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21 Oct 09

The facts have a liberal health-care bias - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

  • Serious students of health care have known for a long time that the magic of the marketplace doesn’t work in health care; the United States has the most privatized health-care system in the advanced world, and also the least efficient.
  • The pale reflection of this reality in the current discussion is that reform with a strong public option is cheaper than reform without — which means that as we get closer to really doing something, rhetoric about socialism fades out, and that $100 billion or so in projected savings starts to look awfully attractive.
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Obama Vows to ‘Deliver on Health Care’ - NYTimes.com

  • The president called for “making a not-for-profit public option available” to consumers. But he suggested he was amenable to refining that idea, which has become a lightning rod for criticism.
08 Sep 09

Why the public option matters - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

  • Private insurers do pay providers more than Medicare does — but that’s only part of the reason Medicare has lower costs. There’s also the huge overhead of the private insurers, much of which involves marketing and attempts to cherry-pick clients — and even with community rating, some of that will still go on. A public plan would probably be able to attract clients with much less of that.
  • Second, a public plan would probably provide the only real competition in many markets.
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30 Aug 09

Thomas Frank: Health Care and the Democratic Soul - WSJ.com

  • What is at stake in the debate over health care is more than the mere crafting of policy. The issue is now the identity of the Democratic Party.
  • By now we know that Democrats can bail out traditional Republican constituencies like Wall Street, but it remains to be seen whether they can enact a convincing version of their own signature issue, health-care reform.
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Op-Ed Columnist - The Guns of August - NYTimes.com

  • No, the biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”
  • As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his own famous Kennedy-era essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” these Arizona gun enthusiasts were convinced that the American government was being taken over by a “subversive power.” Sound familiar?
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Competition Lacking Among Private Health Insurers - NYTimes.com

  • WASHINGTON (AP) -- One of the most widely accepted arguments against a government medical plan for the middle class is that it would quash competition -- just what private insurers seem to be doing themselves in many parts of the U.S.
  • Several studies show that in lots of places, one or two companies dominate the market. Critics say monopolistic conditions drive up premiums paid by employers and individuals.
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21 Aug 09

Op-Ed Columnist - Obama's Trust Problem - NYTimes.com

  • And let’s be clear: the supposed alternative, nonprofit co-ops, is a sham. That’s not just my opinion; it’s what the market says: stocks of health insurance companies soared on news that the Gang of Six senators trying to negotiate a bipartisan approach to health reform were dropping the public plan. Clearly, investors believe that co-ops would offer little real competition to private insurers.

  • Meanwhile, on such fraught questions as torture and indefinite detention, the president has dismayed progressives with his reluctance to challenge or change Bush administration policy.

    And then there’s the matter of the banks.

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20 Aug 09

NBC Poll: Myths Endure on Health Care, Highlighting Doubts on Overhaul - Washington Wire - WSJ

  • Further, a majority of Americans (55%) believe the bill will extend health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants even though no proposals currently under negotiation would do so. An equally high number (54%) believe the overhaul will lead to a “complete” government takeover of the health care system, although there is also no actual proposal for that, either.

Kyl Says Cooperative Health Plan Won't Win Support - WSJ.com

  • The number two Senate Republican said Tuesday replacing a public health care option with a nonprofit private cooperative wouldn't win any more Republican support, saying they are essentially the same thing.
17 Aug 09

Blue Dog Daze

  • is mostly the result of the destructive
    maneuvers of a handful of conservative Democrats in the House, largely
    from the fifty-two-member Blue Dog caucus and their allies in the
    Senate, headed by Max Baucus, chair of the Finance Committee and poster
    child of corrupt and compromised incoherence.
  • Representative Mike Ross and a pack of Blue Dogs managed to force the
    House Energy Committee to gut the public option, while lowering
    subsidies to middle-income families forced to pay higher prices to
    insurance companies.
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If Obama Discards Public Option, What's Left of Reform?

  • The woman who got the HHS job reform advocates had hoped would go to Dean certainly seemed Sunday to be jettisoning the idea of creating a government-organized alternative to private health insurance Sunday.
  • Startlingly, the clearest signal that the administration is preparing to jettison the public option came from Obama himself. Speaking at a town hall event in Colorado referred to the public plan as merely a "sliver" of his reform agenda and said: "The public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of healthcare reform."
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