Today the Senate Finance Committe (made up of both republicans and democrats) released their long-awaited “compromise” healthcare bill.  Since Obama’s healthcare speech last week (Read or watch the speech here) this seems to be the bill everyone’s been looking to as the hope for the future.  Some of that may be warrented but there’s still a long road ahead.  I’ve provided details and links after the jump

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As the battle for healthcare reform rages on, many of the myths that I once expected to quietly die have instead become stronger and more entrenched. In particular, the degree of misunderstanding surrounding the “public plan” portion of healthcare reform proposals continues to astound me, both on the Right and the Left. I addressed some of those concerns in a post last week entitled “All About the Public Plan” and I think some of the misconceptions I discussed in that article have pertinence to the discussion of alternate reform mechanisms as well. Especially in regards to Co-ops, I think misunderstandings on the part of the Left have hobbled any chance at real discussion of this viable public plan alternative. So hopefully this will help clear some things up:

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Well needless to say there’s a lot going on in the healthcare arena lately.  In case you missed it, the House of Representatives released their healthcare bill last week.  I’m planning on writing up my analysis of it but unfortunately I’ve got midterms early next week so you’ll all have to wait a week or so for that.  But in the meantime I thought I’d provide some basic information about what the bill contains since I’ve had several people recently express frustration to me that they don’t know where to get an objective description of the contents of the bill.  So I’ve provided some helpful links after the jump. Continue reading

Well its been a while hasn’t it?  Sorry about that.  I’ll be posting with more regularity in the future.  As many of you know I recently got back from an AMA conference in Chicago and it was a surprisingly eye-opening experience in a lot of different ways.  There’s no way I can cover it all in one post so I’m just going to talk about one of the issues that was discussed at this meeting.  There is a now-famous article that was recently published in the New Yorker entitled “The Cost Conundrum” which analyzes some of the drivers of high healthcare costs.

Everybody was talking about this article.  The President of the AMA called the article a “watershed moment” for healthcare reform.  Supposedly President Obama had everyone on his healthcare team read the article.  So if you have even a passing interest in healthcare policy and reform, you should probably read it too.  So for your enjoyment I’ve posted a link to it after the jump.

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Breaking News!  Tomorrow morning Pres. Obama is expected to announce that he has chosen John Huntsman Jr., governor of Utah and moderate republican as the new ambassador to China.  And sources say Governor Huntsman has accepted the ambassador position.  He learned Chinese while serving a mission for the church in Taiwan and he has an adopted daughter from China.  He also served as Ambassador to Singapore under President George H.W. Bush and worked in the Reagan Whitehouse.  I’ve always liked Gov. Huntsman and he seems to be extremely qualified for this position.  And I’m pleased to see Pres. Obama reaching across party lines to appoint more Republicans to important positions.  The full article follows:

SALT LAKE CITY — President Barack Obama intends to name Utah’s Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman, seen by many as a potential GOP presidential contender, to be ambassador to China, a source close to the governor said Friday night.

The popular moderate governor has accepted the appointment, said the source, who would speak only on condition of anonymity ahead of a White House announcement expected Saturday. Repeated messages to Huntsman’s spokeswoman and other staffers went unreturned Friday. The White House would not confirm the nomination.

Huntsman, a two-term governor, is fluent in Mandarin Chinese from his days as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan. One of his seven children, Gracie Mei, was adopted from China in 1999 after she was abandoned in a vegetable market.  He made headlines recently for encouraging the Republican Party to swing in a more moderate direction if it wanted to bounce back from the 2008 elections, angering some conservatives. Continue reading

Well with finals over and done with you can expect to get a lot more posts from me in the coming weeks!  And we start out today with some very exciting  news.  President Obama held a press conference today for what he called, “a watershed event in the long and elusive quest for health care reform.”  The American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association; PhRMA; AdvaMed; America’s Health Insurance Plans, the SEIU, and the Greater New York Hospital Association and the California Hospital Association announced a new cooperative effort to drastically reduce the rate of growth of healthcare costs beginning immediately.  They pledged to cut the rate of growth by 1.5%.  This may not seem like a lot but this means a cut from about 7% to 5.5%, bringing us much closer to the annual rate of income growth which tends to hover around 4-5% but which has at times grown to near 6%.  And that’s what really matters, that’s really our baseline here.  If healthcare costs can be reduced such that their growth is equal to the rate of income growth in the US then the future of healthcare suddenly gets a lot rosier.  And this commitment brings us much closer to that goal.

