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 ”How Valid Is the Insurers’ Attack on Health Reform?,” -  TIME MAGAZINE

After months of lending its cautious, very qualified support to health-care reform, the health-insurance industry has lobbed its first bomb at the Democrats’ proposals. But many of the industry’s assertions appear to have missed their mark.

Just two days before Tuesday’s scheduled vote on the Senate Finance Committee’s health bill, a report warning that the bill would result in sizable hikes in insurance premiums was released, and then widely panned as a flawed analysis of cherry-picked information. A spokesman for the committee called the report a “hatchet job, plain and simple”; and some Democrats on Capitol Hill claimed that the insurers’ broadside would actually ease, rather than slow, passage of health reform by unifying the various factions of the party against an industry with precious little credibility among the public. (See 10 players in health-care reform.)

“Public Option Is Next Big Hurdle in Health Debate,” - The New York Times

WASHINGTON — As the White House and Congressional leaders turned in earnest on Wednesday to working out big differences in the five health care bills, perhaps no issue loomed as a greater obstacle than whether to establish a government-run competitor to the insurance industry.

One day after the Senate Finance Committee approved a measure without a “public option,” the question on Capitol Hill was how President Obama could reconcile the deep divisions within his party on the issue. All eyes were on Senator Olympia J. Snowe, the Maine Republican whose call for a “trigger” that would establish a government plan as a fallback is one of the leading compromise ideas.

“Obama: New Orleans not forgotten,” -   USA TODAY

NEW ORLEANS — In his first presidential visit to this city, Barack Obama praised the resiliency of residents in rebuilding their flood-wrecked homes and promised to continue flowing federal dollars to the effort.

“It is always an inspiration to spend time with the men and women who have reminded the rest of us what it means to persevere in the face of tragedy and rebuild in the face of ruin,” Obama said during a town-hall-style meeting at the University of New Orleans.

Health reform has officially become a test of character — the character of our nation and, perhaps more immediately, the character of our elected representatives.

Last night, President Obama laid out a strong, meaningful and moral health-reform platform. It is a sensible and fair approach that will help improve the lives, health and security of millions of American families.

Under the plan, hard-working Americans can be sure that an unexpected layoff or an effort to start your own business won’t keep you from getting the treatment you need. And strong prevention measures will help save money and reduce the terrible effects chronic diseases like diabetes and asthma are having on low-income people and communities of color.

It is time for leaders on all sides to put their heads down and do the work we elected them to do. The Obama plan represents a broad consensus, packed with the most promising ideas from experts, doctors and leaders on both sides of the Congressional aisle.

After a long, hot, loud August filled with disinformation and overheated rhetoric, it is time for the politics to cool. How Republican leaders react to this speech throughout September and October will show clearly whether they are in Washington to make the lives of everyday Americans better or if they are there to score cheap political points at the expense of the American people.

The perpetual campaign must stop. Our unfair, outdated, and unresponsive health-care system has dragged down families and businesses for far too long.

Obama stepped up to the plate last night, showing a willingness to bring any good ideas into the fold. But a willingness to compromise does not mean stepping away from essential elements and cannot represent a willingness to wait.

The time is now for real change. It’s up to our elected leaders to decide whether they want to play a constructive role — or merely hurl invective from the sidelines.

This article also appeared in the Washington Post’s “Health Care RX” experts panel. For more of Angela Glover Blackwell’s analyses, click here.

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“Van Jones, Patriot,” - Washington Post

It makes me sad and a little sick that Van Jones, the White House Green Jobs Czar, was forced to resign after being targeted by a vicious smear campaign. The Obama administration lost a brilliant mind who worked day and night to, as Van would say, “get the greenest solutions to the poorest people”. Indeed, Van did as much as anyone to put the concept of the Green Collar Economy on the map, including publishing a best-selling book with that title. More than that, he was one of the nation’s most pragmatic environmental visionaries, someone who was always thinking up practical, pattern-changing solutions to massive climate problems.

Van grew up in a small town in Tennessee, went to a provincial college, and wound up graduating from Yale Law School, launching a number of important nonprofit organizations, and winning way too many awards to count, including being named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list. He’s a remarkable American success story, eloquently captured in Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker profile.

“The Social Side of Obesity: You Are Who You Eat With,” - NEWSWEEK

Sending your kids back to lunch-lady land this fall? Careful, your child’s dining mates may be upping his chances of packing on the pounds. A study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition finds that how much tweens and teens eat can be influenced by how much their friends weigh.

