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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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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).

This morning on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace moderated a discussion about the auto industry.  One of his guests was Dr. Austan Goolsbee, who is a Member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. I want to focus on some incorrect and inflammatory statements [...]

This is the second in a series of occasional posts about the nitty gritty of working in the West Wing of the White House.  I am describing things as they were in the Bush Administration.  YMMV in the Obama Administration.  Again, it seems a bit silly to write about such trivial details, but given the [...]

I began this blog at the end of March after the stimulus bill had become law.  I had been struck by how much the stimulus debate had focused on whether the bill was efficient.  (It clearly was not.)  There was much less discussion of whether the stimulus would be effective, and of the timing of [...]

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, [...]