John Buntin

Recent Articles

• Boots on the Ground (Or, Adventures with David Kidd)
• Mar 9, 2010
• David Kidd is behind the camera, capturing John Buntin interviewing Sonny Jackson, public information officer with Denver Police Department. Governing has long been committed to ...

• Targeting Public-Sector Unions
• Mar 1, 2010
• Manhattan Institute scholar Fred Siegel has spent much of his career studying the decline of American cities. What he sees in New York now is,...
• 21 Comments

• Boston's Hip, New Chief of Staff
• Mar 1, 2010
• Boston Mayor Thomas Menino is an urban legend - the closest thing the East Coast has to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. So when Menino stood...

• Is Health Reform Happening After All?
• Feb 18, 2010
• A big day in the health reform world. First, Kaiser Health News reports that insurers across the nation are raising insurance premiums dramatically -- and ...

• Fixing Utah's Health Exchange
• Feb 18, 2010
• In the February issue of Governing, my colleague Josh Goodman wrote about Utah's health exchange -- a free-market alternative to the Massachusetts Commonwealth Connector. ...
• 3 Comments

• Health Reform Moves to the States: The Case of Minnesota
• Feb 16, 2010
• The apparent collapse of health reform in Washington has shifted attention back to the question of what (if anything) states can do to control prices, ...

• Health-Care Reform: Similar States, Different Views
• Feb 1, 2010
• Twenty-nine-year-old Samantha Brooks has a health problem: She just got a job. In October 2008, Brooks went into the hospital for an emergency gall bladder operation....
• 2 Comments

• Health Care for the Needy
• Feb 1, 2010
• As the complex debate over health-care reform rages, local government hasn't really been figured in. While lawmakers in Washington at least considered the impact of...
• 1 Comments

• San Francisco's Populist Public Defender
• Feb 1, 2010
• Public defenders are often seen as the Rodney Dangerfields of local government: They get respect from neither the prosecutor-loving public nor other public officials. Not...
• 1 Comments

• Health Reform: The Beginning of the End?
• Jan 22, 2010
• What does Scott Brown's victory mean for the future of President Obama's health reform agenda? In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's vote, ...

• Would health reform be good for Massachusetts?
• Jan 19, 2010
• All eyes are on Massachusetts special Senate election, which pits Republican state senator Scott Brown against Democratic attorney general Martha Coakley. Brown has sought to ...
• 1 Comments

• Health Reform: The End Game
• Jan 15, 2010
• For the next 2-3 weeks, Washington will be consumed by one thing -- health reform. Although the House only returned to work yesterday (and the ...

• How Exactly Will Health Reform Affect the States?
• Jan 7, 2010
• Despite the renewed attention on counterterrorism, health reform promises to be the issue that will consume Washington's attention this month, as negotiators from the ...
• 1 Comments

• For Health IT Programs, There's Still Billions in Unclaimed Stimulus Money for States and Cities
• Jan 4, 2010
• Among the many goodies doled out by last year's stimulus package were some $2 billion for innovative health IT programs at the state and local ...

• Bernard Melekian
• Dec 31, 2009
• If all you knew about Bernard Melekian was that he had spent 13 years running the police force in Pasadena, California, you might wonder why the...