In the study, 130 kids ages 9 to 15 were allowed to snack as much as they wanted while hanging out with a friend or with a peer they did not know. All the kids ate more when they were with a friend than with a stranger. But the overweight children ate the most when paired with an overweight friend - an average of 300 more calories than when they spent time with leaner friends. The research also found that friendship itself makes the appetite grow stronger: when overweight kids ate with similar-weight kids who were already their pals, they threw back an extra 250 calories than when they ate with chubby kids they had just met.

“‘24 hours in the ER’ shows challenges of health system,” - USA TODAY

Dr. Robert O’Connor had taken charge of the emergency room only minutes earlier when the cellphone in his pocket rang: The Western Albemarle Rescue Squad was on its way with a 14-month-old girl who had suffered a possible seizure.

Ten minutes later, Tyler McNeely climbed out of the ambulance, her face frantic and her pale, subdued baby in her arms. Shana Crabtree, a third-year resident in green scrubs, waited for them at the University of Virginia Medical Center. EMT Andrew Todhunter delivered a staccato summary of Clara’s vital signs.

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“Grass Roots Put New Orleans Back on Its Feet,” - The Wall Street Journal
With Federal Aid Finally Flowing to Hurricane-Ravaged City, a Flurry of Rebuilding Helps Shield It from U.S. Downturn

NEW ORLEANS — This once-ravaged city is finally mending from Hurricane Katrina after years of administrative delays and political disputes that choked the flow of millions of dollars in federal aid.

Money now flowing through the city is beginning to deliver the most visibly widespread improvements since Katrina struck four years ago today. Scores of public works projects are under way. The last police precinct using a FEMA trailer as temporary headquarters moved into real offices earlier this year. More than half the public schools in New Orleans have been turned into higher-performing charter schools. Returning residents have pushed the population to 76% of its prestorm total of about 455,000.

“Yes, We Can Afford Health-Care Reform,” - Washington Post

“Moderate” opponents of health-care reform like to say that we cannot afford it, particularly in the midst of a recession that has widened the deficit with both reduced tax revenue and the fiscal stimulus package. This was the argument advanced by Sen. Joe Lieberman on TV a week ago and repeated by Michael Gerson in this newspaper: “Obama’s massive spending, intended to stabilize the economy, also drained the Treasury, making it more difficult to propose major new expenditures.”

 ”Report maps out solutions to child obesity,” -  USA TODAY

To make it easier for children to eat healthfully and move more, local governments in towns and cities across the country need to help create a better environment, a new report says.

Children and their families should have access to grocery stores that offer plenty of healthful food such as fruits and vegetables, and schools shouldn’t be surrounded by fast-food restaurants. Children should be able to ride their bikes or walk safely to school, and they should have safe places to play afterward, says the report out today from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and National Research Council.

This post originally appeared on The Washington Post’s “Health Care RX” weekly panel discussion, in response to the question: “Recent polls show declining support for President Obama’s handling of the health-care issue. What should he do to get the effort back on track?”

What are we even arguing about again?

Though the volume of the health-care debate has never been louder, it has never been more silent on what really matters to the real lives and real struggles of everyday Americans.

During the campaign, President Obama and his team were geniuses at keeping an even keel and steadily pushing on a single narrative — hope — that was both powerful and flexible. But during the health-care fight, they have been unfocused. Of course, it’s hard to have a consistent message when you’re bargaining with 535 potential legislative partners at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue (not to mention the dozens of TV and radio hosts who wield inordinate power in the modern media landscape).

Obama must take a step back and remind all Americans why we need to reform health care in the first place.

He needs to fill a town hall with people who have faced death or bankruptcy because of insufficient insurance or no insurance at all. Participants shouldn’t be hard to find — all of us have friends or neighbors or family members who have faced this harsh reality (or just go to Andrew Sullivan’s site where he has spent the past several weeks collecting dozens of heartbreaking “Views from Your Sickbed”)

Obama is a master of policy detail and — If he weren’t so politically savvy — would have made a terrific technocrat. But he must stress the big picture here.

We all know the health-care system is broken. We all know dealing with insurance companies is a maddening, often-frightening task. And we all know people will die needlessly unless we get some kind of reform now.

We need Obama to remind us of this fact. Every day. Every hour. The real pain of real Americans needs to become the center of this debate again, not the pitched voices of ill-informed mobs.

