This is interesting: WASHINGTON — In his press conference on Monday morning, President Barack Obama repeatedly insisted that he was willing to tackle some sacred cows as part of a larger package to raise the debt ceiling. Just how sacred, however, may surprise political observers. According to five separate sources with knowledge of negotiations — [...]

A new Pew Research Poll shows that the American public continues to remain strongly supportive of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, and opposed to any changes that would result in benefit cuts: On the broad question of whether it is more important to reduce the budget deficit or to maintain current Medicare and [...]

What exactly is the GOP trying to accomplish in the debt ceiling negotiations?

Another indication that the public relations battle over Medicare is decidedly not going in the GOP’s favor: Representative Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman who has become a star in the Republican Party with his plan to overhaul Medicare, is emerging as a polarizing figure among Americans. Twenty-six percent of people view the Wisconsin [...]

Further evidence today that the GOP is losing the public relations war over the Ryan Plan and Medicare: A new national poll indicates that a majority of Americans don’t like what they’ve heard so far about congressional Republicans’ plans to change Medicare. According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, a majority also don’t think the [...]

There were two show votes in the Senate today on competing budget plans, and they turned out just about as everyone expected: With five Republicans joining Democrats in opposition, the Senate easily rejected a House-passed budget plan Wednesday calling for deep cuts in domestic appropriations and major restructuring of Medicare, the government-backed healthcare program for [...]

Former President Clinton doesn’t necessarily think his fellow Democrats are pursuing the right policy in their response to the Ryan Plan: WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) — Bill Clinton had a word of warning on Wednesday for fellow Democrats: Don’t get too cocky about voters’ rejection of Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan. In a special election for a vacant [...]

It’s just one Congressional District out of 435, but that won’t stop everyone from trying to turn the results in NY-26 into a national referendum on Medicare reform.

Newt Gingrich’s appearance on Meet The Press today is likely to get a lot of attention mostly for the fact that clearly, and rather emphatically, distanced himself from the Medicare reforms proposed by Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan and adopted by the House GOP: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy [...]

There are signs that the Ryan Plan isn’t playing well with the public.

Cass Sunstein, head of something called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the White House, wants to improve America through subtle manipulation.  A recent NYT accounting: The office, known in Washington as OIRA, reviews major regulations written by federal agencies (on matters like the environment, the financial system, Medicare and Medicaid and public [...]

John Hinderacker pronounces this the “Greatest. Cartoon. Ever.” He comments: Is the US turning into a nation of freeloaders? One certainly hates to think so, but there are powerful forces pushing us–lots of us–in that direction. Michael Ramirez captures the phenomenon of the 21st-century freeloader brilliantly. If you’re not outraged, you haven’t been paying attention. [...]

The big news overnight is that President Obama has ordered hospitals to allow partners of gays and lesbians to visit and be allowed to make critical decisions. Michael Schear, WaPo: “Obama extends hospital visitation rights to same-sex partners of gays” President Obama mandated Thursday that nearly all hospitals extend visitation rights to the partners of [...]

When the Heritage Foundation announced this week that it had moved the United States to “mostly free” for the first time in the history of its Index of Economic Freedom, I took it as a flaw in the index rather than a useful statement about freedom in this country. Like many libertarian-leaning conservatives, I frequently [...]

The combination of a down economy and various stimulus givebacks means that nearly half of Americans paid no federal income tax in 2009. Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions of Americans, but for nearly half of U.S. households, it’s simply somebody else’s problem. About 47% will pay no federal income taxes for 2009. [...]

There has been some interesting analysis of the impacts on our health care system of the bill President Obama signed into law earlier today by libertarian economists Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan, and Tyler Cowen.   Many of the ideas have been floating around for a while  (the bill’s been in development for more than a year [...]

So, the health care reform was passed last night owing to a bizarre compromise is which Bart Stupak persuaded President Obama to issue a meaningless executive order proclaiming that the law passed by both Houses of Congress says what Stupak has spent months pointing out it doesn’t say. The basic facts, from NYT: With the [...]

National Journal‘s Ron Brownstein sees the recent bout of gridlock in the United States as a sign of a more fundamental shift in how our government operates. Obama’s first year demonstrated once again that in this deeply polarized political era, big legislative crusades aimed at big national problems produce only big political headaches. President George [...]

