Six in ten voters are worried about affording health care, according to a KFF poll released today, which seems like a fairly strong hint about what candidates should be discussing with twenty-eight days left until the midterms. People would like to know whether they can get sick, take their children to the doctor, and survive the bill afterward. An ambitious agenda, apparently, for a country that keeps announcing how extraordinarily well it’s doing.
The survey, conducted September 16 through 21, found that voters trust Democrats more than Republicans on health care costs, 42 percent to 22 percent. It also found that 66 percent of adults favor Medicare-for-all, up from 53 percent when KFF last asked in 2020. But support shifts sharply when people hear competing arguments about taxes, treatment delays, guaranteed coverage, and the elimination of premiums and cost-sharing. That measures how people respond to those arguments; it doesn’t establish that every claim made by either side is true.
There is a public appetite for change, and there is a public that deserves an honest explanation of what change would involve. Candidates should be able to tell us who would be covered, how care would be funded, what patients would pay, and how they would address access and waiting times. “Affordable” is a lovely word, but it isn’t a payment method my doctor’s office currently accepts.
Here at home, we finally received Ezra’s MRI results. As Mom mentioned this morning, they came back “unremarkable,” which was only moderately offensive given that he is obviously remarkable. Considering the context, however, I’ll accept it. He is perfectly unremarkably remarkable, and I am enormously relieved. It’s mind-boggling how much of our life changed while we were trying to get him to that appointment. Ezra has already given us such a different life than the one we expected, and the search for this MRI became part of that larger, astonishing story. We finally made it here. After all that waiting, one ordinary medical word carried an extraordinary amount of relief.
That is the part of health care I wish more politicians could hold in their minds while discussing it: the actual people waiting for an appointment, an authorization, an answer. A parent doesn’t experience an insurance dispute as an interesting debate about administrative efficiency. They’re trying to get their child what he needs. The ability to pay is one part of access; getting through the machinery is another.
Democrats’ polling advantage should come with expectations. If voters trust them more on health care, they should show what they intend to do with that trust. We can ask every candidate about coverage, medication costs, and the barriers between patients and treatment, then compare the answer with their record. A sympathetic campaign advertisement is pleasant, but I would also like the policy.
Meanwhile, the people who will be watching us vote have some explaining to do themselves. Democracy Docket reports that the NAACP filed a federal lawsuit on October 2 seeking records about the Justice Department’s plan to deploy roughly 1,000 election monitors for the midterms. Its September records request asked for the legal authority, deployment locations, training, qualifications, and information about whether other federal law enforcement agencies would participate. The lawsuit seeks disclosure; it doesn’t directly ask the court to stop the deployment, and it isn’t a ruling that the program is unlawful.
Federal election monitoring has a legitimate purpose. The Justice Department describes its work as assessing compliance with federal voting rights laws, and its announcements this year have emphasized transparency, ballot security, and compliance with federal law. Protecting people from being prevented or intimidated out of voting is a responsibility government should take seriously.
The concerns aren’t limited to Democratic organizations. As Democracy Docket reports, Wyoming’s Republican governor, Mark Gordon, requested an investigation after the August primary over conduct he described as aggressive and irregular. Local officials raised concerns about monitors’ questions and activities; DOJ disputed some accounts, including the allegation that they sought to inspect voting machines.
Those disagreements make clear instructions and public accountability more necessary. Tell people who’s coming, what authority they have, and what they’re allowed to do. If transparency is the mission, transparency about the mission seems like a reasonable place to begin. We shouldn’t need to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to find out what the Department of Please Trust Us intends to do at the polls.
Back at home, the virus has continued its work without requesting further authorization. I remain extremely sick. This is the kind of sick where your head hurts, your body hurts, and sleep becomes a series of negotiations with a painful cough. I keep getting up for popsicles because they are the only thing saving me from a coughing fit that will wake the rest of the house. I sound like I’m speaking from the other side, and my entire body feels as though it has been struck by a million wet noodles.
Ezra has also been infected, and naturally he is taking it better than I am. The older two and my husband haven’t yet been graced with the virus’ presence, although I suspect our household’s guest policy will prove inadequate. When their turn comes, I’ll care for them the way they’ve cared for me. My husband has been listening to me growl, both because I feel like poo and because growling is now what happens when I attempt speech. He keeps trying to make me feel better anyway. When I briefly fell asleep at my desk this morning while researching, he gently guided me to bed, even if I refused to stay there. He also got up with me before sunrise to prepare the kids’ morning. He’s a kind soul, that one, and I couldn’t be luckier to have him as my partner.
There are people who see that you need help and quietly start helping. It’s a standard I’d like to see represented in public office, preferably with fewer speeches required before anyone brings the popsicle.
At the Supreme Court, another argument about responsibility is unfolding, this time over the cost of climate damage. On Monday, the justices heard Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. The city and county of Boulder sued Suncor and ExxonMobil in 2018, alleging that the companies knowingly contributed to climate harms while misleading the public about the dangers of their products. Boulder wants the companies to help cover local costs. The companies argue that federal law prevents these state-law claims, and the Trump administration has filed a brief supporting them.
Their argument is that a global emissions problem can’t be governed through competing state lawsuits that effectively impose different regulatory standards. Boulder argues that it’s seeking compensation for local injuries, rather than writing an emissions code for the world. The Court is considering whether the case can proceed, along with whether it has jurisdiction to review the Colorado decision at this stage.
During the argument, Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised the possibility that enough lawsuits could bankrupt the companies. That concern deserves legal examination, but so does the position of communities facing costs they can’t simply refuse to incur. Flood protection, disaster response, and repairs don’t become free because determining responsibility is complicated.
