We're unable to get health insurance that's not through Cobra. When we applied to plans that would have halved our costs, we got rejected for reasons of preexisting conditions. So it's either $710 per month for Cobra, or no health insurance at all. Seems to me any help for Cobra people is to help them pay for health insurance, not to help the economy. But last I heard, we fall outside the Cobra help window because we started on it in July. Arrgh.
However, this is hardly the Obama administration's last word on health insurance. It's just a stopgap to help people out of a job, not any kind of long-term solution. I'm interested to see what actually happens.
Obama is not the first government official to talk about saving money by eliminating inefficiency. Has anyone been able to do it before? Dunno, maybe if they hadn't tried, our government would be even more wasteful now than it is. It seems pretty hard to get the government to be very efficient just because it is so darn massive—and even a "small" government in the eyes of any major politician is still going to have to be huge because there are tons of people in this country.
He does seem serious about it, though, making it a point in his inaugural address to talk about eliminating programs that don't work.