The Obama ReBoot: America 44/111 RSS

This "tumble-log" is devoted to the election, transition, and administration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States and to commentaries on the enormous problems (financial, economic, environmental, global, etc.) facing him and our nation.

Begun on October 9, 2008--right after my wife and I completed a 4,000 mile road-trip across the prairie from Chicago to Utah and back, and less than a month before the elections--it presents an on-line scrapbook of news clips, quotations, videos, and photos adapted from news sources, as well as a few observations of my own.

At first, I was mostly interested in seeing whether or not Barack Obama would be elected as our 44th president. Then after he took office, the formulation of an economic recovery plan seemed the single most pressing concern. As time went on, the development of health insurance reform legislation seemed most important.

But beyond these specific questions and issues, I became increasingly concerned with the state of American democracy. The Republican Party, long the carrier of one of of our two great political traditions, seemed to be moving increasingly toward a radical right-wing populism and a new form of "know-nothingism."

Most of the items in this blog can be expanded by clicking on them. The "search" box will create a list every entries that include any particular term. The "archive" below provides a brief calendar of all the items, and thus serves as a kind of "table of contents."

Archive

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The health care debate of 2009 has had so many moving parts that it has sometimes seemed impossible to follow. The crisis behind the debate, though, is about one thing above all: the scattershot nature of American medicine. The fee-for-service payment system — combined with our own instincts as patients — encourages ever more testing and treatments. We’re not sure which ones make a difference, but we keep on getting them, and costs keep rising. Millions of people cannot afford insurance as a result. Millions more have had their incomes pinched by rising insurance premiums. Medicare is on a long-term path to insolvency. The American health care system is vastly more expensive than any other country’s, but our results are not vastly better.
— Magazine Preview - If Health Care Is Going to Change, Dr. Brent James’s Ideas Will Change It - NYTimes.com