I’m a bit embarrased to admit that I wasn’t sure wether the ”doc fix” reducing the reimbursement for doctors who treat Medicare patients (around 21%) was built into the CBO savings projections for the recently passed Affordable Care Act.
However, Jonathan Chait in his article “The Conservative Misinformation Feedback Loop, Cont’d” disproves this claim and explains the “degree to which the public debate is driven by pure hacks.”
From “Tea Party” Leader Mark Williams:
Kennedy Mourners Memorialize ‘Soul of the Democratic Party’ – The nation said final farewell on Saturday to Edward M. Kennedy, who used his privileged life to give consistent, passionate voice to the underprivileged for nearly a half-century as a United States senator from Massachusetts.
Chris Wallace, A Teenage Girl Interviewing The Jonas Brothers – When it comes to Cheney, one of the most incompetent vice-presidents in the country’s history, with a record of two grotesquely botched wars, war crimes and a crippling debt, Chris Wallace sounds like a teenage girl interviewing the Jonas Brothers.
Highlights of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s career
Leading conservative economist Bruce Bartlett writes that the Obama-hating town-hall mobs have it wrong-the person they should be angry with left the White House seven months ago.
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Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform – The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage.
A Tip for The GOP: Look Away – A telling anecdote recounted by Pat Buchanan to New Yorker writer George Packer last year captures the dark spirit that still hovers around the GOP. In 1966 Buchanan and Richard Nixon were at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, S.C., where Nixon worked a crowd into a frenzy: “Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, ‘burned the paint off the walls.’ As they left the hotel, Nixon said, ‘This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.’”
The Berserk ‘Birthers’ – If there’s been a more clinically insane political phenomenon in my lifetime than the “birthers,” I’ve missed it. Is this what our national discourse has come to? Sheer paranoid fantasy?
From Nate Silver:
Baucus’s bill will not contain an employer mandate — a requirement that employers provide health insurance to their employees — even though it does contain an individual mandate.
Does this look familiar to anyone?
– No employer mandate
– No public option
– But yes, an individual mandate
It should — because this particular permutation on health care reform looks an awful lot like the incomplete draft of the HELP Committee’s bill that the CBO scored last month, which also lacked an employer mandate and a public option but contained an individual mandate. That bill, the CBO estimated, would cost about $1.0 trillion — but would only cover a net of about 16 million people. In contrast, the revised version of the HELP Committee’s bill, which did include both a public option and an employer mandate, would cost about the same amount but cover a net of 37 million people.
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Baucus’s bill makes a different trade-off. In order to placate business interests on the employer mandate, and what are frankly ideological interests on the public option, it sacrifices coverage. If I’m reading this right, in fact, 16 million might be on the high end in terms of the net gain in coverage. That’s because whereas the HELP Committee’s unfinished draft subsidized insurance at up to 500 percent of the poverty line (meaning $54,150 for an individual or $110,250 for a family of four), the assistance in Baucus’s draft would end for people making more than 300 percent of poverty ($32,490 for an individual or $66,150 for a four-person family).
The AP may be right that Baucus’s bill will cost less than $1 trillion, but it accomplishes that by shifting the burden to middle-income families, some of whom have poor balance sheets and will face a really tough choice between paying for health insurance they can’t quite afford and facing some kind of penalty.
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This is a pretty poor combination of attributes for a health care reform bill to have. If Baucus & Co. wanted to get the cost below $1 trillion, they could have chopped the subsidies down to, say, 350 percent of poverty, while keeping the employer mandate and the public option.
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