Can’t Barack Obama do anything right? When he’s not being rebuked for being too much in the limelight (the New Yorker, Jan. 25), he’s being zapped by Frank Rich in the March 7 New York Times. Or was it Rich? The high-profile, hard-hitting lift-out quote in his column – “One year on, everyone is puzzling [...]

The last few days, I’ve seen and heard numerous statements by leading Republicans such as John McCain and what’s his name from Kentucky to the effect that public opinion is wildly against the health care reform legislation now moving through Congress. Maybe they’re correct. If so, it’s uninformed public opinion created by screeching, repetitious and [...]

“Democratic senators are taking aim at insurance executives’ pay as they jockey for advantage in a rare weekend session to debate President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul,” the Associated Press reported Dec. 5. The AP article provided no specific examples, so suppose I mention a few likely candidates: One is Ronald A. Williams, chief executive [...]

A certain person I know got a big packet, maybe 300 pages or more, from AdvantraRx, a Medicare Part D insurer, the other day. Most of the news was on one page. It said the monthly fee was going up by 68.98 percent in 2010. It didn’t say it in so many words; we had [...]

The Progressive magazine’s 100th-anniversary issue, published in April, consists mainly of excerpts from issues in each year since 1909. The entry for January 1917 – nearly 93 years ago – expands the much-disputed definition of “American Exceptionalism.” It begins: “At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation [...]

This column first appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Nieman Reports. Three years ago, the Nieman Foundation convened a first-of-its-kind conference for journalists, experts in infectious diseases and world, national and local public health officials to explore how to cover a potential pandemic. Then the concern was avian flu, and the gathering’s purpose was [...]

I’ve seen reports many times showing that Democratic Senator Max Baucus has received enormous sums of money from the drug and insurance industries but I haven’t seen any explanation from him as to why it’s okay to take it. Has anyone been asking Baucus to explain what he did to deserve $1,500 a day from [...]

“[W]e have to control the rate of increase in health care costs,” the chief executive officer of Aetna Inc., told Judy Woodruff the other evening on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Woodruff didn’t mention a glaringly obvious way for Ronald A. Williams and his counterparts in the health-insurance industry to slow the rise in those [...]

On message and with a streak of steel, Barack Obama’s senior advisor Valerie Jarrett made it clear that the president is fighting back challenges to his agenda. It “takes a certain temperament, perseverance and stubbornness” to make changes in Washington, Jarrett said. She addressed poll numbers, town hall disruptions and what it will take to [...]

Now that the battle over health care has moved to the halls of Congress, lobbyists will take center stage. Insurance companies, drug manufacturers, physicians, nurses, hospitals, nursing homes and nearly everyone else with a stake in the health-care system will make their pitches to lawmakers. Note that I didn’t mention patients. The system exists to [...]