Andy Kroll

Reporter

Andy Kroll is Mother Jones' Dark Money reporter. He is based in the DC bureau. His work has also appeared at the Wall Street Journal, the Detroit News, Salon, and TomDispatch.com, where he's an associate editor. He can be reached at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. He tweets at @AndrewKroll.

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The Forgotten Half of Healthcare Reform

—By Andy Kroll

| Tue Oct. 13, 2009 4:03 AM PDT

With the Senate Finance Committee set to vote today on its long-awaited health-care bill, a number of medical experts have criticized the legislation, as well as other committees' bills, for failing to seriously address the country's health delivery system. As I recently wrote, the pitched debate over reforming healthcare has largely focused on the sexier issue of reforming insurance, i.e., creating a public option, co-ops, fine-tuning the system in place, etc. Meanwhile, our broken delivery system—in which costs soar higher, preventive care is marginalized, and doctors get paid on fee-for-service basis—continues to crumble.

Over the past couple days, doctors and policy experts have come out to urge lawmakers to tackle delivery problems before it's too late. "The discussion has gone from health care reform to insurance and payment reform," Toby Cosgrove, president and CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, recently told a reporter for The New York Times's "Prescriptions" blog. Cosgrove added, "We're not really reforming the system. We are reforming how we pay for it. It's certainly all about politics right now." In addition, four former US surgeons general released a statement on Saturday saying our "unsustainable" health-care system is in need of "reform that prioritizes prevention, preventive care and health literacy to encourage healthier lifestyles and we must also lower costs in order to make quality health care affordable for every single person who needs it."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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The Government's Next Housing Bubble

—By Andy Kroll

| Fri Oct. 9, 2009 4:37 AM PDT

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Is the next housing bubble already on the horizon? And is the federal government the one inflating it?

That's what lawmakers in Washington fear, the Los Angeles Times reports. As private mortgage insurers fall by the wayside in this dismal, bottomed-out housing market, the Federal Housing Administration—the government's mortgage insurance company—has stepped in to maintain lending to homeowners. Reports the Times, the FHA insured 21.5 percent of all new mortgages in 2008, (up from less than 6 percent in 2007), including nearly 2 million mortgages worth at least $328 billion. This year, the agency essentially backstopped the housing market.

But is the FHA doing too much to prop up the market by lending to people who could be at risk for default and foreclosure? The catch with FHA loans is that little payment is required up front to get the loan—which means borrowers who face hardship, job losses, or a plunge in home values, are more likely to walk away from their homes. Then the FHA is stuck with worthless mortgages, eating millions in losses. (Sound familiar?)

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Vote Taliban in 2010?

—By Andy Kroll

| Tue Oct. 6, 2009 4:44 PM PDT

Instead of fighting the Taliban, why not encourage them to run for office? Tell them to form their own political party, and they could officially govern many of the local Pashtun areas already under their control. Think of it: "Vote Taliban in 2010."

That’s one of the proposed solutions offered in a Financial Times op-ed on Tuesday with some fresh ideas on how the West can best exit Afghanistan. In a bloody conflict where tangible solutions are as rare as authentic election ballots, the op-ed’s authors—Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan's former ambassador in Washington, and Anatol Lieven, a professor at King's College London—offer Western leaders some food for thought in avoiding a disastrous exit, and a framework for withdrawal that hasn't figured much into US debates on the issue.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

The Doctor Can't See You Now

The looming health care crisis that could derail new reforms—public option or not.

—By Andy Kroll

| Mon Oct. 5, 2009 4:31 PM PDT

It's a year from now, and you wake up with a sore throat. You're not worried, because not too long ago the Obama administration successfully passed comprehensive health care reform, expanding coverage to you and many of the 46 million Americans previously without it. So you call your family doctor to schedule an appointment; the doctor, however, is booked, and can't see you for two months. You decide to wait it out. A couple weeks pass; your throat worsens. Fearing something more serious, you go where you know a doctor will treat you: the emergency room. There, after a couple of hours of waiting, a physician and his team run you through a battery of complicated, expensive tests. The mystery ailment? Strep throat—something your doctor could've spotted in 10 minutes and for maybe $50 or $60. For the four hours you spent in the ER, the cost is 10 times that.

Pretty bleak, right? Yet this scenario—of extended delays to see a doctor, of patients spilling over into emergency rooms, of costs soaring ever higher—isn't far from reality. Indeed, in Massachusetts, where near-universal health care came into force several years ago and now covers more than 97 percent of the population, the rapid influx of patients has strained the system and wait times to see a primary-care doctor can stretch more than three months. Some primary-care doctors have ceased taking new patients at all, forcing individuals into unnecessary appointments with more expensive specialists or trips to the ER. And while Massachusetts' health care experiment isn't a perfect indicator of what national reform might look like, this kind of access crisis, experts say, could derail the Obama administration's best-laid plans for reform.

[Read the full article]

Meet the Taxpayers' $3 Trillion Watchdog

The bailout buck stops with Neil Barofsky.

—By Andy Kroll

| Wed Sep. 30, 2009 2:59 AM PDT

When a haggard-looking Hank Paulson, Jr., then Secretary of the Treasury, assured the American people last fall that the government's multibillion-dollar Troubled Asset Relief Program wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime, he sounded confident. "This is an investment, not an expenditure, and there is no reason to expect this program will cost taxpayers anything," he said at the time. Well, that was then. Last week Neil Barofsky, one of the leading TARP watchdogs on Capitol Hill (and a dead ringer for a young Richard Nixon), offered a far less rosy assessment of the largest bailout of its kind in American history. "It is extremely unlikely that the taxpayer will see a full return on its TARP investment," Barofsky testified to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Barofsky's thorny review comes as little surprise. As the bailout's one-year anniversary looms, no one on Capitol Hill has put more pressure on the Treasury to beef up its oversight of the labyrinthine, taxpayer-funded TARP and ensure that taxpayer dollars went to good use.

[Read the full article]