A quick look at health-care politics from Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker. It wouldn’t take you long to click and read it all, but NewMexiKen liked this summary:
Our health-care system has continued to deteriorate. We spend twice as much as the French and the Germans and two and a half times as much as the Brits, yet we die sooner and our babies die in greater numbers. Thirty-eight million Americans were uninsured in 2000; now it’s forty-seven million. Employer-based health insurance is increasingly expensive, stingy, and iffy. Companies, especially manufacturing companies, are beginning to realize that being deputized to pay the health-care costs of their employees and retirees puts them at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy.
Whether change comes will depend entirely on the next election. If a Democrat wins the Presidency after outlining his or her intentions as specifically as the leading contenders have done, and if the Democrats substantially increase their congressional majorities, then it will happen. If they don’t, it won’t.
Elsewhere in the magazine, Louis Menand has an informative essay about Jack Kerouac and On the Road (50 years old this year): Drive, He Wrote.
And I liked the lead from Anthony Lane’s review of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford:
“It is no mean feat to make a boring film about Jesse James, but Andrew Dominik has pulled it off in style.”