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The Drama Was In The History

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Nov. 08 (Opinion) - Do not be fooled by the Beltway conventional wisdom, which has repeatedly treated House legislation as inferior to its counterpart in the Senate. If anything, the opposite is true. Should the House bill or something like it become law, the vast majority of Americans would have health insurance--protecting them from financial calamity and giving them access to medical care when they need it.

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The Top Ten Things Worth Fighting For

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 14 (News Analysis) - As deliberations continue, in the floor debate and eventually in the House-Senate conference committee, the question is how these bills will come together. The best case scenario is that we get the best of both approaches--the far-reaching coverage and insurance reforms in the House and HELP bills, combined with the CBO-certified cost control of Finance. The worst case is that we get cost control like House and HELP, with coverage that looks like Finance.

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Is the Insurance Industry Declaring War?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 12 (Opinion) - Over the weekend, America's Health Insurance Plans circulated a study it commissioned from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In a memo to AHIP members, reproduced here, president Karen Ignani explained its significance

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Against Transparency

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Lawrence Lessig - Oct. 09 (Opinion) - How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement--if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness--will inspire not reform, but disgust. The "naked transparency movement," as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

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The CBO Just Released Its New Health Care Score. Reason for Relief?

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 07 (News Analysis) - The good news, substantively and politically, is that CBO expects the measure would reduce budget deficits by $81 billion over the next decade and by even larger sums in the following decade, although it won't quantify that amount specifically because estimates are so imperfect that far out.

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Stocked Exchange

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 06 (Opinion) - Ten years from now, if health care reform is a boondoggle, you might be able to trace that failure back to a decision in the wee hours of last week's Senate Finance Committee hearings. It happened on Thursday night, just before midnight, when John Kerry put forward an amendment. It was amendment C-8: "Empowering State Exchanges to be Prudent Purchasers." The title may sound innocuous, if a bit arcane. But if you've followed the health care reform debate, then you know (or should know) that anything involving the insurance exchanges is important.

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Madison Weeps

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - Sep. 22 (Editorial) - Our sense of alarm has been growing for some time. From the moment Barack Obama entered the White House, the Republican Party has cast itself as the Party of No. Whether it was the stimulus bill--which garnered not a single Republican vote in the House--or the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court--which only nine of 40 Senate Republicans supported--the GOP has defined itself in its opposition to Obama. But our alarm has been tempered by the knowledge that, in a way, this is as it should be: In our form of government, the minority party should be the opposition party; and, while the Obama administration did make overtures to the GOP on the stimulus and its selection of Sotomayor, those overtures were largely symbolic. The factionalism, while regrettable, was understandable. But, this week, as the health care reform battle reached a crucial juncture, the violence of faction has become gratuitous.

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The Centrists’ Take On The Speech: Pretty Darn Good

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Suzy Khimm - Sep. 10 (News Analysis) - The moderates and centrists critical to ongoing health care negotiations seemed to have found a good deal to their liking in the president’s speech tonight.

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Why Reform Survived August

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Sep. 08 (News Analysis) - The August recess began with critics attacking health care reform because of its high price tag. It ended with critics attacking health care reform because of how reformers proposed to reduce that high price tag.

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Party Is Such Sweet Sorrow

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Sep. 04 (News Analysis) - During the past year, Republicans have frequently said they want to work with Democrats. But the real story of the last few months is how unserious those pledges turned out to be. Although you wouldn’t know it from their rhetoric or the media coverage, there are not one but two ostensibly bipartisan proposals out there right now. Either of them could be the template for successful reform if even a few Republicans started pushing them seriously. But, even the ostensibly reasonable Republican senators whom Democrats have tried to engage--Mike Enzi, Charles Grassley, and Hatch--just aren’t interested. And it appears they haven’t been for a while.

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The Courtship

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Gabriel Sherman - Aug. 31 (Special Report) - In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

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Thought Rationing

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Chait - Jul. 09 (Opinion) - Two weeks ago, President Obama offered to cut several hundred billion more dollars out of the Medicare and Medicaid budget to help make room for health care reform. This sort of gesture ought to appeal to conservatives, right? Apparently not. The Heritage Foundation warned, "At a time when Medicare is dangerously close to bankruptcy, it is shortsighted to funnel funds into the creation of another government-run program instead of shoring up Medicare." A National Review editorial complained, "These cuts in Medicare and Medicaid payments are nothing more than reimbursement reductions with no empirical or economic basis to justify them."

