Nation-Building

And there it is - officially the law of the land: Television networks actually broke their daytime coverage to show the historic signing . Vice President Biden is reputed to have added, "This is a big f$%king deal" - seriously ! (no s^!t, Joe.) There was a moment yesterday of well-deserved recognition for Speaker Pelosi, who has cemented her place in the ranks of the greatest Speakers of the House in history: And the Republicans held a press conference of their own today: heh. Also, The Republicans have officially introduced legislation to repeal the health reform. That legislation reads, in full, Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, SECTION 1. REPEAL OF PPACA. Effective as of the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, such Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted. Dante at Daily Kos sum...

P032210PS-0292 Originally uploaded by The White House President Obama is congratulated by an ecstatic Hillary Clinton for finally achieving the goal of health reform. Hillary was the chief architect of President Clinton's own failed bid to reform health care back in 1993, so for her this victory must be especially sweet. Its literally been one of her policy goals for 20 years.

Conservative opponents to health reform have been pushing a recent poll ostenibly conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine which claims that doctors are indeed opposed to health reform. This even got play on Fox News by Bill O'Reilly a couple days ago: This seems to contradict an earlier poll by NEJM that found that doctors actually did support health care reform , including both public and private options, by an overwhelming majority of 69%. In fact, that NEJM poll found that support dropped to only 27% when the public option was removedn and only private options remained. So what's the deal with this new NEJM poll? Well, as it turns out, it wasn't actually by NEJM - but rather by a physician recruitment firm, The Medicus Firm, and published in Recruiting Physicians Today , a free advertiser newsletter dedicated to physician employment headhunting. NEJM strongly distanced itself from any affiliation with this poll: Media Matters for America contacted the New Engla...

The public option is almost assuredly not going to be in the final package for health reform, and that's a good thing because it's existence imperils passage of this historic and incredibly progressive legislation . It represents a huge - and long overdue - leftwards shift for American social policy, despite the public option's absence. And note again that the PO would not have been available to everyone anyway, so how progressive was it really? The ultimate progressive health reform would have been single-payer insurance, but that was taken off the table (with good reason) by President Obama. However, since Medicare is already a single-payer system, it's possible to leverage that existing system for creating a "single payer option" which would not be as disruptive as true single payer, would provide a more genuinely public option than the public option, and possibly even help reduce structural deficits. That would simply be to allow people under age 65 to ...