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“Stars Aligning on School Lunches,” - The New York Times

ANN COOPER has made a career out of hammering on the poor quality of public school food. The School Nutrition Association, with 55,000 members, represents the people who prepare it.

Imagine Ms. Cooper’s surprise when she was invited to the association’s upcoming conference to discuss the Lunch Box, a system she developed to help school districts wean themselves from packaged, heavily processed food and begin cooking mostly local food from scratch.

  ”Inmates grow, gather crops to feed the hungry,” - Times-Picayune (AP)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The nation’s food banks, struggling to meet demand in hard times, are turning to prison inmates for free labor to help feed the hungry.

Several states are sending inmates into already harvested fields to scavenge millions of pounds of leftover potatoes, berries and other crops that otherwise would go to waste. Others are using prisoners to plant and harvest vegetables.

“The next healthcare battle: cutting Medicare Advantage,” - Los Angeles Times

President Obama, struggling to discredit bogus charges that his healthcare overhaul would create “death panels,” soon could face another emotionally charged obstacle — a plan to trim the federal subsidy for a program used by nearly a quarter of Medicare beneficiaries.

The program, known as Medicare Advantage, pays insurance companies a hefty premium to enroll senior citizens and provide their medical services through managed-care networks.

I attended an event yesterday that was more than 30 years in the making. 

As I looked around the White House Office of Urban Affairs listening tour meeting at a packed Philadelphia warehouse space and saw low-income residents and local leaders mingling with some of our nation’s most powerful people (including two cabinet secretaries!), I thought back on where the fight for equitable access to healthy food started for me. 

It was 1979 and I was recently out of UC-Berkeley Law School and working for the public-interest law firm Public Advocates when a group of residents of a low-income, African-American neighborhood in San Francisco approached me to see if I could help stop their community’s one and only supermarket from leaving. In my hometown of St. Louis, I had seen first-hand the neglect and despair that festered after supermarkets left poor communities there.

No one had ever tried before to find a legal theory that would provide communities access to healthy food, so we were on uncharted legal ground.  Using interviews with more than 150 residents of local communities threatened by a lack of food access, we eventually filed an administrative petition with then-Gov. Jerry Brown seeking redress to the problem of the exodus of supermarkets from low-income communities.  The Governor was remarkably responsive: appointing a commission that held hearings throughout the state.  

Because of the determination of those residents, California began a slow move toward improving healthy food access for millions of our neighbors; the petition sparked farmers’ markets, cooperative buying clubs, a few cooperative markets-but, unfortunately, not one supermarket.

In the years since, equitable food access has been mostly relegated to a local issue, with fights cropping up sporadically in neighborhoods as local supermarkets threaten to leave. We had seen some successes - like San Diego’s Market Creek Plaza or the Pathmark in Harlem - but the victories had been hard to come by.

That is, until about five years ago, when Pennsylvania’s Gov. Ed Rendell and State Rep. Dwight Evans began to listen to the ideas and innovation of their constituents and the leadership of The Food Trust and The Reinvestment Fund. Out of that collaboration came the Fresh Food Financing Initiative, a remarkable program that has helped open dozens of markets and seed more than 3,700 jobs in under-served communities.

Now, through the tireless efforts of residents and advocates, the White House Office of Urban Affairs has shown real interest in learning about this proven program, hopefully to take the ideas and solutions to the national scale. White House leaders want to lift up the program and hear how it is impacting real people. For the first time, I can see the fight for equitable food access is winnable.

I cannot stress enough how important and exciting it is to have a White House willing to listen to new and innovative ideas. This administration - in virtually every office and agency - seems to recognize that all Americans deserve to live in a community of opportunity.

But that does not mean progress will happen on its own. Far from it. The most important attribute the equity movement has going for it is our tenacity. Thirty years ago, when those residents came into my office to ask for help in improving their community, I knew it would be a long, hard fight. But sitting in Philadelphia this week, I felt emboldened to keep fighting, to keep pushing, because success is always within our grasp.

We must demand equity now.

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“The Ultimate Obama Insider,” -  The New York Times

On Jan. 25, 2008, the day before the South Carolina Democratic primary, Barack Obama endured a grueling succession of campaign events across the state. When his staff informed him that the evening would conclude with a brief show-up at the Pink Ice Ball, a gala for the African-American sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, Obama flatly refused to attend. “I’ve been to sorority events before,” he said. “We’re not gonna change anybody’s mind.”

