Health Care That's Just Too Good

What opponents are saying about the “public option” now

Taking the health care reform debate on the road, President Obama spoke today at a town hall meeting in Annandale, Virginia. Asked about a single payer system—as he so often is—he answered—as he so often does—that our system of employer-funded health care is just too entrenched to be replaced. You know—just like how dangerously irresponsible banks are too big to fail, or coal-burning power plants are too widespread to be closed, or the US had already committed too many resources to Vietnam to consider pulling out, or how DVDs would never catch on because we’d all invested in VCRs.

What does it mean when the immensity of a problem becomes the main justification for it to be perpetuated? We’ve taken the lesson not to change horses in the middle of a river to heart—even if, say, the river turns out to be an ocean and we could ride a dolphin, instead.

But with so many in power declaring single payer dead due to political inexpediency, attention has shifted to its little sister, the “public option.” (“Public option” refers to a public and universally available plan that would compete on an insurance exchange with private plans. Obama, like many economists and analysts, seems to recognize that it’s an absolutely crucial part of real reform, saying today that it’s the only chance for the “competition and choice” that would drive down costs and “keep insurers honest”).

Now, though, opponents are trying to use similar not-quite-logic to cripple the public option. Only this time, instead of telling us that the problem is too big to be fixed, they’re saying that the solution is too good to work. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the only Republican on the Senate Finance Committee not to categorically oppose a public plan, is considered a key swing vote. On Monday, she told the AP that she would support a public option if it only came into existence after private insurers fail to get costs down to a pre-set “trigger” level by a certain date. Her concern, she said, is that "if you establish a public option at the forefront that goes head-to-head and competes with the private health insurance market ... the public option will have significant price advantages.” After all, she continued, "I don't think we can entirely depend on the private insurance market to deliver. They haven't delivered thus far, and that's why we're in the predicament we're in today." So we should keep our terrible system while giving them one more chance to get it together?

In June, Senator Charles Grassley, also a Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said in an interview: “So then what's wrong with what you call a public option? What's wrong with it is the Lewin Group that studies health care deeply, they have estimated crowding-out of about 119 million people. Well, you crowd out 119 million people out of private health insurance, then everybody else's rates are going to go up. And eventually you won't have your own health care system -- health insurance system that you want to keep, as the president promised. That's what we find wrong with it.” Orrin Hatch has echoed his numbers. The problem with Grassley’s statement, though, is that what he calls “crowding out” really means that those 119 million people would choose a strong public plan over their private insurance. Why? Because it would be cheaper.

If you were only following this issue according to what the public option’s opponents were saying, this is where you would start getting confused. Hadn't they been saying that a public plan would mean rationing, bureaucracy, and socialized medicine? Why, then, would so many people want to join it? The answer is that it was becoming clear to many that a bad plan offered as an option posed no real threat, because people would simply choose not to join it. The scare tactics weren’t working.

So the conversation began to change. As the New York Times noted, the new warning was that a public plan would be too good: “[C]ritics argue that with low administrative costs and no need to produce profits, a public plan will start with an unfair pricing advantage. They say that if a public plan is allowed to pay doctors and hospitals at levels comparable to Medicare's, which are substantially below commercial insurance rates, it could set premiums so low it would quickly consume the market.”

“Yeah, don’t throw us into that briarpatch,” responded Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly.

From the perspective of the insurance and health care industries (or of a lawmaker who benefitted from their lobbying dollars) that sounds scary, indeed. But to those actually concerned about whether the system makes sense, whether it’s affordable, or whether it gets better medical care to patients, it doesn’t seem like a problem so much as what we’ve been hoping for all along.

Why Businesses and Economists Are Backing the Health Care "Public Option"

Arguing that delaying or diluting a public plan is what's really bad for business, economists and small business leaders are stepping up their support for an option they say could save the economy.

In the fight to frame the debate over health care reform, opponents of a universally available public plan rely again and again on what they seem to consider their trump card: the economy. Last week, a Congressional Budget Office analysis determined that initial plans proposed by leading Democratic Senators would be more expensive than anticipated (though former Labor Secretary Robert Reich listed some of the crucial factors left out of the analysis), and the news was interpreted far and wide: Any form of public health care is bad for business, bad for the economy, and impossible during a recession.

