All Life Is Problem Solving

The progressive counter-attack against the President’s emerging “austerity” political strategy and program is beginning to emerge. In the last few days, we’ve seen posts by Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson of Social Security Works, Jane Hamsher, Robert Kuttner, and Dean Baker writing against the thrust by the Administration, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and […]

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It looks like the Democratic Leadership will get its wish, a sprawling “health care reform” bill, mostly focused on changes to the health insurance system that deliver many millions of new customers to the health insurance industry. The Democrats are making many upbeat claims about this bill, calling it historic and claiming that it will […]

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Well, it’s official, or pretty official anyway. Scott Brown has been elected to Teddy Kennedy’s old seat and Martha Coakley has conceded. Some Democrats are blaming Coakley for running an inept campaign, and this may well have accounted for Brown’s margin of victory. But the real question is what allowed him to get close at […]

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This is an update on my previous diary trying to identify members of the Medicare for All sub-community at Firedog Lake. Again, I’m not sure how many bloggers and commenters are in it, but I think it includes at least:

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It’s important to sharply distinguish strategy from tactics in health care reform. I think strategy is about your goal and overall orientation toward getting health care reform, while tactics are about the low-level things you do to get from point-to-point in getting the strategy implemented. Tactics are influenced by strategy in the sense that tactics […]

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Absent a substantial change in direction by Congressional Leadership and the President, I think it’s time to do whatever progressives can to kill the health care reform legislation currently moving through Congress, and then to immediately reset to Medicare for All, single payer. As HR 3962 bill sits now, it’s worse than no bill at […]

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A few weeks back I did a diary called “Mis-directed Fury.” It focused on the reaction to the State opt-out idea on health care reform at FDL, and basically made the point that there are a lot more important things to get furious about than the State opt-out proposal. Today we have another explosion of […]

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The general reaction to Harry Reid’s announcement that he is including a public option in the Senate health care reform bill, along with a State opt-out has been to praise Harry for his courage and for “standing up for the American people.” Jane Hamsher, however, expresses her misgivings about the State level opt-out, because it […]

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Olympia Snowe, our modern-day Hamlet, decided to vote in favor of getting the Baucus bill out of committee. This insignificant action in itself (if she had voted against the bill it still would have passed in committee 13-10), was celebrated by the MSM all day long today, as the coming of at least a bit […]

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This morning, Michael Shear and Ceci Connolly at WaPo, with contributions from Anne Kornblut and Lori Montgomery, tried to get us to believe that the Administration was taken by surprise by progressives’ insistence on a viable PO being included in the Health Care Reform bill. This is an interpretation beyond naive, and also beyond imagination, […]

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