Occupy Wall Street Warning: "Obama’s presidency could someday be seen as little but an irrelevancy"

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Another vital component of the Recovery Act that is often overlooked is its expanded funding for unemployment insurance that helped keep 3.3 million people, including 1 million children, out of poverty in 2009. Another overlooked but critical program in the Recovery Act is the funding for Head Start. The $2 billion allocation preserved Head Start and Early Head Start programming for 64,000 children across the country-over 900 in Minnesota alone. These programs are helping the most vulnerable kids in our communities.
It's simple-economic analysis suggests that the Recovery Act boosted demand, created millions of jobs, kept families in their homes, and helped the economy start growing again.

Let me tell you what I love about being a Senator. As opposed to being a candidate for Senate. I think most of my colleagues can relate to this. When you're a candidate, you're speaking mainly to your own party. When you're trying to get the nomination, when you're getting out the vote. But as a Senator, you talk to everyone. I travel all over the state of Minnesota and meet with mayors and city council members, and county commissioners, and small businesses.

And everywhere I go, they thank me for the Recovery Act. They thank me for the teachers and firefighters, for the Workforce Investment Act funds, which they used to train people for jobs. For the highway extension or the wastewater plant or the funds for rural broadband or for weatherization of public buildings.

In fact, Michael Gunwald, writing for Time Magazine, said this: "the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world's largest venture-capital fund. It's pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; energy efficiency; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet."

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Why Republicans are So Intent on Killing Health Care Reform

by Richard Kirsch

It’s not just about expanded care. It’s about proving our government can be a force for the common good.

Why are John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell so intent on stopping health care reform from ever taking hold? For the same reason that Republicans and the corporate Right spent more than $200 million in the last year to demonize health care in swing Congressional districts. It wasn’t just about trying to stop the bill from becoming law or taking over Congress. It is because health reform, if it takes hold, will create a bond between the American people and government, just as Social Security and Medicare have done. Democrats, and all those who believe that government has a positive place in our lives, should remember how much is at stake as Republicans and corporate elites try to use their electoral victory to dismantle the new health care law.

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There’s nothing new here. Throughout American history, health care reform has been attacked as socialist. An editorial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in December 1932, just after FDR’s election, claimed that proposals for compulsory insurance “were socialism and communism — inciting to revolution.” The PR firm that the American Medical Association hired to fight Truman’s push for national health insurance succeeded in popularizing a completely concocted quote that it attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the Socialist State.”

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One year after the Affordable Care Act’s Patient’s Bill of Rights took effect, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report summarizing some of the achievements of the health reform law. In the eighteen months since the president signed the Affordable Care Act into law, health reform has had a tangible effect in the lives of millions of Americans. The report discusses how the law is helping to give hardworking families the security they deserve and the reforms in the Affordable Care Act that have helped hold down insurance premiums, hold insurance companies more accountable and strengthen Medicare.

“The Affordable Care Act has made the health care system better for millions of Americans,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “As a mother, a wife and a daughter, I know how important health coverage is for America’s families. This law is helping to give hard working families the security they deserve and stop insurance company abuses, hold down insurance premiums and strengthen Medicare.”

Recent reports, including the U.S. Census and the National Health Information Survey, have indicated that approximately one million additional young Americans now have insurance coverage due to the Affordable Care Act according to experts. The Patient’s Bill of Rights made it illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage to a child with a pre-existing condition or place a lifetime limit on the care they will provide. Through Affordable Care Act initiatives, 19 million seniors with Medicare have received new free preventive benefits, while efforts to cut fraud and abuse have extended the Medicare Trust Fund by 8 years, strengthening the Medicare program.

To read more about the many accomplishments of the law visit: http://www.healthcare.gov/law/resources/reports/patients-bill-of-rights09232011a.pdf

To read a blog commemorating today by Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Richard Sorian visit: www.healthcare.gov/blog