Must-Reads:
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Jared Bernstein: Paul Ryan’s New Budget: Orwell Would Blush: “It’s a lot like his old ones, as you’d expect, with a few new wrinkles…. Here’s pretty much all you need to know: his cuts to Pell grants–college tuition assistance for students from low-income families–comes under the section called ‘Expanding Opportunity’. ‘Strengthening the safety net’ is actually block granting SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid. ‘Ending cronyism’ is repealing Dodd-Frank. Orwell would blush.”
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Aaron Carroll: Look, exchanges are either evil, or they’re not.: “From the Fiscal Year 2015 House Budget Resolution: ‘Starting in 2024, seniors (those who first become eligible by turning 65 on or after January 1, 2024) would be given a choice of private plans competing alongside the traditional fee-for-service Medicare program on a newly created Medicare Exchange. Medicare would provide a premium-support payment either to pay for or offset the premium of the plan…. The Medicare recipient of the future would choose, from a list of guaranteed-coverage options, a health plan that best suits his or her needs. This is not a voucher program. A Medicare premium-support payment would be paid, by Medicare, directly to the plan or the fee-for-service program to subsidize its cost. The program would operate in a manner similar to that of the Medicare prescription-drug benefit…. This approach to strengthening the Medicare program——which is based on a long history of bipartisan reform plans——would ensure security and affordability for seniors now and into the future….’ If I took this language, swapped in ‘Americans’ for ‘seniors’ and ‘ACA’ for ‘Medicare’, this would almost be a perfect description of the state exchanges that are part of the Obamacare…. I know that exchanges are, to some conservatives… preferable… [to] the single-payer-like Medicare system we have… that these same exchanges are less preferable… than the status quo ante. What I don’t understand, however, are people who declare community-rated, guaranteed-issue exchanges some unholy end-of-days totalitarian plan to destroy freedom when they’re part of the ACA, yet completely awesome and budget-saving when they’re part of Medicare.”
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Austin Frakt: Job lock: Conclusion: “The ACA only addresses certain, but not all, conditions that give rise to job lock and not completely. If you combine this fact with the prior paragraph, you’ll notice that we have a situation in which we neither fully know the extent of the problem nor the extent to which the ACA will address it. In their 2002 literature review, Gruber and Madrian also commented on the fact that we do not know the full welfare implications of job lock. As best I can tell, the literature has not advanced…. Nevertheless, the labor market distortions of the pre-ACA insurance landscape… are real… weighed heavily on the minds of economists… motivated some of the provisions of the health reform law.”
Continue reading “Things to Read at Dinnertime on April 2, 2014”