There is a commonly held view that one of the ways to fight the massive federal deficit is to curb entitlement programs such as Medicare.  But, an expansion of Medicare may be what we really need.

According to a 2010 report produced by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (with… Read full post »

This evening, CBS’s 60 Minutes presented an excellent, poignant report on childhood poverty in Central Florida’s Seminole County.  According to correspondent Scott Pelley, “We’re told the recession ended in 2009. This is a jobless recovery we’re… Read full post »

 I’m just five months away from eligibility for Medicare.  Aging isn’t the most pleasant of prospects but, as the television ad says, one of the good things about turning 65 is Medicare.  Yes, indeed.

I’m comparatively lucky that, a year after I returned to… Read full post »

According to Bloomberg News, “the number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a record 40.8 million in May as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high," according to government sources.  That means that one eighth of the population of a country that still claims to be the/… Read full post »

Compared to what has happened to Shirley Sherrod, an honest USDA official who was fired because of a hasty over-reaction by her employer to a deliberate misrepresentation of her remarks on the right-wing blog site of Andrew Breitbart, the mistreatment last year of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates,… Read full post »

The ad on TV says: “Nothing is more real than Reddi Wip” and I suppose, in some strange existential sense, that’s perfectly true.  The canned whipped cream with nitrous oxide propellant is no more illusory/… Read full post »

Watching his tight-lipped replies to congressional inquisitors, I was, paradoxically, somewhat sympathetic to Tony Hayward’s plight.  After all, his questioners –Joe Barton excepted—had it easy.  They were expected to get outraged --at BP, at Hayward, at our collective hel… Read full post »

Two days ago, I got an interesting letter from my health insurance company (Assurant Health) about how “the recent health care legislation” will affect my coverage.

I was told that, because I was already insured, I won’t be subject to “potential rate increases that will acc… Read full post »

My mistake. At first, I thought that President Obama was sending National Guard troops to the Gulf Coast to take charge of the unfolding eco-catastrophe caused by one of the world’s richest oil companies. It turns out, according to a Washington Post story by Michael… Read full post »

Commenting on the extraordinary testimony of Goldman Sachs executives and officers before the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Carl Levin, the Washington Post’s columnist E. J. Dionne writes: “Goldman may face charges from the Securities and Exchange… Read full post »

Not long after President Barack Obama approved a controversial expansion of U.S. offshore oil and gas drilling, an oil-rig, operated by Transocean Ltd. for British Petroleum (BP), located 42 miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded, killing 11 workers. (This, incidentally, wa… Read full post »

Yesterday was a special day in the perverse annals of military lunacy. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by the estimable Senator Carl Levin, former NATO commander (in the 1990s), retired U.S. Marine General John Sheehan, said that the inclusion of gays in the… Read full post »

In 1998, the British Labor government issued two important reports that underscored its view that, according… Read full post »

Let me put things in perspective, to define the magnitude of the problem that really needs to be systematically addressed in Haiti, after the immediate, urgent relief efforts have abated.  According to the World Bank, Haiti’s GDP in 2008 (in current U.S. dollars, not adjusted for inflation… Read full post »

The U.S. was involved in war in Indochina long before anyone seemed to know (unless they had, perhaps, read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, published in 1955). There was ample time for us to have paid attention. But, from 1954, when the French colonial army lost at Dienbienphu, few people d… Read full post »

Thought for the day:  Today, on MSNBC, Pat Buchanan, former right-wing presidential candidate, said that he doesn’t believe in evolution. In her new memoirs, Sarah Palin, former Republican governor of Alaska and former vice-presidential candidate, says that she’s a creationist. … Read full post »

Here’s a contradiction that, for some reason, fails to surprise me.  I am beyond surprise. 

In a recent blog on Open Salon, Dr. Amy Tuteur discusses a recent measure introduced by Senator Orin Hatch that would require health insurance companies to reimburse people receiving Christian… Read full post »

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. (Stephen Spender)

Joe McCarthy died over half a century ago, but McCarthyism survived his alcohol-induced death.  Politi… Read full post »

The health reform bill introduced yesterday by Speaker Nancy Pelosi does not provide a robust public option unless robust means that, if you eat your spinach today, you may have muscles in three years.  Maybe.

Most of the provisions that would provide needed health insurance to tens of millions… Read full post »

I am running out of things to say about the health care reform process in Congress.  Like other supporters of single payer, the so-called public option already represents a big compromise, so when President Obama let Senator Baucus, a man in the pocket of the insurance industry, frame the Financ… Read full post »

The U.S. suffers from a profound health care crisis that is best measured in terms of two distinctive features: excess mortality and social injustice. In regard to the first: According to Ellen Nolte and C. Martin McKee (both at the prestigious London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), in… Read full post »

I despair.  But, as Joe Hill said, facing a firing squad in Utah, "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize." 

Personally, I favor single payer, something on the model of what Canada enjoys.  But, at the very least, I want what is called "the public option."  A hefty majority o… Read full post »

Sadly, Mike Madden wrote yesterday in Salon that one of the issues the Democrats must now face is “how generously the federal government should subsidize insurance for people who can't afford it at market rates.”  How tragic that, after months of debate,  that question shou… Read full post »

In the best of all possible worlds, Wendell Potter’s testimony the other day before the Domestic Policy Subcommittee (of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee), chaired by Congressman Dennis Kucinich, should have struck a definitive blow for the cause of real health reform.  The he… Read full post »

While it's obviously premature to say precisely what kind of Frankenstein's monster will emerge out of the various Congressional health-reform bills, it is alarming that, according to today's New York Times, the committees that have passed bills "would require all Americans to have insurance" --or fa… Read full post »