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Here’s the fascinating lead in today’s Washington Post story about healthcare reform:

Lawmakers in both parties raised concerns Thursday that the health-care reform bill offered by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus a day earlier would impose too high a cost on middle-class Americans and said they will seek to change the legislation to ease that potential burden.

Italics mine.  Technically, this is true: apparently Olympia Snowe would like to increase subsidies to middle-income families above the level in Baucus’s draft bill.  So that’s one.  But the only other Republican even mentioned in this story is Chuck Grassley, who is suggesting “government assistance to insurance companies” to help them lower premium costs.

That’s evidently the basis of the claim that “both parties” are concerned about the cost of healthcare insurance to middle class workers.  One Republican senator.  And a second who thinks insurance companies could use a little extra help.  Somebody shoot me now.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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