November 6, 2009
This weekend, House Democrats are planning to pass two health-care bills. One is a sweeping plan that would shift nearly all power over the organization of American health care to Washington, D.C. The other — a full repeal of the “sustainable growth rate” (SGR) formula governing Medicare physician fee payments —...
November 5, 2009
The stated number-one priority for Democrats is passage of a government takeover of American health-care. President Obama and his allies in Congress have essentially bet the future of their party on securing something radical and sweeping. Congressional leaders have set aside everything else until they can pass some version of Obamacare,...
October 30, 2009
The health-care bill unveiled yesterday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is being advertised as costing “only” $894 billion over a decade. But that is highly misleading. For starters, the gross cost of expanded Medicaid coverage and a new entitlement to subsidies for health insurance is much higher than Democrats are suggesting,...
October 29, 2009
Most Americans are generally satisfied with their current insurance, and they do not believe a government takeover is needed to address the problems they see occuring from time to time. They’re right: It isn’t necessary. What’s needed is a targeted reform that ensures reliable protection for those who stay continuously...
October 29, 2009
At the beginning of this year, there was great hope in some circles that Congress would enact significant health-care reform that would address the central, vexing problem of today’s arrangements, which is rapidly escalating costs. That hope has waned considerably as the Democrats controlling the process have made a series of...
October 22, 2009
Yesterday, the Chief Actuary at the Department of Health and Human Services, Rick Foster, issued a lengthy memorandum (available here in PDF format) analyzing the House version of health-care reform. The memo makes several devastating points about the House, not the least of which is that it would increase overall national health...
October 22, 2009
In July, the president and the Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives argued that the time for analysis and debate was over and that the House should pass its version of health-care reform before the August recess. Now, just three months later, House Democrats are saying that the bill they were in such a hurry to pass during...
October 19, 2009
Late last week, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad told his fellow Democratic colleagues that he wouldn’t play along with their transparent scheme to offload $247 billion — the amount needed to pay for the so-called Medicare “doc fix” over ten years — from Obamacare onto another piece of...
October 14, 2009
Full disclosure: I do consulting work for private health insurers, but I had no prior knowledge of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers study before it was released. Having said that, its conclusions were not at all surprising, nor was the heated reaction of the Obama White House. Democrats understand how dangerous the PwC study is to their effort...
October 7, 2009
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has issued a preliminary cost estimate (available here) for the Senate Finance Committee bill, as amended during committee consideration. The cost over ten years will be advertised as only $829 billion. But after all that spending, there would still be 25 million uninsured Americans in 2019. Even so,...