In classic veal pen fashion Families USA is working against Vermont’s attempts to get the waivers,as soon as possible, it would need to move the state towards a single payer health care system. Families USA does claim to support Vermont’s reform effort, but just happens to opposes the very law needed to help make it happen in a timely manner.

As you can see in this helpful chart from the Kaiser Family Foundation, America pays much more for health care than any other first-world country. There are a lot of false ideas or very minor explanations that are overstated to try to justify why we pay so much. Other countries are just evil nations that [...]

The deficit reduction plan President Obama vaguely outlined yesterday lacks basic credibility. The problem isn’t that the math doesn’t add up–it is at least a dramatic improvement over Republican Paul Ryan’s plan, which literally defies logic and basic math. This issue is that many of the reductions President Obama promised yesterday come from actions that [...]

Yesterday, Ezra Klein was talking about the relative profitability of different parts of the health care sector. Looking at the data, what stuck out to me wasn’t just how unbelievably profitable the major drug manufacturers were (with 23 percent net profit margins), but how dramatically more profitable they were than the rest of the health [...]

It’s like a party for the Corporate Axis of Evil, and Obama’s throwing a kegger.

One of my strongest hopes is that everyone in the media, especially on the left, can simply stop pretending the new health reform law is some great progressive victory. It is not. It is a conservative, pro-corporate piece of legislation. From the CBS News: Obama: Well, partly because I couldn’t get the kind of cooperation [...]

Glenn Greenwald discovers a rather pernicious memory hole developing: Yesterday, in The Washington Post, Katrina vanden Heuvel claimed that the pharmaceutical industry opposed the health care bill (“Missouri’s Roy Blunt, among others, stood with the insurance and drug companies against health-care reform”).  As Tim Carney documents, the opposite is true:  that industry emphatically supported the bill and [...]

If you ever wonder why American health-care costs are so dramatically higher than in the rest of the world, it’s partly a result of the corrupting influence of money in our politics and the dangerous conflicts of interest that plague the health-care system. Frequently, the for-profit health-care companies pay for the continuing “education” that doctors [...]

The Congressional Budget Office just revised upwards the projected cost (PDF) of the new health care law by $115 billion. The increase is due mainly to the fact that the original CBO score of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act did not factor in the cost of actually having the government implement the reform [...]

Google apparently must not be working today. Either that, or Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher has yet to master this useful internet tool: Hamsher, meanwhile, drew the ire of many progressives when she led a last-minute assault on the health care reform bill. In trashing the bill, she invoked the $80 billion PhRMA deal, with which she [...]