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Glenn Greenwald commends to us Jeremy Scahill’s take on healthcare reform:

BD: Given the political divisiveness of issues like health care, there’s a lot of pressure for progressive publications to fall into what you have called a “blue state” mentality. What are the hazards of this?

….Health care is a perfect example of this. Obviously, we want to have pre-existing conditions covered. Obviously, we want young people to be able to continue on their parents’ health care plans. There are many things that are going to be improvements.

But let’s be clear here: This is a complete and total sellout to the interests of the insurance lobby by the Obama administration. This is, as Michael Moore has said, a complete victory for the ultra-capitalists. Yet, if you look on the liberal blogosphere, people like Jane Hamsher are attacked mercilessly for having the audacity to stand up and say “this is a Democratic sellout.”

So you have this blind allegiance to … what? To Obama as a man? To the Democrats as a party? To me, it’s very dangerous when you start going down the road of unquestioning support for any powerful individual or any politician. The moment you cede your conscience to a politician is the moment you stop struggling for a better society.

I’ve got nothing but props for Scahill’s work, but this is just wrong. There are, obviously, plenty of partisan hacks on both sides of the aisle, but most of us who supported the current healthcare bill — warts and all — did so because it was, plainly, not only an enormous first step1 forward, but the only way to make that first step. A government-run single-payer solution was never even remotely politically plausible, and anyone who insisted on jettisoning our current framework of private insurers as a condition of reforming healthcare would never get any serious reform passed. End of story.

Supporting the legislation we got doesn’t make anyone a sellout, and it doesn’t make anyone a blind supporter of St. Barack. It makes us people who actually want to create a better society, not just struggle for it.

As for the private insurance industry, I’ll make a prediction: within 20 years it will be gone in all but name. Either the federal government will fund the vast majority of health insurance, or else private insurers will essentially be regulated utilities, as they are in Germany or the Netherlands. This bill is the beginning of the end for all of them, and this week’s reform bill is what set that train in motion.

1OK, technically it was the second step. Medicare was the first. But you know what I mean.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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