Rick Wade, a senior adviser, Stacey Brayboy, the state campaign manager, and Anton Gunn, the state political director, took turns beseeching their boss. The gala, they told Obama, would be attended by more than 2,000 college-educated African-American women, a constituent group that was originally skeptical of the candidate’s “blackness” and that the campaign worked tirelessly to wrest from Hillary Clinton. State luminaries like Representative James Clyburn — himself an undeclared black voter — would be expecting him. They would be in and out in five minutes.

 ”EPA vows to examine impact of hazardous waste on poor communities,” – Los Angeles Times

The federal Environmental Protection Agency vowed Tuesday to home in on the impact of hazardous waste recycling plants on minorities and low-income communities.

The move hearkens back to a Clinton-era executive order that required federal agencies to consider the impact of their policies on disadvantaged communities. Although the Bush administration largely ignored the mandate, Obama-appointed EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson has promised to analyze those impacts.

“Fact check: Obama’s health care claims adrift?” - The Associated Press
Assertions at news conference sometimes at odds with Congress, rhetoric

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama’s assertion Wednesday that government will stay out of health care decisions in an overhauled system is hard to square with the proposals coming out of Congress and with his own rhetoric.

Even now, nearly half the costs of health care in the U.S. are paid for by government at all levels. Federal authority would only grow under any proposal in play.

Written by Victor Rubin, Vice-President of Research at PolicyLink 

President Obama’s announcement this week of a $12 billion initiative to support community colleges has brought new attention to their potential for preparing large numbers of people for better-paying, higher skilled jobs.  That he made the announcement on a campus in Warren, Michigan, in a region where the auto industry can no longer be counted on for stable employment, only reinforced the urgency of the message: more than ever before, American workers need more education in order to thrive.  

Community colleges are indeed capable of training young people and experienced workers alike for new careers that require significant technical proficiencies, what are sometimes called “middle-skill jobs.”  The most nimble and effective community colleges have long been building partnerships with industry and organized labor to swiftly generate new curricula and have their graduates placed in real jobs.  As each new wave of technology has come along, there have been community colleges quick to take advantage of its opportunities. The early signs are good about their responsiveness to the growth in alternative energy production and other green business innovations.

But what will it take for scattered success stories to become far more widespread, for millions of community college students to get the basic education, industry-specific skills and connections to employers that they need?  And how can we be confident that these new initiatives would reach deep into low income communities and communities of color, where unemployment rates, high school dropout rates, and most other indicators of poor job prospects are highest?  After all, with so many laid-off skilled industrial workers looking to retrain, how can we maximize the chances for less experienced, less well-connected folks?

FInd out after the jump…

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“Street Farmer,” - New York Times

Will Allen, a farmer of Bunyonesque proportions, ascended a berm of wood chips and brewer’s mash and gently probed it with a pitchfork. “Look at this,” he said, pleased with the treasure he unearthed. A writhing mass of red worms dangled from his tines. He bent over, raked another section with his fingers and palmed a few beauties.

An Urban Farmer Is Rewarded for His Dream (October 1, 2008) It was one of those April days in Wisconsin when the weather shifts abruptly from hot to cold, and Allen, dressed in a sleeveless hoodie — his daily uniform down to 20 degrees, below which he adds another sweatshirt — was exactly where he wanted to be. Show Allen a pile of soil, fully composted or still slimy with banana peels, and he’s compelled to scoop some into his melon-size hands. “Creating soil from waste is what I enjoy most,” he said. “Anyone can grow food.”

“For a Frugal Dieter, Weight Loss on a Sliding Scale,” -  The New York Times

IF you’re one of the millions of people who are dieting right this minute, or even thinking about it, here’s some good news: you don’t have to throw a lot of money at the problem to see results. In fact, you may not have to spend much at all.

Every year consumers spend billions of dollars on supplements, diet foods, books and meal replacements. But the truth is that success depends not so much on what diet plan you choose or what program you join.

 ”Calls Grow to Increase Stimulus Spending,” - The Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden said the Obama administration “misread how bad the economy was” and didn’t foresee unemployment levels nearing double digits, in comments likely to intensify calls for the administration to do more to counter job losses.

Some economists are pressing the White House to enact a second round of stimulus spending or find some other way to avert a prolonged job and wage slump. But the White House is in a tough spot. Officials want to give the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February time to work — only 10% of the spending is out the door so far — and there is little appetite in Congress, particularly among Republicans, for spending more money at a time of record deficits.