This week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a major study of Medicaid in Oregon which has rapidly emerged of a Rorschach test of sorts. That is, partisans on either side of the political divide tend to see what they want to see in its results. While conservatives claim Medicaid expansion has been debunked by numbers showing little change in blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes over two years between those who did and did not gain access to Medicaid, liberals tout findings revealing "Medicaid improved rates of diagnosis of depression, increased the use of preventive services, and improved the financial outlook for enrollees."

Ultimately, as Ezra Klein, Kevin Drum, Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt all conclude, the limited sample size, short-time frame and narrow measures of "health outcomes" make conclusions about the efficacy of Medicaid difficult to reach. But combined with other recent research, there is little question that Medicaid expansion will make the financial prospects and quality of life significantly better for the previously uninsured. As for the legion of Republican politicians instead insisting "no one goes without health care in America" because "you just go the emergency room," studies documenting the rapid disappearance of ER's and trauma centers show that GOP talking point is just a cruel joke.

Writing in the New York Times, Annie Lowrey provided a concise summary of what the NEJM paper says--and doesn't say--about the 10,000 out of 100,000 Oregonians who won the state's Medicaid lottery:

The Oregon Health Study released a new round of results on Wednesday, showing that Medicaid coverage does not seem to improve low-income adults' blood pressure, blood sugar or weight in a two-year time frame. It says nothing about the chance of diagnosis of, eventual health outcomes for or costs associated with any form of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or dozens of other debilitating medical conditions. It also says nothing about health results outside of a two-year time frame...

Where it says something, it says a lot: it provides strong evidence that Medicaid recipients will spend more, use more tests, experience less depression, have fewer bills sent to collection agencies, and so on. It shows health insurance working just the way insurance is supposed to work: protecting the financial stability of the people purchasing it.

As it turns out, other recent analyses also had a lot to say about what happens when the uninsured gain coverage in ways similar to what will happen under the Affordable Care Act starting in 2014.

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I can't tell you the Tweety-like tingles I get at the thought of Elizabeth Warren and Barney Frank in the Senate together. It thrills my liberal heart to imagine to strong, stalwart progressives unafraid to speak out for the American people.

So it is with great glee that I offer you a link to a petition now widely being circulated by the PCCC and MoveOn to let Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick to support the nomination of Barney Frank as interim senator until a special election.

If you want to see Barney Frank in the Senate, please go to AppointBarneyFrank.com and sign the petition.

Now if we could just get Barney Frank to consider running permanently for the seat...

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Oh Congress, Barney Frank just can't quit you! Although he announced that he would not seek re-election in 2012, Barney Frank didn't say that he would fade quietly into private life. To that end, he has made an intriguing proposal to Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick:

The day after his 32-year term in the House of Representatives ended, Mr. Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, said on Friday morning that he would like to be appointed as an interim senator to fill John Kerry’s seat until a special election later this year.

He would not run for election, he said on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe.”

It is up to Gov. Deval Patrick to name someone to fill the vacancy created by Mr. Kerry’s nomination to be secretary of state.

If selected, Mr. Frank would be a reliable liberal vote in a series of decisions on taxes, spending and the debt that face Congress this winter and spring.

He said it was those votes that had made him think twice about his earlier disinterest in the job.

Elizabeth Warren and Barney Frank representing Massachusetts in the Senate? Be still my liberal heart, that is a dream come true.

One of the (few) benefits of living in Texas is that we aren't a swing state (yet), so we (mercifully) aren't inundated with political ads 24/7 the way they are in Ohio & Florida. For that other 4/5ths of America, I started compiling a list of "Reasons to NOT vote for Romney" back in March of this year, updated constantly, the list has since grown to well over 200 solid reasons why the man shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. Early entries noted how the governor... once a champion of health care reform... had since done a total flip-flop on the issue, with later entries becoming far more detailed, like how... while governor of Massachusetts... Romney vetoed an astounding 844 bills (do the math: that one veto every 1.7 days) passed by the mostly Democratic Massachusetts state legislature, over 700 of which had to be overridden just to pass. And not just by Democrats. Governor Romney's 2006 veto of an increase in the minimum wage was overturned unanimously by both Republicans and Democrats alike. So it is beyond belief in these closing days that Governor Romney is running TV ads and giving stump speeches touting his ability to "work across the aisle" while governor of a state with an "85% Democrat legislature."

Tip #1: If you want to convince Democrats of your willingness to reach across the isle, don't use "Democrat" as an adjective. Not only is it bad grammar, but Republicans deliberately misuse the Party name in that way as a pejorative purely to irritate Democrats.

Tip #2: If you want to accuse your opponent of a lack of "bipartisanship", make sure you don't have the GOP Senate leader on tape saying "the single most important thing" (not "political priority"; that came later) his Party "should want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

Tip #3: If you are going to accuse your opponent of "partisanship", make sure he didn't adopt YOUR health care reform law over protests of those in his own Party calling for (at the very least) a "public option".

