Obama victory on health care reform is just around the corner! Once again.

Monday's collaboration in the New York Times by health reporter Robert Pear and White House correspondent Sheryl Gay Stolberg was headlined "Obama Strategy on Health Care Legislation Appears to Be Paying Off."

After months of plodding work by five Congressional committees and weeks of back-room bargaining by Democratic leaders, President Obama's arms-length strategy on health care appears to be paying dividends, with the House and the Senate poised to take up legislation to insure nearly all Americans.

Debate in the House is expected to begin this week, and the Senate will soon take up its version. Democratic leaders and senior White House officials are sounding increasingly confident that Mr. Obama will sign legislation overhauling the nation's health care system -- a goal that has eluded American presidents for decades.

Pear and Stolberg aren't the first Times reporters to declare an Obama victory on the health "reform" front. David Herszenhorn did the same back on September 10, calling Obama's joint address to Congress on health reform "a clear turning point in the health care debate."

Not quite.

The New York Times and the Washington Post had a pretty profound disagreement this morning on whether or not Obama has a chance to get a health care "reform" proposal through Congress this year, with the Times, predictably, being far more optimistic about prospects for the president's big-government health plan.

Times health care reporter Kevin Sack portrayed Obama-style health care "reform" as having serious momentum in the lead two paragraphs of his Friday article, "Health Care Reform's Moment Arrives (Again)."

In their heart of hearts, few in the Obama administration would have predicted late last year that they would be this well positioned by June to achieve a major victory on health care. As the economy faltered, and attention focused on Wall Street and Detroit, it seemed unthinkable that Congress would be ready to devote the summer of 2009 to the costly proposition of providing health coverage for all, a goal that has eluded presidents since Theodore Roosevelt.

But five months after the inauguration, health care dominates the domestic agenda on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Any package that emerges will preserve the country's private insurance system, at least for now. It could nonetheless bring sweeping changes, requiring that everyone be insured, creating a government health plan to compete with commercial carriers and perhaps taxing employer-provided health benefits.

By contrast, the top two paragraphs of Ceci Connolly's lead story in Friday's Washington Post seem to have come from an alternate universe:

The Oct. 26 New York Times took on Sen. Barack Obama's elusive health insurance mandate for employers -- the "play-or-pay" rule that would force businesses to pay a new tax if they didn't contribute a "meaningful" amount toward their workers' insurance. In the debates, Sen. John McCain asked more than once how much businesses would be fined, and Obama declined to say.

Now we know why. Just 'cuz.

“We made a decision even before the plan was rolled out not to decide,” David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist who speaks for the campaign on health care, told the Times. “It’s not that there’s a decision out there that we’re not telling. It’s literally that we’ve decided not to decide.”

Kevin Sack devoted his front-page New York Times Week in Review piece, "The Short End Of the Longer Life," to two recent government reports showing what he finds to be disturbing trends in life expectancy in the United States.

No, it's not on the decline. But one study found that "the life expectancy gap is growing between rich and poor," while the other found "statistically significant declines" in life expectancy for women (not men) in a minority of American counties, many clustered in the Appalachia region. And guess who's cited in the third paragraph as an expert on such matters? Failed presidential candidate John Edwards and his left-wing view of "Two Americas."

The Times painted the findings in crusade-like terms, similar to President Kennedy putting the spotlight on the poor and hungry in rural Appalachia. The paper's propaganda push came complete with a half-page black and white photo of a little girl in Kentucky standing before a portrait of her great-grandmother, reminiscent of Walker Evans' photos in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."