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By David Sirota — Even as the word progressive is now ubiquitous, a perverted form of liberalism has almost completely snuffed out genuine progressivism.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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“Improper payments” figured among the many symptoms of an ailing health care system that President Obama railed against during a pep rally for health care reform near St. Louis on Wednesday—the latest stop in his U.S. tour to drum up support for his controversial cause.
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Last weekend’s big right-wing clusterf summit meeting, CPAC 2010, brought out the bright, white stars of conservative America, many of whom conjured up some creative labels for their enemies on the left, including this gem from Mitt Romney: “Liberal neo-monarchists.” Huh?
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By Joe Conason — For voters listening to the Republican leadership over the past year, the most startling surprise was the shift in the GOP attitude toward Medicare.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Bill Boyarsky — Those telling President Obama to ditch health reform and concentrate on employment are wrong. What’s missing in such advice is a basic understanding of the grim intersection of a failing health system and rising joblessness, especially in blue-collar America.
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whitehouse.gov
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President Barack Obama on Monday announced his proposed 2011 budget, which includes boosted spending for creating jobs and waging wars, a potential tax on big banks, funding for infrastructure on the state and city levels ... and a whopping $1.6 trillion deficit for the fiscal year.
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AP / Evan Vucci
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Meeting its Christmas Eve deadline, the Senate passed its version of the health care reform legislation that’s been rankling Republicans (and even some from the left) for months now.
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Hey, guess what? Politicians don’t always make good on their campaign pledges—and Barack Obama is no exception, unfortunately. Although the president challenged his critics Tuesday on the subject of his campaign pledges about health care compared to the current version of reform legislation taking shape in Congress, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee begs to differ in its newly released media spot.
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Even Droopy has his day, unfortunately. In this clip from Wednesday’s “Daily Show,” Jon Stewart channels some of the primal rage induced by Sen. Joe Lieberman’s not-so-subtle stymieing behaviors during this week’s health care reform showdown in the Senate.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, was far from pleased with certain of his Republican colleagues Wednesday when his attempt to add a single-payer amendment to the Senate’s health care reform legislation was met with stonewalling tactics from his GOP peers. Here, he lets it rip, slamming what he calls their bid “to bring the U.S. government to a halt.”
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By Ruth Marcus — There was a nice, albeit fleeting, moment in the spring when hospitals, doctors, drug companies and insurers came together at the White House, pledging to do their part to get health care costs under control.
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AP Photo/Susan Walsh
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If it didn’t look like Senate Democrats were going to face some serious obstacles in passing health care reform legislation, Sen. Joe Lieberman is poised and ready to remind them, as he proved this past weekend with his ongoing rumblings to the press about joining the apparently inevitable Republican filibuster. Sen. Harry Reid and his cohort have their work cut out for them.
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AP / Lauren Victoria Burke
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By Bill Boyarsky — In his powerful new book, “The Healing of America,” T.R. Reid asks, “Which inequalities will society tolerate? Is it acceptable that some people are left to die because they can’t see a doctor when they get sick? That question encompasses a more basic question: Is health care a human right?”
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In a rare turnabout of camera and subject, “Democracy Now!” host Amy Goodman talks with Truthdig’s Robert Scheer about the major inspirations and role models of her life, her life’s work, and how the ongoing crisis in journalism is really a crisis of truth. Updated
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By Ruth Marcus — Law students may debate whether Congress has the right to mandate health insurance, but in the real world, it’s not a big worry.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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After months of squabbling and tussling with each other as well as their Republican opposition, House Democrats finally produced the latest comprehensive result of their efforts in health care reform in the form of a whopping 1,990-page measure—and then proceeded to congratulate themselves in a public rally outside at the Capitol.
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Flickr / cometstarmoon
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If the point of health care reform is to do something about skyrocketing medical costs, then the House reform bill just got a little more pointless. Although the speaker and other House liberals had hoped to hitch the public option’s negotiating power to Medicare’s wagon ... (continued)
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AP / Douglas Healey
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By Robert Scheer — Is there a more hypocritical figure in American politics than Joe Lieberman? The Connecticut senator declared Tuesday that he would support a filibuster of any health care reform bill that has a public option—even the version with the “trigger” compromise accepted by Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe—because it might cost money.
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Wikimedia Commons/senate.gov
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Good to know there are some seemingly dyed-in-the-wool GOP types who are at least partly open to some of the health care reform proposals knocking around the halls of Congress. Count among that tiny minority the former Senate Republican chief Bill Frist, who says he’d vote for the measure despite its shortcomings.
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stateofthedivision.blogspot.com
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After receiving a less-than-spectacular reception from his congressional colleagues for his health care reform bill last week, Sen. Max Baucus is going back to the drawing board to work on some big changes in an effort to win more of his aforementioned peers to his side. Meanwhile, Sen. Olympia Snowe remains undeclared about his first draft.
