If you’re mystified or just trying to make sense of all the different moving pieces in the health-care policy debate taking place in the Democratic presidential primaries, I’ve got something you’ll want to see. As you know, there’s the ACA expanded with a “public option.” There are various Medicare buy-in models which can be similar to the public option additions. Then there are various flavors of “Medicare for All.” There are many political, ideological and priority questions in this debate. But I was really most interested in clarifying the moving pieces in the different plans, the technical specifics, how transitions work, how you save money without creating big disruptions, how many people the different approaches actually cover. So last week we did a TPM Briefing with President Obama’s Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Andy Slavitt, to discuss these topics. I found it an incredibly illuminating discussion and many participants told me they did too. If you are a TPM member you can watch the Briefing here.
Another quick note of thanks to everyone who’s tried out our TPM Ad Free two-week trial. If you’re a current Prime member and you’d like to try out the cleaner, faster version of TPM with absolutely, positively zero ads, just click here. It’s free. There’s no obligation. It’s totally awesome. And upgrading gets us closer to a robust membership model that can sustain us into the future.
For those of you who are currently using the trial, I have a few updates.
The Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons is making it unreasonably hard for some of us to remain in the reality-based world.
Liberals are, as we’ve noted many times, often captive to policy literalism. While their policy positions are quite similar, Warren’s ethos and political style are fundamentally reformist while Sanders’ are more sectarian and anti-establishment. This difference shapes the coalitions which are available to them in ways that many observers underestimate.
If you missed it or are just interested in some good history book recommendations, check out my list of over 60 books of history books (mostly quality popular history, some from a slightly more scholarly direction) which I can recommend, ranging over various topics and a few thousand years of history.
We’re making a major push to grow our membership base in the second half of 2019. It is both critical to the future vitality of TPM and also a major opportunity. This post will explain what’s at stake, what’s within reach as well as important context and background. It’s mainly filled with points and details I’ll refer back to over time and it’s mainly intended for our core audience and members as some transparency into what we’re doing and why. But it also includes details about the nuts and bolts of the digital publishing economy. So others may be interested as well.
For all the arguing and analyzing and prognosticating about the 2020 presidential race I am surprised how little attention has been given to what may or I think likely will play the biggest role in the outcome: third party candidates.
Ken Cuccinelli, longtime focus of TPM reporting and now President Trump’s non-Senate-confirmed immigration chief, tells CNN that the poem on the Statute of Liberty is actually referring to “people coming from Europe” and “wretched” didn’t really mean “wretched” — just that they were commoners, not members of the nobility or gentry.
Cuccinelli: That statue of liberty poem was about "people coming from Europe." pic.twitter.com/nrDcUGJsU3
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 13, 2019
Happy Thursday, August 15. The New York City medical examiner could not determine Jeffrey Epstein’s cause of death after finding unusual broken bones in his neck. Here’s more on that and the other stories we’re watching.
JoinThat feral dweeb who was arrested for planning massacres at a local synagogue and LBQT nightclub, and who had earlier stalked a neighborhood with his AR-15 to ‘prevent crime,’ turns out to be affiliated with a neo-Nazi group.