The New York Observer » Health Care

The Village, Brooklyn, Now the East Side: N.Y.U. Unveils New Health Ed. Complex

N.Y.U has been rather busy of late. The school is still vying to get its Downtown Brooklyn tech campus approved by the Bloomberg administration and yesterday its hulking Greenwich Village expansion was certified by the City Planning Commission, meaning months of acrimonious NIMBYing are ahead.

As if that were not enough, the school has just released designs for a new dentistry school at 433 First Avenue, the latest addition to its healthcare campus on the Middle East Side. Read More

Friday Morning Roundup: How Many Jobs Did We Lose in August?

• At 8:30 a.m., the Department of Labor tells us just how many jobs we as a nation lost in August. The folks on Wall Street expect America to have lost somewhere around 100,000 jobs, marking a third straight month of labor-market shrinkage. [Calculated Risk]

• Companies that make ATMs and otherwise provide financial infrastructure Read More

Wall Street Read of the Week: Amanda Bennett’s ‘End-of-Life Warning’

Of all the pieces that have been written in the last year, there are few that convey the cosmic heft of American health care while also having an emotional impact that isn't saccharine, partisan, annoyingly anecdotal or all three. Atul Gawande's iconic New Yorker piece on McAllen, Texas, from last June is one example, Read More

That Grand Health Care Compromise? Jerry Nadler Has His Doubts

All year, the biggest fault line in the health care debate has been the public option—a proposed government-run insurance plan that Americans without access to group coverage would be eligible to sign up for.

To liberals, it has been the reason for doing health care reform, an innovative tool that will break up private insurers’ monopolies Read More

That Grand Health Care Compromise? Jerry Nadler Has His Doubts

To liberals, it has been the reason for doing health care reform, an innovative tool that will break up private insurers’ Read More

The War on Facts

Within hours after the House of Representatives approved health care reform by a narrow margin, Republicans predicted retribution at the polls next fall. They promised to make every Democrat regret that historic vote as the first step toward the reversal of power in Washington. And as the current debate has proved, they aren’t going to Read More

Take It From Someone Who Knows Lieberman: He’s Gone for Good

The big question in Washington right now is about how serious Joe Lieberman actually is about joining a Republican filibuster of the health care bill with a public option that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is now pushing.

Connecticut's junior senator said on Tuesday that he'll probably vote to allow the bill to come Read More

A Winning Compromise?

The Senate leadership’s decision to include the “public option” in its health care reform legislation seemed almost miraculous, especially to anyone who believed the hundreds of obituaries recited in the media over the past several months. But by acting on their convictions rather than their fears, the Democrats could ultimately find that the politics of Read More

Schumer Lays It Out, Densely

Chuck Schumer, who stands to be a very big political winner if a public option is included in the compromise health care bill that will soon come to the Senate floor, offered a very specific assessment of where the public option debate in the Senate now stands on Sunday's "Meet the Press."

"I Read More

The Public Option, With a Whimper

The rather surprising news that Harry Reid may now be ready to include a public option in the health care reform bill he will bring to the Senate floor next week has potentially huge short- and long-term political implications.

First, it would resolve the issue of whether Senate Democrats, who have exactly the 60 Read More

An Obscene Protest

Popular disgust over the fat premiums that financial executives bestow upon themselves is burgeoning, and rightly so. Those Wall Street piggy banks are filling up with billions upon billions of government-subsidized dollars.

But anyone infuriated by the grossly inflated compensation of the masters of finance should check out the incredible earnings of the top executives Read More

Obama’s People Stay Adamantly Noncommittal

The White House’s game on health care reform has been obvious since at least the middle of the summer, when President Obama unnerved much of his base by announcing that “the public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of health care reform.”

That was Read More

Does Harry Reid Have the Stomach for This Fight?

Harry Reid should be well suited to the delicate, grueling, and thoroughly thankless task of merging the health care packages passed by the Senate’s two committees of jurisdiction, a process that kicked off with the Finance Committee’s approval of a bill on Tuesday.

The majority leader enjoys the trust and respect of Read More

Closer: Schumer Tinkers, a Public Option Looms

The on-again, off-again legislative odyssey of the public option has been filled with false alarms, red herrings, and dead-end breakthroughs. So the latest twist, Thursday’s news of a potential Chuck Schumer–engineered compromise that would create a national public option but allow states to opt out, could end up a forgotten blip a month Read More

The Daily Show, Cap and Trade, and Scientific Literacy

Watching Jon Stewart use Capn’ Crunch as the logo for climate cap and trade regulation the other night started me thinking about the need for our society to get more sophisticated about its understanding of economics, policy, and science. My reaction to the pitiful state of our public policy dialogue is what you might expect Read More