from the Leonhardt interview.

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.

…So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

Gosh, I wish I could have had him beside me when I was debating health care in Vermont. I kept trying to make this point, and instead the questioners kept coming back to me with statements like, “It’s just a matter of coming up with the political will.”

Well, if the typical Vermont lefty is someone who reads the New York Times and likes Obama enough to read the whole interview, they may get a clue about what I was trying to say, even if they don’t connect it with me.