Posted Thursday, December 17 at 12:08 AM CST, 1:08 AM EST, 0608 GMT.

Top editorial and op-ed commentaries in the Thursday editions of the leading U. S. newspapers:

1) With Democrats pressing to pass health-care reform before Christmas, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) speaks out in the Wall Street Journal against the emerging legislation. “My 25 years as a practicing physician have shown me what happens when government attempts to practice medicine: Doctors respond to government coercion instead of patient cues, and patients die prematurely. Even if the public option is eliminated from the bill, these onerous rationing provisions will remain intact…. An Independent Medicare Advisory Board created by the bill—composed of permanent, unelected and, therefore, unaccountable members—will greatly expand the rationing practices that already occur in the program.”

2) Also opposed to the emerging legislation, albeit from a political perspective opposite that of Coburn, is former Vermont governor and former DNC chair Howard Dean, writing in the Washington Post. “If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform. Real reform would insert competition into insurance markets, force insurers to cut unnecessary administrative expenses and spend health-care dollars caring for people. Real reform would significantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The current Senate bill accomplishes none of these.”

3) In the WP, George Will speculates that an impasse over healthcare may suggest that President Obama is wearing out his welcome with the public. “Rushing to lock the nation into expensive health-care and climate-change commitments, Democrats are in an understandable frenzy because public enthusiasm for both crusades has been inversely proportional to the time the public has had to think about them. And the president pushing this agenda has, with his incontinent hunger for attention, seen his job approval vary inversely with his ubiquity…. A person can be a novelty only once, and only briefly, and charm, like any commodity, when used uneconomically, becomes a wasting asset…. Republicans can win in 2009 by stopping the bill, or in 2010 by saying: Unpopular health-care legislation passed because of a 60-40 party-line decision to bring it to a Senate vote. Therefore each incumbent Democrat is responsible for everything in the law.”

4)  “Let us contemplate the badness of Joe Lieberman,” begins a New York Times column by Gail Collins about the independent Connecticut Senator and his role in the health-care debate. “Lieberman’s apparently successful attempt to hijack health care reform and hold it hostage until it had been amended into something that liberals couldn’t stomach has mesmerized the nation’s political class. This was, after all, a guy who has been a liberal on domestic issues since he was a college student campaigning for John F. Kennedy…. Politicians switch direction all the time, but the Lieberman experience has been weird because he doesn’t seem to feel as though he’s changed. He bounds around happily, doing the talk shows, confident that he’s the same independent-minded independent who believes in independence as always. Observers who have known him for a long time feel as though they’re living out a scene in a science-fiction movie when the guy who’s just been bitten by the vampire-moose comes home and sits down to dinner, unaware that he’s sprouting antlers.”