September 9, 2009
President Barack Obama says he wants to be the last president who has to deal with health care. But it is abundantly clear from his speech tonight that he has no plan to fix the problems in health care as they exist today, much less to settle the issue for good. The primary problem in health care is rapid cost escalation. The...
September 4, 2009
We learned this week that President Barack Obama’s aides are negotiating directly with Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine to strike a deal on a “narrower” health-care bill. It’s easy to see why the White House would be eager to secure Senator Snowe’s support for something. She signed...
September 1, 2009
With Obamacare’s prospects sinking by the day, there’s no shortage of opinions about what the Obama administration should do to resuscitate it. Former Senator Bob Dole has a piece in the Washington Post suggesting that the administration is running into trouble on health care because the president ceded too much...
August 26, 2009
Yesterday, both the Obama administration and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released new, ten-year projections of the federal receipts, spending, deficits, and debt. The administration’s Mid-Session Review (available here) provides an updated forecast of what executive branch scorekeepers think will happen if the Obama...
August 20, 2009
Wednesday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs denied the premise of a New York Times article, which is that Democrats have all but abandoned hope for Republican votes in the health care fight and are planning a go-it-alone approach come September. We’ve seen this two-step before. In today’s version, “top...
August 20, 2009
President Obama has changed his health care sales pitch. Gone is “health-care reform” and “bending the cost-curve.” Now he emphasizes “health insurance reform” and “basic consumer protections.” But the legislation moving through Congress hasn’t changed to match the new rhetoric. The...
August 20, 2009
David Ignatius has an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post on what Dr. Denis Cortese, the head of the Mayo Clinic, is saying about the health care debate as it has been playing out this summer. Dr. Cortese certainly comes to the reform table with unsurpassed credentials. Mayo is universally acknowledged to be an industry...
August 17, 2009
I was recently interviewed by Paul Howard, Director of the Center for Medical Progress at the Manhattan Institute (and coauthor of this recent New Atlantis article), on the flaws in the health-care bills now pending in Congress. During the discussion, I note that some of the most unpopular aspects of the bills as currently...
August 6, 2009
The Washington Post has another piece in today’s paper — there seems to be about one per week — on the ever-so-close “bipartisan plan” being negotiated by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus and five of his committee colleagues. Among other things, the Post provides a side-by-side analysis comparing...
August 5, 2009
Amid all the flurry of news in the hectic last days before the House recessed for the August break, something important went largely unnoticed — a development that should be the knockout blow to the kind of sweeping health-care bill the Obama administration is pushing, at least as it has been cobbled together in the House. In...