A new service gives Xbox gamers the opportunity to play with hot women gamers for a fee. Because male gamers haven’t yet cemented their reputation as socially awkward doofuses with self-esteem issues.

This is the part where I wax all morally superior about how my enthusiasm for gaming has nothing to do with T&A, but I’m really just pissed that this isn’t available for the PC. It gets awfully lonely questing through the realm of Azeroth with nobody but my bust of Spock to observe my heroic deeds.

Wow, that might just be the most pathetically geeky sentence I’ve ever written on this blog. I’m actually kind of impressed with myself.

I wrote this the day after Scott Brown was elected to the Senate:

I was going to post something about the prospects for still passing a comprehensive health care bill, but I fear that any such analysis would quickly turn into an epithet-laced invective against Democratic cowardice. I’d like to think that Democrats will have their little freak-out and then, you know, actually do what we elected them to do. Never mind that Obama already is signaling his willingness to accept a thin gruel of a bill that would do little more than give people the right to bankrupt themselves buying insurance. But that’s just Obama doing his elite Jedi mindfuck with the opposition, right?

Right?

Turns out, I was kind of right, but that’s only because I was listening to smart people like Jonathan Chait and Jonathan Cohn. The Democrats had their freak-out and then realized they had to go all in rather than try to pull off some sort of Clintonesque triangulation hocus-pocus. But that wouldn’t have happened if not for the combined heavy lifting of the President and Nancy Pelosi. I’m not surprised that Obama stepped up, but I had never thought much of Pelosi until recently. She initially struck me as just another career political stiff without much vision or charisma. I was wrong. She kept her head when almost every other Democrat was ready to wave the white flag. She gave the President the cover he needed to keep selling the idea of comprehensive reform. And she rounded up the votes in a Democratic caucus that is anything but homogenous. Without much flash or drama, she got the job done. When the book about the passage of the health care bill is written, she will be regarded as the President’s indispensable partner.

It appears that Democrats are abandoning the deem-and-pass strategy that had been bandied about over the past week and will instead have straight up-or-down votes on the original Senate bill and the companion reconciliation bill. These arguments about process have struck me as so much inside baseball that gets us political types excited, but is dull and irrelevant to average folks. Most Americans want something done to address health care reform and I doubt they care much about the parliamentary maneuvers used to arrive at a final vote. Still, in the event that this legislation does pass, it gives the Fox News zombies pundits one less talking point to support their paranoid claims that the law was somehow jammed through Congress.

In other health care news, MinnPost is running a good overview of how the health care bill would be of tremendous help to low-income Minnesotans who are currently covered through the state-funded General Assistance Medical Care program. If the bill passes, except a lot more chatter at the Legislature on expanding Medicaid as a replacement for GAMC. It won’t be easy for the state to come up with the necessary matching funds and the governor will probably be cool to the idea, but Democrats can make a strong case that it would be foolish to walk away from hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid.

Still thinking about liveblogging tomorrow’s vote. Stay tuned.

This was a big day in the final push towards passage of health care legislation. The House released the final text of the reconciliation bill and the Congressional Budget Office released a very good score for the bill. According to the CBO, the bill will reduce the federal budget deficit by $138 billion over the next decade. No legislation has had this much potential to reduce the deficit since the Clinton years.

The bill itself contains no surprises. It does have a provision to boost Medicaid payments to physicians, which should help address the access issues I discussed the other day. The public option is probably dead (unless the Senate tries to revive it, which seems unlikely), but I remain hopeful that a future Congress can enact it once people realize that the government can do some things pretty well.

The final House vote is scheduled for Sunday. Anything can still happen, but this feels like history in the making.

The Times reports on doctors who are dropping patients on Medicaid because states are slashing reimbursement rates to health care providers. The article focuses on Michigan, one of the states hardest hit by the recession and where the state legislature has already enacted deep cuts to provider payments. As a result of the cuts, more Medicaid enrollees are forced to either go without care or travel long distances to see a physician willing to treat them.

Most states, including Minnesota, are being forced to reduce payments to Medicaid providers. Unfortunately, passage of the health care bill isn’t likely to provide a quick fix to the problem. It will provide some additional funding to pay for individuals who previously weren’t eligible for the program, but states will still be on the hook for a large share of Medicaid costs. And state finances are likely to look pretty shaky for years to come. Unless states can persuade Congress to pick up a higher ongoing percentage of the Medicaid tab, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for them to ensure that people on Medicaid have access to the care they need.