Month: January 2014

Must-Reads:

1. Don Taylor: Private Score of Burr, Coburn, Hatch Plan: “The rage machine that has been perfected to argue against the ACA could get plenty cranked up…. Burr, Coburn, Hatch… achieve coverage expansions via an increase in individual based coverage… at the expense of employer sponsored coverage… [via] ‘an influx of consumers enrolling in low-cost narrow network plans.’… On the overall federal budget… the action is achieved by the capping of the tax exclusion of employer sponsored health insurance…. Medicaid changes… yield around $150 Billion in savings over 10 years, and the savings from medical malpractice reform are essentially a rounding error…. Burr and Coburn missed a big opportunity in January 2010…. [With] Snowe… [and] Collins… [they] could have gotten a lot once Scott Brown was elected. Instead they choose full opposition, and gross over-statements in their arguments against the ACA, especially given the proposal they now put forth… create[d] and exacerbate[d] the political culture that will make it so hard for their proposal to be given the subtle, and nuanced listen that it deserves.”

2. Larry Summers: on The Lead with Jake Tapper: “You got to have some perspective here. Franklin Roosevelt said of the wealthy, ‘They hate me and I welcome their hatred’; top tax rates on the wealthy in this country in the 1950s were 90%; for most of the Reagan administration, they were well above where they are today; President Kennedy sent the FBI to investigate steel executives because he didn’t like a price increase that took place in the steel industry. Forget talking about Andrew Jackson and the like on where the rhetoric in recent days is, compared to where it’s been through much of our history…. We need a much more inclusive prosperity than we’ve had. And it doesn’t work for the country, it doesn’t work for the legitimacy of our institutions when most of the benefits of economic growth, are going to a very small fraction of the population, people like Mr. Perkins. The right concern for any president, the right concern for any political leader, is with the average incomes of those in the vast middle. On that standard, we’ve got to do better.”

3. Jonathan Cohn: People Who Hate Obamacare Would Hate the Republican Alternative Even More: “‘One of the great liberal conceits of the age is that to extend insurance coverage to the uninsured and make sure the sick do not fall through the cracks requires the centralized political management of the health sector’, says a triumphalist editorial in National Review. ‘The great service that Senators Coburn, Hatch, and Burr have performed is to explode that myth.’ Sound too good to be true? That’s because it is…. Early in the week, Coburn and his advisers suggested their plan included a large reduction in the existing tax break for employer-sponsored insurance. Then, on Wednesday, they announced that the reduction would be much smaller…”

4. * Neera Tanden:* If at First You Don’t Succeed: “Although it’s been seen as largely quixotic, the ceaseless bid to destroy the Affordable Care Act has nonetheless been marked by an array of strategic approaches—some quite inventive…. For those who may have lost count, here’s a brief review of how House Republicans have gone after the law—which proves, if nothing else, that persistence doesn’t always pay…”

Continue reading “Things to Read on the Afternoon of January 31, 2014” →

* Neera Tanden:* If at First You Don’t Succeed: “Although it’s been seen as largely quixotic, the ceaseless bid to destroy the Affordable Care Act has nonetheless been marked by an array of strategic approaches—some quite inventive….

For those who may have lost count, here’s a brief review of how House Republicans have gone after the law—which proves, if nothing else, that persistence doesn’t always pay…

The answer to Nicholas Bagley’s questions is: The idea is that the worse you can make things under ObamaCare, the more likely there is to be constructive change because only an intolerable status quo can generate pressures to overcome inertia.

This is usually called a “Leninist argument”. But did Lenin ever actually say it? The only person I can find actually saying it is Plekhanov?

Nicholas Bagley: Why are conservatives so happy about the exchange litigation?: “What would be the payoff of invalidating the IRS rule allowing people on federally facilitated exchanges to get tax credits?… The exchange litigation isn’t a game: in the unlikely event that it succeeds, millions of middle-class Americans would lose their health insurance and millions more would have to pay a lot more for it. Even if you hate the ACA, how exactly is that a good thing?…

The hope seems to be that it might lead to the unraveling of the ACA—that it could, as George Will put it in a recent column, “blow [the ACA] to smithereens.” But the ACA isn’t as fragile as its opponents think it is. Consider the Medicaid expansion. Although it was expected to take hold nationwide, that expectation was dashed when the Supreme Court made it easier for the states to refuse to expand their Medicaid programs. As a result, the ACA now applies differentially across the states—the poor in California are covered, for example, and the poor in Texas aren’t. The exchange litigation, if successful, would result in a similar patchwork. But if disparate Medicaid coverage hasn’t unraveled the Act, why should the disparate availability of tax credits?

Continue reading “Did Lenin Actually Ever Say: “The Worse, the Better”?” →

Jonathan Cohn: People Who Hate Obamacare Would Hate the Republican Alternative Even More: “‘One of the great liberal conceits of the age is that to extend insurance coverage to the uninsured and make sure the sick do not fall through the cracks requires the centralized political management of the health sector’, says a triumphalist editorial in National Review. ‘The great service that Senators Coburn, Hatch, and Burr have performed is to explode that myth.’ Sound too good to be true? That’s because it is….