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Legos, Red Sox, and Those Long Waits in Massachusetts

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Jul. 08 (Opinion) - The suggestion that the 2006 health reform jacked up the price of health insurance misses one inconvenient fact: Insurance in Massachusetts was among the nation's most expensive long before the law took effect. There are a variety of reasons for that. The higher cost of living in New England has something to do with it. So does the heavy concentration of teaching hospitals. (Research suggests that when you have a lot of high-tech hospitals in an area, it tends to create greater demand for high-tech medical services, which drives up insurance for everybody.)

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Rising Costs

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - Notwithstanding the predictable fits-and-starts of the legislative process, it seems likely that Obama will have a bill to sign by year's end, thereby accomplishing what the Clintons famously could not. But then what? Having crafted a bill that can pass Congress, will Obama be signing a bill that people actually like? It's a question best answered by examining another episode of the past--one that, although a mere footnote in political history, is fraught with warnings for today's reformers.

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Now This CBO Projection Should Worry You

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Jun. 17 (Opinion) - ... the Republican attacks clearly rattled centrist Democrats. And when the Finance projections came in, they began announcing that something drastic had to be done. "It’s clear there have got to be changes made to make the whole package affordable," Kent Conrad, a Finance member, told the New York Times.

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More Than Words

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Shmuel Rosner - Jun. 04 (Opinion) - The specific details the president offered were scarce. He said, for example, that the United States "will support a secure and united Iraq as a partner, and never as a patron," but didn't say what happens in case the American withdrawal of forces leaves an Iraq that isn't secure or united. He laid out the reasons for which it will be better for the region and the world if Iranians decide to give up on their nuclear military program, but refrained from threats, or from offering a path through which such goal can be achieved. In fact, the only aggressive message conveyed in the part dedicated to Iran actually seemed aimed at Israel: "No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons. That is why I strongly reaffirmed America's commitment to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons." This might mean future American pressure on Israel to disarm, as part of the deal the Obama team will be seeking with Tehran later this month.

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Just Like Bush

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Michael Crowley - Jun. 04 (Opinion) - Most of his main arguments have been made before--not just by Obama himself, but by his predecessor. "Today I'd like to speak directly to the people across the broader Middle East," George W. Bush said at the United Nations on September 16, 2006.

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Backward Runs 'Newsweek'

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Michael Kinsley - May. 22 (Opinion) - The new Newsweek, judging from the first issue (which Meacham calls "a model of the form"), bizarrely resembles the old Newsweek more than the new Newsweek Meacham describes. It is cluttered with departments and headlines and labels and tiny features, all of which imply some hierarchy or order in the editors' minds, but only add to the chaos in the readers'. Its longer pieces follow all the stale conventions of newsmagazine prose.

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The Case Against Sotomayor

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jeffrey Rosen - May. 04 (Opinion) - despite the praise from some of her former clerks, and warm words from some of her Second Circuit colleagues, there are also many reservations about Sotomayor.

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Straight Man

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Michelle Cottle - Apr. 28 (Opinion) - If Biden speaks the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, what happens should he eventually utter a disastrously inconvenient truth--not a run-of-the-mill gaffe but something more grave and substantive? Will the White House ultimately regret its decision to attach ethical import to the vice president's candid, digressive, unpredictable, and occasionally out-of-control political style?

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Tough Reid

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Eve Fairbanks - Apr. 13 (Special Report) - The reviews are so bad it seems almost impossible that Reid has survived as Senate leader. But, though Reid is disliked by the people, his Democratic Senate colleagues adore him.

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Charm Offensive

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Laura Secor - Apr. 01 (News Analysis) - You could almost hear the international sigh of relief that greeted President Obama's videotaped message to Iran last week. After eight years of bluster and threats, an American president civilly addressed both Iran's people and its leaders; he spoke of mutual respect, of Iran's role in making the world "a better and more beautiful place," of "shared hopes" and "common dreams."

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A Cap And Trade Calamity?

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By William Galston - Mar. 24 (News Analysis) - If the president remains committed to Making Work Pay and clean energy investment, he will probably have to agree to equivalent spending reductions elsewhere, because fiscal moderates within his own party will insist.

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MBA Frayed

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Bradford Plumer - Mar. 18 (Special Report) - Business schools aren't, of course, primarily responsible for the implosion of global finance: On the list of culprits, they rank well below the bursting real-estate bubble, skyrocketing bank leverage, and the decline of regulatory oversight.

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Bobby Jindal and Racial Stereotypes

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Christopher Orr - Feb. 26 (Opinion) - Boosters of Bobby Jindal's presidential prospects have suggested to me--correctly, I think--that his racial background could be less of a hurdle for white voters than Barack Obama's was because, as a South Asian American, Jindal would be perceived as a "model minority." Where racially nervous whites might look at Obama and think of some scary African American they saw on "The Wire," they'd look at Jindal and think of that nice young internist who took care of them while the family doctor was on vacation in Boca.

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