Over the next year, the Office of National AIDS Policy, led by Dr. Jeffery Crowley, will come up with a strategy for fighting HIV in the United States. That project is long overdue. While the Bush administration devoted unprecedented resources to combating HIV/AIDS in the developing world, it largely ignored the epidemic here at home. […]
Dana Goldstein
Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.
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THE CBO CONCERN-TROLLING BEGINS.
Yesterday the Senate Finance Committee trotted out Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf to state the obvious: that health reform is really, really expensive. To pay for it, we might have to provide doctors with incentives so that they don’t order unnecessary tests and operations. We might have to raise some taxes. Now, predictably, centrist […]
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STRANGE WORDS FROM ABE FOXMAN.
Something is really wrong when a major American Jewish leader complains that the president is doing too much to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman: Still, I continue to sense that the administration is putting too much weight on solving the conflict. We all want to see progress and I have no […]
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HILLARY CLINTON AND “MULTI-TASKING.”
As Ben Smith reports, in advance of the secretary of state’s major, agenda-setting address yesterday, Hillary Clinton‘s aides pushed the phrase “muscular” to describe her approach. Smith writes: But the early spin gave, at best, a very partial and misleading sense of what Clinton actually said yesterday. The most “muscular” portions were the carefully-drafted signals […]
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IN HOUSE BILL, A NEW LANDSCAPE FOR MEDICAID FAMILY PLANNING.
The House tri-committee health reform bill, released yesterday, does not overturn the Hyde Amendment, which prevents Medicaid from funding abortion for 7 million poor women. But it does contain one major victory for reproductive rights: It allows states to offer contraceptive coverage to poor women outside of Medicaid without first applying to the federal government […]
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TEACHING AND THE MIRACLE IDEOLOGY.
Speaking to the American Federation of Teachers on Monday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “Great teachers are performing miracles every single day.” Later on, when asked during a press conference about what makes a good teacher, he replied, “An effective teacher? They walk on water.” On the surface, Duncan’s “miracle” ideology might seem like […]
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THE NEW HOUSE HEALTH REFORM BILL AND REPRODUCTIVE CARE.
The House just released the new draft of its health reform bill. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn have full wrap-ups. Here are my bullet points on what this particular proposal means for reproductive health: An expert medical commission led by the surgeon general will decide what services must be covered by the public plan and […]
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WHAT IS THE GOP’S GOAL ON ABORTION AND HEALTH REFORM?
Chuck Grassley speaks at an Iowa McCain-Palin rally, 2008. Just now on MSNBC, Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, claimed that when it comes to abortion and health reform, “What we’re trying to do is maintain current policy.” As I report today in a full-length piece, current policy — which prevents […]
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THE WHITE HOUSE PAY GAP.
An enterprising college student, Ariel Boone, has used the White House staff/salary list to do some digging on gender and pay disparities. Here’s what she found: On average, a White House woman earns $9,168 less than a White House man. A woman’s median WH salary is $57,314, while a man’s median WH salary is $65,000. […]
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Playing the Abortion Card
Conservatives are crying “abortion” in their efforts to derail health reform. But progress for reproductive rights is far from assured.