This may sound like a new version of the all too familiar notion that, in a dispute between the short-term health of our economy and the long-term health of our nation, the former ought to win. Sure, it’s nonsensical—but it’s also effective (remember “Drill, baby, drill”?).

This time, though, economists are trying to tell us that the dispute has more to do with framing than with substance—that there may be no need to take sides. A robust public plan, they say, wouldn’t come at the expense of the economy. It would come to its rescue. In a recently-released petition, more than 300 economists, business leaders, and health care experts declared that “we can’t afford NOT to reform our health care system.” Meanwhile, an in-depth study of the effect of a pay-or-play system (in which large firms are required to either provide health coverage for their employees or pay into a public fund all workers could access) on employment found that such a system would likely lead to significant job growth.

So what makes them conclude that universal, public health care is good for the health of businesses and workers, too? There are a lot of factors:

For all the harm that housing bubbles and layoffs have done to the balance sheets of American families, it’s often missing or insufficient health insurance that sends them over the edge. One study found that bankruptcy filers had an average out-of-pocket medical debt of $12,000; another noted that every 30 seconds, an American files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health issue. Universal coverage would not only help prevent these bankruptcies, it would, in the words of the economists’ petition, “give lower and middle-income Americans greater financial security—and the ability to pay their mortgages, start small businesses, save for college, pursue new job opportunities, and make other choices that will benefit our economy.” In other words, helping families stay solvent is as least a good a definition for “economic stimulus” as roads and bridges.

One of the hidden costs of our health care problem is that it constrains those who would like to change jobs or start new businesses. A new report by MIT’s Jonathan Gruber found that at least 1.6 million small business workers suffer “job lock,” meaning they can’t leave their job for fear of losing benefits.

Health care costs keep small businesses from offering the jobs, and the wages, that they otherwise could. A 2006 study showed that pay levels decline 2.3 percent with every 10 percent increase in health premiums; the Small Business Majority found that, over the next 10 years, health care reform would save $29.2 billion in small businesses’ profits, $309 billion in their workers’ wages, and 128,000 small business jobs that would otherwise be lost. A study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that wages suffer when health costs grow, stressed that “workers and households pay for health insurance through lower wages and higher prices.”

Big businesses suffer, too. Take a look at U.S. auto manufacturers, laboring under the high costs of medical care for workers while trying to compete with manufacturers from countries with universal health care. It’s one major reason production gets outsourced.

A streamlined system would slash administrative costs. Ask any doctor (or any medical receptionist): Today’s insurance payment systems are incredibly complex. A University of California, San Francisco study found that, by switching to a single payer system like Canada’s, the U.S. could save $161 billion every year on paperwork alone—as Holly Dressel pointed out in this YES! Magazine article about Canada’s system, “these billions of dollars are not abstract amounts deducted from government budgets; they come directly out of the pockets of people who are sick.”

In these days of picketing CEOs’ houses, let’s not forget the price of profit when health is a purely private industry. CEOs in the insurance industry make their millions, too, and pharmaceutical companies keep a full 17 percent of what we pay for medicine as profit (compared to a 3 percent profit margin for other businesses). Another 30 percent goes toward marketing and administration, leaving research and development only a 12% slice (see these and more thought-provoking numbers here). In a public system, that money could be redirected to, well, health care.

And finally, with costs spiraling out of control (health care spending is expected to be 20 percent of GDP by 2016—compared to 9.7 percent in Canada), things will only get worse without a robust public option to offer what Jacob Hacker called the three Bs: “We need a national public plan that is available on similar terms in all parts of the nation as a backup. This plan has to have the ability to improve the quality and efficiency of care to act as a benchmark for private insurance. And it has to be able to challenge provider consolidation that has driven up prices to serve as a cost-control backstop” (emphasis added).

A public plan gets the support of 76 percent of Americans and it’s good for the economy? The only argument left against the public option appears to be that it would be too popular – that Americans would vote with their feet and choose the public option when offered a choice.

Political cover for opposing the public option is getting harder and harder to find.

Correction: The original version of this piece said that the Small Business Majority supported the 'public option.' In fact, the SMB favors a reformed system "based on shared responsibility among individuals, business, government and the healthcare industry," which would include tax credits for small businesses and a sliding-scale pay-or-play system.

