Also available as a free preview to non-subscribers is Ezra Klein's feature piece, "The Health of Nations," which offers analyses of several real-world health care systems that work better and cost less than ours:
Medicine may be hard, but health insurance is simple. The rest of the world's industrialized nations have already figured it out, and done so without leaving 45 million of their countrymen uninsured and 16 million or so underinsured, and without letting costs spiral into the stratosphere and severely threaten their national economies.Read Ezra's full system-by-system breakdown here.Even better, these successes are not secret, and the mechanisms not unknown. Ask health researchers what should be done, and they will sigh and suggest something akin to what France or Germany does. Ask them what they think can be done, and their desperation to evade the opposition of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry and conservatives and manufacturers and all the rest will leave them stammering out buzzwords and workarounds, regional purchasing alliances and health savings accounts. The subject's famed complexity is a function of the forces protecting the status quo, not the issue itself.
So let us, in these pages, shut out the political world for a moment, cease worrying about what Aetna, Pfizer, and Grover Norquist will say or do, and ask, simply: What should be done? To help answer that question, we will examine the best health- care systems in the world: those of Canada, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the U.S. Veterans Health Administration �
Elsewhere in the new issue:
- Simon Lazarus offers one of the first comprehensive assessments of John Roberts's tenure so far as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Guess what? Roberts may sound in interviews like a restrained consensus-builder, but he votes and leads the Court like an ideological, polarizing, and (yes) activist right-winger.
- Eyal Press reports on new social science research illustrating the importance of social cohesiveness and "collective efficacy" -- even on a block-by-block basis -- in buttressing the health and safety of neighborhoods.
- Mark Schmitt offers a theory of Barack Obama's theory of the contemporary political moment.
- Garance Franke-Ruta casts contemporary intra-left skirmishes over the Israel lobby in terms of "Shul Politics" -- arguing that "the new liberal critiques of AIPAC closely mirror recent efforts by the resurgent progressive movement, home to many Jews without kippahs, to force groups whose base is Democratic, but whose politics are deemed too conservative for the present era, to relitigate their hold on power."
- Paul Waldman looks at the last hold-outs of Bush cheerleading in the right-wing media, and how they discuss the president's disastrous war.
- Michael Kazin reviews two new works of history on the Gilded Age.
- In a Special Report package for the magazine this month, 20 writers, including David Callahan, Tamara Draut, Joan Fitzgerald, Jared Bernstein, and Marta Tienda offer articles on ending poverty in America.
--The Editors
