Jill Lawrence
The latest raft of polls isn’t great news for President Obama and congressional Democrats. His average approval rating has fallen below 50 percent and theirs is even lower. So where did they go wrong? What could they have done to avoid what many analysts see as portents of doom for the 2010 House and [...]
Congress plays make-believe, but the bill to taxpayers is real.
HAVING PASSED a health reform bill that is, at least theoretically, paid for, the House of Representatives is poised this week to blow a quarter-trillion-dollar hole in the federal budget involving, you guessed it, health care. This is the so-called doc fix, to prevent scheduled cuts [...]
By: Byron York
How many times have you heard Barack Obama talk about “the fierce urgency of now”? The president has used the quote, from Martin Luther King Jr., to call for quick action on the war in Iraq, on global warming, on homelessness, on education — you name it.
Now, Obama and his fellow Democrats are [...]
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Let me offer a modest proposal: If Congress fails to pass comprehensive health reform this year, its members should surrender health insurance in proportion with the American population that is uninsured.
It may be that the lulling effect of having very fine health insurance leaves members of Congress insensitive to the dysfunction of [...]
By Kristin Jensen and Edwin Chen
Sept. 23 (Bloomberg) — White House Budget Director Peter Orszag said health-care legislation can be completed in six weeks and may largely be based on a measure being drafted by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee.
“The goal would be, yes, over the next six weeks or so, maybe sooner,” Orszag said [...]
Things may look bleak for President Obama in the first week of September. They’ll look a lot different a few months from now.
Robert Shrum
The cooler days of September have brought no change in the heated political weather. The stakes in the battle of health reform are too high to permit a cooling off, whatever the [...]
The higher taxes, debt payments and interest rates needed to pay for health reform mean lower living standards.
By MARTIN FELDSTEIN
While the deficits caused by the fiscal stimulus package will end in 2011 and will help to sustain a fragile recovery in 2010, the deficits projected for the longer term are a threat to our economic [...]
By Michael Gerson
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
At first it seemed plausible that President Obama had a communications problem on health care — to which the solution was always more and more Obama. But exposure did not translate into persuasion.
Then it seemed useful to diagnose a partisan problem, blaming a small minority of congressional obstructionists and town [...]
By J. Taylor Rushing
Sen. Edward Kennedy’s absence from two high-profile public events is raising worries that the country’s longest congressional champion for health reform may not be available to shepherd it through the Senate this fall.
Kennedy, 77, who has been battling a particularly deadly form of brain cancer since a diagnosis last May, did not [...]
msnbc.com
By Ian Urbina and Katharine Q. Seelye
LEBANON, Pa. – They got up before dawn in large numbers with angry signs and American flag T-shirts, and many were seething with frustration at issues that went far beyond overhauling health care.
More than 1,000 people showed up here Tuesday morning in this largely Republican town in central Pennsylvania [...]
