Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, October 17, 2011

HCR -- C.L.A.S.S. Act Dies, R.I.P.

By John Ballard


I heard a talk radio host yesterday crowing about Friday's announcement that the long-term care portion of Obamacare known as the CLASS Act has been abandoned, Although this is very old news he was spinning bullshit into cotton citing this development as further evidence of the failure of healthcare reform.


Previous posts have described one of Ted Kennedy's legislative efforts but from soon after the bill passed the idea proved to be actuarially unworkable. At this point the less said the better. But the challenge of how best to care for a growing population of aging and otherwise disabled Americans remains one of the country's numerous crippling social problems.


Naomi Freundlich (writing at Maggie Mahar's place) sez...



The problem of paying for long-term care has not gone away. Anyone cheering the demise of CLASS and claiming a victory for the anti-reform (and anti-Obama) side is deluded; this issue has no �side� and we�ve merely punted it further down the road. We are all going to get old. The vast majority of us will require long-term care services in the future and most will require government or other outside help to pay for it. The silence from the right is deafening.




2 comments:

  1. "... The silence from the right is deafening." It's a feature they share with vultures until it's time to pick over the bones.

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  2. Hi John,
    Just wanted to give you the heads-up that I wrote the HealthBeat article about the demise of the CLASS Act, not Maggie. Also, if you want more information about Medicaid managed care plans, there is a Medicaid Commission (similar to MEDPAC)that published a report recently on managed care in the program. You can access the report here http://www.macpac.gov/reports.
    Thanks,
    Naomi Freundlich
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Forgive me, Naomi. Careless oversight. Now fixed.
    You do good work, by the way.
    JB

    ReplyDelete