Op-Ed

While the debate over healthcare reform continues in Washington, America’s doctors have been quietly moving ahead with plans for a first-ever code of conduct for the nation’s health insurance industry.

Most Americans, if they can picture a filibuster at all, probably imagine a lone senator (played by Jimmy Stewart) talking nonstop for hours to stall a vote as the public slowly takes notice.

It’s been a year since President Barack Obama’s historic election, and Tuesday will be viewed as something of a referendum on his performance since then.

It’s the strategy, stupid. Once again, we’re hoping that Pakistan’s latest offensive in the tribal belt will solve the Taliban problem. Our military-centric strategy, which has cost us eight years and $10 billion tax dollars, is incomplete. What’s missing is the complementary soft-power component necessary to secure the pivotal conflict zone in the war on terror.

The House Financial Services Committee has taken up the question of the credit rating agencies. These are the quasi-regulatory bodies that gave Wall Street permission to pump trillions of dollars in toxic assets out into the arteries of global finance, with consequences familiar to us all.

Perhaps Smokey Robinson’s lyrics say it best: “We’ve come too far to end it now.” That is exactly where we are today in the debate over healthcare reform.

Recent news has reported that I am trying to “kill” healthcare reform, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

I remain surprised at the almost total silence by liberals about a common, uncomfortable fact of all the plans Democrats have introduced in both houses: that so few people will have true choices in purchasing a health insurance plan, and if there is a public option, that more than 150 million insured workers will not have access to it.

As America and the international community scramble to prevent a repetition of the famine that killed a million Ethiopians 25 years ago, the Obama administration must hasten an ongoing review of U.S. policy toward Ethiopia.

Winston Churchill once quipped that Americans always do the right thing after exhausting all other options. When it comes to our policies on detaining enemy belligerents, we have met Churchill’s low expectations with an arbitrary system that has damaged our national security and harmed the United States’s credibility abroad. Now is the time for Congress to make the necessary changes to bring our detention policies in line with America’s historic commitment to the rule of law, and to justice and human rights.