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$ 16.95
By Andy Borowitz
$9.95
$21
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Joe Conason — The senators who now claim we cannot afford to spend a trillion dollars to make long overdue changes in health care know exactly what that amount can buy. They know because they have spent it, year after year, on military misadventures and subsidies to big banks and corporations.
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AP photo / Alex Brandon
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While Congress was away, President Obama made another play to boost public support of his health care reform plan. It came Wednesday in a town-hall-esque forum in Virginia. Those hoping for the federal government to back a viable single-payer system, however, will have to keep on hoping.
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cnbc.com
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SEIU President Andrew Stern and Wal-Mart have joined forces, breaking with most other companies to support President Obama’s plan requiring employers to provide health insurance to workers. The thing often forgotten is Wal-Mart’s horrible record on health care and its current move to make about 40 percent of its employees part-time and thus ineligible for benefits.
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U.S. Air Force / S. Sgt. Maria L. Taylor
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Al Franken won’t officially be a U.S. senator until next week, but he’s set to make a big impact, and not just because he gives his party that 60th seat. Senate Democrats have reserved four committee spots for Franken, two of which will make him a key participant in health care reform and the confirmation of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The president has shied away from handing Congress his own plans on “stone tablets,” but if he doesn’t intervene in the health care debate, and soon, lawmakers are going to send him an unworkable monstrosity of a bill.
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On this week’s “Left, Right & Center” it’s lots of sex, a little health care and even less Michael Jackson. Is sexual repression a uniquely Republican problem? Discuss.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Joe Conason — Democrats who are talking down Obama’s health care initiative tend to have something in common—their abject dependence on campaign contributions from the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations fighting against real reform.
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Collage from Fox and James Montgomery Flagg
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Health care reform is shaping up as astronomically expensive, but that’s only if private insurers and Big Pharma get their way, writes Clinton-era Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Without competition from the government—a public option—the health care industry will continue to gouge and Americans will still be in the weeds, a trillion dollars poorer.
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Last week Bill Maher took on the president. This week, the “Real Time” host accuses the Democrats of selling out their principles to hedge funds and polluters: ” ... over the last 30-odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into a mental hospital.”
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AP photo / Esteban Felix
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By Eric W. Fonkalsrud, M.D., and Michael D. Intriligator, Ph.D. —
The best way to achieve universal health care in the U.S. is by expanding the popular and effective federal Medicare program. This restructuring would gradually extend benefits, first to the most needy and eventually to the entire population.
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flickr.com
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For only $5 a month, you too can undermine a developing country’s health infrastructure. Since 1990, foreign funding for “development assistance” has quadrupled, offering medical resources to the poor but also luring local health care workers away from government hospitals and toward more lucrative private companies.
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By David Sirota — Most of the great American advances, from the airplane to the Constitution, were born from reinvention, not tinkering. For all the positive, even admirable steps Obama’s America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old conceptions of how things must work.
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senate.gov
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By one estimate, Sen. Max Baucus gets about $1,500 a day from the health industry. Who put this man in charge of health care reform? The senator’s latest innovation in compromise is to slash proposed insurance subsidies in a bid to get Republicans on board. And forget about a government-run insurance program.
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By Joe Conason — The real question is not what the AMA will support or whether the attitudes of the AMA have changed, but why anyone would still heed its policy prescriptions. Very few national organizations have been so wrong for so long about the matters most salient to their own members.
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By Ellen Goodman — At the meeting of the American Medical Association, Barack Obama tackled the model “that has taken the pursuit of medicine from a profession—a calling—to a business.”
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AP photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Where did we get the idea that the only good health care bill is a bipartisan bill? Is bipartisanship more important than whether a proposal is practical and effective?
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By Marie Cocco — At the moment, Republicans are gleeful and Democrats glum because of a Congressional Budget Office analysis—based on an incomplete and early draft of what is likely to be the most liberal-leaning health care proposal to emerge from the Senate—that shows the measure just won’t get the job done.
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Flickr / SFBart
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It would take new legislation to extend full health coverage to the same-sex partners of federal employees, but President Obama, via presidential memorandum, will grant some benefits to them. Update: Progress or pandering?
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By Amy Goodman — As the Obama administration pushes for a vote on health care reform before Congress recesses in August, has health industry money too thoroughly polluted the process for anything good to come of it?
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Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News —
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The “Real Time” host has some harsh words for the president, who, he says, is caving to insurance companies, banks and polluters: “This is not getting the job done. And this is not what I voted for.”
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By Joe Conason — Big insurance and pharmaceutical companies are lobbying frantically (and spending millions of dollars) to foreclose the possibility of the most promising aspect of health care reform: a public insurance option.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Remember the imaginary couple who appeared in the television ads that helped beat President Clinton’s health plan 15 years ago? That duo and the corporations behind them have switched sides in the debate, and for a good reason: 50 million new customers.
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gov.ca.gov
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As if delivering the tagline of his latest movie, California’s governor announced to the state Legislature Tuesday that the “day of reckoning is here.” But Democrats are fighting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan to cut funding for schools, the poor and sick children while refusing to raise taxes.
