Health Care

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Health Care Sanity

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 Clinics …

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Death Panels

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 …

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Health Care Wisdom

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 …

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Obama’s Press Conference

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 you heard there was a …

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Overmatched by Events?

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 his

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Dr. No

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 …

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Health Care: A Better Way

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 coverage, has been scored …

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Bargaining Chip

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 …

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Latest Column

On the need for Barack Obama to renew his domestic policy focus. This column could easily have been longer, and I know there will be some disagreement over the positions I favor. Here are a few notes and further explanations:

1. On the carbon tax and the inadequacy of cap-and-trade, here’s a terrific paper by Elaine Kamarck putting …

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