President Obama made several trenchant points in his press conference last night. He offered a reason for public skepticism about his plan for health-care reform. Americans “haven’t seen a lot of laws coming out of Washington lately that helped them,” Obama said. Too true. What’s they’ve seen, most of all, is a $787 billion economic “stimulus” that hasn’t done a thing to stimulate the economy.

The president also said: “If you don’t set deadlines in this town, things don’t happen.” Here again, there’s a measure of truth. But his deadline is this August for a health-care plan that won’t go into effect fully until 2013. And the part of the plan he emphasized last night, a panel of health-care “experts” to decide what remedies and medicines doctors should use–that wouldn’t be a activated until 2014.