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The Covid-19 relief bill is the first test for the Biden administration. It’s no surprise there’s disagreement on how to proceed. One controversy is strategic: How vigorously should the administration pursue bipartisan support for its legislation, and what price should it be willing to pay to achieve it? Some Democrats—myself among them—believe that the president’s calls for unity will be hollow unless he does all he can to reach a bipartisan agreement that satisfies his core objectives. Monday’s meeting with 10 Republican senators to discuss their $618 billion offer was a good first step, and conversations will continue. In the end compromise may be out of reach, and Mr. Biden could be forced to depend on Democratic votes. Then the question will be if the arcane congressional process of “budget reconciliation” is compatible with political reconciliation. The optimists hope that the president can start with one-party government and shift to bipartisanship later; the pessimists fear that early partisanship will poison the well for the next two years. I believe that the preponderance of the evidence supports the pessimists, but Mr. Biden will have to make a tough call. (William A. Galston, 2/2)

Of course the Chicago Teachers Union blamed “sexism, racism and misogyny” for the pressure to open the nation’s third-largest public school system. The CTU could have added a fourth grievance: anti-Puerto Rican vacationism. On the same day that a CTU board member explained that she was not in a classroom teaching because schools are unsafe, she posted a poolside photo of her grinning self, 2,000 miles from Chicago’s winter winds. Teachers unions always justify their aggressions as “for the children,” but always are serving only their members. Abundant data — from public and private U.S. schools, many of which have remained open, and from schools worldwide — refutes the proposition that children, or teachers, are seriously endangered in schools that have taken, as in Chicago, precautions including air purifiers and intensified cleaning. (George F. Will, 2/3)

A medical degree from one of America’s elite private medical schools adds prestige to a new doctor’s resume. But it can also come with a significant impediment to society: Because of the exorbitant tuition these schools charge, it’s extremely difficult for their new doctors to help patients in underserved sections of the country who would greatly benefit from their skills, knowledge, and passion. (David Lenihan, 2/3)

President Biden’s ambitious program to fix American healthcare will succeed only if healthcare costs are brought under control. This can only be done with Medicare, which has a scale and simplicity that allow the administrative efficiency and market power needed to control costs. (Gerald Friedman and Travis Campbell, 2/2) 

Infrastructure investment is at the top of the agenda for the new administration and for members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, as it’s a tried-and-true strategy for creating jobs while fulfilling a public need in the midst of a deep recession. (Heather McCulloch and Al-Jen Poo, 2/2)

It takes nearly an hour to clean an intensive care unit room between Covid-19 patients. The curtains come down first. Next the custodial staff removes the trash, disposable gowns and gloves, biohazard bins, leftover belongings. They wipe the room down with bleach. New sheets on the bed, hospital corners. Mop the floor until the splatters of bodily fluids are gone, until it shines. I stopped to watch this process on one recent overnight shift as we prepared for a new patient. She was in her mid-60s, intubated with severe respiratory failure from Covid-19. In some states she might been vaccinated weeks ago, but not yet in Massachusetts, where 7.2 percent of the population has been vaccinated, a rate lower than in three-quarters of the rest of the country. And now she would enter the same freshly cleaned room where countless Covid-19 patients lived and died before her. (Daniela J. Lamas, 2/3)