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As Obamacare Lay Dying

The brand new President Barack Obama, whether wittingly or not, invested his entire political capital in reforming health care in America. He gambled and he lost, not because he had nefarious intentions, but because he left the gory details to a corrupt Congress and a shady cadre of lying and conniving technocrats, ending up with something vastly different from what he campaigned on. From everything I’m reading now, Mr. Trump is about to walk in Mr. Obama’s footsteps, and if he does, the results will be unsurprisingly identical. On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump repeatedly stated that Bernie Sanders forfeited his place in history when he “made a deal with the devil” and embraced the corrupt Democratic Party establishment that fought his candidacy in most abject fashion. Guess what? Mr. Trump seems to be making the same deal with the red version of the same devil. Mr. Trump’s cabinet choices indicate that he is now embracing the ultra-conservative factions of the Republican Party, the sa

Call to Action: Organizing for Patient Care

By NIRAN S. AL-AGBA, MD and MARGALIT GUR-ARIE On November 8th America elected a President who ran on a promise to restore government of the people, by the people, for the people (among other things). However, we cannot expect such government to be given to us on a silver platter, no matter who resides in the White House. We must build it ourselves, by definition. Government of, by, and for the people requires the people to stand up and do more than just vote every four years, do more than author clever blogs, do more than compose brilliant tweets, post cynical quips or write constructive comments on the websites of power. Self-government requires informed citizens with a vision to organize, mobilize, and take purposeful action. For the last eight years we engaged in all of the former and none of the latter. We know many of you are in the same predicament. We are the everyday people and frontline doctors everybody in government is supposedly trying to help. We don’t entirely doub

Is the Better Way Really Better?

Dear President-elect Trump, The American people, myself proudly included, chose to send you to Washington DC to do their bidding. That’s what happened on November 8th 2016. Everything you hear now from the elite punditry is aimed at obfuscating this simple truth. Forget about dainty glass ceilings, we the people were able to break through the fortified ramparts erected by entrenched money and power and exercise our right to govern ourselves. I would caution the smug intelligentsia against underestimating the wisdom of the people once again, and I would caution you against forgetting who sent you there and why we did so. We now know we have the power, and what the people giveth, the people can taketh away. RyanCare The ecstatic welcome you received from Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell the other day looks more like an act of violence than one of true reconciliation. Fair weather friends are usually there because they want something, and in this case they want to hijack the people’s agenda

Our Deplorable Health Care

Even the most ardent Obamacare supporters are now forced to admit that the law has hit a rough patch this year. The opposition to Obamacare is positively gloating with self-congratulatory “I told you so” assessments of the supposedly dire situation. Defenders of the cause are counteracting with the customary deluge of charts and graphs to prove unequivocally that Obamacare is actually turning out better than they expected. Integrity and honesty being in short supply on both sides of this quandary, chances are excellent that no matter what happens next, the American people will lose big league, unless…. If Mrs. Clinton becomes the next President of the United States, Obamacare will survive largely unharmed with a few minor tweaks to address a few minor initial oversights, best summed up by Sara Rosenbaum , a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University: “The subsidies were not generous enough. The penalties for not getting insurance were not stiff enough. And we do

The Dog Whistles of Health Care

Discrimination in health care was institutionalized in Independence, Missouri on July 30, 1965 when President Johnson signed the Social Security Amendments of 1965 into law, creating “two moral frameworks for public financing of healthcare”. Medicare was supposedly an “earned” right for the elderly, while Medicaid was framed as a “welfare” program for the poor. It was a necessary political compromise. It was just a first step and bigger and better things would certainly be accomplished in due course. It was better than nothing. But fifty years later, and after taking yet another “first step” with Obamacare, the wasteful, divisive, discriminatory, and ultimately self-defeating direction we chose back in 1965, and again in 2010, has not changed one bit. After 45 years of tinkering with Medicare and Medicaid, Obamacare in a bold stroke expanded the welfare model of medical care upwards into the heart of what used to be known as the American middle class, the former engine of progress and

Open Letter to Senator Bernie Sanders

Dear Bernie, I was one of the gullible liberals who thought and vehemently argued for months on end that you could win the Democratic Primaries fair and square. After all if a rookie billionaire with zero political credibility and a spotted past could win the Republican nomination, why wouldn’t an unimpeachable United States Senator be able to do the same in my party? We both know the answer(s) to that, don’t we, Senator? You chose the high road when all was said and done, but was that the right road? I have no doubt that your entire career and this ill-fated campaign in particular were driven by a desire to lift the exploited, the downtrodden, the poor and the excluded to their rightful place in a government of the people, by the people, for the people. In which case, Senator, you are now squandering the opportunity of a lifetime to change history in a way no one else can, or ever could, or will ever be able to even try. You may be telling yourself that once you failed to win from the