Three former Senate majority leaders -- Republicans Robert Dole and Howard Baker and Democrat Thomas Daschle, who was President Obama's initial pick to be health and human services secretary and point-person for the health care overhaul -- have put out their own plan on health care. It's worth a look. Not perfect by any means, but very much worth a look. It includes "fees" on employers that don't provide insurance and taxes on health benefits that exceed the value of those offered to members of Congress.

Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, the American Enterprise Institute's John Calfee warns that an increased government role in health care may have "devastating effects" on research and development of new medical technology. "Competitive markets have generated the prices and the profits necessary to induce a steady flow of medical innovation in this country. A public plan option would tend to dismantle that system," he writes.

ABC News's White House special with President Obama on health care didn't draw particularly strong Nielsen ratings, the New York Times reports. The show came in third in its time slot, drawing 2 million fewer viewers than a "CSI" re-run that was broadcast on CBS, the Times says.

When I last spent some time with Jim DeMint, it was six years ago, and he was a member of the House of Representatives hoping to win a seat in the Senate representing South Carolina. The encounter produced an editorial in the New York Sun, "The DeMint Agenda," that described the politician as "a Republican who can see over the horizon" and concluded, "If Republicans are scouting for ideas, Mr. DeMint's office is a place worth a stop."

I've just finished spending some more time with Mr. DeMint – not in person, but with the senator from South Carolina's new book, "Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide Into Socialism" (Fidelis, $26.99, 277 pages). And the book is worth a stop for anyone, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, interested in what arguments can be marshaled against an expanded role of government in the economy.

Sex scandals aren't the usual fare around here, but given all the attention that Governor Sanford of South Carolina is getting, it's worth mentioning that among all the commercials during the ABC Obama-Care special last night was one from the Republican Governors Association, which Mr. Sanford was chairman of until his resignation in connection with the disclosure of his extramarital affair. The advertisement, apparently designed to influence the New Jersey governor's race, was a criticism of the incumbent Democratic governor of the Garden State that began "Wall Street Banker Jon Corzine..." It's a sign of the poor repute in which "Wall Street bankers" are held these days that Mr. Corzine's political opponents want to depict him as one. Some of us can remember a time when Republicans thought that private-sector success would be an asset in winning over voters, including those New Jersey residents who might commute to Wall Street and work as bankers or with bankers. Now, Republicans seem to think or hope that having been a Wall Street banker is going to hurt Mr. Corzine with New Jersey voters. If a Democratic campaign committee ran a commercial attacking a Republican politician as a "Wall Street banker," Republicans would probably be tempted to denounce it as class warfare.

In the book-publishing industry, family-owned or family-controlled businesses have experienced success, writes Mike Shatzkin, who provides some interesting detail about long-term perspective, including an anecdote about a dinner with one publishing executive who said Wall Street "undervalued family ownership." The executive's family had owned the publishing company since 1807. The push for more regulation of publicly held companies, including restrictions on executive compensation, may give family businesses an even greater advantage than they already had. Of course, family businesses fail too, sometimes.

Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz's partner in Journalism Online, Leo Hindery, has an op-ed in the Financial Times headlined "Obama Must Act to Curb Executive Greed." He calls for "permanent limits" on executive compensation at "all regulated financial institutions and all public companies." The limits he proposes might drive companies to organize themselves in other jurisdictions (offshore) or in other forms (privately held) so as to avoid the rules.

It turns out that there is a tax-law angle on the fatal crash of the Washington Metro train. The Tax Prof blog had the goods on Tuesday-- "sale-leasebacks, which are purely tax-motivated transactions, may have locked Metro into using outdated and unsafe equipment"; Senator Grassley follows up today with a press release and a letter that makes reference to an unidentified "foreign bank."

Judge Richard Posner has an op-ed piece in today's New York Times about financial regulation. He writes that the "pathologies of regulation" are "rooted in our regulatory culture — the timidity of civil servants, the contamination of public administration by politics and interest groups."

Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett supported Barack Obama during the presidential campaign, and one of his insurance companies, Geico, was one of the advertisers on last night's ABC Obama-Care special. So it is interesting to see the Oracle of Omaha expressing skepticism of some of the Obama administration's initiatives and claims. In an interview yesterday on CNBC, Mr. Buffett pretty much rejected Treasury Secretary Geither's claim that the global economy has begin to turn around. Mr. Buffett said, in essence, "it hasn't happened yet." He also suggested it was a mistake for the administration to turn its attention away from jobs and the economy and toward health care: "they've turned their sights to other problems, but this problem is not yet solved. And it's the most important problem we have." He expressed skepticism about the overhaul of financial regulations: "it's in human nature to go to excess. And it's very hard, in a country of 300-million people and a 14-trillion dollar GDP and all of that, to set up a set of rules that will prevent excesses in a market system." He bridled a bit at how the government set the terms of its loan to Wells Fargo under the TARP: "the government set the terms on it. They [Wells Fargo] just signed a blank piece of paper." He also complained about the cap-and-trade plan for emissions: "it's a huge tax and there's no sense calling it anything else. I mean, it is a tax. And it's a fairly regressive tax."

On his "Carpe Diem" blog economics professor Mark Perry writes that one reason doctors in America make good money, and that health care costs seem to be high, is that there is a restriction on the supply of doctors because of a "medical cartel," the American Medical Association that accredits medical schools. There are a limited number of medical schools producing a limited number of graduates each year, and those medical schools accept far fewer students than apply. Mr. Perry says that increasing the number of medical schools to 200 from 130 "would probably go a long way to solving our 'health care crisis.'"

Having just watched an hour and a half of ABC News's special coverage from the White House, the thing that upon reflection seems the most striking is the commercials. I was watching on cable in New York, so some of the ads may have been specific to my cable company or the local ABC affiliate, but, with that caveat, I counted two commercials from the U.S. Postal Service – the government paying ABC to help promote the Obama agenda. There was at least one commercial from Bank of America, the recipient of $35 billion in money from the Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program ($47 billion if you also count the $12 billion that Bank of America and Merrill Lynch got passed through to them as AIG counterparties). That's the government paying a bank to pay ABC to help promote the Obama agenda. Another advertiser was Ford, which just this week got a $5.9 billion loan from the federal government. There was a commercial from Wachovia, whose parent, Wells Fargo, took $25 billion from TARP, and one from Capital One Bank, which took $3.5 billion from TARP that it repaid last week. There was a commercial from Chrysler, which, if you count its suppliers and financing affiliate, took in $11.5 billion from TARP.

In advance of tonight's health care townhall with President Obama (ABC, 10 p.m. Eastern), some healthcare links:

Mr. Obama tells ABC's Diane Sawyer this morning that he is now open to imposing a mandate on individuals to buy health insurance -- the sort of mandate that, during the campaign, he criticized Hillary Clinton for supporting.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll finds "Most respondents are 'very concerned' that health-care reform would lead to higher costs, lower quality, fewer choices, a bigger deficit, diminished insurance coverage and more government bureaucracy. About six in 10 are at least somewhat worried about all of these factors."

The Wall Street Journal waddles in this morning with a review of Pete Peterson's book, three weeks after FutureOfCapitalism.com's review appeared. (The New York Times got to it over the weekend.) The Journal and Times reviews, like Bloomberg's, all pretty much avoid the ideological and policy issues related to state-pension-fund capitalism that were covered in the review of the book here on this site.

The chairman of Evercore Partners, Roger Altman, just told a conference that the financial crisis has put has put the "Anglo-Saxon model of free-market capitalism out of favor," and that "a new period of state intervention, re-regulation and creeping protectionism has begun," the Wall Street Journal reports. Mr. Altman ought to know that firsthand; Bloomberg reports that the Obama administration is in court challenging Evercore's fees leading up to the General Motors bankruptcy as "staggering," arguing, in essence, that the bankers don't deserve to be paid an additional $18 million to $54 million because the Treasury Department did a lot of the work that would have ordinarily been handled by bankers.