Category: healthcare policy

Link: http://gawker.com/5332558/whats-bad-for-the-gop-is-good-for-fox-news

Rupert Murdoch
Chair and CEO
The News Corporation
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

Dear Mr. Murdoch:

The speech President Obama gave about health care last night was one of his best to my ears. It has been a long summer for us progressives, and some of us had begun to wonder if the candidate we worked so hard to elect had somehow lost his moxie or, in the words of New York Times columnist Frank Rich, we had been punked.

Since our politics spring from very different experiences, I have no idea how you view the president’s performance. But since you gave him your endorsement, I assume you saw something in the man that speaks of greatness.

Last night’s speech demonstrated for me that Obama still understands that change must come, and it must come under his watch. But I must confess that when South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson shouted “You lie,” to the president’s claim that health care reform would not extend coverage to undocumented immigrants, I held my breath while the president took his measure of the man and stood his ground.

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Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/21/AR2009072102712.html?referrer=emailarticle

A year ago, most of America seemed convinced that healthcare reform was imperative. Would we prefer Hillary’s plan or Barack’s? The debate was furious, but most people considered it intolerable that 47 million Americans had no health insurance.

You’ll never convince me that things have gotten better since then. Employment, through which most Americans receive health insurance, has plummeted. In most states, unemployment hovers around ten percent. President Obama says that 14,000 people lose their health insurance every day. COBRA payments, through which the unemployed can extend insurance for eighteen more months, are often prohibitive. Strapped for tax revenue, many states keep tightening the reimbursement of Medicare and Medicaid costs to providers. (I chronicled in an earlier post called Strong Medicine how these cuts finally demolished a business that had been in my family for more than a hundred years.)

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The California cognitive scientist George Lakoff http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/08/25_lakoff.shtml has urged Democrats to resist Republican attempts to influence policy by “framing” it in language that obscures its true nature—death tax rather than inheritance tax, entitlement programs rather than veterans’ benefits and social security, and, of course, “pro-life” to cover a whole lot of issues that are less than life-enhancing to many sentient beings.

Democrats attempted this with some success, but most of the time, the Democratic problem has been a lack of imagination and courage. As Team Obama gears up for a new beginning, here are some of my ideas for them:

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