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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Last December the Congressional Budget Office published a comprehensive paper that describes how they approach analysis of health insurance reform proposals.  It is a critically important (and somewhat technical) document for anyone who cares about health care legislation in the United States.
CBO is the referee for the budgetary costs of legislation.  They estimate the effects [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This past weekend the President signed a short-term extension of a program that finances health insurance for children, called SCHIP:  the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.  We expect the Congress today will send the President H.R. 976, a bill that “reauthorizes” SCHIP for five years.  The President has said he will veto this bill, and [...]