Many of the design principles for the insurance market exchanges in the Affordable Care Act were based on unproven, discredited, and frankly absurd conservative notions about the economagic of free markets.  But too many liberals refused to acknowledge this. During the height of the debate on the ACA, the inherently conservative and flawed nature of [...]

During the debate over Obamacare Ezra Klein was a huge proponent of  health insurance exchanges using only private insurance companies. He called the exchanges the number one cost control idea in the new law. From Klein March 22, 2010 in his list of “five most promising cost controls in the health-care bill”: (1) Create a [...]

If there is one good thing to come out of the passage of these bills, which are estimated to cost over 200,000 American jobs and increase the trade deficit by billions of dollars, I hope is is the message that it sends to those participating in #OWS protests across the country.

This is what happens to the things you believe in at the hands of Barack Obama, the Democratic party…and those like Ezra Klein who carry their water.

I’ve found one of the saddest yet most common defenses of President Obama’s handling of his job to be the weird argument that it simply wasn’t possible for him to do a better job, or to do anything different from what he did. It always reminds me of the mantra of the misguided extreme optimist [...]

I have, and always have had, tremendous respect for Cenk Uygur. His contract with his audience is that he will never put himself in a position where he cannot say what he really thinks.  And in turning down MSNBC’s offer to host a weekend show so he could give his audience a fair appraisal of what happened, he honors that contract.

Writers like, Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent, who have bought into the idea that that debt ceiling must be raised by August 2nd to avoid catastrophe, are very worried about this new Pew poll that found the country evenly divided on the dangers of the debt ceiling. The poll found that 39 percent thought we [...]

It is never a good idea to get focused on the politics instead of results of your policy. When you do you wind up making bad policy and still get hammered politically.

It is nice to see both Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias openly admitting that the Affordable Care Act is about as right-wing any insurance coverage expansion “reform” could be. From Yglesias’s The Sensible Conservative Alternative To The Affordable Care Act Is The Affordable Care Act: If you simply do what Ponnuru and Levin propose, every [...]

It is always nice to see more people come around to my stated belief that health insurance exchanges intended to make people be “smart shoppers” for very complex products is a truly failed idea. Paul Krugman made a very straightforward case against the concept this weekend: That’s the title of a blog post by Nathalie [...]

Today, Ezra Klein made the logical and concise case for why Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan wasn’t about health care cost control but just saving the government money by shifting more of the health care cost burden onto regular people. Ryan’s plan works differently. Let’s say health-care costs grow at 8 percent a year — [...]