Tip #4: Hint: Don't run a TV ad during your first run in 2007 entitled "I Like Vetoes" bragging how you obstructed a mostly Democratic legislature.

Tip #5: Make sure the keynote speaker at your convention isn't going around praising your opponent's efficiency and refusal to play politics in the midst of a natural disaster just a week before the election.

Another wealthy Republican with "daddy issues" who dodged the draft, thinks "tax cuts" are the answer to every problem, and is already saber-rattling against nations in the Middle East trying to convince voters that he's "a uniter, not a divider"? What could possibly go wrong?

I used to work for a pharmaceutical consulting firm, and as soon as George W. Bush became president, the FDA pulled 'way back on random investigations of pharma manufacturers. There were some really scandalous things going on, and I kept sending information to various biotech reporters around the country, none of who saw fit to cover the story. (They kept telling me they "couldn't believe" manufacturers would do anything that might actually put people at risk. You know, the Ronald Reagan philosophy.) Oh well!

Anyway, so I'm a little jaded when it comes to Big Pharma -- or in this case, Baby Pharma. I wonder whether this regulation was being enforced -- and who was governor when they pulled back on it (or, as is even more likely, simply stopped hiring enough inspectors to enforce it):

Authorities in Massachusetts have been accused of failing to properly enforce regulations aimed at protecting patients from contaminated drugs, after the death toll from an outbreak of meningitis linked to a medicine made in the state rose to 14.

The specialised compounding pharmacy at the centre of the escalating health scandal is being investigated for breaches of state and federal laws.

A patient from Minnesota, one of almost 14,000 patients at risk of contracting the disease after being injected with the potentially tainted steroid produced by New England Compounding Center, has filed what is expected to be the first of many lawsuits against the company.

Now state agencies are facing questions over their enforcement of existing regulations. On Friday, a congressional committee called on the state’s pharmacy regulator to provide information about its oversight of the company.

Massachusetts is one of just 17 states with regulations designed to protect patients from the sort of health scare which has now spread to 11 states. Two former compounding pharmacists who now work in the quality control industry told the Guardian that the risk to patients would have been minimal had the regulations, known as USP 797, been enforced.

“It’s abysmal that the local authorities are calling for greater oversight” said Eric Kastango, a committee member of US Pharmacopeia (USP), the industry body behind regulations governing compounding sterile drugs. “If someone just enforced Massachusetts law, these cases could have been avoided. They failed in their responsibility for enforcing what they already had.”

[...] Each case has prompted calls for federal oversight of the drug-producers, which are not subject to the same controls as mass manufacturers but whose regulation falls between the state board of pharmacy, the state department of health and the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the pharmaceutical industry.

Kastango questioned how closely the state board of pharmacy had inspected NECC’s books and said that the regulations adopted by the state to protect patients, if properly applied, should have avoided contamination.

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I know everyone was entranced by Bill Clinton's speech last night, as well they should have been. The man has more charisma in his pinkie than the biggest rock star has in their entire body. And there's no question he laid out the most compelling case possible for re-electing President Obama. But the really important speech last night in terms of raw substance, by far, was Elizabeth Warren's 15 minutes.

Because Warren made clear, even more than Clinton, what really is at stake in this election. It's down to a simple choice for Americans: Do they want democracy, or do they want oligarchy, rule by the rich? It's really that simple, that stark, and that significant.

Here's Warren last night:

I’m here tonight to talk about hard-working people: people who get up early, stay up late, cook dinner and help out with homework; people who can be counted on to help their kids, their parents, their neighbors, and the lady down the street whose car broke down; people who work their hearts out but are up against a hard truth--the game is rigged against them.

... People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here’s the painful part: they’re right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs--the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs--still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.

Anyone here have a problem with that? Well I do.

... The Republican vision is clear: “I’ve got mine, the rest of you are on your own.” Republicans say they don’t believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government to help themselves and their powerful friends. After all, Mitt Romney’s the guy who said corporations are people.

No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people. And that’s why we need Barack Obama.

As D-Day puts it:

That’s simply a far more honest portrayal of the America we actually live in than anyone usually articulates on stage at a national political convention. She told the story in broad strokes, the story people feel in their core, the story that anyone paying attention since the Great Recession knows. We’re not a fairy-tale land where everyone can grow up and be whatever they want. We’re not a land of social mobility and equality of opportunity. We’re in an economy that’s unraveled pretty badly, and over a 30-year period, that has cut off those avenues for mobility, and now has become a favor factory for the rich and powerful. People may not want to hear this; but they know it.

By most accounts, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is a devoted father, dedicated family man and committed church leader. But as his record sadly shows, Romney's family values often take a back seat to his presidential ambitions. Just last week, he cast aside his father George Romney, the man whose rags-to-riches success story Mitt uses as a proxy for his own, all in the name of keeping his mysterious tax returns secret. His wife Ann Romney, the woman who now heads his Women for Mitt Coalition and who her husband says "reports to me regularly" regarding what American women care about, has been hung out to dry over issues including Planned Parenthood, abortion and the family's personal finances. And as it turns out, Mitt's betrayals hardly end there.

