Must-Reads:
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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.”
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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.”
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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…”
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* 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”