March 20, 2010
One of the options the Democrats are looking at is an executive order to get their last votes. But this seems highly unlikely to work in any real and enduring sense to change the underlying policy from what’s in the Senate bill regarding funding of abortions. For starters, the Democrats say the Senate bill already satisfies the...
March 19, 2010
Yesterday I sat down with Kathleen Shannon of WLBZ2 in Maine to discuss the health care bill, entitlements more generally, and the deficit and debt. [Permalink]
March 18, 2010
The White House and its congressional allies are trying to suggest that the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) cost estimate proves that their health-care plan is fiscally responsible. But, in fact, the latest CBO projections confirm — again — that the president’s health plan would pile another unfinanced...
March 17, 2010
For months, one of the primary talking points pushed by the president and his allies in Congress is that their health-care plan would reduce the federal budget deficit substantially, especially during the second decade of the program’s implementation. This claim has always rested on completely implausible assumptions, gimmicks, and...
March 16, 2010
The New York Times invited me to participate in an online symposium with Robert Reich, Gail Wilensky, and others to debate the odds on whether the Democrats’ health care plan will pass into law. Here’s an excerpt from my contribution: Despite the enormous pressure from the White House, the odds remain against passage,...
March 15, 2010
My colleague Yuval Levin and I have coauthored a piece in the latest Weekly Standard that examines the consequences of the Democrats’ health care plan for the broader economy, and especially for the jobs outlook: Beyond taxes and spending, Obamacare would also wreak havoc on the labor market. Because employers would get penalized...
March 11, 2010
In 2009, Democrats chose to proceed with a health-care bill under the regular order — that is, they sought to pass the legislation under normal House and Senate rules. They did not put together a budget reconciliation bill with health care in it, something that could have passed the Senate with a simple majority vote. They conceded...
March 10, 2010
I have a post over on NRO’s Corner about President Obama’s proposed budget, going through some of the numbers. Here’s a snippet: According to CBO, the Obama budget plan would run up much larger budget deficits and pile up even more debt than the administration reported in February. Over the period 2010 to 2020, CBO...
March 5, 2010
Here’s the conclusion of my latest column for Kaiser Health News: The federal government is piling up new debt at rates not seen since World War II. As Warren Buffett said recently, what the country desperately needs is a serious plan to slow the pace of rising health care costs. What the president’s plan would deliver,...
March 5, 2010
Congressman Paul Ryan’s systematic dismantling of the argument that Obamacare would cut the budget deficit, delivered at the Blair House “summit” meeting, has gotten a lot of attention in recent days, and deservedly so. The Wall Street Journal ran the full text of his presentation on its opinion page yesterday and...