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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

SiCKO At last

By Matthew Yglesias
Jul 7 2007, 3:00 AM ET Comment

I'll probably have more to say about this at a less sleepy time, but let me just note that in my opinion this film has been dramatically undersold by your liberal media. The tendency has been to assign health wonk types as reviewers so they've written health wonky reviews, ignoring the fact that Michael Moore's made a very successful film -- frequently laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally poignant, and at one point sufficiently moving as to prompt me to shed a tear. The focus of the film is on what he's best at -- and what health wonks are worst at -- human stories and experiences.

The result would, I think, be utterly devastating politically were it not for the detour into Cuba which winds up raising a bunch of issues only tangentially related to Moore's core point -- primary reliance on private health insurance is a hellish experience for patients, and a ghoulish one for doctors; other wealthy liberal democracies in good standing have a variety of different systems and they're all better than the American one. If this isn't quite the death blow to the insurance industry, then it's something like the blow that leaves you unconscious in the middle of the highway waiting for someone to run you over.

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