My late evening was going well. The struggling Dallas Cowboys had somehow overcome their annual December swoon and were leading the theretofore unbeaten New Orleans Saints by three touchdowns early in the fourth quarter. The Saints scored two quick touchdowns and the Cowboys’ basket case kicker Nick Folk missed a chip shot field goal but [...]

Progressives are increasingly frustrated that, despite having won the presidency by a comfortable margin and having solid majorities in the House and Senate — where they have a “filibuster-proof” 60 votes — they still can’t enact the policies they want.   Matt Yglesias says “smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the [...]

Ezra Klein passes on word that the public doesn’t understand the public option.  Or, more specifically, when asked, “Could you confidently explain what exactly the public option is to someone who didn’t know?” 66% answered no; the others lied or were in error.  Matt Yglesias is bemused by this because, after all, this has been [...]

Paul Krugman has taken some rather interesting stances on the fiscal situation here in the U.S. First up is a piece entitled Fiscal Train Wreck from March 2003, With war looming, it’s time to be prepared. So last week I switched to a fixed-rate mortgage. It means higher monthly payments, but I’m terrified about what [...]

In a front piece story in today’s NYT, Edmund Andrews warns that the bill is about to come due on the massive borrowing the federal government has engaged in. Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and [...]

Time features an article on the “Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from China” that I can only characterize as surreal. Here are the five lessons: Be Ambitious Education Matters Look After the Elderly Save More Look over the Horizon For the details you’ll just have to read the article. On ambition, the article’s author, [...]

The House passed a trillion dollar bill that will force Americans to buy health insurance, force even small businesses to provide health coverage, and require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions.  (The last, as I have previously argued, makes it something other than “insurance.”) Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray for WaPo: Hours after President Obama [...]

In a much discussed post, Ezra Klein produced a series of graphs showing that Americans pay more for office visits, scans and imaging, drugs, and other aspects of health care — often, far more — than is the case in Canada or Western Europe. There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs [...]

Ezra Klein points to a new ABC/WaPo poll showing a solid majority support “a law that requires all Americans to have health insurance, either getting it from work, buying it on their own, or through eligibility for Medicare or Medicaid.” Further, the same poll finds a third of those who oppose would switch sides “if [...]

Ezra Klein has yet another op-ed in WaPo on health care in which he outlines a state of facts that one would think is beyond dispute and then leaps to conclusions that are quite disputable. The title of the piece is “You Have No Idea What Health Costs,” which is likely true for most people, [...]

Ezra Klein details why it’s so hard to get a comprehensive reform of our healthcare system passed. There are three primary difficulties in finding the money for health-care reform. The first is that costs inside the system grow more quickly than incomes outside of the system. Imagine if your mortgage grew by 10 percent a [...]

In the comments on my Obama’s New Health Strategy: Leadership post, Michael Reynolds makes a salient point about President Obama’s leadership style: “He operates like a community organizer: let people have their say, let them wear themselves out, then step in and define the consensus.” I think that’s fundamentally correct.  I’ve long marveled at Obama’s [...]

Some “60,000 people have canceled their AARP memberships since July 1, angered over the group’s position on health care,” CBS News reports. Many are switching to the American Seniors Association, a group that calls itself the conservative alternative as CBS News Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports. Last week alone, they added more than 5,000 new [...]

President Obama, seeing that he is taking a beating in the polls, and that health care is starting to founder took to the pages of the New York Times to lay out the case for health care reform. I think he did a rather bad job of it. He could have done it with far, [...]

Kevin Drum seconds Alex Massie that a British-style nationalized health system is not a politically feasible option in the United States.  Indeed, even Democrats don’t want that: [W]ith the exception of a few outliers, the liberal community really, truly doesn’t want a fully government owned and operated healthcare system like the NHS.  We want a [...]

David Frum frets that conservatives might be in for a Pyrrhic victory in the health care fight if they define winning as “beat back the president’s proposals, defeat the House bill, stand back and wait for 1994 to repeat itself.” [W]e’ll still have the present healthcare system. Meaning that we’ll have (1) flat-lining wages, (2) [...]

Bill Maher has a piece at HuffPo arguing that Americans are a bunch of idiots who should just shut up and let people who know what they’re talking about make decisions on tough issues like health care reform. [T]ake the health care debate we’re presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can [...]

