In his comments about the health legislation the other day, Doc made a very good point: the recent health care bill really doesn’t reform health care, it reforms health insurance. In particular, the bill does very little to directly address the spiraling costs of health care. Obviously that should be the next step [...]

1) The New York Times webpage has some very nice information about the bill here and here. You should check those out to see how the law is changing and how it might effect you.

A commentator on this site Blue Foot, just posed a really interesting question that I thought I would take a shot at answering. But the answer got long, so I thought I’d put it in a post instead of a comment. The question was:
“So what’s the path to small government?”
So I’m pretty liberal [...]

The Republican Party is holding their national meeting this winter. This is standard fare for both parties, and these meetings are generally taken up by electing and appointing various people, tweaking the platform in small ways, and generally being an excuse for party leaders to get together and schmooze each other once in awhile.
A [...]

Whatever you think about the mammogram debate right now, the evidence indicates that the mammography tests are broken. The stats that are floating around right now are this: if 1900 women received regular breast cancer screenings during their 40s, exactly one of them would discover a curable cancer that would have otherwise killed them. [...]

Abortion is a complicated issue. Even the most ardent pro-choice advocates have to deal with the fine line between abortion and infanticide, while the most ardent pro-life advocates have to deal with the fine lines between abortion, contraception, and miscarriage. The current debates focus on ease-of-access debates (government subsidies, parental consent, etc.) none [...]

Make sure to check out this op-ed in today’s New York Times. The author, John Cougan, is a lawyer for the public commission in Rhode Island that oversees the health care industry. He argues that a huge problem that contributes to the confusion, denial of care, and legal hassle that surround the health [...]

I’m sick of people justifying rude, insensitive, anti-democratic, behavior behind the phrase “grassroots movement”. Just because a movement is supported by quite a few people, doesn’t make the movement any more beneficial or legitimate than a movement that is only supported by a few. In fact, many of the worst tragedies we’ve seen [...]

I hang out in some pretty liberal crowds. And so, in 2004 when Bush was reelected after what felt like four solid years of shocking, undemocratic growth in executive power and an administration more concerned about privacy and loyalty than about real Americans with real problems, a lot of my friends did some pretty [...]

The Democratic Party is losing the health care debate. I still believe that some version of health care reform will be passed this year; even moderate Democrats and Republicans ran on that in this last election and they want to be able to take something home. But the public debate right now, as [...]