Hardly anyone notices when government works—so how to design policies that get credit?
Jonathan Cohn
Jonathan Cohn is senior national correspondent at The Huffington Post. He served as an editor and writer at The American Prospect from 1991 to 1997, and is the author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—and the People Who Pay the Price.
Posted inSpecial Report
Getting Insurers to Behave
Job No. 1: Write new rules for health insurers and make sure they follow them.
Posted inSpecial Report
What Really Ails Medicare
The cost crisis of Medicare gets a lot of attention. The program can be fixed only by universalizing the larger health system in which Medicare resides.
Posted inFeatures
This Pill Makes You Honest
Protecting America’s Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation By Philip J. Hilts, Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95 In the 1990s, attorney Daniel Troy made a name for himself defending pharmaceutical manufacturers and tobacco companies in their frequent fights with the Food and Drug Administration. But in 2001, Troy got an […]
Posted inCivil Rights in America
Children’s Crusade
They’re at it again — conservatives are masquerading as the patrons of the young. Before you buy it, think carefully about how much kids and young adults depend upon activist government.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
The Fleece Police
I t’s Wednesday night on the NBC Nightly News-time for yet another installment of “The Fleecing of America,” the weekly series on government waste. Tonight’s episode stars a job training program in Puerto Rico, designed to move seasonal farm workers off welfare and into better-paying, permanent work. “Nothing wrong with that, right?” Tom Brokaw asks. […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Should Journalists Do Community Service?
T he Philadelphia Inquirer should not have been embarrassed last May when the Wall Street Journal uncovered a scandal in a Philadelphia charity. Even Pulitzer magnets like the Inky sometimes miss big stories right under their noses. But this was no ordinary case of being scooped by out-of-town competition. The foundation that the Journal exposed […]
Posted inBooks
Storylines: Scandals for Dummies
O n the first Sunday in March, the Washington Post published an investigative piece highlighting Vice President Al Gore’s central role in the Democratic Party fundraising operation. The article, by Bob Woodward, chronicled how Gore called donors one by one, hitting them up for money in a manner so direct even one veteran fundraiser called […]
Posted inFeatures
Child’s Play
Tracey Hunt, a 28-year-old single mother living in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood, did not want to go back on welfare. She had been there before, about five years ago, while she was pregnant with her second child. Back then, the problem was not a lack of work; it was that the work (waiting tables at a […]