March 6, 2009
Yesterday, just days after holding a “summit” on “fiscal responsibility,” President Obama hosted another hours-long confab with a cast of thousands (okay, one hundred and fifty), this time to talk about health care reform. What’s all this summitry really about? After all, it’s obvious that nothing...
March 3, 2009
Yesterday, President Obama tried again. Some three months after first nominating former Senator Tom Daschle to be Secretary of HHS, the president announced he was nominating Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius for the slot. He also named Nancy-Ann DeParle, a competent veteran of the Clinton administration, to head the White House Office of...
February 27, 2009
Here’s the bottom line on President Obama’s budget: It’s a massive spending increase when what the country desperately needs is a plan for fiscal discipline. According to the administration’s own projections, the federal budget deficit will fall no lower than $533 billion over the next ten years and the country...
February 26, 2009
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. Politicians like to say they are “cutting the budget.” But budget cutting can only be understood in context. In budget-speak, there is a “baseline” against which budget decisions are measured. Normally, the “baseline” assumes current law and policy. But...
February 25, 2009
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that the federal budget deficit in 2009 was going to be $1.2 trillion before passage of the “stimulus” bill. Now, it’s likely to be closer to $1.4 trillion. President Obama promised in his speech to cut it in half by the end of his term, which others have taken to mean fiscal...
February 24, 2009
Last week, USA Today ran a front-page story on recent premium increases in the individual health insurance market that got some attention. We are told, among other things, that Anthem Blue Cross in California is passing on double-digit premium increases to 640,000 enrollees, and an insurer in Washington state is charging nearly 18...
February 20, 2009
Over at Politico, Ben Smith has written an interesting and revealing profile of the new Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director, Peter Orszag. Among other things, Smith’s piece confirms what I had previously speculated, which is that Orszag and OMB are calling the health-care shots in the administration right now—and...
February 19, 2009
President Barack Obama is holding a “fiscal responsibility summit” next week at the White House, on the heels of securing passage of the “stimulus” legislation. That’s the subject of a piece from me, up today at National Review Online. Among other things, I observe that Republicans have taken on political...
February 16, 2009
In this piece in today’s Washington Post, advocates for Obama-style health reform express anxiety that the withdrawal of former Sen. Tom Daschle’s nomination to be Secretary of the Health and Human Services (HHS) has set back the Administration’s health policy agenda for months. Perhaps. But it seems just as likely that...
February 13, 2009
This week, the new Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Doug Elmendorf, delivered important testimony to the Senate Budget Committee. His full, written presentation is available here. Health policy expert Bob Laszewski helpfully noted at Healthcare Policy and Marketplace Review that, during the back and forth at the...