Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Why Politicians Know So Much That Just Isn’t So

March 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: DENIS BELYAEVSKIY/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Ezra Klein highlighted an interesting recent story in which Republican strategist Mike Murphy said that the GOP would only negotiate with President Obama on budget matters after Obama made two key concessions: means testing of Medicare and limiting the growth of Social Security expenditures over time. Funny thing is, Obama has already offered these two precise concessions. Murphy responded to this new information in an interesting, but entirely predictable, way: he dismissed Obama's concessions as false, and he said that the GOP doesn't trust him anyway. In other words, a political elite had a ... Read More

More like this: Seth Masket
Tags: , , ,

Can Obamacare Win by Losing at Highest Court?

March 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

As day two of the U.S. Supreme Court’s epic three-day examination of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) came to a close, the general consensus -- from left and right--seems to be that the government’s lawyer failed to convince any of the five right-of-center justices to uphold the individual mandate alongside the court’s four left-of-center justices. The contrast between Paul Clement’s sterling performance challenging the mandate and the pointed questions from justices that marred Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s stumbling defense (here’s a funny ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Legal Affairs
Tags: , ,

Making a Case for Televising the Supreme Court

November 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Over the years, media advocacy groups and news outlets have jotted off letters to the Supreme Court pleading for a basic form of access their counterparts in other democracies already have: cameras in the country’s highest courtroom. The response has always been the same, but with varying explanations. Cameras would be too obtrusive. The wires and equipment would get in everyone’s way. Filming the court would turn it into a circus. The whole demeanor of the place would change. Justice David Souter summed up all of this with a jurist’s eloquence: “I can tell you the day you see a ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, The Idea Lobby
Tags: , , , ,

Can Privacy, Electronic Medical Records Coexist?

June 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The stimulus bill passed in 2009 set aside $27 billion to encourage doctors to migrate their illegible handwriting and paper charts into the electronic medical records that policymakers and politicians have for years been saying could revolutionize medical care (and the amount of money it costs us). That windfall, now fueling a booming health IT industry, was intended to address another goal outlined in the stimulus bill: Every American should have an electronic health record by 2014. The promise is enormous. Patients could take control of copies of their own personal health histories. ... Read More

More like this: Health, The Idea Lobby
Tags: , , , ,

Obamacare: No Friends in Free-Market, Single-Payer Camps

May 31, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

You might think in a debate over President Barack Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act would have one side arguing in support of it. But when Miller-McCune.com moderated a debate between an advocate of free-market approaches and one for a single-payer system, neither endorsed what's come to be called Obamacare. Which is not to suggest that Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a nonprofit research organization advocating a free-market approach to health care, and pediatrician Margaret Flowers, a congressional fellow who directs the Maryland chapter of ... Read More

More like this: Health, Politics
Tags: , , ,

GOP Examines Ways to Block Health Care Reform

March 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

How might Republicans try to block the U.S. health reform law from going into effect? Let us count the ways. Repeal, replace, defund, deregulate. And, lest we forget, litigate. If all that fails, they can always shut down the government — if not during this week's spending showdown, then the one after that, or the one after that. In January, House Republicans voted to repeal the Patient Protect and Affordable Care Act (PDF here) entirely. Senate Republicans tried for repeal, too, but there aren't enough of them to finish the job. Democrats, who control the Senate, pushed back and no ... Read More

More like this: Health, Politics
Tags: , , ,

Palliative Care May Trump Heroic Measures in Life Expectancy

August 18, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

What if those "death panels" were actually good for your health? The death panels, of course, don't exist; they were the product of overheated political imaginations amid an overheated debate about health care reform. But palliative care does exist — and despite the distortions of last summer's debate, it doesn't mean "pulling the plug on Grandma." (Or Grandpa for that matter, although he seems to have been neglected in the national brouhaha about death panels.) A study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine found that palliative care — which includes talking to ... Read More

More like this: Health
Tags: , , ,

10 Things You Didn’t Know Were in the Health Bill

March 29, 2010 • By • 16 Comments
Click her for more Idea Lobby posts.

The 2,000-page health care bill that became law last week is packed with major reforms probably well known (in concept if not in detail) by anyone who has channel-surfed through the nightly news over the past year. There's an individual mandate, a system of exchanges, new government subsidies and a ban on some of the worst practices of the insurance industry. Let's say the small print on the big stuff accounts for about 1,500 pages, give or take a ream. What's in the rest? Some random, weird and interesting solutions to problems you may or may not have known you had, some with dubious ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Health, Politics, The Idea Lobby
Tags: , , , ,

It’s Not About Process, Stupid

March 25, 2010 • By • 2 Comments

The public debate over health care the last six months has focused an inordinate amount on "process," the single simplest word to shoehorn together a mess of parliamentary maneuvers like reconciliation, the filibuster, the "deem-and-pass" and the "up or down." Many Americans, the theory goes, were turned off more by the process of creating the bill than the policy in it — in part because they didn't know what was in it anyway, but also because a drawn-out process suggests if lawmakers can't agree on things, centrists should be suspicious. Republicans gladly fanned this narrative by ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
Tags: , , ,

Health Care Summit Includes an Active Cyber Audience

February 25, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Barack Obama tried to introduce a new dynamic into the year-old, stalled health care debate today with a bipartisan health care summit. The proposals, from either side, weren't novel. Neither were the basic talking points, the Congressional Budget Office stats cited or the tear-jerk constituent stories retold. But this much was: All seven hours of the discussion were broadcast on TV and — of more importance to the thousands of people unlikely to ever tune to C-SPAN — streamed live on just about every corner of the Internet. Ostensibly, the summit was an experiment in whether a live ... Read More

More like this: Health, The Idea Lobby
Tags: , , , ,