Time to get pumped

A message from the heart

Welcome to a Thursday evening edition of Progress Report.

I’ve got some personal news to share, and because I’m a stickler for keeping the newsletter in a neat, consistent format, I’m teasing that news here and sharing it below.

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After spending several days caught in the vicious cycle of writing introductions and then scrapping them for fear of seeming self-indulgent, I’m running out of stamina, both figuratively and literally. Fading fast and breathing heavily has been an increasingly regular occurrence for me over the past five months, which is why I’ll be undergoing open heart surgery on Thursday morning.

I’ve mentioned my heart issues every now and again in this newsletter, most recently in November, when I wrote about the immense pain that follows one of these surgeries as a way to contextualize the incalculably worse pain that Palestinian civilians have had to endure while receiving anesthesia-free care in the remains of Gaza’s bombed out hospitals. When I wrote the piece, I knew I’d need some kind of procedure, but was hoping to avoid what will be my fifth open heart surgery.

This has been a lifelong affliction for me, whereas today, a baby born with aortic stenosis would be fixed with a more minor procedure and be on their way, with maybe one more fix later in life required. My road was far rockier, but the hope is that this surgery, which will swap and replace some valves and fix some other issues, will be my last big operation.

via Unsplash

A fifth surgery is inherently more complicated, but I’ve got a great surgeon and doctors who seem very confident, so I try to keep any complaints I have about this very shitty experience to a minimum. That’s always been the paradox for me: with good health insurance and great doctors, I’m the luckiest of the unlucky.

Employer-based health insurance has been a lifeline since my first surgery at five weeks old, which does nothing to change the fact that employer-based health insurance is part of a catastrophic and immoral system. As I got older, understanding that family and friends without insurance couldn’t see doctors radicalized me, so to speak, and became my gateway into politics. That politics has anything to do with people’s access to health care is really the fundamental problem, and I think a significant part of what ails our society.

According to a report released by KFF this week, more than 16 million Americans have been thrown off of Medicaid since the unwinding began last spring. A vast majority of them were likely still eligible for the low-income insurance program, and it’s unclear how many have signed up for a plan via Obamacare. As I’ve regularly reported, many of them live in states with governments bent on maximum disruption to the social safety net.

Millions of children have been caught up in this purge, with an outsized number of kids losing their health care in states such as Texas, Florida, and Georgia, where Republicans continue to refuse to expand Medicaid.

There is no economic justification for the morally bankrupt state of the American health care system — a national single-payer system like Medicare for All would save trillions — and the fact that it has become so implicitly accepted that most politicians are okay with tens of millions of Americans being denied access to medical care indicates just how much we’ve been worn down by relentless corruption and mindless horse race journalism.

An article in Politico today offers a timely example of this nihilism. Republican leaders in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi are beginning to talk about finally expanding Medicaid, which would give around 470,000 low-income Americans health insurance. The sudden change of heart is a response to the party’s growth among working class voters and the feeling that it’s no longer politically potent to oppose something with “Obama” in the title.

“Eight years ago you would have had to dance around the jargon you used because Obamacare still had this bad branding with Republicans, but these days I don’t even think you have to do that,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist in Georgia and deputy chief of staff to former Gov. Nathan Deal, who refused to expand Medicaid. “The politics have changed because the facts have changed.”

It’s a startling admission of diabolical cruelty and systemic failure. Republicans waged war on Obamacare as if it were a secret Soviet mind control scheme, turned its most generous aspect politically toxic, and then blamed that toxicity for their refusal to provide access to medical care to millions of people. The political press doesn’t bat an eye at this, because it can only present the world as it is, their values subsumed by the adherence to realpolitik of our damaged system.

Measuring our health care system by access to care is in and of itself a capitulation to the useless for-profit middlemen, because even with insurance, people are drowning in medical debt. I shudder thinking about the leaving the hospital and being handed a bill loaded with items that my insurance won’t cover. But again, I’ll still be one of the lucky ones.

What does this all mean for the newsletter?

Not a whole lot is going to change. I’ll be in the hospital for between five and seven days, and I’ve got a smart story written by good friend queued up to send during that time.

It’ll take maybe a month to recover after I leave the hospital, and during my first week at home, I’ll probably publish to Substack’s Notes section, which you can all access in the app and on the web. I’ll start sending out newsletters again as soon as I can, and between the Notes and guest columns, you probably won’t even realize I was gone.

Now, let’s get to a few headlines that are much more interesting than my surgery.

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🧑‍🍼 🤒 Virginia Democrats are once again pushing to enact guaranteed paid family and medical leave. Now that they’re back in charge of both houses of the legislature, the bill has a very real chance of making it to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s desk.

The leave would be funded by small taxes on employers, much the same as the state unemployment tax. Republicans blocked it last year, so Youngkin was able to remain silent on the issue. After last year’s election shellacking, he’ll want to think hard before picking up his veto pen.

Interestingly, Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer — who is being challenged by a union leader, as you well know — and Independent Sen. Angus King are advancing a bill to incentivize businesses to offer paid family and medical leave. As always, it’s tax credits that are on offer.

💰 😵‍💫 New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s wife, Tammy Murphy, did not have a good week. Murphy is running for the US Senate seat that is all but guaranteed to no longer belong to the morbidly corrupt Sen. Robert Menendez, and in this new New York feature story, she doesn’t exactly do a convincing job of appearing to be above the state’s shady, machine politics. Murphy is getting filleted for the favor-trading on display, but it was this conspiracy theory that really stuck out to me:

She also floats a theory about the war, drawing on the years she lived abroad when Phil served as President Obama’s ambassador to Germany: “In my opinion, there’s about four really bad actors in the world” — Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea — “and this whole thing was instigated as a proxy war in order to distract the West, in order to make sure we weren’t able to focus on Ukraine.”

What?!

🛠️ 😡 Elon Musk and Trader Joe’s are trying to take down the entire NLRB. I’ve written about this front of the far-right’s attempt to take over and gut the federal government, but here’s a good legal deep dive into the whole sordid affair. Here’s another deep dive with more context about the actual cases and politics.

The goal is to get the case to the Supreme Court, as Starbucks has already done with its challenge to part of the NLRB’s process.

📉 😬 New polling indicates that President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is in more trouble than ever. A Bloomberg poll released on Thursday found Biden losing to Donald Trump in all seven major swing states, and not by small margins. Trump leads by 10 in North Carolina and eight in Nevada, the latter of which is a union-heavy, must-win state for Biden. Immigration is the issue that’s killing him right now

The one thing Biden can hang his hat on is that a majority of voters in those swing states wouldn’t be willing to vote for Trump if he’s convicted of one of the many crimes for which he faces charges.

The other disturbing poll for Biden this week was a survey of voters ages 18-29, which shows him up just one point on Trump. That big discrepancy comes largely from young male voters, who prefer Trump by a 51-40 margin. There are a lot of reasons behind young mens’ increasingly dramatic drift to the right, but time will tell if Democrats and other organizations are interested in pursuing real solutions.

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