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Last week I found myself talking about healthcare for a few minutes with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and at one point she remarked sarcastically that if healthcare reform was such a great idea, why didn’t Congress give itself whatever deal it was foisting on the rest of us?  I mumbled some kind of lame reply, but little did I know that the Senate bill actually does this.  Joe Klein explains:

My favorite provision requires that all members of Congress give up their federally-funded health care benefits and join the health care exchanges that will be set up by this bill. This is brilliant politics, addressing the tide of populist anger and fears of incipient socialism. But it also makes an important substantive point. The future of health care reform in this country will depend on how effectively the exchanges — health insurance super-stores — are working. If members of Congress have to participate in this system, you can bet they’ll insist on a array of choices, similar to the system they currently use, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan.

There are actually a couple of ways you can look at this, and the pessimistic way is that if you make Congress buy insurance from the exchange then we’ll never get any cost controls in place — because members of congress will never approve of anything that might infringe on their own perks of office.

But even I’m not quite that pessimistic.  I think Klein is right: if this survives the conference report, and gets the publicity it deserves (why is this the first time I’m hearing about it?), it will actually go a long way toward assuaging public cynicism about both Congress and healthcare reform.

(And hey — why is this the first time I’ve heard about this?  It’s not as if I don’t follow this stuff pretty closely.  Was it added in by Harry Reid at the last second?  Or what?)

UPDATE: Answer here!

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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