My friend Merrill Goozner, a long-time Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune Reporter, now publishes a terrific blog called “GoozNews,” which really digs into health care in our country.  This week, he posted three incisive articles:  “The Return of the C-Ops (and the demise of the public option);  “Land of the Fee”; and, “The Faustian Bargain With Big Pharma.”  I urge you to visit him at www.GoozNews.com.

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Note: This is a cross-post from my friend, Bebe Bahnsen, who has just started blogging through her website, Bebe’s Place: Musings of a Southern Writer www.bebebahnsen.com  Bebe’s a living miracle who suffered half a life of depression before discovering it was a brain tumor and having it successfully removed.

My Brother and Julian Bond

I’m not sure these two special men have ever met, but each of them recently received an honor worth noting. First, my brother, Ralph Nelson, who received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Camera Operators. “From whom?” you ask.  You see, camera operators’ work every time you watch a movie and you see my brother’s stills every time you see ads for many, many movies, including Frost/Nixon, The Green Mile and Batman Forever, to name just a few. (More)

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“The White House is signaling that it will back health care reform legislation that does not contain stringent cost containment measures.”
Cross posted from www.gooznews.com/node/2915
By Merrill Goozner

I, too, join in praising the medical-industrial complex’s pledge to hold down costs. Today’s White House announcement — already carried in every major paper and telegraphed to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman with a personal phone call on Saturday — greatly increases the likelihood that some kind of health care reform bill will pass this year.

The groups that will gather around the president today include the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, the Advanced Medical Technology Association (devices), the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Service Employees International Union (which represents more health sector workers than any other labor organization). Their pledge: holding health care spending to a growth rate that’s 1.5 percentage points less than the projected trend, which would save $2 trillion over ten years. (More)

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Old Gus Bevona would have been turning over in his grave, only he ain’t dead yet. There we were, rocking out to Motown sounds in the auditorium he’d built as a tribute to himself and using it instead to honor a young Indian woman who’s organized 11,900 New York City cab drivers, and a businessman who thinks we should deny pension and health care benefits to members of Congress until they guarantee all of us the same. The Hitsville show was emceed by Paul Butler and delivered exquisitely by musicians Ivan Bodley, James Dower, and Joe Goretti, and vocalists Bobby Harden, Michael James Leslie, Sherryl Marshall and Alice Tan Ridely (got to give credits in this business). But the real superstars of the evening were Bhairavi Desai, Tom Mackell, Jr. and Working Theater, an organization with a mission to produce plays for and about working people and charge $25 a pop for admission. (More)

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My friend the writer-feminist-political activist Bebe Bahnsen, AKA Bebe Smith, is having a breakthrough year. She discovered, near death, that her ten year struggle with depression, suicide and institutionalization was being caused by a brain tumor that had been misdiagnosed by her doctors. The tumor was successfully removed and she’s recovering at an amazing pace. Now she’s had parts of her story – Demon in My Brain – published in My Turn at www.newsweek.com.

So this Thanksgiving, we all have something to be extremely thankful for: the return to life of one of the smartest, most dedicated, and, pardon my latent sexism, most beautiful champions of women’s rights and human rights this world has ever known. Welcome back, Bebe!

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First posted on the AFL-CIO’s News Blog
by Seth Michaels, Oct 18, 2007

Republicans in Washington have had their hands dirtied by plenty of scandals in recent months, but this latest action has to rank among the lowest. In an effort to beat back full funding for children’s health care, the staff of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) supported a smear campaign against a 12-year-old survivor of a car crash.

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