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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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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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