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By Mark Lilla
$17.16
By Garry Wills
$16.27
$23
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — One of the clearest signals President-elect Barack Obama has sent is his determination to learn from the Clinton years, and particularly from the former president’s failures on health care.
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treas.gov
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Almost a year ago, Citigroup’s then-director Robert Rubin downplayed the enormity of the economic catastrophe headed our way and made a pre-emptive move to shift any potential blame to politicians instead of financial experts such as himself. Fast-forward to the present and the picture changes considerably.
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By Marie Cocco — Much of the business-tax package Obama contemplates fails his own test of cutting business taxes “where it makes sense and is going to work.”
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Flickr / FaceMePLS
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President-elect Obama is still working out the nuts and bolts of his recovery (fingers crossed) package, but Obama advisers have disclosed that at least one proposal would expand benefits and compensation to the unemployed. With the economic meltdown vaporizing more and more jobs, here’s hoping Congress gets it done before February.
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By Marie Cocco — As Congress and the White House lurch toward possible approval of a loan package for the crippled auto industry, we are undoubtedly in store for more union-bashing.
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AP photo / Rick Bowmer
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By Bill Boyarsky — With unemployment soaring, the need grows daily for guaranteed health care. But that may not happen in the coming year because of the desperate need to revive the economy and put people to work.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — No, the federal government isn’t going to discover new billions under some rock in a national park. But with the economic downturn, the new president’s imperative will be to spend as fast as he can, to the tune of perhaps $500 billion, to keep the economy from going belly up.
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By Marie Cocco — Over the past 10 months, as the hemorrhage of jobs began to push the national unemployment rate toward its October level of 6.5 percent, about 3 million Americans were thrown off the insurance rolls or had their incomes fall so much that they became eligible for Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
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AP photo / Kiichiro Sato, file
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By Chris Hedges — The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. If Barack Obama continues to turn to the elites who created the mess, if he does not radically redirect the nation’s resources to assist the working class and the poor, we will become a third-world country.
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Flickr / marcn
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Sen. Ted Kennedy has asked Sen. Hillary Clinton to take up an important post shaping landmark health care legislation. The offer comes as Clinton reportedly weighs continuing her work in the Senate against joining Barack Obama’s administration as secretary of state.
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A devastating and growing problem is explored in Michael Paul Mason’s riveting new book, “Head Cases.”
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listphile.com
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It would seem imprudent, given the government’s recent and unprecedented bailout of companies such as insurance giant AIG, for the likes of AIG to even entertain the idea of hefty executive payouts.
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starwoodhotels.com
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What’s $85 billion if you don’t get to spend it? Just days after taxpayers saved AIG from ruin, executives of the insurance giant spent $440,000 pampering themselves at the exclusive St. Regis resort in Monarch Beach, Calif.
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Tuesday night marked the second debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, moderated by NBC’s Tom Brokaw at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. While Brokaw struggled to stick to the script, the two candidates fielded questions about the current economic catastrophe and American foreign policy.
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By Eugene Robinson — We all owe a debt of thanks to the skeptics who refused to be steamrollered by the Bush administration’s $700-billion financial bailout plan until we at least had some understanding of what we were doing and why.
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By Marie Cocco — So this is how the “ownership society” works. We own all the bad stuff.
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What to make of the bailouts and sellouts that dominated the past week’s financial headlines? Well, “Left, Right & Center” commentators Matt Miller, Robert Scheer and Tony Blankley (Arianna Huffington was away) have some ideas about what caused the nightmare on Wall Street and what the future holds.
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Hey, now that Jon Stewart mentions it, that whole government bailout thing starts to sound a lot better: We, the taxpayers, just bought a really, really big insurance company. That’s like having two hotels each on Boardwalk and Park Place in Monopoly, right?
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By Amy Goodman — With financial institutions begging for bailouts, taxpayers should be in the driver’s seat. Instead, decisions that will cost people for decades are being made behind closed doors, by the wealthy, by the regulators and by those they have failed to regulate.
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listphile.com
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Here we go again: The Federal Reserve is bailing out another tanking financial institution—the insurance behemoth American International Group—by sinking $85 billion into AIG in return for a stake in the company. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a Wall Street investigation following this latest startling agreement between big government and big business.
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By Marie Cocco — It is worth pausing during these orchestrated partisan celebrations to look afresh at entitlements. There is no more recent evidence of their enduring value than the latest report from the Census Bureau on the number of Americans who are doing without health insurance.
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The FDIC’s list of “problem” banks grew by 30 percent in the last quarter, with more on the way. The net income of FDIC-insured lenders, meanwhile, has plummeted 87 percent. IndyMac, one of nine banks to kick the bucket in 2008, cost the FDIC $8.9 billion.
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AP photo / Charlie Neibergall
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By Bill Boyarsky — As Barack Obama moves into the Democratic National Convention, he should speak out more clearly and forcefully on an issue that clearly distinguishes him from his do-nothing opponent—national health insurance.
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By Marie Cocco — Before the energy-price crisis, before the mortgage crisis, before the credit crisis and the banking crisis, there was the crisis in health insurance that is in reality a crisis in care.
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video.aol.com
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Dr. Marty Klein, author of “America’s War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust and Liberty,” has some additional questions for John McCain—who flailed in the face of a perfectly reasonable query about Viagra versus birth control last week—as well as his rivals for the presidency.
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By Marie Cocco — The comment was outrageous, but it was not the least bit surprising. A psychologist responsible for assessing returning war veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder—a psychological ailment that could entitle them to monthly disability payments—told staff members not to diagnose the illness because to do so would increase the government’s costs.
