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Hello, everyone!
I’m extremely excited to be here, meet all of you, and get to work together. A bit about me: I’m a musician, a writer, and an organizer. I came to blogging through my colleagues here, Alex Thurston (who you’ll hear from soon) and Lance Steagall. Blogging was the start of my political awakening in 2006. Before then, I was a music student in the midwest. Now, politics is my full time job.
I work for Health Care for America Now in the online department. I blog for the campaign, so you’ll be seeing a lot of those posts here at The Seminal. While I won’t deny that these posts represent an institutional viewpoint, I try to make them as engaging and truly useful as possible. Seeing as health care is such a big issue right now, I’m sure we’ll have a lot to talk about, and I’m looking forward to getting into the nitty-gritty with people here. I’m a fan of the horse race, but I like getting down into the policy even more.
My interests outside of health care range from foreign policy (Alex and I have been very active in talking about our mistakes in Afghanistan) to media consolidation and criticism, so expect some discussion of those topics from me.
Mostly, however, I’m interested and excited about this community and the progressive movement at large. It’s an honor to be able to help grow a site that has such an active community, and I hope I can help make this a bigger part of the progressive conversation. I’ll be reading diaries written here closely, and we’ll be featuring a lot of your writing here on the front page. Discussion is what makes the progressive movement better, so that’s what I’m looking for here.
I can be reached at seminal@theseminal.com. Feel free to contact me at any time.
And thanks for the warm welcome!
P.S. The diaries are back up and working. So have at it!
12 Comments
Hello, Jason. Diversity of voices is always a good thing. However, as a frequent critic of HCAN, I’m leery at the transformation of an egalitarian diary blog into a two-tiered site with HCAN’s institutional cross-posts now elevated to front-page status. Maybe it doesn’t make a shred of difference. We’ll see. As I’ve noted on Jane’s suggestion thread, I give you credit for engaging with comments to your past diaries here. Other institutional cross-posters have dropped their diaries onto the page and never stuck around.
Anyway, as you say, let’s all just have at it and see where this goes. Best of luck.
It’s definitely a concern.
I would say two things. First, I’m not that only one over here controlling the front page. We intend to put lots of diaries up here, even ones critical of HCAN. Second, the criteria for front-paged diaries that they be well written, newsworthy, and persuasive. We’re not looking to be the content police.
If you don’t think I’d be receptive, email Lance or Alex Thurston (who’ll introduce himself tomorrow) and they may be receptive. But I intend to try and be fair, too. I started as an independent blogger, and I like to think I retain that still to some extent.
Either way, your dairy can still be on the recommended diary list, as that takes no input from the editors here.
Very glad to have you here – welcome!
HCAN is not a progressive voice on healthcare. It never promoted a single payer plan. Instead it enables, facilitates, and legitimizes a process that no matter how awful the final product and how far it falls short of what is needed will be justified as the best that could be achieved given the circumstances, circumstances that HCAN did so much to create.
Thanks, Jason; appreciated.
This is a beaut and deserves to be widely distributed. From Aravosis over at americablog.
“I asked a health insurance expert friend of mine to detail for me exactly what kind of health insurance plan Senators like Chuck Grassley actually get as members of Congress. Is it true that members of the US Congress have a sweet deal as compared to the US public at large? His answer: Yes. Here’s his analysis.”
Link.
Everything they’re saying about the sweet deal Congresspersons have is true, but it’s not just a function of favorable premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. The real sweetness comes from the fact that insurance companies handling these policies know better than to screw Congresspersons and their staffs on benefit pay-outs the way they screw regular Americans, including lesser federal employees with ostensibly the same coverage.
People sometimes say regular Americans should have the same health coverage as our politicians. That’s a fine rhetorical position (indeed, the California Nurses Association campaigned for a time on the slogan that all Americans should have “Cheneycare”) but overlooks the fact that insurers will concoct or exploit loopholes in reimbursing therapeutic or diagnostic bills for ordinary Americans that they wouldn’t dare invoke for VIPs with identical policies on paper.
Oxdown seemed to be characterized by behind-the-scene changes in management, starting with Ari, followed by who knows. Glad to see the management is more up front, even if after the fact. Good luck! Was your major in an instrument or composition, or voice?
I majored in music technology, but I also took classical guitar lessons, as that’s my main instrument.
Looking forward to these changes, and welcome!
welcome jason – nice to have ya aboard
Jason, they’ve thrown you to the wolves!
Most folks in here are single payer oriented, and seek and end to the healthcare INSURANCE binds and squeezes.
HCAN is NOT one of my fav orgs.
Boy howdy, you’ve stepped into it deeply, and I respect you for doing so.
Yer not, like, FDL’s Token Broder, or something like that are ya? *G*
Srsly, Welcome, and I look forward to reading what you have to say . . . *G*
Um, just for the record, are you in favor of single payer, as the types that work well in Britain, France, Canada?
Or do you support the present corporatist model where profit and The Wall numbers mean more than the delivery of care? (yep, loaded question, huh) *G*