A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

A compendium of all of my thoughts on... OBAMACARE aka the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)  aka the Affordable Care Act (ACA) History of Health Reform: A Legislative Timeline of Obamacare At some point, I hope to come back and flesh out a fuller history of U.S. healthcare reform attempts prior to passage of the ACA ("Obamacare"), but for now, I’m going to skip over some of the more interesting details. That back story includes Pres. Richard Nixon’s role in shaping how the vast majority of us get healthcare and his work with Sen. Ted Kennedy on a proposal that shares some similarities to today’s ACA, the political collapse of Pres. Bill Clinton’s proposal (known derisively as “Hillarycare”) before ever receiving a vote [1] , and the Heritage Foundation’s counter proposal which became the basis for the Massachusetts reform which in turn became the basis for the ACA. Until then, a timeline: In March 2009, congressional committees begin holding...

A Mile Wide... Working for the U.S. House of Representatives for much of my adult life, I liked to say that being a congressional staffer made me great at cocktail parties: thanks to the nature of the job, I have a knowledge base that’s a mile wide but only an inch deep.  This blog is my opportunity to write about those areas of focus where I have been able to dive deeper.  It is, theoretically, a chance to spend less time terrorizing friends on Facebook in disposable policy debates that get lost among Dexter discussions and kid photos (I’m a fan of both) and to spend more time putting my thoughts into one nice, coherent, semi-permanent place.  But I suspect it's probably more about the latter than the former: I envision a repository that grows with me as I learn and think about new things, or think about old things in new ways--one that allows me to keep all of those thoughts together so that I'm not reinventing the wheel every time I write a new memo or want to track...