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.
Diane Fesmire, a teacher in Alamogordo, was one of more than 80 teachers from across the nation who won a 2008 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.
Fesmire is the mathematics lead teacher at Sierra Elementary…
New Mexico Public Education Department Secretary Veronica Garcia’s qualified endorsement of studying merit pay pushes New Mexico into a national debate over the efficacy of basing part of a teacher’s pay on performance, as well as how that performance should be measured.
Health care in England and France are considered basic human rights. In the United States, health care is considered a pot of gold for some and the thin edge of the wedge to bankruptcy for many others.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted a waiver on Tuesday that allows California and 13 other states, including New Mexico, to create regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in new automobiles, according the governor’s office late Tuesday afternoon.
Gov.…
The White House has tapped the executive director of a New Mexico domestic violence organization to fill a newly created post — that of White House Advisor on Violence Against Women.
There comes a time, as one ages, where you (meaning, me) realize how little you really know. And you (meaning, me) hear the clock ticking.
So, you read up a storm, ingest books (bless you, Albuquerque Public Library), magazines, blogs and other Web wisdom. And you take classes. Like Fred Nathan’s fascinating presentation a few days ago at OASIS, the adult education program.
Nathan is executive director of Think New Mexico, the “results-oriented think tank” that pushed our state to sever some Gordian knots by focusing public attention, banging the drums of good government and taking the Legislature in hand to enact relief.
Think New Mexico’s triumphs include full-day kindergarten, removal of most food taxes, competition in title insurance rates and more lottery dollars funneled to scholarships.
But until hearing Nathan recount a war story or two, I hadn’t realized how much he (and his board of pragmatic Democrats and Republicans) did hand-to-hand combat with lobbyists.
This reminded me that I’m reading a lot about the intricacies of national health care reform but little about the lobbying and almost nothing about the role of the mother’s milk of politics — money.
In fact, the health industry — a term that should make us tremble — maintains a permanent drip of cash at Washington bedsides. And after taking the electorate’s temperature, Big Medicine began to share its largesse with the other party before the 2006 mid-term elections, continuing through the presidential primaries last year.
“Health Sector Puts Its Money on Democrats” was the headline on an October 29, 2007 report in the New York Times.
Today, however, as committees actually write legislation, corporate medicine is allocating significant sums of fresh, new legal tender aimed primarily at killing the public option.
As reported, the American Medical Association opposes that option. If this is news, it’s the “dog-bites-man” kind, since the doctors’ union has an impeccable record of fighting efforts, including Medicare and Medicaid, to make health care accessible and affordable.
What you may not have read is how generously the AMA funds its priorities. It gave $9.8 million to congressional candidates since 2000, according to Robert Reich, the liberal economist, in a June 15 Alternet.com post.
And health industry expenditures on lobbying soared in the first quarter of this year compared to 2008. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the trade group for the largest private insurers, spent $6.4 million, United Health Group spent $1.5 million, Aetna spent $809,793 and Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug-maker, spent more than $6.1 million.
Killing the public option makes good business sense, of course; it protects private insurers (and Big Pharma) against price competition.
But health insurance reform isn’t just about health.
For the last 25 years, American incomes have grown so unequal they evoke the Roaring Twenties. The top 300,000 Americans enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans, per IRS data from 2006. Individually, they received 440 times as much as the average Joe in the bottom half, nearly doubling the gap back in 1980.
So making health care affordable for the great majority of Americans might just begin to redress the balance, narrow the gap, bring the class warriors perched atop the hierarchy into view from below.
Sadly, it won‘t happen, not this year.
Oh, President Obama may get a bill that tidies the mess, but nothing more. While the cliché says money “talks,” it really shouts in our democracy, buys public office, enacts laws or aborts them.
We’ll never get money out of politics, but we can turn down the volume. If and when we do, we may get real health care reform. Not before.
As the Obama administration and the Congress approach consensus on a health care reform, they must agree on how to pay for it. Of course, the political right, protective of the status quo rages against taxes. And many liberals, afraid to rile the electorate, won’t defend them.
President Barack Obama played traveling salesman Thursday. And his pitch — to reform the country’s credit card system — got an enthusiastic thumbs up from the 2,000 or so people packed into the Rio Rancho High School gymnasium.
Though he was recently in Las Cruces to discuss immigration and border issues, U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman — New Mexico’s senior senator — said renewable energy and health-care reform will be Congressional priorities this year.
Last week, a senior aide to President Obama told The New York Times that the White House plans to support a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would offer a path to legalization for undocumented workers. But will Obama be willing to invest the political capital needed to pass such a bill during an economic crisis – when anti-immigrant sentiment is generally at its peak?
Ninety-nine percent of Republicans and many Democrats, you see, voted billions for the Iraq adventure, borrowing it and forwarding the bill to our kids’ kids. Now, with their jerrybuilt financial temple falling on them (and us) they discover responsibility? ‘Taint funny, McGee.
I graduated from Rio Grande High School and now, ten years later it appears the cluster is once again reverting to a failed hierarchical “trickle down” approach. This philosophy and administrative shakeup is not only antiquated, but ignores the lessons and calls from President Obama’s declared “new era of responsibility.” The APS superintendent’s proposal falls short because it fails to give the community ownership or input in the cluster’s successes and failures.
President Obama told the nation on inauguration day that it wasn’t the size of government that mattered, it was whether programs worked or not. And he said as much for his own agenda. Will the American people have the unvarnished information they need to make clear decisions about what’s working and what is not? At first blush, it seems they will.
