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President Obama describes how American families will have more control over their health-care this year, after health reform passes.

Read the rest here: Obama Addresses Health-Care Reform/a>

Hard to believe, but it was just weeks ago that everybody was busy hashing out the last-minute nitty gritty of what the Dems’ final health-care bill would look like.

Now, in a 59-41 world, President Obama’s call for a televised bipartisan discussion of health care — a proposal that’s reasonable enough, but pretty dull and process-y — passes for big news on the health-care overhaul front.

President Obama was more than 3,000 words into his 7,000-word State of the Union speech last night by the time he got to the health-care overhaul.

What’s more, he referred to the health-care overhaul as “health-insurance reform” — a subtle shift from “health-care reform” and perhaps an indication of the Dems’ move toward less-sweeping changes, and their sharpened focus on health insurance regulation.

Washington Dems are still grinding out a deal on the health-care bill; here’s coverage from the WSJ, New York Times and Los Angeles Times on yesterday’s meeting between congressional leaders and President Obama.

Meanwhile, the WSJ’s David Wessel writes today in his Capital column that Medicare Part D — the prescription drug program launched a few years back — offers some useful lessons for the current debate.

So Senate Dems worked out a deal and it looks like they’re going to pass a health-care bill this week.

All year, Congress has been trying to figure out what to do about the 21% cut in Medicare payments to doctors that’s set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2010. The latest legislative maneuver would block the cut — but only for two months.

That short-term patch is tucked inside a big defense spending bill the House passed today.

In the U.S. Senate, where a slim majority does not rule, a provision that would have made it legal to import prescription drugs went down to defeat last night. The vote was 51-48 in favor of the amendment, but the magic number in the Senate is 60 votes.

The newest idea to come out of the Senate’s health-care negotiations isn’t new at all: Allow people age 55 to 64 to buy into Medicare if they can’t get insurance elsewhere.

The politics of the proposal are straightforward. The public option, beloved of Senate liberals, is getting turned into a private-nonprofit option. Adding a Medicare buy-in option could be a way to keep liberals’ backing for the bill.

Rising health-care costs are a problem that can never be solved outright; they can only be managed in an eternal, iterative way. So including a bunch of little pilot projects in the Senate health-care bill — rather than a few big, sweeping measures — is a step in the right direction, Atul Gawande argues in this week’s New Yorker.

Here’s an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question to kick off the week: If the public option offers private insurance, is it still the public option?