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AP Photo / Toby Talbot
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By Marie Cocco — Overlooked in the health care debate is the recently reconfirmed fact that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are working better than ever.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Bill Boyarsky — President Barack Obama’s health care reform speech to Congress Wednesday night was impassioned, but it also echoed a lot of ideas from insurance company lobbying.
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By Ellen Goodman — When exactly did the Republicans start operating one of those marketing scams that target the elderly?
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AP / Susan Walsh
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By Bill Boyarsky — By the time Congress returns from its recess and takes another whack at the health insurance mess, Rep. Henry Waxman will have started revealing the deceit that protects health business profiteers.
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AP
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Public memory often has a short shelf life, and it doesn’t preclude the potential for rapid recycling, according to The New York Times’ take on the current “death panel” controversy, considering that a prototypical version of this particular argument made the rounds during the (Internet-enabled) Clinton era.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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So far, we’ve had the angry protests, the scuffles at suddenly volatile town hall meetings, and no resolution of the health care reform argument from our elected leaders, but President Barack Obama is now embarking on a campaign to try to sway public opinion on the issue using ... a series of town hall meetings across the country. Updated
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tvguide.com
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By Amy Goodman — The 50 people a day who die from inadequate health care might be tempted to call on Jack Bauer—or the grandfather of the man who plays him.
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By Eugene Robinson — The nut jobs and carpetbaggers are outnumbered by confused and concerned Americans who seem genuinely convinced they’re not being told the whole truth about health care reform.
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AP / Susan Walsh
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The good news, at least for those hoping for progress on the health care reform front, is that the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the latest version of a bill aimed at revamping the nation’s flagging health care system. The bad news: Now that Congress is headed for a monthlong vacation, we’ll have a whole new round of squabbling to look forward to in September.
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By Marie Cocco — Medicare is where political posturing runs headlong into historical truth: It is, along with Social Security, the most successful government program that the United States has ever created.
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Flickr / Combined Media
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New research indicates that nearly 10 percent of all U.S. medical spending goes toward treating obesity and diseases more common in the overweight, such as diabetes and heart disease. Many health economists believe it is one of the leading causes of rising health care spending. About one-third of adult Americans are obese.
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Flickr / David Paul Ohmer
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By Mike Elk —
When I heard Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., floating the idea of a tax on health benefits in order to raise revenue for health-care reform, I was baffled; how could this be?
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By Ruth Marcus — If you’re interested in how to get health care costs under control, the case of the F-22 offers an instructive example.
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whitehouse.gov/video/
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Despite rumblings from detractors on both sides of the aisle, President Barack Obama held his ground as he held forth about health care reform in a speech at the White House on Friday afternoon, declaring that he was “absolutely convinced” that substantial changes to the system will be made this year.
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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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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. — Critics who argue that he is asking Congress to do too much are finding it far easier to talk about an overloaded system than to tell those without health insurance that they will have to wait a few more years.
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By Eugene Robinson — Advice to solve the financial crisis before even thinking about health care, energy or education is either misguided or disingenuous. Fortunately, Obama seems to be ignoring all the chatter.
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By David Sirota — Republicans insist that “competition solves health care,” and tell us that government programs are worse than private health insurance. So, don’t they welcome a private-versus-public competition, believing that the former will trump the latter? Well ... uh ... no.
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By Marie Cocco — No Wall Street rally can obscure the scary historical prospect that most Americans now working can expect to have less income security in retirement than their parents had.
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By Marie Cocco — Obama’s bid to reduce the taxpayer-funded slush fund that flows to the managed-care insurance industry through Medicare is an emphatic, if overdue, effort to turn Washington around.
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By Marie Cocco — It is time to wipe the term entitlement reform, a monument to the dark art of disinformation, out of the political dictionary. There is no crisis in Social Security, or even in Medicare and Medicaid.
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economistmom.com
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With news of a $1.2 trillion federal budget deficit and continually rising unemployment numbers, President-elect Barack Obama is facing an economy that has the constitution of a sickly cat. A remedy for what ails it may be coming in a restructuring of Medicare and Social Security, which Obama said will be central to efforts in how he will curb spending.
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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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unconfirmedsources.com
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Time to relive the magic that was the 2008 presidential campaign—one big, outrageous prevarication at a time. FactCheck.org delivers the “Whoppers of 2008,” courtesy of both Team McCain and Obama HQ.
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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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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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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — The world according to John McCain is one in which America is triumphant at home and abroad thanks to the Bush legacy, rolling to victory internationally and mastering its domestic economic problems. If daily news would seem to deny such a rosy scenario, then that only shows skeptics lack the courage that sustained McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
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AP photo / Lauren Victoria Burke
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Just when it seemed they wouldn’t have enough votes to pass a key Medicare bill, Democratic senators staged a dramatic coup by secretly whisking Sen. Edward Kennedy into the Capitol on Wednesday to cast his vote and make his first congressional appearance since he was diagnosed with brain cancer in May.
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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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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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