The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that 15.8 percent of Americans lived in poverty last year, using an alternative method to analyze their numbers provided by the National Academy of Sciences.  This is significantly higher than the 13.2 percent official poverty rate the agency released last month. Since a great deal of the estimated cost of health care reform relies on the old data, what do these numbers have to say about the final cost of the bill?

For starters, this places 7 million more Americans below the poverty line.  18.7% of these are elderly, and will receive Medicare.  The remaining 5.69 million are non elderly.  Under the Senate Finance Bill, anyone earning 133% above the poverty line or below qualifies for Medicaid.  Using the new numbers, this means that at the very least, 5.69 million more people will be eligible to receive Medicaid than Congressional Democrats and the CBO are accounting for.

The CBO estimates, “there would be roughly 14 million more enrollees in Medicaid and CHIP than is projected under current law.”  But the CBO estimate was based on the old census numbers.  If Congress adopts the new methods for rating poverty, that number will increase by at least 5.69 million people. From the report [pdf]: [Read more →]

David Frum comes out in favor of Wyden-Bennett and against the Club for Growth’s recent attacks on Senator Bennett.  He points out that the very things the Club for Growth are attacking in Wyden-Bennett – namely “job-killing tax increases on employers” – exist in the Republican Coburn-Ryan plan as well.  However: [Read more →]

If there was ever even the faintest glimmer of hope for Wyden-Bennett or any other kind of meaningful health care reform proposal amenable to conservative and libertarian sensibilities, the Club For Growth just killed it.  Honestly, I find this nothing short of sickening.  It is now clear that supposedly free market leadership types really don’t give a damn about free markets or about the ways government interventon already distorts health care.  No, it is instead clear that they’ve decided that the American health care system as it exists is already a paragon of free market economics in action and that what is important is continuing to drum up fear amongst seniors. 

This is yet another example of precisely the issue I was trying to address the other day in discussing the falsity of using an anarcho-capitalist mindset to defeat changes to the status quo, which is already far from an anarcho-capitalist ideal. 

This is not to say that Wyden-Bennett is in any sense of the word perfect or even uniformly good.  There are definitely provisions that I would oppose on their own if we were building a system from scratch.  So I could understand a situation where the Club For Growth and other allegedly pro-free market groups refused to support it, or even actively opposed its passage on purely tactical grounds (ie, not wanting the Obama Administration to take credit for health care reform).   But to claim that it is somehow “government-run healthcare” in a meaningfully greater degree than the system we already have such that it is worth mounting an organized primary campaign against the co-author?  When the central feature of the bill is the elimination of the single-worst government intervention into our health insurance system in our history, a feature that every free market group has been begging to remove for years? 

With this action, the Club for Growth is signalling that it cares not one iota about introducing free market reforms into our health care system.  Instead, it is clear that at least in the context of the health care debate, “free market advocacy” now means something much more akin to “defender of government-run programs like Medicare and Medicaid, defender of employer-based health insurance, and defender of heavily-regulated state health insurance monopolies and oligopolies.” There is only one word I can think of for those who would couch their defense of the, dare I say it, statist status quo in terms of being free market advocates: nihilists.

UPDATE: Relatedly: there are not going to be many times that I agree with Digby on things having to do with issues other than civil liberties.  But this is one of those times.  Read it – it’s good stuff, even if I think Digby’s slightly too hard on the Blue Dog Democrats, who really do tend to be from districts where any significant health care reform at all is a political hot potato.  Still, the analysis strikes me as about right, especially this bit:

“But in the end the Republicans may just force them to pass something decent anyway by failing to give them the cover for capitulation they so desperately need. It’s an interesting squeeze play that may backfire on the GOP in the long run if good health care reform is passed.”

Now here’s a good idea: [Read more →]

Not surprisingly, this poll from Gallup showing that the extremity of the town hall protests may be succeeding in increasing opposition to health care reform – and certainly have not provoked a backlash – is rightly the story of the day and has the Right celebrating, and the Left a bit bruised, with the proud partisan Big Tent Democrat proudly reasserting his long-held belief that Dems need to be more partisan because they’re never going to succeed in convincing anyone.  Relatedly, the Obama Administration is taking up the argument that the media are failing to refute blatant falsities alleged by many of these protesters.

I take a different view, as usual.  The reason why the health care debate has favored liberals and Democrats in recent years has been their ability to appeal to powerful anecdotes of the uninsured and other actual victims of our current health care system.  What the health care protests have done is to put actual people who sincerely (if very, very wrongly) believe they would be victims of Obamacare front and center, providing reform opponents with easily-relatable appeals to emotion that they’ve never had in the past fifteen years.

That these people have acted in extreme and normally unacceptable ways in making their appeals is largely irrelevant to the observing public, who put themselves in the shoes of someone who sincerely believes that she will die if Obamacare becomes reality.  Of course, if people recognize that you honestly believe a piece of legislation will kill you, then they’re going to be willing to empathize with any manner of nonviolent but otherwise extreme methods of protest. 

I think a lot of proponents of reform recognize this, which is why they point the finger at organizing groups, talk show hosts, and Sarah Palin for spreading misinformation about the proposal, and at the media for failing to rebut that misinformation.  This is an understandable complaint, and is I think an accurate one, though not with respect to the media (more on that in a moment). 

What reformers don’t seem to realize is how the decision to water down health care reform rather than pushing for something more ambitious (like single-payer, on the one had, or Wyden-Bennett, on the other) has hurt them in this debate, perhaps irreparably. 

[Read more →]

What do we mean when we talk about the “rising costs of health care” in America?  It’s a very ambiguous term with a lot of different possible meanings.  We could mean the cost of health care per capita, or as a percentage of GDP.  In 2007, total health care spending was $2.4 trillion dollars.  Per capita, health care costs were an average of $7900.  This number is rising, and total spending is supposed to reach over $4 trillion by 2017, an estimated 20% of GDP.  Premiums on employer-based coverage rose 5% in 2008.

In 2007, here’s how medical spending broke down:

Then again, when we talk about costs of health care, we might also be talking about government expenditures.  This is another set of costs altogether, and according to the CBO: [Read more →]

The Wyden-Bennett “Healthy Americans Act” really is the most sensible health-care reform bill out there right now.  I don’t think health care reform is a hill worth dying on for conservatives (there are other, better hills to die on), but it is worth the effort to find a plan that will actually work, that is fiscally sound, and that still covers most, if not all, Americans.  The “Healthy Americans Act” does all these things, and it’s worth setting aside ideology to achieve meaningful reform.

Yesterday, in the Washington Post, the Senators pushed their plan once again.  It’s worth noting that right now the Wyden-Bennett proposal has more bipartisan support than H.R. 3200, the bill being pushed by many Democrats, including the bought-and-paid-for chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus.  Not only that,  Wyden-Bennett also does a better job, and is far more fiscally sound a proposal than H.R. 3200. [Read more →]