May 13, 2011
The headline news from today’s release of the 2011 Medicare Trustees’ report is that the Hospital Insurance trust fund is scheduled to be depleted in 2024, five years earlier than projected in last year’s report. The primary reason for the erosion in the condition of the trust fund is, apparently, the anemic economic...
May 3, 2011
I have a new column up at Kaiser Health News on efforts to discredit the Ryan Medicare plan: Ryan’s critics have focused particular attention on his plan’s indexation of the Medicare “premium support credits” to the CPI in the years after 2022, suggesting that this idea is somehow beyond the pale. But this is...
April 26, 2011
Yesterday, I posted a detailed explanation of how Obamacare would index vouchers provided through the state exchanges. This was a follow-up to my original column on this and other subjects from last week. But, detailed though yesterday’s post was, there’s still more to this story. To recap from the...
April 25, 2011
In my post last week, I asserted that the premium subsidies provided in Obamacare’s state exchanges would be tied over the longer run to consumer inflation. The story is actually much more complicated than that, and requires additional explanation. (Fair warning: What follows is very technical.) The way the...
April 21, 2011
Hypocrisy and cynicism come awfully easily to some people. Recall that in October 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama launched a ferocious political attack on his opponent. In debates, and then in tens of millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements, the Obama-Biden campaign excoriated Senator John McCain for proposing to...
April 18, 2011
I have a new article as the lead story of the latest print edition of National Review; it’s on the Medicare reform element of the Ryan debt-fix proposal and the unduly negative response to it. Here’s an excerpt: The Obamacare “solution” for Medicare is nothing of the sort, and nothing new at all. It’s...
April 5, 2011
A piece I wrote a few days ago for Kaiser Health News explains why President Obama cannot use the health care law, his signature legislative achievement, as the basis for his reelection campaign. Here’s an excerpt: Having spent so much political capital to secure its passage, one might think that the health law would feature...
April 5, 2011
House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R.-Wisc.) is minutes away from unveiling his proposed budget for fiscal year 2012. I’ll have much more to say in this space about Representative Ryan’s important proposal in the days ahead. To start things off, however, here is an excerpt from a post I wrote for the New...
April 5, 2011
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has laid out a vision for twenty-first century governance that will become the GOP program for 2011, 2012 and beyond. It is unquestionably the boldest budget plan ever offered (including Reagan’s first budget), focused first and foremost on bringing federal spending commitments into line...
March 29, 2011
Over at The Weekly Standard, I have a new article up with National Affairs editor Yuval Levin on the importance of health care reform to the 2012 election: The outlines of … reform have been clear for some time. What’s needed is a functioning marketplace in health care, with cost-conscious consumers seeking and finding more...