Looking through the manager’s amendment, one of the best pieces of pure good news is the extra money going to community health care centers and the National Health Service Corps fund. Community health care centers provide the vital service of getting individual cost effective primary care

U.S. oil companies have been frozen out of the first major round of bidding for exploratory oil-field development contracts in (non-Kurdish) Iraq.

For many long years, I’ve rummaged around the AHIP (America’s Health Insurance Plans) web site quite regularly. Do yourself and the American people a favor, and in the days and weeks ahead, check in from time-to-time with this despicable organization.

They are:

big-firm partners and associates, sole practitioners, federal public defenders, lawyers for public-interest organizations, law professors, lawyers with extensive experience in criminal and civil rights litigation, lawyers with no prior experience in those fields, young lawyers, old lawyers, lawyers who are Democrats, lawyers who are Republicans and lawyers who are independents.

So I’m frantically trying to read the manager’s amendment (turn on CSPAN-2 and you can follow along yourself) and all the supplementary information that’s out there on just what’s now in this health care bill, and here’s what I’ve got so far…

Senator Harry Reid has just released his manager’s amendment to the Senate Health bill, and they’ve apparently bought off Emperor Ben Nelson by allowing individual states to ban any/all abortion coverage in the new insurance exchanges.

The manager’s amendment would eliminate the state regulation gutting “nationwide” plans and replace them with “multi-state plans” in a new OPM exchange. This is a positive change I was hoping would be made.

I wish for the day when legislation is written by our legislators and not by some unelected accountant. Because Senator Harry Reid wanted to make the CBO score look prettier he will allow insurance companies to waste an extra 10% of your premiums on not providing health care. All hail the almighty CBO.

The White House still believes we live in the 1990s, where the “left” is weak and has little popular support. They’ve not understood the transformative effect of the 2000s and Bush in particular, who helped create a genuine American left with real and widespread popular support for the first time in 40 years.

If you are looking for a job in the field of banking regulation and oversight, Uncle Sam wants you. They just announced they will be hiring 1600 new employees and are practically doubling their Receivership budget for next year.

It sure doesn’t look like Sheila Bair thinks things in the banking world have hit bottom yet. 2010 is going to be a very busy year for the FDIC.