Early in the week, Coburn and his advisers suggested their plan included a large reduction in the existing tax break for employer-sponsored insurance. Then, on Wednesday, they announced that the reduction would be much smaller…. 

Continue reading “Morning Must-Read: ObamaCare and Burr-Coburn-Hatch PCare: Which Is Beelzebub and Which Is Satan Again?” →

Don Taylor: Private Score of Burr, Coburn, Hatch Plan: “The rage machine that has been perfected to argue against the ACA could get plenty cranked up….

Burr, Coburn, Hatch… achieve coverage expansions via an increase in individual based coverage… at the expense of employer sponsored coverage… [via] ‘an influx of consumers enrolling in low-cost narrow network plans.’… On the overall federal budget… the action is achieved by the capping of the tax exclusion of employer sponsored health insurance…. Medicaid changes… yield around $150 Billion in savings over 10 years, and the savings from medical malpractice reform are essentially a rounding error….

Burr and Coburn missed a big opportunity in January 2010…. [With] Snowe… [and] Collins… [they] could have gotten a lot once Scott Brown was elected. Instead they choose full opposition, and gross over-statements in their arguments against the ACA, especially given the proposal they now put forth… create[d] and exacerbate[d] the political culture that will make it so hard for their proposal to be given the subtle, and nuanced listen that it deserves.

5-1 instead of 3-1 age premium bands. Continuous-coverage window to community rating instead of mandated purchase and community rating. A different and stricter cap on the tax-preference for employer-sponsored insurance. Definitely in the ACA family.

And that’s the problem for Burr, Coburn, and Hatch: If–as they have been saying for four years now–ObamaCare is Satan, then this is Beelzebub, if not worse.

Live at Project Syndicate: BERKELEY – Back in the late 1980’s, Japan seemingly could do no wrong in economists’ eyes. They saw a clear edge in Japan’s competitiveness relative to the North Atlantic across a broad range of high-tech precision and mass-production industries manufacturing tradable goods. They also saw an economy that, since reconstruction began after World War II, had significantly outperformed the expected growth of European economies. And they saw an economy growing considerably faster than North Atlantic economies had when they possessed the same absolute and relative economy-wide productivity level.
Continue reading “The United States Economy Today in the Transpacific Mirror: Thursday Focus: January 30, 2014” →

Larry Summers: on The Lead with Jake Tapper: “You got to have some perspective here.

Franklin Roosevelt said of the wealthy, ‘They hate me and I welcome their hatred’; top tax rates on the wealthy in this country in the 1950s were 90%; for most of the Reagan administration, they were well above where they are today; President Kennedy sent the FBI to investigate steel executives because he didn’t like a price increase that took place in the steel industry. Forget talking about Andrew Jackson and the like on where the rhetoric in recent days is, compared to where it’s been through much of our history….

We need a much more inclusive prosperity than we’ve had. And it doesn’t work for the country, it doesn’t work for the legitimacy of our institutions when most of the benefits of economic growth, are going to a very small fraction of the population, people like Mr. Perkins. The right concern for any president, the right concern for any political leader, is with the average incomes of those in the vast middle. On that standard, we’ve got to do better.

Cardiff Garcia: The Fed’s converging misses on inflation and unemployment: “The unemployment rate… has been falling quickly towards the Fed’s central tendency forecast of 5.2-5.8 per cent for the long-term rate….

Inflation (1.1 and 0.9 per cent respectively) [has] remained well below the Fed’s explicit 2 per cent target–as they have for nearly two years…. If… current trends hold, the extent of the Fed’s miss on inflation will start to converge with its miss on its full-employment mandate. To increasingly emphasise the former as a signal that policy will remain loose… wouldn’t be too difficult to justify.

Jay Rosen: Keep me informed: parsing the logic of Ezra Klein’s move to Vox Media » Pressthink: “If you want to understand… look at these phrases from his announcement tour. They are all signaling the same thing: a shift from supply side logic in the production of news to demand-side: Keep me informed. Help me understand this. Don’t give me updates when you have them, but when I need them to stay on top of things. Missing background often prevents me from understanding the news; solve that problem for me and I will rely on you for my information. Here’s Klein:

New information is not always–and perhaps not even usually–the most important information for understanding a topic.

We are better than ever at telling people what’s happening, but not nearly good enough at giving them the crucial contextual information necessary to understand what’s happened. We treat the emphasis on the newness of information as an important virtue rather than a painful compromise.

The news business, however, is just a subset of the informing-our-audience business–and that’s the business we aim to be in.

The product is not “news” but understanding and that steady state of feeling well informed. The news system we have is simply not organized that way. And so it’s no surprise to me that Ezra Klein had to leave the Washington Post to find backers who understood what he wanted to do.