A Dangerous Secret to the Baucus Bill
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on October 11th, 2009 4:30 am by HL
A Dangerous Secret to the Baucus Bill
Shawn Tully, Fortune
But the CBO's comforting analysis relies on a big assumption that's highly questionable, an assumption that virtually no one on either side of the debate — politicians, pundits, even economists — is even challenging.The assumption is that America's employers will keep providing coverage for their workers. But, in fact, the Baucus bill severely undermines the employer rationale for offering insurance. Economist Michael Tanner of the conservative Cato Institute points out two main reasons.First, the Baucus bill would substantially increase the costs of coverage, for example by…
Abandoning Ashraf an Embarrassment for US
Gary Morsch, Boston Globe
AS US officials grapple with Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons, they also need to address its human rights abuses against its own people as well as the regime’s meddling in Iraqi affairs.Soldiers don’t concern themselves with politics; we leave that to the politicians. There are times, though, when a soldier makes an exception. Like all American troops who have been deployed to Iraq, I went to serve my country and to help bring peace and democracy to the Middle East. I’m a doctor from Kansas and a colonel in the Army Reserve, and I served for a…
Making the ‘Public Option’ a Simple One
Robert Pozen, Boston Globe
WHEN THE Senate Finance Committee voted down the "public option'' for health care reform last week, the ideological and economic strands of this debate were fused. For certain politicians, the main objective behind the public option is to move toward nationalized health care. For others, it is to move toward a one-payer system in which the federal government disburses payments to private doctors and hospitals. However, neither of those concepts will probably garner enough votes to pass the Senate, and the ideological debate is not likely to be resolved.By contrast, Congress…
Who’s in Big Brother’s Database?
James Bamford, NY Review of Books
Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US…