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TODAY’S HEALTHCARE NEWS….Just in case you’ve been getting a little too optimistic about the prognosis for serious healthcare reform this year, here’s a couple of pieces of light reading to bring you down to earth.

First up, the Wall Street Journal explains that a $1.1 billion provision in the stimulus bill to fund research comparing medical treatments is in trouble. Why? Because pharma and device companies don’t really want anyone finding out just how effective their treatments are. Full story here.

Second, Michelle Cottle deconstructs a story about a lobbying war over electronic medical records. Pretty much everyone from Tom Daschle to Newt Gingrich is in favor of this, so what’s the problem? Answer: drug companies want to make sure that privacy provisions don’t prevent them from paying hospitals and pharmacies to hawk their latest wonder drugs to their customers. Full post here.

Just another day in the healthcare trenches. I can hardly wait til we get to the hard stuff.

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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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