Saturday Half Dozen

By John Ballard

With limited time, I'm stopping my morning surfing to share six links that caught my eye. With more time I would likely pick one and flesh out a more interesting post, but instead I toss them out without much reflection.

?Connecticut and Vermont are moving ahead on state-level health care options.

So you not only have a plan [in Connecticut] that would cover low-income residents, but it would change the health care delivery system in ways that would reduce the cost of care and save the government money. SustiNet would be rolled out gradually, and by 2014 would be open to all state residents who qualify. The incoming Governor, Dan Malloy, appears to be on board with the approach. There could be improvements to this model � particularly automatic enrollment � but in general this is a solid proposal.

Beyond the Basic Health approach of SustiNet, you have the possibility for a single payer system in Vermont. Last May, lawmakers in Vermont passed into law the creation of a commission tasked with designing three possible health care plans. The options must include a single payer system, along with an alternative that includes a state-run public option competing with private insurance.

Add Massachusetts to the list and we have three states on the way to state-level universal health care. Contrast that with Arizona where the death panel nightmare is emerging as reality.  (Oh, how I wish I had time to get on a soap box about this one.)

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?Cute French kids looking at games and technology from the distant past.... (thirty years?) H/T TPC

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?Birthright Citizenship may be an American ideal but not worldwide. Globally, citizenship is a confused and inconsistent status as mobile families are discovering the hard way. I don't remember where this link came from and the information comes as no surprise. It's something I had not thought much about before.

Most of the world's estimated 12 million stateless people - who cannot cross national borders - are poor, marginalised and live mainly in Kuwait, Nepal, Iraq, Myanmar, Thailand and the former Soviet republics.

But Mark Manly, head of the statelessness unit at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said that gaps between national citizenship laws have put high-flying professionals around the globe in the same boat as migrants and refugees when it comes to getting passports for their kids.

"Far more people live outside their country of nationality than before, and there are more children born to parents of different countries," he said. "We have a lot of situations where the children are not acquiring any nationality at all."

Certain countries, including Switzerland, Japan and much of the European Union, do not confer citizenship automatically to babies born on their soil. In such places, expats whose own nationality cannot be transmitted abroad can find themselves with more than the usual dose of new-parent stress.

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?More Small Businesses Offering Health Care To Employees Thanks To Obamacare

�One of the biggest problems in the small-group market is affordability,� said Ron Rowe, who oversees small-group sales for the Kansas City operation for Blue Cross Blue Shied. �We looked at the tax credit and said, �this is perfect.�

Rowe went on to say that 38% of the businesses it is signing up had not offered health benefits before.

Whatever your particular ideology, there is simply no denying that these statistics are incredibly heartening.

(Every time I see the term Obamacare it annoys me because it is used derisively more than objectively. Even journalists who should know better do it all the time. How hard is it to call it ACA or PPACA or call it the Affordable Care Act and let readers and viewers add more accurate terms to the vernacular. Death panels sure took hold in a hurry.) Again, H/T TPC

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?Matt Taibbi makes me feel better about the future of reporting. He and his generation of future journalists will be telling my grandchildren to wake up and pay attention long after I'm gone. And that's a reassuring thought. H/T 3Quarks

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?Did the US Government Have an American Teenager Beaten In Kuwait?  This is from Mother Jones. I wish this were a shocking revelation but it's not. Rendition for the purpose of torture is now part of the US lexicon of resources. In the same way that marriage has been replaced by shacking up, rendition for the purpose of torture is going mainstream. I'm still old-fashioned enough to get uptight about the erosion of morals and ethics. But that's just me, I guess. There's an update at the link now... plausible deniability, I'm sure.

Gulet Mohamed, an American teenager detained in Kuwait who claims to have been brutally interrogated there, was arrested and questioned by Kuwaiti security on behalf of the US government, his lawyer and family members charged on Thursday.

Mohamed, a 19-year-old from Alexandria, Virginia, called the New York Times' Mark Mazzetti and Salon's Glenn Greenwald this week via a cell phone another inmate smuggled into the prison where he is being held. In the interviews, Mohamed recounted being severely beaten. He said he was forced to stand for hours, and that interrogators threatened to torture him with electricity and imprison his mother.

Questions that Kuwaiti interrogators asked Mohamed "indicated a level of knowledge about his family and actions" that could only have been obtained from American law enforcement, the teen's lawyer, Gadeir Abbas, told the two reporters at a sparsely attended press conference Thursday afternoon. In fact, he added, interrogators mentioned a specific, off-the-cuff conversation Mohamed had at a mosque in the US some time ago�a conversation that he claimed they could only have learned about through surveillance. Since the idea that Kuwaiti intelligence forces are spying on US mosques strains credulity, Abbas and Mohamed's family believe American officials were passing information to the Kuwaitis.