Sen. Tom Harkin continues to refer to the Senate health reform bill as a “starter home” in a new entry on the Huffington Post. Instead of that “partial loaf” analogy, I like to think of this bill as like a starter home. It is not the mansion of our dreams. But it has a solid [...]

Medicare spends about 97 cents on every dollar it collects in premiums to provide care. The Senate bill, if enforced properly, would only require private insurance companies to spend 80 cents of every dollar on actual care. We are creating health care “reform” using a system that we know is dramatically more wasteful than public [...]

There is a myth that the public option was only a tiny idea blown out of proportion for symbolic reasons. The public option was never going to be truly tiny, it was only going to be small at its inception. It is not because it was “weak,” it was just strongly caged in. But even [...]

Clearly, Blanche Lincoln is upset that the people of Arkansas are realizing that she cares more about what is best for private insurance companies than she does about what is best for the American people. To try to shake that image, the Senator has co-sponsored a basically meaningless, faux-populist Amendment: Under current law, companies can [...]