Slate Brings US The Health Care Slugfest!

Slate Magazine, an online daily owned by The Washington Post that has attracted numerous awards brings us a really useful collection of links to information from all sides of the health care debate.

As Slate's writer, Timothy Noah, puts it:

If you want to learn the current parameters of the political debate over health care reform, scrutinizing the plans proposed by presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain will get you only so far. A sharper picture of where the battle lines are drawn is starting to emerge from two new lobby campaigns recently created by two key opposing groups.

He then goes on to provide capsule descriptions of the Insurance Industry's Campaign for an American Solution and the liberal movement's Health Care For America NOW!

It is, as blog posts often are, a quick read. A plethora of hyperlinks will take the online investigator to a variety of pertinent source material on both sides of the issue, and does so with the usual patented Slate cheekiness.

SOURCE: "Health Care Reform: The Slugfest Begins - Meet the interest groups that will decide the fate of medical insurance." 07/22/08
photo courtesy of d. billy, used under its Creative Commons license

The $40 Million Push

What do Elizabeth Edwards, ACORN, AFSCME, Americans United for Change, Campaign for America's Future, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Community Change, MoveOn, NEA, National Women's Law Center, Planned Parenthood, SEIU, UFCW, and USAction have in common?

They are all pulling together as a unified force in an attempt to storm the airwaves with a message of reform.

On July 8, Health Care for America Now! launched their $40 million campaign with a press conference for the National Press Club in which they unveiled their campaign plans as well as their first $1.5 million ad buy to support it.

Julie Bosman who writes for The New York Times' blog, The Caucus, brings us the money quote when it comes to the overall thrust of the ads:

Its theme? “You can’t trust the insurance industry to fix the health care mess,” said the spokeswoman, Jacki Schechner. “We’re educating the public about our principles and what we’d like to see from the president and the new Congress.”

For those of you who remember the Harry and Louise commercials that were a driving force behind the failure of the Clinton Administration's attempts at health care reform, this should be redolent of a certain "turnabout is fair play" ethos.

Ms. Bosman's post to The Caucus gives a good overview of the group and its aims. Roger Hickey, Co-Director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a founder of Americans United to Protect Social Security, one who helped to create and build Change America Now and the new Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, shares his perspective as a man on the inside of the efforts in this piece on the Huffington Post.

The battle for reform continues. Please feel free to drop us a comment on the ads if you see them aired in your area.

SOURCE: "New Health Reform Group to Spend $40 Million" 07/03/08
photo courtesy of Simon Davison, used under its Creative Commons license