[ed. note: This is another post in Firedoglake’s semi-regular series exposing and exploring ways in which the federal government spends vast sums or forsakes vital revenue in a perpetual, profligate and pathetic quest to assure corporate America that the elected representatives of we the people are really, truly, madly, deeply “business friendly.” With each story, [...]

Our long-term deficit problem is due basically to the incredibly high cost of health care if we fixed that we won’t have a long term deficit problem. The reason our health care costs so much is that Congress allows providers to engage in practices that rip off the public and the government. A great example [...]

During a conference call with reports Peter Orszag defended the Senate health care reform bill’s minor cost-control measures: Orszag suggested that others who have questioned the bill haven’t been as thorough as Brownstein. He noted that The Atlantic reporter identified specific pages of the bill while interviewing him for the piece. “I would say to [...]

I don’t know why anyone is surprised by the CMS’s conclusion that HR 3962 would result in a very minor increase in overall national health care spending. The estimated effects of H.R. 3962 on overall national health expenditures (NHE) are shown in table 5. In aggregate, we estimate that for calendar years 2010 through 2019 [...]

The Republican’s have just released their “alternative” bill to the Democrats’ health care reform legislation. It is frankly a meaningless, very long press release, filled with some really bad ideas. The Republicans did find basically only one section of the Democrats’ reform bill they really liked. In fact, the Republicans thought it was such a [...]