Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail ServiceA Year Spent Riding Across America by James McCommons Chelsea Green, 304 pp. ames McCommons insists he is not a rail fan. This is not uncommon among those who work for, or with, the rail industry. To be a rail fan is to be what […]
Phillip Longman
Phil joined the staff of the Washington Monthly in 2012. He is also the policy director at the Open Markets Institute and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins, where he teaches health care policy.
In addition to writing many feature articles for the Monthly, Phil’s work has appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The New York Times Magazine, Politica Exterior, Der Spiegel, and World Politics Review. He is a graduate of Oberlin College, and was also a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University.
Phil is on X @LongmanPhil.
Posted inJuly/August 2009, Magazine
Code Red
How software companies could screw up Obama’s health care reform.
Posted inMagazine
Washington’s Turnaround Artists
Think government can’t fix the auto industry? Then how did it manage to fix the railroad industry—twice?
Posted inMagazine
Back on Tracks
A nineteenth-century technology could be the solution to our twenty-first-century problems.
Posted inMagazine
Too Small to Fail
While the behemoths of Wall Street stumble and fall, humble local banks are doing just fine, thank you. Their surprising resilience holds a key lesson for twenty-first-century global finance.
Posted inMagazine, October 2007
Best Care Everywhere
Here’s an idea: a civilian VA for the uninsured, and maybe the rest of us.
Posted inMagazine
Best Care Everywhere
Back in July, while trying to justify his opposition to expanding government health care coverage for children, President Bush made a telling comment. The uninsured, he said, “have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.” That remark stuck many as blithe and callous, and in many ways […]
Posted inPolitical Animal, Politics
Electronic Records at the VA
ELECTRONIC RECORDS AT THE VA….What’s the big deal about the VA’s electronic medical record system? Almost uniquely, its original code was written by doctors for doctors, as part of an ad hoc, collaborative process. The story, which I chronicle in my book, Best Care Anywhere, is wonderful. It’s one of an underground subculture of geeky […]
Posted inPolitical Animal, Politics
Long-Term Care and the VA
LONG-TERM CARE AND THE VA….Kevin wonders why, in “Best Care Everywhere,” I say that the VA’s near lifetime relationship with its patients, which it has always had, is a key to its current success. In part the answer is that the VA was never as bad as portrayed in movies such as Born on the […]
