John McDonough has a really interesting post on the motivations and machinations of the major players in the health care negotiations, including Our Guv’s “attempt” to ditch the employer assessment.
I hear that he will now attempt to “negotiate” a chocolate cake back into flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. Good luck with that, and write us a postcard sometime, will ya?
Broken record warning: Isn’t it amazing how much we’re hearing about this lousy $295 assessment, and how little we’re hearing about health care, and who gets it, and who doesn’t?
Good job, local media! Thanks! Can’t wait for the next decade’s “historic opportunity” for health care!
Please share widely!
Why is it that with the biggest piece of legislation since I’ve paid attention to Beacon Hill, health care, Terry Murray gets to go on vacation and there’s nothing in the press? has anyone seen anything? is she really in europe? the end of the session is looming and she’s on vacation. why does the globe & herald give her a free pass?
the Globe and the Herald (reg. req’d) have both mentioned Murray’s trip, though they haven’t exactly made a big deal out of it.
This is the reason people are not reading the Globe (especially) and the Herald in great numbers anymore. This is a bigger story than Harkins going to Portugal. It’s amazing to me that she is getting a free pass and I think it has to do with scott lehigh & other Globe reporters getting wine & access to the Senators who drop diversionary dimes. it’s disgraceful that it’s not as big an issue. where’s the outrage?
don’t know too much about the herald. i only read it to check on who won the fourth race at raynham and the status of angelina jolie’s pregnancy, but the globe was was in the bag on the healthcare debate from day one.
the globe takes in a huge (at least by todays dwindling ad revenue standards) amount of ad buys from partners healthcare and blue cross/blue shield and harvard pilgrim and others.
not coincidentally, the globe has gently and steadily moved the spokespeople for these corporate entities into the chairs at the table. the globe is one of the major reasons that this has become a negotiations game between the fattest of cats in the medical industrial complex.
if there was any doubt to where the sympathies of the boys over on morrissey lie, it was put plain and simple when shortly after the real detail crunching on healthcare reform started, the globe ran paid advertisements on the previously (by my memory) sacrosanct spaces of the op-ed page from partners one week and bcbs the next touting the importance of sensible, free market reforms.
you would think that the only sort of ‘other’ voice in the debate is that of bcbs-funded john mcdonough who is quoted incessantly. but when, for example, have you read in the globe anything from the massachusetts nurses association who has a huge membership and who has been out front from the beginning about the dangers of the profit-driven free market mantra that our healthcare system bows to?
it’s not there. and it’s not going to be there until the ink has dried on whatever the globes fatcat benefactors have gleefully signed off on.