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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 traditional Beltway logic on health care reform goes like this:

The problem is that 46 million Americans lack health insurance.  (I addressed why this number is incorrect and misleading last Thursday.)
Government should provide health insurance to those 46 million people, or at least pay for it.
Let’s expand a taxpayer-subsidized health insurance program to [...]

When discussing health insurance we frequently hear that there are “46 million uninsured” in America.  This figure is from a monthly survey of about 50,000 households done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.  This Current Population Survey (CPS) then uses statistical techniques to paint a picture of the entire U.S. population.
Advocates [...]

Budget Director Peter Orszag wrote on his blog yesterday that he thinks “Debt held by the public net of financial assets is the most meaningful measure of current federal debt.”
I wrote earlier today why I think Director Orszag’s new metric is misleading and dangerous.  Now, however, I’m going to take his argument [...]

Yesterday on his blog the President’s Budget Director, Peter Orszag, asks himself and then answers the question, “How much does the federal government owe?”
This sounds like a technical question of concern only to “those of us wearing the green eyeshades,” but the Director’s suggested answer has dangerous ramifications, and could mislead or at [...]

I would like to compliment and thank President Obama for saying this in Strasbourg, France last Friday:
As we take these steps, we also affirm that we must not erect new barriers to commerce; that trade wars have no victors. We can’t give up on open markets, even as we work to ensure that trade is [...]

Last Friday I posted that I thought the Administration had less than $40 B of room remaining in the TARP.  The Wall Street Journal reported today Monday that Treasury says “it has about $134.5 billion left in its financial-rescue fund.”  Secretary Geithner addressed this question Sunday on This Week with George Stephanopolous.
GEITHNER: George, we [...]

The President emphasized the importance of health care reform in Tuesday evening’s press conference.  One of his arguments was that reforming health care would help address federal and state government fiscal problems:
What we have to do is bend the curve on these deficit projections.  And the best way for us to do that is to [...]