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By Marie Cocco — So it’s health care overhaul this year—or bust. If this is the bet, right now I’d put my money on bust.
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Flickr / dave_mcmt
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By Paul Cummins — So, with the economy in the proverbial toilet and the D word (depression) hovering on the periphery, what is the Obama administration supposed to do about education? What can it do? Will additional and new funding be necessary to address his main concerns?
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By Ellen Goodman — I was not surprised by the president’s story. Health care reform is not just a matter of spreadsheets and patient charts. It’s a repository of the personal narratives we carry around in our family hard drives.
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syracuse.com
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By David Sirota — As counsel for the Warren Commission, Arlen Specter described a “magic bullet” that changed America. Four decades later as a U.S. senator, Specter is providing another history-altering magic bullet—one Democrats will either fire off in a starting gun, or use in their suicide.
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By Marie Cocco — This is how it ends. Or at least, this is how the latest, sad chapter in a story that has been ending for three decades is written.
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By Marie Cocco — The defenders of the health care status quo have been frantically arguing these past few weeks that any coming reform of the health insurance system cannot include a public insurance plan, even if that’s the whole point.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Because of the defeat of health care reform in 1994, there will be a temptation to treat every dispute as the first step toward the collapse of the process, ignoring the fact that times and minds change.
Posted on Apr 23, 2009
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White House / Pete Souza
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President Obama presided over his first formal Cabinet meeting Monday with a rather important chair left empty. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s pick to head the $750 billion Health and Human Services Department and spearhead his ambitious health care reform initiatives, has finally made it out of hearings and should be approved by the end of the week.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Yes, this is the year Congress will finally give every American access to health insurance. For the first time since the passage of Medicare in the 1960s, the forces favoring action on health care reform are stronger than the forces of cynicism and obstruction.
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By Ellen Goodman — Sadly, we have developed a system that rewards procedures over primary care. The incentives tip toward the kind of medicine that is performed with hands, tools and technology over the medicine that is practiced with eyes, ears and mind.
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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This has gone from coincidence to self-parody to alarming. Another of Barack Obama’s nominees has had to apologize for not paying her full taxes. Kathleen Sebelius, the president’s pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department, has now paid off $7,918, a paltry debt compared with Tom Daschle’s $140,000.
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By Eugene Robinson — The last thing the surgeon said to me before they rolled me into the operating room was, “You know, if you and Obama had your way with health care, it wouldn’t be me doing this operation. It would just be some guy.”
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By Amy Goodman — Obama promises health-care reform, but he has taken single-payer health care off the table. While single-payer reduces the administrative costs and removes the profit that insurance companies add to health-care delivery, such solutions get almost no space in the debate.
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reportercaps.com
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The rocky road to staffing still-vacant government positions suffered a bit of a setback Thursday, as the creamy filling—Dr. Sanjay Gupta, henceforth known as “The Gupta”—of Obama’s team withdrew his name from consideration for the post of surgeon general.
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governor.ks.gov
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Let’s try this again, shall we? Tom Daschle didn’t make the cut, but President Obama has a new contender for secretary of health and human services. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who may be vulnerable to attacks on the abortion issue, faces a potentially challenging confirmation process.
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In his weekly address, President Barack Obama makes the case for his proposed budget scheme, arguing that while it might rankle the likes of Washington lobbyists, it will deliver on the promises he made during his campaign.
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AP photo / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Gbemisola Olujobi — Linda, a 24-year-old sex worker in Kigali, Rwanda, didn’t want to be tested for HIV because she feared she would find she would soon die. Her fear was not unfounded. Being aware of one’s HIV-positive status was a first step toward dying of AIDS in Rwanda, as in most parts of Africa. Anti-retroviral drugs were expensive and hard to come by. But that was before President Bush’s PEPFAR.
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Disagreement abounds on this week’s episode of “Left, Right & Center,” especially when it comes to President Obama’s budget plan and the origins of the economic crisis it’s intended to remedy. Who’s the moderator again? And is Bobby Jindal done for?
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By Amy Goodman — The American Chemistry Council assures us that “we make the products that help keep you safe and healthy.” But U.S. consumers are actually exposed to a vast array of harmful chemicals and additives embedded in toys, cosmetics, plastic water bottles and countless other products.
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Wikimedia Commons
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The Senate passed its own version of the stimulus package Tuesday, slashing funding in areas that would most effectively stimulate the economy, such as aid to low-income Americans and states, while expanding tax cuts. The House and Senate bills must now be reconciled with one another.
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
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By William Pfaff — Barack Obama in Washington reminds one of Diogenes in Athens, with his lantern in search of an honest man.
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AP photo / Alex Brandon
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By Chip Fleischer — Now that Tom Daschle has withdrawn his name from the running to be health and human services secretary, President Obama should revisit the idea of nominating former Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean for the position, an idea he abandoned last November for all the wrong reasons.
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Barack Obama is coming out of the gate with quite the to-do list, not the least part being his new economic recovery plan, which carries quite the price tag at about $1 trillion. What is he thinking? Here, Obama gives some details in his weekly online address.
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