Tag Archives: Health Care Policy

Scoring The Health Care Bill

March 19, 2010 – 7:51 am

Democrats are ecstatic about the score given to the health care bill by the Congressional Budget Office. One wonders why, given a close analysis of the bill and the score. Let’s turn the mike over to Jeffrey Anderson:

For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs. First, it includes 2010 as the initial year. As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time. Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009. But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare. If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments

Could “Deem And Pass” Be Constitutionally Challenged?

March 18, 2010 – 11:40 pm

At the very least, it appears to be worth a shot. As mentioned, unlike the case in Marshall Field, an actual Constitutional provision–Art. I, Sec. 7–is implicated. As Jonathan Adler notes, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals may be willing to analogize any challenge to the one that was issued in Public Citizen, thus causing it to rule the same way that it did in Public Citizen. But since the Supreme Court may well think differently, and since there is ample cause for it to think differently, a Constitutional challenge to the use of the “deem and pass” rule should very much be found to be on the table.

Of course, if we could just have a straight up-or-down vote in the House on health care reform, perhaps we could avoid any litigation altogether. But that apparently is not going to be a luxury we can enjoy, now is it?

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Tea Leaves

March 18, 2010 – 6:45 am

So, there may be no vote on the health care package this weekend because House Democrats suddenly decided that they want to wait for the CBO score? I don’t know about anyone else, but I read this as meaning that the House Democratic leadership believes–the pledges of “yes” votes from the likes of Dennis Kucinich notwithstanding–that they don’t have the votes.

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The Illogic And Injustice Of Deem And Pass

March 17, 2010 – 6:36 am

Law professor and former Tenth Circuit judge Michael McConnell puts the issue succinctly on Speaker Pelosi’s proposed “deem and pass” scheme. I don’t have a WSJ subscription, but fortunately, Michael Cannon does, and he has excerpted the pertinent analysis:

Under Article I, Section 7, passage of one bill cannot be deemed to be enactment of another.

The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form. As the Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the “exact text” must be approved by one house; the other house must approve “precisely the same text.”

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Health Care Reform Myths

March 16, 2010 – 6:44 am

Robert Samuelson demolishes them:

How often, for example, have you heard the emergency-room argument? The uninsured, it’s said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That’s expensive and ineffective. Once they’re insured, they’ll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it’s untrue.

A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was “more convenient” to go to the emergency room or they couldn’t “get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed.” If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency-room use may increase.

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The Ultimate Cop-Out

March 16, 2010 – 6:23 am

Think you’ve seen it all when it comes to the health care reform debate? Well, think again:

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic — known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass” — has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

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The Health Care Reform Christmas Tree

March 15, 2010 – 5:31 am

Apparently, special deals in the health care bill are just fine, so long as they affect more than one state. I won’t be surprised if after a while, even that condition becomes negotiable.

No more evidence is needed to conclude that the health care reform effort has essentially turned into a farce. Nonetheless, more such evidence will likely be forthcoming.

It’s too bad that the White House didn’t spend more time working with people like Paul Ryan on how to responsibly reform health care. Instead, it spent time demonizing him for putting out a fiscal roadmap and for trying to offer alternative ideas on health care. Just about every Republican will remember the way the White House treated Ryan and those associated with him the next time a call for “bipartisanship” comes out from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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“But Republicans Used Reconciliation Too!”

March 13, 2010 – 1:16 pm

The chief excuse used to justify the Democrats pending use of reconciliation to pass a supplemental health care bill–once the Senate’s version is presumably passed by the House–is that since Republicans used reconciliation in the past, Democrats can use it too. And specifically, since Republicans used reconciliation for things like “tax cuts for the rich!”, Democrats can use it to pass health care.

James Joyner points out that Democrats shouldn’t be allowed to get away with making this argument:

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That Stubborn Parliamentary Procedure

March 12, 2010 – 7:07 am

I am sure that at this point, the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats would be delighted and relieved to ram health care reform through Congress. I almost don’t blame them; the process has been long and arduous, to say the least. But the rules keep getting in the way:

Republicans said they won a parliamentary victory as they try to fight Democrats’ efforts to pass legislation to overhaul the U.S. health-care system.

Republicans said President Barack Obama has to sign a Senate health-care bill into law before the House and Senate can approve changes to it under a process called reconciliation. The Senate parliamentarian told Republicans that a reconciliation bill has to “make changes in law,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“This would be another headwind for Democrats in the House” who oppose provisions in the Senate bill, said John Sullivan, a health-care analyst at Boston-based Leerink Swann & Co. “Their biggest fear has been that they vote for the Senate version and they never get the relief they’re looking for.”

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The Very Unpopular President

March 12, 2010 – 6:47 am

Well, I’ve seen better.

The current poll standings are bad enough, but Patrick Caddell and Doug Schoen point out how much more unpopular the President and Democrats can become:

In “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman asked, “Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests?” Her assessment of self-deception — “acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts” — captures the conditions that are gripping President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership as they renew their efforts to enact health-care reform.

Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November. In the wake of the stinging loss in Massachusetts, there was a moment when the president and the Democratic leadership seemed to realize the reality of the health-care situation. Yet like some seductive siren of Greek mythology, the lure of health-care reform has arisen again.

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Attention, Bart Stupak

March 11, 2010 – 12:10 am

The Senate Democrats won’t allow your anti-abortion language through on reconciliation if the House passes the Senate’s health care reform bill.

Something to consider as you decide whether to give your vote, and the votes of the House members in your coalition to the House Democratic leadership when the Senate’s health care reform bill comes up for a vote in the House.

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments

Obama Overhyped

March 3, 2010 – 11:30 pm

I am late to this, but while the President is certainly a smart man, perhaps hosannas to his intelligence ought to be tempered by the fact that his current health care reform stance is in many ways diametrically opposed to the stance that he took during the election campaign, and that one of the anecdotes he used to advance his current arguments concerning health care reform revealed a less-than-intelligent side to the President.

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments
- March 19, 2010 -

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