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President Obama gave a speech to the American Medical Association on Monday. A significant portion of the speech concerned the state of health care in the United States.
What struck me…

Senator Edward Kennedy has completed and submitted a draft health care plan that is modeled after the plan in Massachusetts. This is in conjunction with the Obama Administration’s goal to…

President Obama is taking as many steps as he can to promote his plan for health care reform. Just recently he turned to the nation’s governors for support. …

As I promised in last Friday’s TaxVox post, here is TPC’s estimate of the 2012 distribution of President Obama’s tax proposals in the 2009 budget, measured against the administration’s chosen baseline. That baseline looks a lot like current policy: extend the Bush tax cuts, index and make permanent the 2009 estate tax, and permanently patch [...]

President Obama hopes so.
But, as Abraham Verghese writes, we can’t be so sure of that. The great cost-cutting hopes proposed by the government, which also include information technology and preventive medicine, all have very little data that show there will be any meaningful cost savings.
Are we focusing on the wrong things for cost control? [...]

Following last month’s release of the Treasury Green Book, the Tax Policy Center reworked its distributional analysis of the tax proposals in President Obama’s 2010 budget. We learned many new details about specific tax provisions, including the practical definition of who has enough income to face higher taxes. The bottom line? You have to have [...]

Here we go again. I posted yesterday on a new TPC analysis of the tax cuts in President Obama’s proposed 2010 budget. The conclusion: Nearly everyone, even most of the very wealthy, would enjoy a big tax break. This, I suggested, was not smart, given the nation’s huge deficit and Obama’s ambitious priorities. 
Not surprisingly, a commenter—AMTbuff—called [...]

It doesn’t make any sense. After revealing his own history of drug use, why on earth has Obama refused to fund needle exchange programs?
Presumably, despite his own past, he…

Beth Garrett, President Obama’s choice to be Assistant Treasury Secretary for Tax Policy, has withdrawn her name from consideration. Beth didn’t say why, except for the usual boilerplate about her “personal family situation.” However, the Bloomberg story on her announcement quotes a friend, lobbyist Jeff Trinca, as saying she pulled out because she was unwilling [...]

Sonia Sotomayor has been named as a potential favorite to fill the upcoming Supreme Court opening.
But she has type I diabetes, and diabetes blogger Amy Tenderich discusses whether this will work against her.
As she puts it, this can be a ground-breaking decision, “where survivorship with chronic illness meets the glass ceiling.” There are arguments [...]