Can Jeff Merkley solve America’s health care problems? The verdict on that is still out, but he’s a pretty slick operator with a Rubik’s Cube.
A new video shows Oregon’s junior senator fiddling with a cube as he explains: “Just as this cube is all mixed up, so is our health care system messed up.”
Health care reform needs to achieve three main objectives, Merkley continues: “Make insurance work better for those who have it, extend health care who those who don’t, and get control of those runaway costs.”
“Some have said, just like with the Rubik’s Cube, it’s just too complicated. But that’s wrong. We’re a can-do nation. We need to apply ourselves and Congress needs to buckle down and get to work.”
Then we watch Merkley puzzling over the cube for about 40 more seconds before finally solving it. “There we go,” he says. “That took far too long, my son would say. But it’s also taken us far too long to fix our health care system. So we need to dive in together and get to work.”
According to Oregonian blogger Jeff Mapes, “Merkley spokeswoman Julie Edwards said it took the senator about five minutes [to solve the cube], which I thought was pretty fast until I saw the site of a Rubik's Cube champion who has solved the puzzle in as little as 13.6 seconds.”
Five minutes is plenty impressive to me – I’ve never been able to solve the damn thing.
