Ezra Klein explores what Barack Obama's choices for his health care positions mean for reform:
Yesterday, in Chicago, Illinois, Barack Obama named the personnel for his own health-reform effort. Tom Daschle, the former majority leader of the United States Senate, will serve as both secretary of Health and Human Services and as director of the newly constituted White House Office of Health Reform. Jeanne Lambrew, the former top health-care staffer for the National Economic Council and the Office of Management and Budget, will serve as his deputy. Their presence ensures that Obama's effort to reform health care will follow a very different path than that of his Democratic predecessor.The mistakes of the 1994 health-care reform were predictable the moment Magaziner was unveiled as its architect. Peter Gosselin, writing in The Boston Globe, noted Magaziner's tendency to produce "mammoth policy studies conducted under the auspices of big bi-partisan commissions that don't just make recommendations, but come up with entirely new language for talking about problems." This has since become the standard explanation for what doomed the Clinton plan. The lumbering, bureaucratic approach produced a proposal few understood and none desired. But Gosselin wasn't writing a post-mortem. He wasn't even writing about the health-care battle. He was profiling Magaziner in November of 1992, before Magaziner had any involvement in health-care at all.
Joanne Kenen and Sarah Axeen explain the costs of not fixing health care:
Health insurance inflation will continue to outpace wages; the average cost of an employer-sponsored insurance plan for a family would reach $24,000 in 2016, an 84 percent increase from today. At least half of U.S households would need to spend more than 45 percent of their income to pay for insurance -- while the coverage itself would be sparser. Health costs would further undermine the ability of U.S. manufacturers to compete internationally, threaten the stability of U.S. jobs, and deepen the burden on local, state, and federal budgets
Rick Perlstein argues that Frost/Nixon shows that television can be most effective when it acts like television:
I noticed it only months later. It certainly wasn't intentional. I chose several dozen photographs to illustrate my book Nixonland, pretty much a random selection of galvanizing images illustrating the general theme of social conflict in the American 1960s and 1970s. And in almost half of them, just as if I had planned it, the accoutrements of media -- microphones, cameras, tape recorders, TV lights, cue cards -- crowd their way into the frame.
And Jessica Wakeman talks with Bitch magazine co-founder and editorial director Andi Ziesler about her magazine and her new book for students, Feminism and Pop Culture:
Some might say the subject of Pop Culture and Politics, a feminist analysis of media like Sassy magazine or shows like Sex & The City, is frivolous for students.
When it comes to feminism, there are a lot of internal arguments about what the worthiest debates are. There's this idea that feminism should only have a couple of different issues or focuses. And there's also often a fear that, when you're talking to people who aren't interested in feminism, you have to kind of snare them, and you have to snare them with an issue that won't be perceived as frivolous.
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--The Editors
