These days it’s hard to be more outrageous than the news. Given the increasingly hysterical attacks on the proposed health care reform, this piece, which I wrote a few weeks ago, may not be enough of an exaggeration to pass muster as satire. My fear is that the opposition will pick it up and run [...]

The Census Bureau has just released a study that shows that you are more likely not to have health insurance if you live in a state that generally votes Republican. These states (Texas is the worst, surprise, surprise) send people to Congress who oppose health care reform, and their legislatures are stingier in providing child [...]

It’s beginning to look like we’ll get something in the way of health care reform. Whether it ends up being something that actually works to cover everyone and reduce costs is another question entirely. If it contains a universal mandate and eliminates the ability of insurance companies to exclude people, it will at least be [...]

So, the public option, the very thing that makes health care reform doable, is evidently dead in the Senate, killed by Republicans who oppose any change in the status quo, and by timid Democrats who still operate as though they’re in the minority. How did we get to the place where the word “government” is [...]

The medigogues demonizing health care reform have scared people most with the boogeyman of “government-run health care,” whatever that means. What’s bizarre about the effectiveness of this approach is that Americans much prefer the government-provided health care we already have to private insurance. I’m speaking, of course, about Medicare and the Veterans Administration, both of [...]

There could be be no more fitting way to remember the man whose lifelong passion was providing universal health care for the American people. Perhaps his death will shame those whose distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies threaten to derail reform into doing the right thing. One can hope.

The reports that the health care reform plans moving through Congress contained a so-called “death panel,” which would have encouraged or allowed euthanasia, are complete falsehoods. Unfortunately, although the rumors deserve a swift death, there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism in the current health care debate to kill them. What was contained in the [...]

My fellow Americans, I’m speaking to you today from the Oval Office on a subject of great importance to all of us. The past few weeks have seen the debate over health care reform turn into an ugly, angry, divisive shouting match. Senators and Congressmen have been shouted down, insulted, even threatened at town hall [...]

The GOP-encouraged, right wing media-inflamed, health care industry-funded mobs engaged in shouting down Democratic congressmen and Senators at town hall meetings presents us with a new low from a party I thought couldn’t sink any deeper. The goal, of course, is to defeat health care reform by drowning out the support with a wall of [...]

We finally know the answer to the question, what’s the dog going to do with the car if he catches it? In the case of health care reform, bury it. Republicans who want to hand Obama a major defeat are jubilant that the blue dog Democrats are doing their work for them. I know these [...]