Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst during Obama’s address to Congress was a perfect illustration of just how much the public conversation has deteriorated in recent years. I suppose that it was inevitable that the deliberate rudeness of the town hall meetings held this summer would not end there. Although Wilson immediately apologized, he didn’t recant his [...]

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.

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 [...]

I admit that I (along with tens of millions of other Americans) have a big stake in the issue of health care reform. When the Rocky folded, I lost not only my income, I also lost my health insurance, 80% of which had been paid for by the company. Yes, I took COBRA, which is [...]

I can only hope that Obama is as firm and decisive with health care reform as he was with the Somali pirates. The Senate has an ambitious schedule of getting serious reform passed before the August recess, but the insurance and for-profit hospital and HMO lobbies are already hard at work trying to scuttle anything [...]