February 10, 2010
My EPPC colleague Yuval Levin has written a post that nicely sums up why a bipartisan health-care solution will not be easy to come by. It’s not that conservatives and liberals don’t both see the shortcomings of today’s arrangements. They do. It’s that they simply have very different conceptions of what must...
February 5, 2010
I have a new column up at Kaiser Health News this week. An excerpt: It is now readily apparent that piling up debt at the rates implied by the president’s budget would all but invite an economic crisis. At some point, the flood of Treasury debt instruments worldwide would lead lenders to demand higher rates of return for their...
January 29, 2010
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many of her allies outside of Congress have spent the past week trying to convince rank and file Democrats and others that Obamacare need not be dead if only the party had the will to pursue what might be called the “reconciliation solution.” Indeed, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities...
January 27, 2010
In a new post over on NRO’s Corner tonight, I comment on the health care and budgetary aspects of President Obama’s State of the Union address: On health care, he offered nothing new. He is sticking with the plan the public has quite plainly rejected. According to a recent CNN poll, a full 70 percent of Americans want...
January 24, 2010
With my colleague Yuval Levin, I have cowritten a piece in the latest Weekly Standard examining the political landscape for health care reform in the wake of the election of Scott Brown to the United States Senate. After discussing how the Democrats’ ambitious plans have screeched to a halt, we suggest some ideas for...
January 22, 2010
The House Budget Committee held a hearing yesterday on “Perspectives on Long-Term Deficits.” I was invited to testify. Here is how I concluded my written testimony: The nation’s long-term budget outlook is bleak in large part because our healthcare entitlement commitments far exceed the revenues available to pay for...
January 21, 2010
The New York Times invited several conservative and libertarian analysts to comment on the Republican approach to health care. Here’s my contribution: House Republicans have already offered an alternative to what the Democratic majority was pushing in 2009. They, and their counterparts in the Senate, would suffer no political...
January 20, 2010
I had a piece on health care over on the online magazine Public Discourse yesterday (ably edited by Ryan Anderson, a sometime New Atlantis contributor). An excerpt from what I wrote: All of this political fighting can be disconcerting to average citizens. Why, on an issue that is plainly so important, can’t our nation’s...
January 19, 2010
Speculation is rampant on what will happen if State Senator Scott Brown pulls off an improbable upset and wins the special election for the U.S. Senate seat today in Massachusetts. Of course, that’s still a big if. Most votes have yet to be cast in this race, and low-turnout special elections are notoriously difficult to...
January 15, 2010
As a candidate, Barack Obama promised an audacious presidency. If nothing else, he’s delivering on that. For a year now, the president has argued that the health-care bill he is pushing will “bend the cost-curve.” Of course, his own Chief Actuary of the Medicare program — the man charged with actually running the...