Author Archive
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Campaign Desk
Sebelius Watch
April 16, 2010 01:30 PMHealth and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has emerged as the person to watch as the Obama administration scrambles to implement health reform. The health care czarina’s words and silences offer clues about the way health reform will play out... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Sebelius Watch Archive
April 16, 2010 08:00 AMBelow, you will find links to every entry in Trudy Lieberman’s “Sebelius Watch” series, in descending order. 09/14/10: Sebelius Watch, Part V - The war of words with insurers continues 07/30/10: Sebelius Watch, Part IV - The press... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Bad News for Ben Nelson?
April 15, 2010 12:03 PMA few days ago, I found myself a visitor in Lincoln, Nebraska, a city where I cut my teeth as a reporter. So with a bit of time on my hands, I decided to do some reporting there again, this... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Finishing The Treatment
April 13, 2010 10:34 AMCampaign Desk was sorry to see Jonathan Cohn’s last post on The New Republic’s health reform blog, The Treatment. Cohn made a valuable journalistic contribution during the health care debate. He tells us that the magazine had... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
The Devil in the Details, Part VIII
April 12, 2010 01:40 PMHealth reform is now the law of the land, and the 2,000 or so pages of the legislation contain lots of clauses and fine print that lobbyists had managed to insert as the bill wound its way along its tortuous... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
The White House vs. the Associated Press
April 7, 2010 12:25 PMLinda Douglass, who works at the White House Office of Health Reform, smacked the AP last week for its “so-called analysis” in an article describing how young adults could see their insurance premiums rise when health reform takes effect. Douglass... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
The Best-Covered News Story, Ever?
April 5, 2010 12:10 PMLast week, The New Republic turned over its health care blog “The Treatment” to an odd commenter on media coverage—University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack, who runs the university’s Center for Health Administration Studies. I thought I knew most of... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Laurel to Denver’s Westword
March 30, 2010 12:02 PMIt was a riveting tale that reporter Alan Prendergast told in Westword, the Denver alternative weekly. Graphically and methodically, he showed how a Wisconsin-based insurance company by the name of Assurant Health fought one of its... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
The Devil in the Details, Part VII
March 30, 2010 10:03 AMHealth reform is now the law of the land, and the 2,000 or so pages of the legislation contain lots of clauses and fine print that lobbyists had managed to insert as the bill wound its way along its tortuous... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
At Last, the Press Discovers the Consumer Story
March 26, 2010 12:50 PMA few days ago I stopped by a medical clinic in Greenwich Village; the waiting room was abuzz with talk about health reform. How would the health law affect you, I asked Jane Stark, a medical secretary at the office.... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Bob Reich on the What-It-All Means Question
March 23, 2010 10:56 AMIn a column yesterday on Talking Points Memo, former Secretary of Labor Bob Reich got to an issue that has been strikingly absent from the miles and piles of health coverage up to now. The reform law-to-be, although historic... Continue reading
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Feature
An Rx for Reporting
March 23, 2010 10:20 AMJust before Christmas, a CNN poll asked Americans whether they favored or opposed the health-reform bills moving through Congress. Forty-two percent favored them, 56 percent were opposed. This and other polls released last fall also suggested that most Americans... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
A P.S. on WellPoint
March 22, 2010 12:57 PMLet it be known to friend and foe alike that WellPoint was at the health reform table. The ill-timed rate increases it heaped on policyholders across the land may well have tipped the balance in favor of reform—but the... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
The Meaning of Those CBO Numbers
March 22, 2010 12:07 AMCongressional Budget Office (CBO) numbers released at the end of last week gave the House Democrats the ammo they were looking for: their revised health bill would reduce the deficit by about $138 billion in the first ten years, and... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Social Security’s Code Words
March 19, 2010 11:48 AMThose who consider themselves Social Security mavens know the name Erskine Bowles. Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, and currently president of the University of North Carolina system, Bowles has teamed up with former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson to head... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Parsing the AP’s Health Care Primer
March 17, 2010 03:31 PMThe Associated Press has been an important voice in the health care debate. So it was disappointing to see its latest story: “HealthCare 101: A consumer primer on Obama’s bill.” There was nothing wrong with the premise of... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
The President Pushes against Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
March 16, 2010 12:10 PMThe president has a sales job to do if he wants the American people to get behind whatever reform emerges from the congressional sausage grinder in the next few days. As part of his pitch, he has been flogging three... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Is the Past Prologue?
March 15, 2010 10:51 AMBefore too many weeks pass, I want to comment on an illuminating Gray Matters column by Saul Friedman, an old hand at writing about issues of social justice, Medicare, and Social Security. Full disclosure here: Friedman taught me my... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Medicare Kicks Out Fox Insurance
March 11, 2010 02:53 PMThe Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) took strong action the other day when it kicked Fox Insurance out of the Medicare program. The small, New York-based insurer had carved out quite a business for itself selling stand-alone... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
What Was Sebelius Saying?
March 10, 2010 04:01 PMThe president and his staff have brought us to the stump-speech stage of health reform: the familiar talking points, the oratory, the exaltations, the fuzzy language, the misstatements, the “yes, buts.” Why, it almost sounds like a political campaign, judging... Continue reading
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