January 13, 2010
Just after the new year, the Obama administration and its congressional allies tried to convince the press that passage of a health-care bill should be relatively easy and quick, because the House- and Senate-passed versions have so much in common. Oh, really? You wouldn’t know it by listening to House liberals this week. They are...
January 7, 2010
From a new piece I have over at Kaiser Health News: But even if all of the offsets work out as planned, which is not likely, the House and Senate bills would still create substantial budgetary risks because of the pressures for entitlement expansion they would unleash. Both bills assume the new entitlement spending can be held down with...
January 4, 2010
Now that health care bills have passed in both the House and the Senate, Democrats just can’t seem to stop themselves from rhetorical excess. Just before Christmas, as the bill sponsored by Majority Leader Harry Reid was clearing its final hurdles in the Senate, Democrats took to the chamber floor and cable television shows to...
December 28, 2009
Over at the Mirror of Justice website, Robert Hockett posted a thoughtful reply to my previous defense of Charles Krauthammer’s critique of the health-care legislation wending its way through Congress. Here (and cross-posted at Mirror of Justice) I offer a short reaction to some of the points he made. First,...
December 28, 2009
In the new Weekly Standard, my colleague Yuval Levin and I discuss the bill that has emerged from the Senate. An excerpt: The [Democrats’ original] goal was to get a large swath of the public insured by the government, and so gradually create a socialized insurance system. Conservatives opposed this scheme because they believe a...
December 19, 2009
The Obama White House and its congressional allies have tried all year to push their various bills through to passage by truncating the time between introduction and a decisive vote to the bare minimum. They figure the only way to get something passed is to minimize public review and scrutiny of whatever their latest idea is to engineer...
December 19, 2009
From a new piece my colleague Yuval Levin and I have over on the Weekly Standard website: Now that Senator Nelson has announced his intention to vote to end debate on the Reid bill, it’s worth looking at whether his actions match his words…. The new Reid language that Senator Nelson now finds acceptable would allow federal...
December 18, 2009
Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson announced yesterday in an interview with a home-state radio station that new language regarding abortion coverage in subsidized insurance plans was not acceptable to him, dealing yet another blow to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s mad-dash rush to pass a bill before Christmas. Of course, it’s...
December 15, 2009
Senator Joe Lieberman announced today that he is ready to support “health-care reform” now that both a new, government-run insurance option and the ill-fated Medicare “buy in” idea have been stripped from the legislation. It’s not really surprising that Senator Reid and the White House, desperate to pass...
December 14, 2009
In the new Weekly Standard, I have a piece co-written with my New Atlantis and EPPC colleague Yuval Levin. We discuss how Harry Reid’s latest proposal is even worse than his original one. An excerpt: Apparently, in exchange for dropping the “public option,” moderate Senate Democrats have tentatively agreed to open up...