by the Sarkozies, the Merkels and the Browns just because of his apparent lack of sex-appeal and supposed lack of ambition, over candidates like Holland's J.P.Balkenende or Letlands former president.

One thing is sure, read my lips, the man is terribly UNDERestimated.

Listen to his Jesuitic-, finely tuned-, rebuttal of sarkozist and insular British policies. Developing a realistic approach to the priorities of an European Union in a new era of political globalization.
Here follows a part of it (in English):

Even Eurocritic Tony Barber of the London Financial Times ......

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