“Citizen Cohn” is the newsletter of Jonathan Cohn, a Senior National Correspondent at HuffPost and author of THE TEN YEAR WAR: Obamacare and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage, out from St. Martin’s Press on February 23, 2021.
Jonathan covers politics and policy, with a particular focus on social welfare and health care. A former senior editor at the New Republic and executive editor at the American Prospect, Cohn has also written for the New York Times, Atlantic, and Self, among others. He is a two-time winner of the Sidney Hillman Prize for journalism and was called “one of the nation's leading experts on health policy” by the Washington Post. He appears frequently on television, radio, and various streaming platforms, and once got to tell Stephen Colbert that his show’s company health plan included a form of “death panels.”
That was back in 2009, during the debate over what became the Affordable Care Act, when Jonathan was discussing his first book, Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis–and the People Who Pay the Price. It used the stories of eight everyday Americans to chronicle the problems with America’s health care system, making a case for universal health coverage. It was a finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy and Helen Bernstein book awards.
Jonathan is a graduate of Harvard. When he went to classes, which was somewhat dependent on publishing schedules at the Crimson daily newspaper, he studied American government and political theory. His senior thesis, on the political philosophy of John Calhoun, was not the greatest. But it has proven surprisingly (and distressingly) useful as he writes about American politics today.
Jonathan grew up in South Florida — in Fort Lauderdale or, as he likes to put it, the “Brooklyn part of the state.” (His family comes from New York originally, and spiritually never really left.) He lived for years in the Boston area before moving to Ann Arbor, where his wife is a professor at the University of Michigan. That explains his peripatetic interests in sports. He’s a huge fan of the Dolphins, Red Sox and Wolverines. But his biggest allegiance and love is for his wife and two kids.
