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 […]
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Tag Archives: SEC
The belt-and-suspenders of the Kennedy-Dodd health care bill
11 June 2009 
70 Comments
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 […]
Read more Ten more things about the official Kennedy-Dodd health care bill
10 June 2009 43 Comments
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 […]
Read more Understanding the House Democrats' health care bill
9 June 2009 218 Comments
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). The three committees are: […]
Read more Understanding the Kennedy health care bill
8 June 2009 383 Comments
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 of […]
Read moreDr. Goolsbee gets it wrong on the auto loans
7 June 2009 41 Comments
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 […]
Read more Working in the West Wing: Doing a TV news interview on the North Lawn
5 June 2009 1 Comment
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 […]
Read moreWill the stimulus come too late?
3 June 2009 38 Comments
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 […]
Read more Parsing the President’s health care reform letter
3 June 2009 11 Comments
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 […]
Read moreUnderstanding the GM bankruptcy
1 June 2009 51 Comments
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 […]
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