In his interview with David Muir of ABC last week, Governor Romney trotted out a new defense of keeping his secret tax returns secret:

"From time to time I've been audited as happens I think to other citizens as well and the accounting firm which prepares my taxes has done a very thorough and complete job pay taxes as legally due. I don't pay more than are legally due and frankly if I had paid more than are legally due I don't think I'd be qualified to become president. I'd think people would want me to follow the law and pay only what the tax code requires."

Put another way, if you paid a penny more to Uncle Sam than you could've, you're not just a sucker; you should be disqualified from becoming President.

Just like Mitt's dad, George Romney.

Mitt's idol didn't merely establish a precedent by releasing 12 years of tax returns during his failed 1968 presidential campaign. As Paul Krugman recently reminded voters, the auto magnate and Michigan governor not only paid a lot to the U.S. Treasury, but probably much more than he needed to.

Those returns also reveal that he paid a lot of taxes -- 36 percent of his income in 1960, 37 percent over the whole period. This was in part because, as one report at the time put it, he "seldom took advantage of loopholes to escape his tax obligations."

(The contrasts between father and son hardly end there. As Rick Perlstein documented, George Romney didn't merely develop an innovative profit sharing plan for his employees at AMC and return bonuses if he thought them too high. He also believed that "rugged individualism" is "nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.")

But if Mitt Romney has turned his back on the legacy of his late father, he has similarly shown no compunction about tossing his wife Ann overboard when political circumstances dictated.

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With the Affordable Care Act having passed constitutional muster, Republicans are once again targeting the Internal Revenue Service in order to deny funding for the ACA's implementation. Hoping to repeat the GOP's successful 1990's war on the agency, Republicans like Maine Governor Paul LePage are resurrecting terms like "the new Gestapo" to slander the IRS, and even suggesting “they’re headed in the direction of killing a lot of people.”. Of course, LePage's grotesque smear isn't just disturbingly wrong on its face. It also suggests that in 2006 Mitt Romney must have unleashed a goose-stepping Massachusetts Department of Revenue after the passage of his virtually identical Bay State individual mandate.

As you will recall, the Affordable Care Act is forecast by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to reduce the U.S. national debt. It does this in part through $500 billion in new tax revenue over 10 years. But as it turns out, penalties for noncompliance with the individual mandate to purchase insurance represent only a small fraction of those funds. The CBO estimates only 4 million people (less than 2 percent of the population) will pay that penalty, producing just $65 billion in the first decade of the law.

Which is very similar to the experience in Massachusetts, where six years ago Governor Romney signed what MIT professor and adviser Jonathan Gruber called "the same f--king bill." Enjoying the consistent support of Bay State residents by a 2 to 1 margin, the bill Governor Mitt Romney signed into law lowered the uninsured rate from around 10 percent to a national low of two percent. In March, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) showed that universal coverage in Massachusetts is indeed making people there healthier. And as it turns out, only 48,000 Bay State residents out of a population 6.6 million opted to pay the penalty ranging from $228 to $1,212 a year rather than acquire health insurance under Mitt Romney's version of the individual mandate. That's less than half the national rate projected by the CBO.

Nevertheless, Republicans are sounding the alarm about what the Fiscal Times called "the new health care tax the IRS won't enforce." Dredging up bogus charges that "the tax man cometh to police you on health care" by deploying 16,000 new IRS agents, House Republicans have scheduled hearings this week. Overlooking the ACA's tax incentives for small businesses and individuals needing help purchasing insurance, the GOP's best-and-brightest like Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) are issuing dire warnings:

Romney "supported it on the state level. Which means if you didn't like it in Massachusetts, you could move to another state," Rubio said on Bloomberg Television. "What are people supposed to do? Leave the United States now because of Barack Obama's brilliant idea to stick the IRS on millions of people? More importantly, the state of Massachusetts doesn't have the IRS. The IRS will follow you. Do people understand what this means?"

In his Saturday radio address, Maine Republican LePage claimed that he does. As the Portland Press Herald reported:

LePage said the court decision has "made America less free."

"We the people have been told there is no choice," he said. "You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo -- the IRS."

On Thursday, Governor LaPage doubled down on his casual Holocaust analogy during an interview with Burlington weekly Seven Days:

Asked if he had a sense of what the Gestapo did during the Second World War, LePage said, "Yeah, they killed a lot of people." Asked whether the IRS "was headed in the direction of killing a lot of people," LePage answered: "Yeah." (audio here)

If that kind of incendiary rhetoric sounds familiar, it should. Because back in the 1990's, Congressional Republicans used it to undermine both the Internal Revenue Service itself and the tax revenue it is supposed to collect.

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The latest stories from the front lines of the labor fight across the country...