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AP photo / Kevork Djansezian
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By Bill Boyarsky — On May 5, the day before Barack Obama all but clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, I visited Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., because I was sick—sick of stories about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his most famous parishioner and of television close-ups of Obama drinking beer and Hillary Clinton belting straight shots in efforts to show their inner blue collars.
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By Amy Goodman — As the media coverage of the Democratic presidential race continues to focus on lapel pins and pastors, America is ailing.
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Flickr / Kiwi NZ
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From the L.A. Times: “In what appears to be the latest symptom of the nation’s mortgage meltdown and credit crisis, insurers, law enforcement officials and state agencies nationwide report a jump in home and automobile fires in the last year believed to have been set by owners unable to pay their debts.”
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Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s health-care plans contain some form of mandate—a requirement that Americans purchase insurance. At least one legal scholar wonders whether that’s constitutional. At the very least, Karl Manheim argues in an Op-Ed article, it’s “certainly unprecedented.”
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By Marie Cocco — Add doctors to that growing list of Americans who would like to see some form of national health insurance.
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factcheck.org
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Hillary Clinton was so irked by a couple of Barack Obama campaign mailers that a few days ago she publicly scolded him and said “every Democrat should be outraged.” Clinton herself has been accused of sending misleading mailers to voters, including one that went out shortly after her now infamous “shame on you” news conference. For inundated Ohioans, it’s a question of whom to trust. Updated.
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By Eugene Robinson — Not only are Rudy Giuliani’s figures about prostate cancer survival rates in the United States and Britain wildly misleading, but he’s also wrong on his general point: that a single-payer system, of the kind that Republicans call “socialized” medicine, inevitably would deliver inferior care.
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By Eugene Robinson — In slamming Clinton-style reforms, “America’s mayor” uses data in a way that shows disregard for the truth. Does that remind you of any other famous politician? Maybe the one in the Oval Office?
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politico.com
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House Democrats managed to pick up a few more votes for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, but not enough to override the president’s veto. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to keep fighting for the overwhelmingly popular program: “In the next two weeks we will send the president another bill that insures coverage for 10 million children.”
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By Marie Cocco — The elderly are paying for waste in the GOP-crafted Medicare drug benefit. Rep. Waxman, D-Calif., is lifting the lid on this kettle, and what’s inside ain’t pretty.
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By Will Durst — Oooh. He’s clever. And obviously knows exactly what he’s doing. This is all a setup, people. Has to be. Yes, I’m talking about George Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Who but a total stoned horned ogre would do that? Maybe an ogre with something up his sleeve, eh?
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foxnews.com
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President Bush may not have done his party any favor in coming elections by exercising his veto privilege—the fourth time he’s done so—to deep-six a bipartisan bill passed by Congress that would have renewed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
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Christo Komarnitski, Bulgaria —
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AP Photo / Charlie Niebergall
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By Bill Boyarsky — If there’s any candidate who knows what he or she would be dealing with in attempting to change the American healthcare system, it’s Hillary Clinton. And, according to Boyarsky, charging into that particular political battleground might have made her a stronger contender.
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By Marie Cocco — When the National Guard helicoptered her husband, Mark, to Staten Island to work as a wireless technician setting up a communications network for thousands of emergency workers who were descending upon Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, Jeanmarie DeBiase did not know this would begin the unraveling.
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By Marie Cocco — Why does the Bush administration want to orphan the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, one of the few programs that both Democrats and Republicans have claimed as a wild success since the Clinton days?
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MichaelMoore.com
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A Blue Cross exec sent out a memo with talking points to help company employees handle the fallout resulting from filmmaker Michael Moore’s scathing take on the American healthcare system, “SiCKO”—and Moore got his hands on it. Oops! (H/t: Crooks and Liars)
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movies.yahoo.com
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By Eunice Wong — After all the usual controversy that swirls around any film by director and rabble-rouser Michael Moore, and after all those stories about Moore taking 9/11 workers to Cuba for treatment, “SiCKO” is finally in theaters. Eunice Wong delivers her diagnosis for Truthdig.
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movies.yahoo.com
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After all the usual controversy that swirls around any film by director and rabble-rouser Michael Moore, and after all those stories about Moore taking 9/11 workers to Cuba for treatment, “SiCKO” is finally in theaters. Eunice Wong delivers her diagnosis for Truthdig.
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By Marie Cocco — The rudimentary equation of the health insurance industry is that to make a profit, it must take in more money than it pays out in claims. This is why the public, as distinct from the political class, will intuitively understand and likely appreciate Michael Moore’s new film, “Sicko.”
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By Amy Goodman — Michael Moore screened his new film, “SiCKO,” on Father’s Day at a special New York event honoring Sept. 11 first responders. Moore spoke of their heroism and recognized their role in the film. “SiCKO” is about the broken U.S. healthcare system. Case in point: the 9/11 rescue workers.
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Documentarian Michael Moore takes clips from his latest to Oprah for a discussion of the healthcare crisis and why even Republicans are responding warmly to the film: “I don’t want this to be a political issue. ... When you get sick, you get sick. The illness doesn’t care whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican.”
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AP Photo / Chitose Suzuki
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Michael Moore is enjoying major buzz at the Cannes Film Festival for his new film, “Sicko,” about the U.S. healthcare system. Meanwhile, one of his staunchest detractors has discovered that the anonymous benefactor who paid off his sick wife’s $12,000 yearly medical insurance bill was none other than the documentary filmmaker.
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An increasing number of the 46 million Americans without health insurance have begun fleeing to places as far away as India to get lifesaving medical treatments.
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