Photo: On May 30, thousands rallied in Seattle for health care reform. Photo by Neil Parekh/SEIU Healthcare 775NW

Doctors Just Want to Be Doctors

When President Obama discussed health care reform with the physicians of the American Medical Association on Monday, he was speaking to a group considered one of the strongholds of opposition to reform, particularly any that includes the so-called “public option” (creating a government-sponsored insurance plan, modeled after Medicare and available to all Americans, that would expand options and reduce costs by competing with private plans on a national insurance “exchange”). The AMA has a history of opposing major changes to health care, dating back to the advent of Medicare in the 1960s, and had gone on record the week before opposing any public plan—saying, in comments sent to the Senate Finance Committee, that “the introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers.”

It’s commonly assumed that the AMA’s stance reflects the beliefs of a majority of the nation’s physicians, many of whom do benefit from the runaway costs of health care. Wouldn’t doctors, concerned that reform would drive down costs, uniformly stand with insurance and pharmaceutical companies in defense of the status quo?

But this view is based on a belief that all doctors like the way the current system has, as President Obama put it, “taken the pursuit of medicine from a profession—a calling—into a business.”

The truth is, they don’t.

Despite its prominence and lobbying budget, it’s important to remember that AMA doesn’t speak for all doctors—fewer than a fifth of practicing physicians, in fact, and that number appears to be dropping. Meanwhile, membership is growing in physicians’ groups that have a different perspective. Sixteen thousand doctors are members of Physicians for a National Health Program, dedicated solely to research, education, and advocacy in support of a universal, comprehensive, single-payer system.

Or, take the National Physicians Alliance. Recognizing that “some physician organizations prioritize political agendas concerned with physician compensation and malpractice over medicine and health issues,” the NPA’s mission is to “restore physicians' primary emphasis on the core values of our profession: service, integrity, and advocacy.” When the AMA came out in opposition to the public option last week, NPA policy director Dr. Chris McCoy quit—publicly. In an open letter to the AMA, he said he could no longer be a member of an organization that encouraged physicians to “have a vision of themselves as money-generating profit centers rather than professionals serving the public good.”

On Monday, a coalition including the National Physicians Alliance, The American Academy of Family Physicians, the Doctors Council, and five others released a joint statement supporting the creation of a public option, saying it would increase affordability and promote better and more collaborative care. Together, the associations represent 215,000 doctors.

Doctors for America, another of the signatory coalitions, offers a forum for physicians to express their frustrations and hopes. The voices that emerge aren’t worried about making more money, but about being good doctors:

Dr. Hamid Rabiee, California: “I want health reform that takes the profit out of health, [and] changes the health industry to health care.”
Dr. Robyn Liu, Kansas: “I want health reform that is about health and puts patients first. I want incentives that are aligned with patient health and not with performing more tests and procedures.”
Dr. Robert Patterson, Indiana. “I want health reform that allows me more time to know the patient I am serving better.”
Dr. Elizabeth Powers, Oregon: “We must measure the efficacy of any new system by the health of our entire population. Inequities based on race, socioeconomic status, insurance status, etc. must be eliminated.”
Dr. Bonnie Gifford, West Virginia: “I want health reform that removes the business model from caring.”

The AMA isn’t a monolithic bloc, either, and many voices within are speaking out for change. Though the association hasn’t wavered in its opposition to expanding a government-run system like Medicare, its policymaking group today voted to support “health system reform alternatives.” Dr. Nancy Nielson, the group’s outgoing president, says that the AMA is not categorically opposed to a public plan and encouraged members not to allow themselves to be cast as “naysayers” to reform. She also reminded the group that it should focus more on patient care and less on defense of the insurance industry.

It’s clear, though, that many doctors don’t need that reminder. Fifty-nine percent of them support a national health insurance program, according to a March poll published in the Annals of American Medicine. It’s the system that makes the most sense to doctors—and patients—of all political backgrounds, as YES! has reported. All over the country, they’re pushing for universal, fair, and public health care that values patients over profits and health over industry.

They’re the ones President Obama was talking to when he said that the pursuit of money “is not why you became doctors. That is not why you put in all those hours in the Anatomy Suite or the O.R. That is not what brings you back to a patient's bedside to check in or makes you call a loved one to say it'll be fine. You did not enter this profession to be bean-counters and paper-pushers. You entered this profession to be healers - and that's what our health care system should let you be.”

