Over at Kaiser Health News, Jonathan Cohn (with an assist from MIT’s Jonathan Gruber) does the numbers for those who buy on the non-group market (that is, people who don’t get their coverage from their employer):
He didn’t win it pretty, but he won. Harry Reid showed, once again, why being Senate Majority Leader is the second hardest job in Washington. And on some days, the hardest.
Okay, let’s give Tom Coburn the benefit of every conceivable doubt. Is it possible to read this comment as anything but a wish prayer that catastrophe befall one of his colleagues, especially with the frail and ailing 92-year-old Robert C. Byrd requiring a wheelchair to make it to the Senate Chamber?: At 4 p.m. Sunday [...]
Sigh. So yesterday, I wrote this post saying that the new version of the Senate bill does more to “bend the curve” of health care costs. I based that in large measure on the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the how effective a new independent board to regulate Medicare would be. Except CBO got it [...]
Jacob Hacker, who invented and was the most convincing promoter of the public option, backs the health reform bill.
Frank Rich is a former theater critic. As such, he’s been a valuable observer of the histrionic trivialization of our national politics, the scandalous metastasizing of infotainment over substance. But he also has a tendency to see everything as theater, to overlook the details of policy on some difficult issues…like health care, for example. Today, [...]
Word comes that Ayatullah Hossein Ali Montazeri has died at the age of 87. He was Iran’s road not taken, a leading cleric–Ayatullah Khomeini’s designated successor for a time–who came to understand that the Islamic Republic’s religious dictatorship was taking a fundamentally irreligious path. He was a revolutionary who came to believe that the mullahs [...]
In addition to getting a sweetheart deal for his home state, Ben Nelson also got Harry Reid to offer more than the Casey abortion language in the manager’s amendment. In addition to providing stronger conscience protections for medical institutions and health workers opposed to abortion, and expanding adoption tax credits, the manager’s amendment segregates funds [...]
