The latest word is that the Democratic leadership and the White House see a “60% chance” they will split their health care bill into two parts—one a budget bill that would be eligible for the 51-vote Senate rule and the other the operational non-budget portions that will need 60 votes. This is all intended to get around the Byrd Rule—which allows the use of reconciliation
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The Obama Admistration Would Do Well to Read the Senate Rules and the Polls
The latest reports are that the White House is getting ready to ditch any thoughts about a bipartisan health care bill and just ram the Democratic bills through the Senate with bare majorities. Readers of this blog know that I don’t think it is ever possible to ram anything so big as health care through with slim Congressional majorities and even less public support. I
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Co-Ops Are the Single Dumbest Idea I Have Heard in the Health Care Debate in Twenty Years
This is a repost from June 23--sort of like regifting...I am sure you have heard the story about the committee that was charged with designing a horse but, because of the bureaucratic ways of the committee process, instead ended up creating a camel.We will not see a Medicare-like public health plan as part of any health care reform bill in 2009. I know proponents don’t want to hear that but it is
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The Other National Universal Systems of Care Are Not Our Problem
You can't have an American health care debate without plenty of trashing of single payer systems elsewhere.I am not a single-payer advocate. I believe it is simplistic to think that if we just had one and eliminated the duplicate expenses multiple payers bring with them everything would be OK.I think a single-payer solution is simplistic because it misses the different histories that have gone on
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Are Democrats Getting Ready to Ditch the Public Option? But They Would Still Be Challenged by the Trillion Dollar Price Tag
It looks to me like the popular objections to a health care bill being expressed by voters this month are concentrated in two primary areas:A concern about “government control of the health care system”—mostly around the public plan option.The trillion-dollar cost of a health care bill at a time deficits are swelling and worries about who will really end up paying for it.As a result of the first
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You Call This a Health Care Debate?
Any of us who do health care policy full time might as well take the rest of the month off and let the demagogues bent on scarring the American people just get it all out. I swear it is getting worse by the hour. Then maybe we can get back to a rational debate.The British Health System's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel have been particularly
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Why the Democrats Are On Their Way To Blowing Health Care –Again
There will be a pretty long list of answers to this question but I will give you what I consider to be the number one reason.The Democrats chose partisanship over bipartisanship.There has been a school of thought in this town, of which I have strongly agreed with on this blog, that the only way you can do something as big and complicated and close to people’s self interests as health care is to
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Insurance Companies Say They Can't Compete With a Public Option--But FedEx and UPS Do Pretty Well Against the Post Office--What's the Difference?
The Post Office doesn’t get to unilaterally fix the cost of all of the things it buys that go into its services--Medicare and Medicaid do.What critics of the public health plan option often fear is that, like Medicare, a public option health plan would be able to unilaterally set what it pays doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and other providers. Private health insurers often pay providers 20%
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This Health Care Reform Debate is Really Starting to Scare Me—What if We Were Having a Real One?
The recent stridency of this health care debate has led me to wonder what if the Democrats were proposing real health care reform?The Democratic health care bills are hardly more than expansions of the health insurance entitlement paid for by largely insignificant cuts to existing spending and lots of new taxes. Any provider cuts to Medicare are so small they will be easily cost shifted to the
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The Bigger the Lie
I come from a corporate background.A longtime ago a chief marketing officer introduced me to the term, “The Big Lie.” Apparently, this also applies to politics.As he put it, in not a complementary way, the bigger the lie that is told the easier it is to believe.Sarah Palin has been practicing Big Lie politics.She recently posted on her Facebook account:“The America I know and love is not one in
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