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 Effective as of the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, such Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted.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 ...

Have you ever had COBRA health insurance coverage? It's the stopgap insurance coverage you get after you leave a job, intended to fill the gap in your coverage until you find a new job (and doesn't last forever, which is why extended unemployment still leaves people uninsured. This in a nutshell why single-payer/Medicare for all is a better system than our employer-provided insurance model, and why since we are stuck with employer-provided insurance, why we need universal insurance coverage reform.) As NPR - exclusively - reminded us today , the "R" in COBRA stands for none other than budget reconciliation, the very process currently being painted as a "nuclear option" by establishment Republicans desperate to stop the health reform train. In fact, as it turns out, budget reconciliation has a long history of being used for health care legislation : health care and reconciliation actually have a lengthy history. "In fact, the way in which virtually all o...

This is a pretty depressing assessment by Joel Rubin at Democracy Arsenal, who just returned from the Herzliya conference in Israel (the premier security summit attended by all major Israeli politicians). It was clear, after attending this conference, that the weight of a decade of American neoconservative failure in the Middle East had brought Israelis neither security nor peace of mind. This situation is problematic for Israeli political elites, who are also concerned that President Obama, unlike his predecessor, will not indulge conservative Israeli politicians in their greatest self-destructive behaviors anymore, especially when it comes to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Compounding this dilemma is the irony that the population supports a hard-line government, despite being frustrated by the policies that it is advancing. For example, the citizens of Tel Aviv loathe settlers, whose representatives hold sway over the Netanyahu government. While settlers hold on to thei...

In the debate over health care, and the associated debate over illegal immigration, I've often heard the argument that "health care isn't one of the rights defined in the Constitution." This argument seems to me to deny the very concept of human rights itself. Let's make no mistake - the present era is 100% different from the world just 60 years ago. The passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions mark a major turning point in the entire history of humanity and civilization. That is the world we live in now and that world is better in every respect than the previous one. The Constitution of the United States was written in that old world - but what makes it such a brilliant document is that it anticipated the new world, even though at its draftin it was still saddled with language that was a compromise to the old (in particular, the slaves are 3/5ths of a human being clause, the silence on slavery, etc.) No, health care is not a...