If you look at President Obama’s State of the Union address as primarily a political speech to kick off his re-election effort, you get a strong sense of what the Obama campaign thinks are his strengths and weaknesses. The auto rescue and several foreign policy successes made up a huge part of the speech.  But [...]

Since President Obama took office the percentage of uninsured people in America has been steadily raising and has now reached a new high. From Gallup: This rise in the number of uninsured is for the most part not the fault of the Obama administration. It is primarily the result of long term trends, rising health [...]

Jonathan Gruber, the economist who was a paid top adviser to the Obama administration on health care reform but didn’t disclosed the fact in media interviews at the time, continues his tradition of defending the Affordable Care Act with his special brand of half truths, distortions, extreme hyperbole and logically incoherent statements. In an interview [...]

The implementation of the new universal health care law adopted by Vermont earlier this year will result in system wide health care savings there of between 5.5 percent and 18.3 percent in the year 2020, according to a new report (PDF) by the Vermont Legislative Joint Fiscal Office. Vermont’s new health care system will be [...]

The percentage of Americans who don’t have health insurance continues to grow slowly, increasing slightly since last year according to the latest data from Gallup. An average of 16.8% of all American adults were uninsured in the first half of 2011, similar to the 16.4% in 2010. This percentage, however, has been edging up each [...]

With less than three years until most aspects of the new health care law start, only 10 states have passed legislation creating new health insurance exchanges according to a report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (PDF). The Affordable Care Act requires states to set up these exchanges; and if a state fails [...]

During the health care reform debate the Democrats put an absurd amount of focus on getting a pretty CBO score for the law. President Obama said the new law must reduce the deficit and have net outlays below an entirely arbitrary $900 billion dollars. To achieve this, the Democrats made some truly bizarre policy decisions, [...]

The Affordable Care Act will eventually start requiring health insurance policies to be explained in a simpler to understand manner. While this a good thing there is still the huge problem that simpler is not the same thing as “simple.” Insurance policies in this country are just inherently complex, making it almost impossible for regular people who will be using the new exchanges to actually know what is the best policy for them.

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.

When deciding how to move forward with our roughly $100 billion a year war in Afghanistan, President Obama apparently didn’t even take into consideration the issue of cost at least according to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.
Apparently the position of our government that when it comes to saving the lives of regular Americans it will only be done if it can done on a tight budget but when it comes to killing foreign people cost is no obj