Even at the AMA, that got a standing ovation.

Photo: Members of the National Physicians Alliance in front of the Capitol. Photo courtesy of the NPA.

After May Day: We are the change we seek

Update from the May 6th protest at the Regional Headquarters for Immigrant Custom Enforcement in Bloomington, MN.

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This past May Day, we marched and rallied in over 125 cities throughout the U.S. to hold the Obama administration accountable to the promises of humane immigration reform. Here in Seattle, spirits were high and a sense of hope resounded throughout downtown. However, between swine flu precautions and increased raids in the last year, the number of protesters were fewer than in the legendary 2006 marches. The energy of participants, however, was not diminished, nor was their ability to continue mobilizing. The hope of the May Day marches resides not in the media coverage nor the government's lack of response but rather in how it connected people in the community in their efforts for further actions. As Obama himself said: "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change we seek."

One group of immigrant and worker rights activists in the Twin Cities have taken Obama at his word. On May 6th over 25 people commited civil disobedience at the Regional Headquarters for Immigrant Custom Enforcement in Bloomington, MN. These citizens of conscience were part of a national movement to establish a moratorium on raids within the first 100 days of the new administration. Since this did not happen, they are "putting their bodies on the line to stand up against the dehumanization in the our current immigration system," said Katherine Sharpe of the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Coalition and a participant in the action. May 6th is the official end of the first 100 days, as well as a day when one of the weekly deportation flights take off. Sharpe continued, "Our goal is to raise the level of debate and dialogue about humane immigration reform.  Our hope is to spur more actions throughout the country." 

For more information about the action and to read the group's  powerful Open Letter to Obama please visit http://shutdownice.wordpress.com.

We Are All Workers. Todos Somos Trabajadores

This May Day we are asked to contemplate these words anew through the lens of hope-- a hope that calls us into action at a crucial moment in the history of human rights.  The first 100 days of the Obama administration will soon be up, signifying an examination of promises made and a mobilization upon promises broken.  Of all ethnic groups, Latinos represented the greatest shift for Obama with more than 2 out of 3 voting for him, in large part because of his stated support for immigration reform.  The hope of May Day this year is that the administration not only recognizes this fact, but is also moved into action by the united platform presented by this constituency.  Every day the labor movement gradually internalizes more profoundly how immigrant rights affect all workers’ rights. We have only raised the quality of life for working people in the U.S. by organizing across ethnic, racial, and gender lines.

On May 1^st in every major U.S. city, hundreds of thousands will take to the streets to demand immigration reform, a moratorium on raids and detentions, the Employee Free Choice Act, health care for all, and an end to all wars.  In the past the corporate media has used the broadness of the May Day demands to present a fractured movement. It may be fair to say their depiction was not entirely inaccurate.  So, what has changed about the labor movement in recent years to transcend these divides?  What exactly is this united platform?

One change is that work-place raids are being preceded by union drives. Traditional labor groups are recognizing that these raids hinder their organizing capabilities.  So too do the immigrant rights activists now see the unions as an integral part their work-place security.  I was deeply moved, for instance, by the display of solidarity shown by union folks at the Republican National Convention protests.  I was marching with an immigrant rights contingent at the time and the labor groups formed a human barricade around us in case of arrests or even a raid.  The united platform is spun from our collective desire to live lives free of fear.  This fundamental concept is the backbone of each of the May Day demands. 

What is the fear?  Is it foreign?  Christine Neumann-Ortiz, founding Executive Director of Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant rights organization in Wisconsin, described this fear in a recent interview: “Fear that at any moment you can be picked up and be separated from your family; the sense that everything you have worked for is fragile.  Having to live with the fear of traveling within the U.S. and being stopped by police and questioned about your status, fear of not having identification, which is so necessary in everyday life, the fear of crossing the border to be reunited with your family because of the danger if you try to come back.  Fear of approaching the police if you are the victim of a crime.  Fear of jail.  Fear of hunger. The anguish of having to make the choice between seeing your family, in many cases your children and aging parents, or sending them money to help them survive.” Especially as we plunge deeper into troubling economic times, the fears of immigrant workers become less foreign to working families of all backgrounds.  The crisis is showing our true colors, colors that aren’t that different from one another.  

