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The Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee (or, HELP) reported details of its proposed health care reform legislation this week. The details included specifics on the employer mandate included…

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) is floating the following trial balloon: Congress would fund part of health reform with a cap on the tax exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance but only at a level “significantly above” the cost of the standard plan offered to federal employees. The measure would also exclude policies bargained [...]

Until now, unions have been among the strongest critics of paying for health reform by limiting the tax exclusion for employer sponsored insurance. But on Monday, a well-connected labor lobbyist told me a deal could be done. “It all depends,” he said, “on what the cap looks like.”
Remarkably, in just a few weeks, lawmakers seem to [...]

It’s looking more and more likely that federal health reform will look very similar to what’s going on in Massachusetts.
As I’ve written in the past, expanding coverage is easy, controlling costs is not. And Massachusetts has taken the route of least political resistance and did the former.
I’ve written previously that expanding coverage without re-aligning [...]

President Obama appears to be ever-so-slowly backing away from his hard-edged campaign opposition to capping the $246 billion employer-sponsored insurance tax exclusion as a way to help pay for health reform.
It’s the typical Washington dance. First, on June 2, the President met privately with two dozen Senate Democrats to talk about health reform. Senate [...]

Despite the poor shape of the American health system, public preference is the limiting factor in how far we can change the system.
Ezra Klein notes the lessons learned from 1994, saying that there is a status-quo bias, and that people “want more options,” and “don’t want to be forced out of their current arrangements.”
This is [...]

Does the media accurately report medical news?
According to a poll from the ACP Internist, most respondents don’t think so. Some of the problems come from the academic medical center PR departments, which either “overstate results or don’t include important caveats when pitching study results to the media.” Often times, these press releases make [...]

Everybody gets a tax cut!
To look at TPC’s latest estimates of the tax provisions of President Obama’s 2010 budget, you’d think there was no deficit of $1.84 trillion, or that the White House has no need to pay for an ambitious health reform plan. Or more education spending. Or more infrastructure construction.
According to [...]

MedPAC, the obscure commission that advises Congress on the inner workings of the vast Medicare system, could be headed for the health-reform spotlight.
Talking yesterday with Senate Democrats about how to pay for his envisioned health overhaul, President Obama argued specifically in favor of expanding the powers of MedPAC, formally known as the Medicare Payment Advisory [...]

President Obama is trying to put some numbers on his argument that spending a lot of money on health reform in the short run will lead to savings over the long haul.
A report out from the president’s economic advisers today makes the “economic case for health reform,” as the advisers put it.
Say, for instance, we [...]