KeithHennessey.com

I want to propose a four-part test for measuring any particular bill on health care cost control.

short run

long run

Federal deficit

1

2

Government health care spending

X

3

Private health care spending

X

4

In each case, I will define the test so that “yes” is a good outcome:
Test 1:  The bill does not increase the federal deficit in the short run.
Test 2:  The [...]

There is much debate about whether a health care reform bill should include a government-run health insurance plan, a so-called “public option.”  Advocates argue that such a plan can compete fairly with private health insurance, and that this competition would “keep insurers honest.”  They also argue that more choices are a good thing.
I fall in [...]

The Senate HELP Committee staff has filed an official copy of their draft legislation with the Senate clerk.  A friend and I were discussing today two possible tactical scenarios:

The weekend leak forced the majority staff to release their official text as damage control.  Under this scenario, filing the official copy is a damage mitigation strategy:  [...]

This page contains the most recent version of my list of “things you should know about the Kennedy-Dodd health care bill,” interspersed with parallel observations about the leaked outline of the House Democrats’ health care bill.
I will post each time I update this page, so you can track it incrementally.  If you bookmark this page, [...]

Yesterday I posted and described the draft Kennedy-Dodd health care bill.  Today I would like to do the same for an outline produced by House Democrats.
Here is a three-page outline of “Key Features of the Tri-Committee Health Reform Draft Proposal in the House of Representatives,” dated yesterday (June 8, 2009).

Over the weekend a draft of Senator Kennedy’s (D-MA) health care bill leaked.  After playing with Adobe Acrobat, here is the text of the draft Kennedy bill as a text file (173 K), and as a single Acrobat file (3.4 MB).  Update:  I fixed the broken link to the PDF. Unlike the leaked version, both [...]

The White House has released a letter from the President to the two Senate Chairmen who are working on (different) versions of health care reform:  Senator Kennedy (D-MA), Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, and Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.  The letter is dated yesterday and [...]

Many of you are new to this blog since I wrote extensively about autos six weeks ago.  As background, I coordinated the auto loan process for President Bush last fall as the Director of the White House National Economic Council (the position now held by Dr. Lawrence Summers).  I wrote a series of posts on [...]

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
_______________________________________________________________________________________
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 1, 2009
BACKGROUND BRIEFING
BY SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS
ON THE GENERAL MOTORS RESTRUCTURING
May 31, 2009
Via Conference Call
7:10 P.M. EDT
MS. PSAKI:  Thank you, everyone, for joining the call.  Just a reminder that the call this evening is on background, and you can attribute quotes to a senior administration official.  And [...]

In a few hours I will offer my thoughts and reactions to the General Motors bankruptcy filing and the President’s noon announcement.  For now, here is what I have been able to figure out from the White House fact sheet and secondary source reporting through CNBC and the Wall Street Journal.  I assume that both [...]