The current immigration system attempts to frame immigration issues as a political debate instead of a humanitarian crisis.  The marches and rallies of May 1^st are an opportunity to say no to the dehumanization of workers and the monopolization of American identity; to create a solidarity movement with workers that addresses the internal politics of globalization that have negatively affected people’s ability to stay in their countries and earn a living; to define a pro-worker legalization process that benefits low-income working class families over business interests and provides a simple and affordable pathway to citizenship; to expose the abuses behind the private, for-profit detention centers. In essence, International Worker’s Day is an opportunity to take a bold stance against a government-sanctioned culture of fear. 

Over 1.5 million people took to the streets on May Day 2006, culminating in the largest immigrant rights protest in US history to date.  This year under the new administration, our actions are more important than ever; the combination of urgency and hope is unparalleled.  The window of opportunity we are forcing open right now, however, lies not in what happens on May Day, but what happens after, in our communities and in our own hearts.

 For More information or to find a march and rally near you please visit www.anewdayforimmigration.org 

Reflections on Power Shift at 30,000 Feet

“How do you get to a rest which is legitimate and deserved?” Wendell Berry asked the audience of Artists for the Climate last Sunday night. Good food for thought for a group of people about to participate in a mass direct action.

Berry, along with other climate justice activists such as Bill McKibben and Vandana Shiva recently called for mass civil disobedience against the coal industry. Chesapeake Climate Action Network's Artists for the Climate event was the convocation to the historic action taking place the following day. The question of rest seemed a poignant one to this multi-generational audience, half of whom were reflecting on their lifetimes spent in the movement and half of whom were exuberantly upholding the popular slogan of Power Shift '09,“This is just the beginning.” As the night unfolded with poetry, song, and prayer, activists were reminded of a humanity which only art can portray; a humanity worth fighting for, worth breaking the law for.

The next morning, DC woke up in a winter wonderland. Social networks were hard at work spreading the word that all Lobby Day and Capitol Climate Action events were still on. Powershifters converged in front of the Capitol to hear Nancy Pelosi speak, wearing green hard hats -- as much for warmth as for the symbolic demand of green jobs. With only a megaphone on stage, the speeches soon faded into the chatter of excited youth lobbyists just returned from meetings with their representatives. The previous day, Powershifters had gathered by state to discuss strategies and unite about issues particular to their region. The culmination on Monday morning was the largest lobby day on climate and energy in our nation’s history. Coming of age under the Bush administration jaded my perception of democracy in this country, but to be privy to these conversations rejuvenated in me a sense of hope.

Just down the street from the Capitol gathering, affinity groups gathered in the Spirit of Justice Park preparing for a march around the coal-fired Capitol power plant. The intent was to blockade all the plant’s entrances using non-violent direct action. The demonstration was peaceful but not passive, sending a clear message to the public: our tolerance for coal is over and our planet does not have time to wait for legislation to be passed. We must take action now for clean energy and a green economy that includes all people.

As I fly back across the country to Seattle, I am reflecting on the appropriate complexity of my long journey. As Wendell Barry stated, “I’ve been flying all over the country for 40 years, to tell people, in effect, that they ought to stay home.” As I try to sift through the words, organizations, concepts, innovations, and tactics I’ve learned at Power Shift, I realize it is the people I’ve met that ultimately shaped the value of this experience -- inspiring activists like Energy Action Coalition's Jessy Tolkan, Marcie Smith of the Kentucky Clean Energy Corps, Ursula James, working for climate action in the heart of Texas oil land, and Elandria Williams of the legendary Highlander Research and Education Center.

We come together to renew ourselves, to be reminded that we are not alone in what is often a thankless fight. A fight, I might add, we don’t have that much time to win. The enormous value of this collective solidarity travels back with us to our communities.

While the youth climate movement fills me with pride in my own generation it is also a bittersweet reminder that this movement is not about me. As we marched down the sludgy streets, climate justice chants wearing out our vocal chords, a six year old boy came out onto his porch to cheer us on.“This is for you! This is for you!” echoed the marchers for miles on end.