And this is also great news for America’s future financial security.  Many people don’t realize the huge impact that rising healthcare costs have on our country’s national budget.  The reasons why that is are a subject for another article but even a savings of 1.5% will mean much smaller deficits and less national debt.  One Obama aid put it this way: Continue reading

One of my absolute favorite political sites on the internet, Politifact.com, recently won a pulitzer prize!  They were apparently the first exclusively online news organization to do so.  And they really, really deserve it.  They do top-notch fact-checking of most of the controversial statements being thrown around by public officials.  They’re also running an “Obameter” where they keep track of over 500 of Obama’s campaign promises and record which ones are kept and which are broken, with comprehensive explanations for each.

Every time I start to get depressed about the sorry state of investigative journalism, the decline of objective reporting and rise of partisan pontificating, or the way our news media has devolved into a megaphone for the most apocalyptic, opinionated, and insane of our politicians and pundits, I surf on over to politifact.com and bask in their worship of sweet, sweet facts, and it gives me hope.  Seriously, if you have even a passing interest in politics, you should probably bookmark politifact and check it a couple times a week.  They only update every once in a while.  If they expanded into a full news agency I’d probably make them my number one source of political information.  Another fantastic, and equally objective, site is Factcheck.Org.  I know I’ve promoted them both before but seriously, check them out:

www.PolitiFact.com

www.FactCheck.org

Thanks to Joel for this tip.  It turns out my old stake president from my Glenwood days, Larry Echohawk, just got asked to head up the bureau of indian affairs!  Here’s a portion of the Salt Lake Tribune article about it:

President Barack Obama on Friday picked Brigham Young University law professor Larry EchoHawk to lead the Bureau of Indian Affairs, making him the first high-profile Mormon and first Utahn to join the administration’s senior ranks.

EchoHawk, a member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, has lived and worked throughout the West. He made history in 1990 as the first American Indian elected to statewide office when he won Idaho’s attorney general race. After a failed bid for Gem State governor, EchoHawk, a Democrat, relocated to Utah, where he started teaching courses on criminal law and federal Indian law at BYU.

“Larry EchoHawk has the right leadership abilities, legislative experience and legal expertise,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, “to bring about the transformative improvements we all seek for Indian country.”

The rest of the article can be found after the jump. Continue reading

Hey look, a timely article for a change!  Finally I’m addressing a phenomenon before it happens and not days/weeks after it has passed.  Anyway, you may or may not have heard about the “tea-party” anti-tax movement that’s developing around the country.  This tea-party movement consists of people gathering in various cities on April 15th holding protests about the “terrible taxes burdening americans”, and what they see as America’s coming descent into socialism.  Here’s a quote from one of the two fawning FoxNews articles that were up about it today.  From one of the organizers of the tea party protests:

“People are getting killed — they’re getting hammered with taxes and it’s not the way this country is supposed to be run. … We want to fight back,”

Are people really getting hammered with taxes?  I don’t challenge their right to gather and protest taxes or whatever they want, but they may want to check a few facts first.  And to make it convenient for them, I’ve gathered the pertinent graphs and information after the jump.  I should also note before I begin that not all tea-party participants are claiming taxes are too high and that some are doing this for other reasons (to protest the stimulus, just to express their anger that McCain lost etc), I’m not addressing those concerns here.  But these tea-parties are being billed as “anti-tax protests” so this is a significant part of what they’re organizing for and this article will address that issue.  Anyway, as best as I can deduce, here’s some relevant historical perspective… Continue reading

Well its long been my position that the largest bias of the media is their bias towards the exciting, tantalizing, scandalous, lurid, and enraging.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the way that the media treats the actions of murderers who commit mass shootings.  I was reading an interesting article in MindHacks (an excellent psychology/neuroscience blog) the other day about this subject and with the immigration center shooting that happened in New York today, I thought this was an appropriate time to post something about it.

A very interesting video clip on this subject and a brief commentary can be found after the jump (which means after you click “continue reading” for my readers who are new to the blog culture) Continue reading