Over at Balkinization, my colleague Jared Goldstein has a marvelous piece, titled "Broccoli and the Conservative Imagination," that explains why conservatives are so enamored with the argument that if the government can make us buy health insurance, it can make us buy broccoli -- not just anything, but specifically broccoli. You can access it here.

Who will Mitt Romney pick as his running mate?

Except for the President’s re-election team, which must be prepared to run against the Romney-X ticket, there is only one reason to play this game. For fun! That’s reason enough, so let the game begin.

Romney will have two key criteria for this decision.

First, Romney will pick someone perceived as making a capable president, should the need arise. Because we are still in the wake of the Sarah Palin disaster and Romney is risk adverse, this will be his single most important factor. Romney wants to be certain that commentators will hail his choice as a serious and intelligent person who is knowledgeable about national affairs. Romney also wants to be confident his choice will perform well in interviews and the vice presidential debate. (The vice presidential debate will be no cake walk because Joe Biden is a formidable debater.) Romney has undoubtedly told his selection team a hundred times, I want someone who will not implode when Katie Couric asks brain-stumpers like: What do you read?

Second, Romney will pick the most centrist person he can find who will not send the hard-right ballistic. After having moved far to the right to win the nomination, Romney must drift back to the center. That is often the modus operendi of Republican nominees – but Romney has a unique problem. A key knock against him is that he’s a flip-flopper. His Republican opponents warned that Romney’s a moderate temporarily posing as a conservative, and one of his own advisers predicted Romney will change like an Etch A Sketch. Romney will have a terribly difficult time modifying positions; any modification can be used as evidence against him. He must, therefore, move back to the center through signals and symbols, and the most important of these will be his VP selection.

With that said, here’s my prediction: Senator Rob Portman (R-OH).

I could provide a rank-ordered list of possibilities, but it’s going to be Portman, so why bother? Here’s why: Portman has fourteen years of experience in Congress – twelve in the House, two in the Senate – and two years experience as U.S. Trade Representative and Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). One negative is that those last two positions were in the disgraced George W. Bush administration, but at least Portman had nothing to do with Bush-43 foreign policy, and hey, no candidate’s perfect. Portman is smart, solid, and a wonk. He’s co-author of a book about a nineteenth-century Shaker community, for goodness sake. Compare that to Palin’s Going Rogue! Romney will find Portman’s top-shelf academic background – Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan Law School – reassuring. According to one analysis, Portman is the seventh least conservative Republican in the Senate. Being what the Republican Party is these days, that still makes him extremely conservative. Nevertheless, he’s ideologically positioned just right for Romney. Finally, Portman is a very popular politician in the important swing-state of Ohio.  

Here’s why it won’t be other frequently-mentioned possibilities.

Marco Rubio is too hard-right and has too little federal experience. Coming from a family of Cuban expatriates, he’s not as attractive to voters of Mexican heritage (who comprise the majority of Hispanic voters) as many assume. Rubio also suffers from the ironic deficit of being too engaging. No presidential candidate can afford to be upstaged by his running mate. By contrast, Portman is not boring, but he’s not too far from boring either. Again, just right for Romney.

It won’t be Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty, Bob McDonnell, Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley, or Jeb Bush because they are governors. One of Romney’s greatest weaknesses is that he has only four years of government experience of any kind, and no experience whatsoever in the federal government. Romney needs someone with federal experience. In addition, Christie is too undisciplined; he'd be certain to create dust-ups during the campaign, and risk-adverse Romney will find Christie too dicey. As for Jeb Bush, the last thing Romney needs is people recalling the Bush-43 administration. It doesn't matter that Jeb had nothing to do with it; it's just too soon for someone named Bush on the ticket. Daniels is the most tempting of the group – he, like Portman, is a serious person – but running with another governor is not what Romney needs most.

Romney and his team will be tempted to take Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico: she’s a woman and he needs to close the gender gap. But Martinez, of course, is a governor. Moreover, she has only been governor for two years, and before that was a district attorney. Romney will consider her too risky. Romney will think about Condoleezza Rice, who is smart and has deep foreign policy knowledge and experience. But even if Rice wasn't one of its principal architects, she’s associated with the Iraq war, and Romney and his team will decide that baggage is too heavy.

It’s not going to be Paul Ryan because he’s too hard-right and is the author of a budget proposal that – notwithstanding Ryan's claims – is not truly about the deficit (or it would not include tax cuts) but about pursuing an extreme agenda of drastically shrinking the federal government. It’s bad enough Romney had to endorse Ryan’s budget proposal; he’s not going to tie himself tighter to the millstone of the Ryan budget and then jump into the sea. Although he has some attractive attributes, it’s not going to be Senator John Thune (R-SD) because he’s too far right and from a state with only three electoral votes.

So it’s going to Portman. It’s a prediction you can take to the bank.

Whether we like it or not, we all are going to have to learn quite a bit about the health care system. For most of us, this won’t be fun. The health care system is a briar patch of complexity – a subject most of us would rather not jump deeply into.

But we can’t avoid it. The nation is not going to be healthy – physically or fiscally – until we improve the system. And because the politics of improving the system are so difficult, improvements will not happen until a large segment of the public understands the problems and demands specific reforms. Improvements require overcoming resistance by special interests – insurance companies, hospitals, and doctors – and that won’t occur without something of a mass movement. We can’t leave this up to the experts.

Let’s start with our physical health. Our health care system not as good as we’re led to believe. By every objective measure, we are worse off than comparable nations. The Commonwealth Fund conducted a comparative study about the quality of care in wealthy nations. Quality was defined by the survival rates of people with potentially fatal but treatable diseases. How did the U.S. rate? Right near the bottom – number 17 out of 19 countries – behind Greece and well behind Spain. Other evaluations yield similarly dismal results. The World Health Organization evaluated the health care systems of all 191 United Nation member states. In terms of how long the average person can be expected to live without serious disease or disability, the United States rated number 24. In terms of “overall performance” of the health care system, the U.S. ranked number 37.

The fiscal picture is even worse, much worse. We have, by far, the most expensive health care system in the world. That’s unfortunate, but here’s the real problem: Like the monster in the old horror movie “The Blob,” our health care costs are growing, and growing, and growing.

In 1970, health care consumed 7 percent of our GDP. By 1980, it was 9.3 percent. By 1990, it was 11.9 percent. As of last year, it was 17.7 percent. Without radical reforms, health care costs will devour us completely.

Reforms are possible. For example, 20 percent of premium dollars paid to private health insurance companies are consumed by “administration,” that is, the cost of operating those companies. In France, which also has a private system – that is, insurance companies and hospitals are privately owned and operated, and physicians are in private practice – less than 5 percent of insurance premiums are consumed by administrative costs of the insurance companies. France accomplishes this by rigorously regulating insurance companies: insurers aren't permitted to spend money on marketing; they don't spend money on patient selection and coverage issues because they are required to cover anyone who wishes to enroll and pay for all mandated services; and what they pay for services is set by the Health Ministry. This also results in corresponding savings on the delivery side. Hospitals need far less staff to submit claims to to insurance companies; in fact, French hospitals have more doctors and nurses per patient but only a third as many administrative personnel as U.S. hospitals. Doctors, too, are largely free from the hassle of dealing with insurance companies, and can focus exclusively on practicing medicine.

For those willing to jump into the briar patch, let me recommend two superb books that nicely complement each other.

In Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform (Yale 2011), Paul Starr describes health reform efforts from Truman to Obama. Starr was intimately involved in the Clinton proposal, and he provides something of an inside account of those struggles. Paul Starr is a sociologist at Princeton who won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes for The Social Transformation of American Medicine (Basic Books 1984). He is also a founder and editor of The American Prospect. (Full disclosure: From time to time, I write for the The American Prospect and work with Paul, who is in charge of book reviews.) Any reader will learn a great deal about health care policy – and even more about health care politics – from Starr’s serious but eminently readable book.

Another terrific book is T. R. Reid’s The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (Penguin Books 2009, expanded 2010). Reid describes the health care systems of France, Germany, Japan, Britain, and Canada, and a bit about Taiwan too. Reid’s a correspondent for the Washington Post, and he successfully brings a good journalist’s breezy style to complex material. Obviously, America shouldn't import another system lock stock and barrel. We need our own system tailored for our own values. But there is a great deal to be learned about what’s working – and not working – elsewhere. Anyone reading Reid’s book will often find himself asking, Why aren't we doing that here? Starr’s book answers those questions, and the reasons generally involve money and politics.