Month: December 2009

The above is Jon Cohn's attempt to measure the impact of the current bill against the status quo for various socio-economic segments:

Here's a graph showing people's incomes (the blue bar), the amount they could pay in medical bills without reform (the green bar), and the amount they could pay with reform (the orange bar).

It seems pretty obvious to me that it's a huge boon to the working poor who need healthcare and cannot now afford it. Meanwhile, Ezra thinks the health care debate will soon largely fade from view:

Health-care reform is very big on the scale of things that Congress normally does, but very small in comparison to our health-care system, or even our health-care problem. This bill isn't as good a bill as it needs to be, in large part because it leaves so much of a broken system untouched. But by the same token, it is not as vulnerable a bill as it could be, because it leave so much of a politically powerful system untouched. The political system will move onto other things, and the underlying policy isn't dramatic enough to hold America's attention.

The ultimate takedown.

This is one of the entries in the contest, among several strong contenders. View the finalists and vote here. Vote as often as you like.

I'd always dismissed the story as a classic anti-Semitic blood libel: and in its more dramatic versions, such as the lurid lie that Palestinians were actually being captured and killed for organ harvesting, it was. But this more nuanced truth is what we now learn:

Israel has admitted that it harvested organs from the dead bodies of Palestinians and Israelis in the 1990s, without permission from their families. The admission follows the release of an interview with Jehuda Hiss, the former head of Israel's forensic institute, in which he said that workers at the institute had harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers.

In the interview, which was conducted in 2000 when Hiss was head of Tel Aviv's Abu Kabir forensic institute, he said: "We started to harvest corneas … Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who conducted the interview, told Al Jazeera on Monday that Hiss had said the "body parts were used by hospitals for transplant purposes – cornea transplants. They were sent to public hospitals [for use on citizens]. And the skin went to a special skin bank, founded by the military, for their uses", such as for burns victims.

Hiss was dismissed from his post four years ago. It's obviously unethical by any measure and the government says the illegal practice stopped many years ago. It is a far, far paler version than the original lie, but it  suggests there was a small, isolated flame that provoked all that smoke. Israel's need for organ transplants is severe.

James Joyner is jealous:

While this revelation has been controversial, it’s actually a brilliant model for blogging. I spend most of my day doing what Patrick and Chris do and much less time than I’d like actually writing and analyzing the things I find. Most days, I identify several topics that I never get around to writing about because I just don’t have the time and energy.

James gets it. But it really isn't a "revelation" since I've been very candid about this experiment's evolution since it started, including every step along the way with Chris and Patrick.

This video shot by an emotional mourner is haunting:

(Hat tip: Tehran Bureau)

CNN's new poll suggests that the likely passage of health insurance reform has resulted in a big jump in support for Obama among the young and the Democrats. Once it sinks in, I suspect the effect will be more potent. And once the full panoply of the first year sinks in, even more so. The liberal base is not always best represented by HuffPo and Howard Dean.

Well, almost. Ezra notes how the final bill is remarkably similar to the plan Obama outlined in his campaign. If you recall the mandate debate in the primaries, it's moved a little to the left, although the death of the public option moved it back again a little to the right. I certainly regard the passage of the health insurance reform bill to be another victory of strategy over tactics. In his first year, Obama will have achieved something that no previous Democrat had managed: universal health insurance. This will be spun away by some. And maybe the infuriated left-liberals and the angry right-oppositionists will get some temporary respite from that. But guess what? He did it. It was as grueling a victory as the one in the primaries, and took even longer. But it was a victory, a substantive, enduring legislative victory the like of which no president has achieved since Reagan.

It will have to be tweaked, as Reagan's tax cuts were. But like that first year triumph, it will last. For good or ill. And unlike tax cuts announced as pain-free, this was a clearly budgeted, deeply difficult, legislatively complex operation. The only Pyrrhic part of it is the GOP's celebration of its opposition. Their glee is premature.

This dramatic clip is labeled, "Booing the Supreme Leader’s Message”: