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HEALTHCARE DAY….This is sort of anticlimactic, but Barack Obama officially announced today that Tom Daschle would be both his nominee to head up Health and Human Services and his healthcare czar. Ezra Klein reports that Obama was quite clear about pushing through reform quickly:

Key words: “This year.” Obviously, he doesn’t mean in 2008. But that does suggest a year one commitment, which syncs with Obama’s previous statement that he’d like to send a bill to Congress by March or April. Given the financial emergency, that might prove optimistic. But Obama made a point during the presser of arguing that the two are connected. “This has to be interwoven into our economic recovery program,” he said “This can’t be put off because we’re in an emergency. This is the emergency!”

Jon Cohn agrees:

In response to the final question, the only one on health care, he said “the time is now to solve this problem. I met too many families in this campaing, even before the economic downturn, who were desperate.” He then mentioned the role health care costs played in personal bankruptcies and employer struggles, and reiterated that “this has to be intimiately woven into our economic recovery program. It’s not something we can put off because we’re in an emergency. This is part of the emergency. We want to make sure the strategy reflects that truth.”

So: good news. The only cautionary note I’d add is that it doesn’t sound like Obama has made any commitments yet about what kind of reform he plans to focus on right out of the gate. If it’s the full-blown plan he proposed during the campaign, that’s great. If it’s expansion of SCHIP and a push to automate medical records — well, that’s good stuff too, but not exactly the change we’ve been waiting for. I’m pretty optimistic that he’s talking about the former, but obviously we’ll have to wait and see.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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