What newspaper is better positioned than the Washington Post to host a bunch of people who observe health to respond to Big Questions facing health reformers and citizens in 2009?

It’s the Washington Post’s Healthcare Rx series. On a weekly basis, you can read what these people have to stay about a broad range of health reform issues with which President Obama, Congress, and health citizens are wrestling:

Angela Glover Blackwell, CEO and Founder of PolicyLink
Ceci Connolly, WaPo’s own national health policy analyst.
Chisara N. Asomugha, a pediatrician and Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Yale University
Chris T. Pernell, a doctor and clergywoman in New Jersey
Colleen Conway-Welch, dean of Vanderbilt University’s School of Nursing
David Brennan, CEO of AstraZeneca
Doug Ulman, cancer survivor and president of the Lance Armstrong Foundation
Georges Benjamin, ER physician and executive director of the American Public Health Association
Dr. Howard Forman, a professor at at Yale University
Jeff Emerson, president of NorthEnd Group, a medical technology expert
Jeffrey Korsmo, executive director of the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center
John Agwunobi, SVP and president of health and wellness for Wal-Mart
Kathy-Ellen Kups, breast cancer blogger for Everydayhealth.com
Maggie Mahar, the health care journalist
Mark Kelley, CEO of the Henry Ford Medical Group in Detroit
Michael Critelli, health innovator at Pitney Bowes where he was CEO
Nancy LeaMond, EVP at AARP and director of Divided We Fail
Newt Gingrich, founder of the Center for Health Transformation and former speaker of the House
Peter Neupert, who leads Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group
Raymond J. Zastrow, president of QuadMed
Raymond Martins, CMO of Whitman-Walker Clinic
Dr. Scott Young of the Permanente Federation in California
Shannon Brownlee, author of the seminal book, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer and fellow at New America Foundation
Sue Falkner Wood, blogger on EverydayHealth.com of Life with Chronic Pain: A How-to Guide…

and….me.

Health Populi’s Hot Points: As you can tell from the roster of contributors, we represent every stakeholder group in health care, to WaPo’s credit. Central is the consumer-citizen health angle, as well as technology, provider, pharma, physician, payer-employer, and policymaker.

Our first question was, “What should Congress tackle first,” to which I replied, in summary, “attack chronic conditions through info-tainment.” Others tackled waste, aligning payment with performance, universal coverage, equity, and cost containment.

This week, we’re all reacting to President Obama’s speech to the AMA on health reform delivered on June 15, 2009. Please visit each week as my fellow panelists and I build the broad range of perspectives on health reform in America.