Neil deMause

I wrote recently that I was worried that without a public insurance option in a health reform bill, “we could be left with a system that ‘solves’ the health care crisis by guaranteeing everyone access to expensive, crappy coverage.” Now Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi has explained in terrifying detail why this is exactly what will happen. For example, check this out:

If your employer does not offer acceptable coverage, you then have the right to go into one of the state-run insurance “exchanges,” where you can select from a number of insurance plans, including the public option.

There’s a flip side, though: If your employer offers you acceptable care and you reject it, you are barred from buying insurance in the insurance “exchange.” In other words, you must take the insurance offered to you at work. And that might have made sense if, as decreed in the House version, employers actually had to offer good care. But in the Senate version passed by the HELP committee, there is no real requirement for employers to provide any kind of minimal level of care. On the contrary, employers who currently offer sub-par coverage will have their shitty plans protected by a grandfather clause. Which means …

“If you have coverage you like, you can keep it,” says Sen. Sanders. “But if you have coverage you don’t like, you gotta keep it.”

Extra bonus points to Tiabbi for summing up the Republican argument that a public plan would be unfair to private insurance companies because they need to lard up their premiums enough to rake in a profit: “This is a little like complaining that Keanu Reeves was robbed of an Oscar just because he can’t act.”

I review Joel Berg’s new book “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?”

If there’s anyone in America who knows more about the politics of hunger than Joel Berg, they’re well hidden. First as a top staffer in the Agriculture Department under Bill Clinton, and currently as director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, Berg has been a tireless advocate for ensuring that all people have enough to eat.

After years of lecturing mostly to an audience of perplexed city officials, Berg has now set down his knowledge in book form with “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?” Though dense with useful statistics, Berg’s trademark good-natured snarkiness makes this an eminently readable book that lays out the dimensions of the growing hunger epidemic…

I’m belatedly making my way through David Cay Johnston’s new book “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill),” which is well worth reading (and not just because I get a mention in it). I’m only a few chapters in, but my favorite factoid so far:

In 2005, the 300,000 men, women, and children who comprised the top tenth of 1 percent had nearly as much income as all 150 million Americans who make up the economic lower half of our population. Add the income the rich are not required to report and those 300,000 made more than the 150 million.

This growing concentration of income at the top is nothing like the distribution of income America experienced in the first three decades following World War II. Nor is it like that found in Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Instead it resembles the distribution of income found in three other major countries: Brazil, Mexico, and Russia.

Now there’s an epitaph for your democracy.

For more discussion of Free Lunch, see fieldofschemes.com, where I’ve posted about another section of the book – the bit with me in it, though it’s interesting for other reasons as well. You can also buy it at finer bookstores, like I did.

For those of you within reach of central Brooklyn, I’m going to be moderating a discussion this Saturday night by Brian Berger and Tom Robbins, two of the many authors (Berger is co-editor as well) of the marvelous new anthology “New York Calling,” a look back at New York City in the ’70s and ’80s that is remarkably free of either rose-colored nostalgia or revisionist Giulianiesque horror at “a city out of control.” (My favorite snippet: The Scene Is Now keyboard player Phil Dray recalling a block committee meeting in the rapidly gentrifying Alphabet City on adding street trees: “All the white people want the trees, but the Hispanics are against it, saying that prettifying the block will just drive the rents up.”)

The reading/discussion will start at 7 pm this Saturday, October 13, at Vox Pop, corner of Cortelyou Road and Stratford Road in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. (By train, take the Q to Cortelyou Road, then walk about six short blocks west, past the newly planted street trees in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.)