The New York Times ran a front-page story today about a quiet man who drove a long distance with his wife to attend a town meeting in Georgia hosted by his Congressman Sanford Bishop. The guy was there because his wife has breast cancer and he’s worried that the Obama health care plan will force [...]
The news that the Obama Administration seems to be abandoning the so-called Public Option should come as no surprise to anyone who was following this issue. My assumption always was that the public option–which was never really defined (there were several versions)–was a bargaining chip to be cashed late in the game in return to [...]
If you’d like a break from reading about the foolish rantings of the Limbaugh-Palin Republican mainstream, this column in the New York Times today suggests a smart path toward controlling health care costs. Nothing radical here. And I suspect, in the end, the real answer is putting doctors on salaries as the Mayo and Cleveland [...]
Michael Scherer’s excellent interview with Ezekiel Emanuel below should be required reading, and so should Ezra Klein’s interview on Monday with Senator Johnny Isakson, who has made end-of-life counseling a personal cause. It is difficult to bear the nihilist cynicism of mainstream Republicans like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh on this issue. The cruelty inherent in [...]
Not often do you see David Brooks and Paul Krugman in substantive agreement on anything, but they are today–on the need to contain health care costs and the gravity of the President’s effort to confront this problem head on. The immediate challenge is Medicare reform: the fee-for-service system, where doctors are paid by the procedures–tests [...]
He’s good. You forget that when you haven’t seen him in a while. He seemed entirely in command, not at all rattled by the toxic political dust storm swirling in Washington. His answers were supple, substantive. The questions were pretty good. The key point that he hammered was the ugliness of the status quo. “If [...]
This is the silly season among my dear colleagues in the press. We’re at the ugliest stage of the health care sausage-making–and so there are all sorts of dire predictions going around. Of course, the wingnuts are the worst. You can see blog posts with sentences like this almost every fifteen minutes: Suddenly, six months into [...]
The sun rises in the east. The sky is blue. Bill Kristol advises Republicans to vote against health care reform. The first time he tried this, in 1994, he established a reputation for tactical “brilliance,” as he managed to intimidate Bob Dole–whose life was saved by government health care–into opposing the Clinton effort. The Republicans [...]
For the past few years, I’ve been pushing Senator Ron Wyden’s Free Choice Act as the best way to reform the health care system. Ezra Klein, now of the Washington Post and still no relation of mine (except friend), feels the same way and explains the bill here. This is a solution that promises universal [...]
Drudge is going purple-apoplectic about the looming Nationalization or perhaps Government Takeover of health care and all the–red alarm bell here–taxes and–another alarm bell–public options that will surely destroy free enterprise–no, freedom itself!–as we know it…in other words, he and his Republican friends are rabid crazy demagoguing the proposed House health care plan. A few [...]