Those costs eventually fall on households, towns, insurers, governments, or companies. The legal question is how responsibility can be established under the law; the political question is what our elected representatives intend to do while those bills keep arriving. Candidates can explain their plans for disaster preparation, resilient infrastructure, and climate policy without pretending that a single court case will settle all of it.
I still hope to get some plants into the ground today, depending on whether my body agrees to participate. Planting is such a small, hopeful transaction with the future. You put something living in a place where you think it can grow and accept responsibility for helping it along. I would like the people making decisions about the larger landscape to demonstrate at least the level of foresight I am attempting with a shovel and a respiratory virus.
New York City is also asking who should take responsibility before a powerful industry leaves everyone else to manage the consequences. The City Council held a hearing Monday on artificial intelligence risks and proposed safeguards. The Council’s announced package includes independent validation of AI systems, reporting of safety incidents involving city contracts, protections and incentives for whistleblowers, and a path for people to sue over certain foreseeable harms when companies fail to provide reasonable safeguards. These are proposals under consideration, not a set of protections that has already become law.
The details matter. Independent validation would need to examine things such as data quality, bias, privacy, and security. Incident reporting would need to reach the people capable of responding. A whistleblower protection is useful only if someone can report a problem without sacrificing their livelihood, and an enforcement office needs enough people and money to do its job.
BetaNYC, a civic technology organization that uses AI itself, testified at the hearing and urged the city to make its oversight records public and usable, clarify who is responsible, and fund the offices assigned to enforce the rules. It also raised concerns about how broad proposals could affect research and open-source work. Those are the kinds of distinctions that deserve attention when legislation moves from an attractive announcement into something people must actually follow.
Useful technology and enforceable safeguards can coexist. I work with AI it’s almost impossible not to these days; that doesn’t make me interested in accepting a company’s reassurance as a substitute for accountability. We should be able to ask what a system can access, how it’s tested, who answers when it harms someone, and what recourse that person has. “We’re innovating” shouldn’t function as diplomatic immunity.
My daughter, meanwhile, has informed me that Halloween costume shopping is now the household’s highest priority and that all other activities must halt until she selects a costume. She knows precisely what she wants, except for the costume itself, which remains undecided. The deadline is binding; the specifications are forthcoming.
Halloween always makes me think of Guy Fawkes because Mom grew up in England, where Guy Fawkes Day was part of her childhood, and we used to watch V for Vendetta together. This year, however, the most immediate demand on my diminished revolutionary strength is getting a small girl through a costume selection process. There are worse uses for a parent’s afternoon.
There are also places where a girl’s ability to make decisions about her own future has been deliberately taken away, and an important development in Afghanistan deserves our attention.
On October 5, the International Criminal Court unsealed four arrest warrants against senior Taliban figures: supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada, chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, education minister Habibullah Agha, and higher education minister Neda Mohammad Nadim. The warrants were issued in July and September 2025. Yesterday’s announcement made those warrants public; the allegations have yet to be tried.
The judges found reasonable grounds to believe the suspects were responsible for crimes against humanity involving persecution on gender and political grounds. The allegations concern women, girls, people targeted for not conforming to Taliban gender policies, and people perceived as their allies. The Court describes severe restrictions on education and other fundamental freedoms as part of the persecution.
Deutsche Welle reports that the Taliban rejected the Court’s authority. And as the Associated Press notes, the ICC has no police force of its own to execute warrants. These legal steps don’t mean arrests are imminent, or that Afghan women and girls can suddenly return to the lives they have been denied.
They do matter. The public record names people accused of responsibility for policies that deprive other people of basic freedoms. Education ministers are among those named. A girl being denied a classroom is experiencing the consequences of decisions made by officials, and those decisions can be examined as something more serious than a government’s preferred way of organizing society.
I keep thinking about how much of raising a child involves making room for the person they’re becoming. You don’t know every interest they’ll discover, every talent they’ll develop, or what they’ll decide to do with their life. You try to keep those possibilities open. Afghan girls deserve those possibilities on their own terms, and the women demanding their rights deserve sustained attention long after an arrest-warrant headline passes.
Back here, our ballots offer a practical way to influence who gets to make decisions about health care, public oversight, climate protection, and much else. Congress matters, and so do state legislatures and local offices. Read the candidates’ actual proposals, look at their votes and records, and ask how they intend to carry out the promises they make. A party label can tell you something; it cannot answer every question.
If you’re in Oregon, the registration deadline is October 13 and counties begin mailing ballots October 14. Elsewhere, check your state or local election office for the rules that apply to you. Help someone else check theirs, arrange a ride or childcare if they need it, and make a plan that survives the ordinary chaos of being alive.
I will be doing my part today while sounding like a disgruntled spirit trapped in a laundry room. There may be costumes, there may be plants, and there may be folded clothes, although I wouldn’t put that last item in a campaign promise. There will certainly be enormous loves for Ezra and gratitude for the husband who keeps trying to get me to rest.
We finally got the answer we had been waiting for. I want more families to have the chance to reach their own ordinary, remarkable afternoons, with care they can access, rights they can exercise, and a future that leaves room for their children to become themselves. That is a reasonable thing to expect from the people asking for our votes.
If this report helped you sort through what deserves attention, please restack it or share it with someone preparing to vote.
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Today’s adventures include a wonderfully unremarkable MRI report, emergency popsicles, and a Halloween costume search under the direction of a small person who has suspended all other government business. The plants are waiting patiently for the administration to reopen.
So relieved about Ezra! Carry on, I love your posts.