The rest of us will want to focus on two questions. How serious is Washington about slowing the soaring the growth in health costs? And will Washington figure out a way to cover most of the uninsured?

As it happens, there is one policy that can help with both issues. It’s the same policy that will allow Congress to solve its herculean budget problem: Taxing health care.

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In recent days, the Finance Committee has been considering precisely such a tax, on the health benefits that Americans receive from their employers.

The fact that these benefits are not taxed, as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber notes, stems from “nothing more than an arbitrary administrative decision made 60 years ago.” Unfortunately, that decision created all kinds of economic damage. Because health care  unlike food, clothing and most other things  isn’t taxed, it’s effectively on sale. And when something is on sale, people often buy more of it than they need.

In the case of health care, they buy  or their employer buys for them  insurance plans that don’t make much of an effort to control costs. Rather than putting pressure on hospitals to root out administrative waste, the plans cover the cost of that waste. They also cover the costs of brand-name drugs that are no more effective than generic alternatives and other kinds of expensive care that do little to improve health.

As a result, the tax exclusion ultimately raises your tax bill, via wasteful Medicare spending. Indeed, if there is a single health care idea on which liberal and conservatives agree  including Douglas Elmendorf, director of the influential Congressional Budget Office  it’s scrapping the exclusion.

Yet many politicians are loath to come out against the exclusion, for the obvious reason that it makes them sound pro-tax. The Blue Dogs may be the best example. They have rightly pushed House leaders to be tougher about holding down cost growth. But most Blue Dogs have not been willing to get specific, on the tax exclusion or most everything else.