FLYP, a pretty cool interactive online magazine, takes a look at what's ahead for the Obama administration. New America health policy director Len Nichols was among the experts providing advice. His suggestion is not surprising: fix health care.

Len looked both back to the lessons of the Clinton years and forward to how to realistically bring about change. Fixing the health care delivery system—creating an infrastructure that allows better decision-making clinical tools and use of best practices and comparative effectiveness data—will take five to seven years, he predicted. That means we need to "start this afternoon."

Len also strongly believes that, as hard as it is to get bipartisan agreement on something as complex as health care, it's even harder to pass (let alone sustain in the long-run) significant reform without bipartisanship. That doesn't mean you need unanimity, but you do have to find some way of accommodating different values and priorities. A bipartisan deal should create a health care system that will finally make sure that everyone has affordable health coverage, with help for low-income people, but doing it in a way that preserves choice and (fairly-regulated, level-playing-field) markets. Doing nothing, he says, is not an option.

Historically, doing nothing was the fall-back position because too many people opted to keep what they had, however flawed, than risking something new. But no longer can people be sure they can hang on to what they have. Or afford what they have. Health care costs are hurting our economy, hurting our ability to compete globally, hurting our job market, and hurting our individual family budgets. The only choice is to dig in and start changing what we have. It may well take a few years, and a series of legislative steps instead of one big bill, but that's OK as long as we're moving, and moving in the right direction.

The good news, Nichols said, is that we can afford health care reform. A vast array of researchers have concluded that about a third of U.S. spending on health care has no clinical value. The "waste" adds up to about 5 percent of our GDP. If we can squeeze out only a part of that waste—say one percent of GDP—by practicing smarter medicine in a system with better aligned incentives, that's enough to cover all the uninsured right there.