April 1, 2009
The Health Policy Consensus Group is an affiliation of health policy analysts, mostly located at think tanks around the country, who believe market-based reforms can produce broader coverage and higher value care while preserving the best features of American medicine. Today, the group — of which I am a member — released a...
March 31, 2009
The so-called “public plan option” has emerged as one of the most controversial elements of the emerging health-care reform effort in Congress. Critics have argued that it would pave the way for a full government takeover of American health care. They’re right, as rigorous analysis from The Lewin Group, a health policy...
March 31, 2009
President Barack Obama has promised, repeatedly, that Americans who are satisfied with the health insurance they have today can keep it, even if Congress passes the sweeping reform program he favors. But is it true? In May 2007, then-candidate Obama issued a plan to change the way working age Americans get their health insurance. He...
March 27, 2009
President Barack Obama seems to think—or at least he wants voters to think—that he has a credible plan to control health-care costs in the United States. At various points in his televised press conference on Tuesday, he said the following: [Our budget] invest[s] in reform that will bring down the cost of health care for...
March 25, 2009
After months of delay, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner finally unveiled the Obama administration’s plan for jump-starting a marketplace for “troubled” real estate-backed assets held by banks. As noted in an editorial in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, a more direct, Resolution Trust Corporation-type facility, if...
March 19, 2009
Here’s a story, posted at Politico, that should alter the coming debates on the budget, health care, energy, and pretty much everything else Congress is planning to consider this year. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is apparently readying a forecast of the president’s budgetary proposals—to be released officially...
March 16, 2009
Remember this devastating political ad from last year? Many Americans probably do, as it represented a real turning point in the presidential campaign. Aired in October, the ad picked up on an exchange from the vice-presidential debate between then-Senator Joe Biden and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Palin had just explained that the McCain...
March 16, 2009
It was only a matter of time before this story appeared, as it did in yesterday’s New York Times. Having promised lavish subsidies for expansive health insurance, it seems state officials in Massachusetts have finally begun to admit that their health-care reform program, passed in 2006, is unaffordable for the state’s...
March 10, 2009
In recent days, several commentators, including some who are otherwise disposed to be supportive of the new president’s agenda, have been startled to find the administration’s budget plan has a strongly liberal tilt (see here, here, here, and here). It seems the president’s moderate-sounding rhetoric during the campaign...
March 9, 2009
David Brooks got it right the first time. His New York Times column last Tuesday was a blistering critique of the Obama budget plan. He had been deceived, Brooks said. Candidate Obama spoke like a centrist, but his governing agenda, as reflected in his first budget submission to Congress, betrayed an aggressive liberalism that had to be...