Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has released a new report that indicates Gov. Deval Patrick’s goal of controlling health care cost by moving the state towards a global payment method is unlikely to produce real savings.

It seems that President Obama’s former senior health-care adviser, David Cutler, is following in the proud tradition of Jonathan Gruber by conveniently ignoring potentially huge cost-saving ideas to make Obama’s health care proposal sound better than it really is. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, David Cutler claims there have been 10 broad ideas offered [...]

For all those apologists who say we should absolutely pass a health care bill, even without a public option, because it still “has so many great consumer protections,” I have a rude awakening for you. The AP is reporting that Harry Reid quietly gutted one of the most important consumer protections in the bill, the [...]

Despite all the talk about “bending the cost curve,” President Obama and Harry Reid have declared all-out war on cost control. They are in the process of doing everything they can to kill Byron Dorgan’s bipartisan drug re-importation amendment. They have delayed the vote on his amendment for days (effectively filibustering their own bill), had [...]

Sen. Debbie Stabenow is prepared to kill the public option to make Joe Lieberman and Blanche Lincoln happy: Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)–a staunch public option supporter, told reporters she’d be happy with a health care bill without a public option, so long as it accomplishes the public option’s imperatives of lowering costs and providing competition. [...]

It is a good thing that Democrats are trying to put together a bill that will massively expand coverage while reducing the deficit and slightly reducing premiums for a majority of Americans. That is a serious accomplishment, and something to brag about. What the Senate bill does not do is take the serious steps that [...]

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 [...]