Washington University will offer a dual master’s degree in business administration and public health starting in the fall of 2011. The graduate degree will combine classes and faculty from both the Olin Business School and the George Warren Brown School of Social Work.

While the passage of health care reform makes significant changes, the new heightened level of public discourse is the more dangerous change in our country. Health care reform will change our nation in major ways. According to the Congressional Budget Office, health care reform will cut the deficit by $1,300,000,000,000. It will ensure that 32,000,000 more people will have health insurance.

So you just don’t want to pay for stuff for other people? That’s your hang-up with the health bill?” I’ve gotten this question many times. Many who do not share my political persuasions and don’t really understand them simply see universal health care as being, in my eyes, just something else I don’t want to be taxed for.

Liberals in Congress and their citizen base are celebrating the passage of a landmark health care reform bill that they claim will make insurance affordable for Americans. If that is what the bill were to do, it would be less of an anathema. In reality, the cost of health care will not come down, but rather skyrocket.

A breakdown of the passage of the extensive health care bill which will bring coverage to millions of uninsured people and will most directly affect students by allowing them to remain on their guardians’ health insurance policy until 26.

Ideological compatibility is essential for representation, but citizens should care about more results than principles. Representatives of varying ideological backgrounds make up Congress, making for an entertaining and often-frustrating political process. Small-government conservatives, self-identifying socialists and everyone in between work together to pass a budget.

In a stunning reversal of fortune, the Democratic supermajority in the United States Senate has now been shattered with the election of Republican Scott Brown to succeed the late Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts. With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Brown received 52 percent to his Democratic challenger Martha Coakley’s 47 percent, an astonishing demonstration of widespread apathy and even anger at President Obama’s health care reform proposal.

In a packed auditorium last Friday, the Association of Black Students teamed up with Campus Progress to present a panel on the state of health care in St. Louis.

In spite of President Obama’s calls for bipartisan health care reform, only one Republican congressman—Rep. Anh Cao of Louisiana—voted for the House’s sweeping health care overhaul bill on Saturday.

With national health care reform on the horizon, health insurance is a hot topic among Washington University students. Some say they are unhappy with the school’s Aetna student health insurance plan, which is mandated for all University undergraduate and graduate students.