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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'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.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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