This morning driving to work I listened to a story on NPR Morning Edition.  It described the effort to build Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine – a mechanical predecessor to today’s computer.  Babbage died before he could ever complete his machine but modern engineers have recreated it.

The analogy with health care struck me.  Congress is building a Babbage machine in an era of super computers.

And we dare to call it progress?

Charles Babbage Difference Engine