I was debating whether I should do one final piece to show that the health care bill about to be signed into law lacks serious cost control. Fortunately, Ezra Klein, who is a big supporter of the bill, accidentally did my job for me. In his piece “The five most promising cost controls in the [...]

Before Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts, Democrats were still foolishly trying to pass health care reform while adhering to the insane 60-vote myth in the Senate. Under this scenario, while I’m disappointed that union leaders could only secure some small improvements to the excise tax and a special carve out for their members, I can [...]

It’s not every day that the head of the DCCC takes on the President, the Senate and the entire Democratic leadership of the House to defy passage of their hand-crafted legislation on their signature issue. But Chris Van Hollen has said that the House will not pass the Senate bill without changes, as the Senate and the White House are demanding.

Why would the man charged with getting House Democrats elected in 2010 do such a thing?

Now that Martha Coakley has lost, it seems that there are only two paths to passing health care reform–and both use reconciliation. One path would be a new, redesigned bill passed using reconciliation. The other would be to force the House to pass the Senate bill as is. Given that the Senate bill is unlikely [...]

CNN has a new poll out showing that a large majority of Americans prefer the House’s plan of taxing the rich to pay for health care reform: According to the poll, 61 percent of the public favor the House provision, which taxes people with high incomes regardless of the kind of health insurance they have. [...]

You could see this one coming down Sepulveda, ever since the Senate started doing carve-outs for individual unions to exempt them from the excise tax: Unions tentatively struck a deal Tuesday to exempt collectively bargained healthcare plans from a tax on high-cost plans expected to be used to help raise revenue for the healthcare overhaul. [...]

The so called “Cadillac” tax is, in reality, a teacher tax. It taxes plans based on their cost, but not their generosity. As anyone who has bought health insurance will tell you, the biggest factor in determining the cost of insurance is not how generous the coverage is, but the sex, age, and health status [...]