Powershifting in Appalachia

Four years ago the environmental movement was declared by some as sterile, calcified, dead. The issues were no longer sexy. The ruling administration was rolling back what advances had been made, and there was nary a protestor in sight. But last weekend’s Powershift ’09 conference proved the post-mortem premature. Environmentalism is back, reanimated by sweeping Democratic victories and the looming danger of climate change. The revived movement is full of vigor, and the energy is focused on one challenge in particular: King Coal.

Coal was the target of the mass action that blockaded the Capitol Hill power plant on March 2^nd. It was specifically mentioned by movement visionary Van Jones in his speech, and it was the subject of multiple panels and workshops. Although many attendees had conflicting views on movement ideology and tactics, no one even played devil’s advocate for “clean coal”. During one panel, a speaker asked the packed room, “Who here believes in clean coal?” Not a hand went up.

The panel “The Story of Coal: Past, Present and Future”, drew a huge crowd Saturday morning. Late comers had to be turned away by harried events staffers, and the overflow sat on the floor around the podium, entranced by the moving speakers who spoke of the devastation coal has brought to their Appalachian communities. While coal mining has had an impact on other areas of the United States, few have been dominated so completely and so brutally by the coal industry as Appalachia, and with so little tangible benefit for the surrounding communities. A soundbite advanced by business interests has tried to equate coal with jobs and prosperity, but Kathryn Kraisse, who lives on the Kentucky-West VA border in Harlan County, upended the myth. “In Harlan County, 30% of the people live in poverty. They say coal enriches the land, but we are living proof that it doesn’t.”

To make matters worse, the local populations have little say in the maneuverings of the coal companies. Michael Tomasky, a West Virginia native, described the immense power of the companies in a recent New York Review of Books article, “[West Virginia] is a company state. Local judges who dare challenge the industry are voted out of office, and bureaucrats who attempt to uphold the law are reassigned. Democrats or Republicans, it doesn’t matter — they all bow down to one industry.” The same is true of communities all over Appalachia, which makes it virtually impossible to get any regulatory laws passed.

The region is ripe for action, but in the past environmental movements have been pitted against Appalachian workers who depend on the coal industry for work, to the detriment of both. In recent years, with more of the jobs becoming mechanized, and the United Mine Workers losing much of their power, the parasitic intent of the coal companies has become obvious. (According to Kraisse most of the non-union workers are only paid $10 an hour.)

Today, the will to change is there amongst the working people of Appalachia. “We have had everything that gave us dignity taken away from us,” Kraisse told me after the event. “The coal companies are laying people off, alienating them. People are wanting to be empowered again.” Van Jones made special note of this in his speech, declaring that the environmental movement needed to work with and for the coal miners and their families, rather than at cross purposes with them.

The workers are already aware of coal’s negative impact. “People in Appalachia aren’t stupid, they know the effects coal has on their health, their kids, their community,” said Kyla Jagger, an activist who went to Ohio to help embattled community organizers after graduating from Oberlin College. “They have to weigh their choices very carefully. Most of them conclude that some kind of income is better than no kind of income.” The trick for the environmental movement will be providing a worthwhile incentive for workers and local communities to join the fight against coal. In short they will need jobs, and preferably unionized jobs, to break the grip coal companies have on the region’s economy.

There are already several groups devoted to providing alternative economic solutions for Appalachia, and the environmental movement will need to ensure that they work with these groups, rather than over them, in the coming struggle. The fatal flaw of past incarnations of the environmental movement has been a perceived condescension, and even disregard, for the interests of local workers and their families (which has led to some bruising conflicts with the labor movement). But labor rights and environmental rights are intrinsically linked, and both have been brutalized over the last quarter century of Reaganomics, neoliberalism, and the predatory capitalism of the Bush Administration. Both movements have the same enemies and similar interests, thus providing a relatively solid foundation for an alliance. Indeed, there were signs of a burgeoning friendship between the movements at Power Shift. In addition to Van Jones’ shout out to coal workers, the AFL-CIO was represented on several panels and a number of workshops dealt with labor issues and the Employee Free Choice Act.

Such an alliance could bring King Coal to its knees, with the help of sympathetic legislators, of course. Such a victory would go a long way towards fighting global warming, and it would show the world that environmentalism is back and here to stay.

Jake Blumgart is a guest blogger for YES! and an editorial intern for The American Prospect and Campus Progress Magazine.