Pravda:

Congress and the incoming Obama administration are contemplating profound shifts in the government's role in health insurance to try to alleviate a significant ripple effect of the damaged economy: Americans losing health coverage as they lose jobs.

As part of a sprawling $825 billion strategy to heal the economy that House Democrats laid out this week, lawmakers and transition officials envision a two-prong approach to help unemployed people retrieve health benefits. One would reshape a basic entitlement program, allowing states temporarily to sign up jobless residents for Medicaid, with the federal government for the first time paying the entire cost. The other proposal would provide unprecedented federal subsidies to help people afford coverage under COBRA, a law that allows some laid-off workers to buy health benefits that they used to get through their jobs.

So, in the Village, what the Village is proposing for people who will either get sick, or die, without health care is: Tinkering with Medicaid to bring more people in, and further subsidizing the already broken COBRA. To them, that's "profound." The contrast between two trillion for the bankers NOW NOW NOW NOW and getting help to real people who need it because the bankers wrecked the financial system couldn't be more, er, profound. (Further on in the article, WaPo's stenographers call these cosmetic changes "sharp departures," "unprecedented," laud the proposal's "boldness", claim they're "sparking debate along the ideological continuum" (i.e., the Overton Window as presently nailed firmly in place).

Oh, and HR 676 and single payer?

You guessed it.

Not. One. Word. I guess Conyers doesn't return Pravda's calls?

You can send mail to Amy Goldstein here. Be sure to mention HR 676 and be polite!

NOTE * Dammit, somebody posted here in COBRA, and I can't find it. Anyone?