The CBO has analyzed some of the suggested methods for controlling health care costs, and the Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC) in particular. The findings so far is not all that good, In particular, CBO reviewed draft legislation transmitted to the Congress by the Administration on July 17, 2009, titled the Independent Medicare Advisory Council [...]

Dan Miller laments that “the right has basically abdicated its role in the conversation” on health care reform. Health care has been THE liberal project for literally decades; entire careers (not to mention presidencies) have been built around it.  There’s a vast policy apparatus on the progressive side of the aisle built around health care, [...]

Mickey Kaus calls Ezra Klein a “concern troll” for his “unsettling thought” that: [H]ealth-care reform isn’t simply suffering because the public is overly opposed to some of its revenue raisers. It’s suffering because the public is insufficiently supportive of its core. … [snip] [I]t’s not obvious what health-care reform will do for the average American. [...]

I actually like this article by Ezra Klein. Often I’ve found his articles lacking in understanding of economics, an appreciation for incentives, etc. But this looks quite good. Well balanced and displaying a healthy skepticism about why Medicare’s adminstative costs are lower and if we can get such low costs in general for health care [...]

For the sake of argument let us assume that Medicare’s administrative costs are lower than those of the typical health insurance company. Does this imply that Medicare is more efficient than the private company? I’ve been skeptical of this view point since one thing I’ve learned in economics is that firms want to maximize profits. [...]

Kevin Drum argues, correctly I think, that British- and Canadian-style socialized medicine is not on the table in the United States and that we should therefore frame the debate in terms of a French- or Dutch-style mixed system.  He further cites Jonathan Cohn‘s argument that these systems are quite good. But in the course of [...]

Are they lower? This article by the Heritage Foundation makes an interesting point. Medicare beneficiaries are by definition elderly, disabled, or patients with end-stage renal disease. Private insurance beneficiaries may include a small percentage of people in those categories, but they consist primarily of people are who under age 65 and not disabled. Naturally, Medicare [...]

Mohamed El-Erian points out that there are good reasons for Bernanke to be worried about the future with regards to fiscal policy. Mr Bernanke acknowledges that, despite the ”green shoots”, there are still question mark over which components of demand will kick into gear once the cyclical inventory pick-up runs its course, as it will [...]

Pretty much everyone. Laurence Kotlikoff and Christian Hagist have looked at OECD data for 10 countries and the picture is pretty grim. Although healthcare spending is growing at unsustainable rates in most, if not all, OECD countries, the U.S. appears least able to control its benefit growth due to the nature of its fee-for-service healthcare [...]

Tyler Cowen’s second health care fallacy is from one of my least favorite psuedo-economists Robert Reich, Social Security is a tiny problem. Medicare is a terrible one, but the problem is not really Medicare; it’s quickly rising health-care costs. You would think it is hard to resist the fiscal conservatives’ core argument — X is [...]

Tyler Cowen has three health care fallacies and the first one is something I’ve mentioned before (and tooke quite a bit of heat for), Today’s report is this: The financial outlook for Medicare and Social Security has significantly worsened, as the bad economy and mounting job losses have pushed both programs years closer to insolvency, [...]

Megan has a very good post on the subject. Perhaps predictibly, someone showed up in the comments to my post on Medicare and Social Security to argue that liberal analysts have very serious plans to cut Medicare’s costs, which is why we need universal coverage, so that we can implement those very serious plans. I [...]

Ari Fleischer‘s WSJ column “It’s Bad for Our Democracy to Exempt Half the Country From Income Taxes” is attracting widespread commentary, mostly along predictable party lines. While I agree with the basic premises (see, for example, “Class Warfare: Framing the Debate“) I am rather dubious of his actual programmatic prescription: I favor the abolition of [...]

Amity Shlaes tells NPR’s Kai Ryssdal that the current tax system reverses the problem that the founders faced. Taxation without representation. That’s what our nation’s founders rebelled against. Subjects in the colonies were sending money home to the crown without getting say in their own government. The course of U.S. history can be seen as [...]

In response to my last post on Social Security, Medicare and the medium to long term fiscal outlook for the U.S. Bernard Finel has another response. In this post Bernard looks at the deficits from 1950 to 2007 and writes, in part, (Warning: Biiiiig Post Below the fold.)