Senator Michael Bennett is gathering co-sponsors for his letter asking Harry Reid to pass a public option via reconciliation. Now Democracy for America is giving you the chance to join 10 Senators and 119 Representatives by becoming a citizen co-sponsor of the letter. Sign it here, and find out the latest Congressional representatives to sign on to this critical measure.
No, really. I mean NAPKINS. In case you haven’t heard of Dan Roam, he’s the napkin guy, helping large corporations solve complex issues through “visual thinking”. Now he has joined forces with Anthony Jones, a non-practicing physician, to explain healthcare reform on the back of a napkin. It’s an interesting presentation that will help you explain healthcare reform and why we need it to less in-the-know friends and family. (Watch it after the jump.)
The numbers for 2009 are out, and they aren’t pretty. For all the fuss over the ten-year, $1 trillion health reform price tag, well, one year’s worth of our current healthcare costs 250% of that. Ouch.
MAPLight.org, an organization dedicated to exposing the relationship between money and politics, includes a summary of healthcare fun facts in their latest newsletter. We covered the effect of lobbying money on Senators’ affection or aversion to a public option before, but seeing the big picture of repeated healthcare votes and the money behind them is eye-opening.
We’ve had a lot of bad days during these 9 months or so of D.C. healthcare reform charades. Today could be the worst one yet. Policy wonks are celebrating like pigs in slop tracing the byzantine twists and turns of Monday’s last-ditch effort to pass reform and hypothesizing about all possible solutions and outcomes. Meanwhile those of us who are really affected by this gargantuan US healthcare mess are holding our heads in our hands. Let’s take a look at how we got here.
