I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., has been one of the most influential voices in the health care debate as part of the “Gang of Six” senators who were charged with crafting the Senate Finance Committee’s health care reform bill.
As such, he’s been in the public spotlight a little more than even during recent discussions over energy legislation (Bingaman is the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee). So I thought I’d make a semi-regular feature of the roundup of the health care debate, concentrating on New Mexico’s senior senator.
Yesterday came the news that the Senate Finance Committee bill would not include a public option. And ABC News reports the three Democrats in the Gang of Six — Bingaman, Max Baucus of Montana and Kent Conrad of North Dakota — are leaning away from the public option and instead towards a non-profit, non-government co-op proposal.
And while the bipartisan negotiators, led for Democrats by Sens. Max Baucus of Montana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, are not ceding some key liberal talking points. Chiefly, they are moving toward a series of non-profit, non-government co-ops to compete with the insurance industry instead of a government-run health plan.
It seems a bit questionable to call this the “liberal” plan, as the more liberal plan has seemed to be the public option — or even a single-payer reform.
Predictably, after news came out that the Senate Finance Committee’s health care reform bill would not include a public option, pressure came from the left. Matt Yglesias of Think Progress wondered why senators from such small states held such ironclad control over the health care reform process.
We’re talking, after all, about Max Baucus of Montana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Collectively those six states contain about 2.74 percent of the population…
The largest metropolitan area contained in whole or in part within any of those six states is the Albuquerque MSA, population 846,000, the 59th largest in the United States—smaller than New Haven or Fresno or Richmond.
A Politico article shows that Bingaman is open to “benchmarks” to gauge the success of any health care reform that comes out of Congress.
“I think that makes sense,” said Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), when asked by POLITICO about the possibility of setting benchmarks. “You could make an evaluation and midcourse corrections if needed. I think that’s the prudent thing to do.”
Yesterday, Bingaman spoke to radio reporters in a weekly conference call and a number of the questions pertained to, unsurprisingly, health care. You can listen to the mp3 of the call here.
And NMI’s own Gywneth Doland notes that health care reform is ignoring Bingaman’s efforts to rein in the nation’s obesity epidemic.
If that isn’t enough reading for you, then the New York Times has even more on the Gang of Six.
