Are the pieces of the health reform puzzle falling into place? We think so.

Lately, the media hasn't painted the most optimistic picture, lots of doom and gloom about health reform. Of course we recognize that there are still difficulties to overcome but we don't think it's all falling apart or hitting a wall. From where we're sitting, it actually looks like it's coming together in a positive way.

Earlier this week, the White House announced a deal with hospitals to provide $155 billion towards funding health care reform. Wal-Mart has joined up with SEIU and CAP to endorse an employer mandate and serious cost control.  In a deal supported by the AARP, PhRMA has agreed to provide $80 billion in funding to help seniors afford prescription drugs and to pay for health reform. If you don't think getting the health industry and businesses on board for health reform is a big deal -- or big change from previous attempts at reform -- Harry and Louise beg to differ.

While the preliminary CBO scores for the Senate HELP bill shocked a lot of people, further analysis released by the CBO had a much more workable price tag. Three House Committee chairmen -- from Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Education and Labor -- have come together and produced a single draft bill, which any Congress-watcher can tell you is no mean achievement. The committees start considering the bill next week. President Obama, Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-MT), and the Senate HELP Committee have all made health care reform a top priority. Numerous physician groups, which represent about 400,000 doctors (almost twice as many as the AMA) have written to the White House and Congress to strongly support health reform. And the AMA itself is still at the table.

Bill Clinton, who was Commander in Chief during the health reform attempts in the early nineties, is now serving as the Optimist in Chief for the Obama administration. This week, he cited three factors he sees as a major boon to health reform.

"The filibuster won't be an option," Clinton said in the Huffington Post. "The small business community won't be as against any plan we got now, and frankly the economy is in such a mess that you've got a little more budget flexibility."

As a nation, we've been burned before when it comes to health care reform. About every 20 years or so, our nation attempts and fails to reform the health care system. Bill Clinton probably knows this better than anyone, so it's even more exciting that he's optimistic about reform. But as many have pointed out, the cost of doing nothing is high and trends in cost and coverage have only grown worse for Americans and their families since the last major attempt to revamp our health care in the early nineties. And Americans really want health reform. Getting all of the pieces of the health reform puzzle to fall into place won't be easy, but it is necessary.

We've got some good momentum going -- a lot of people who opposed health reform in the past have now invested money, time, and interest in the success of health reform this time around. Generally, puzzle pieces don't fall together effortlessly when you dump them out of the box (at least not the kind we're used to) -- you have to put them together. And a puzzle as big and complicated as health reform needs a lot of people working together to put the pieces into place. The puzzle is not done yet, but we can see the pieces coming together to create a picture of high quality health care that all of us can count on.