July 7, 2009
President Obama and his congressional allies greeted the Congressional Budget Office’s latest estimates of the Kennedy-Dodd legislation with great enthusiasm. The cost had come down, we were told, even as more people would get covered. But, as others have already noted, there was an awful lot of spin in the media coverage of what...
July 1, 2009
President Obama has made passage of an expensive new entitlement to health insurance his top legislative priority this year even as it has become abundantly clear that his fiscal policy is driving the country headlong toward a crisis. In June, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) took another, more complete look at President...
June 30, 2009
Late last week, Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, tried to jump-start the push for a sweeping health care bill by letting it be known that he has made progress toward a “bipartisan” deal in his committee on a health care plan. Of course, no one knows for sure what’s in the Baucus plan except...
June 26, 2009
President Obama and his chief of staff have said that the only non-negotiable principle in the health care debate is success, by which they seem to mean passage by Congress of something. From their perspective, that’s a smart place to be. With such large Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, just about anything...
June 24, 2009
At his press conference today, President Obama scrambled to “clarify” his promise to Americans on health care. It won’t work. For months now, going all the way back to the early days of the 2008 campaign, President Obama has been promising Americans that, if they like the insurance plan they have, they will get to keep...
June 22, 2009
It is a foregone conclusion that the bill now getting marked up in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) is not going anywhere. Even the president and his advisers are distancing themselves from it. It costs a fortune — $1 trillion over ten years, according to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO)...
June 17, 2009
President Obama’s announcement on Saturday that he was proposing an additional $313 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cuts over ten years — on top of the $309 billion in his 2010 budget — is noteworthy for a couple of reasons, despite the meager coverage it has gotten in most newspapers. For starters, there’s the...
June 16, 2009
The more that is learned about the emerging Democratic reform plans, the less likely they are to pass. Last evening, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its first cost-estimate for one of the emerging Democratic bills — the Kennedy-Dodd bill that the Senate HELP Committee is planning to take up this week. As Yuval...
June 11, 2009
Last week, the Joint Tax Committee sent a letter to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus outlining the potential revenue that could be raised from some of the tax options the committee is apparently considering. Three of the options would limit the tax preference for employer-paid premiums. It is clear from the wide range of the...
June 11, 2009
The administration and Democrats in Congress have been trying to cultivate the impression in the media that passage of an Obama-style, sweeping health-care reform bill is all but inevitable — the only questions are about details and when. But Obamacare was never inevitable, and it is getting less so by the day. The reason is...