Ezra Klein: March 21, 2010 - March 27, 2010

Reconciliation

Today I looked at "the largest yielding of sovereignty from the Congress since the creation of the Federal Reserve," the ways in which the conservative strategy on health care actually kinda worked, and talked with George W. Bush's Medicare director...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 6:38 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (8)
 
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Senate rules: Not as important as some would have you think

Paul Kane has a great piece on the freshman Democratic senators who're tired of serving in a body that functions like a cross between Robert's Rules of Order and an SNL skit. But most telling are the sage warnings of...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 6:19 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (10)
Categories:  Senate  
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The win-win politics of health-care reform

This is an interesting tidbit from Noam Scheiber: On Wednesday, Obama told Dodd and his House counterpart, Barney Frank, that he could more or less live with either version, according to an official knowledgeable about the meeting. (Though he...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 5:50 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (10)
Categories:  Financial Regulation  
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A thought on financial innovation

We talk a lot about "financial innovation." This sounds pretty good, though it turns out to be pretty hard for anyone to make a very good case in its favor (this is the best attempt -- warning: pdf -- I've...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 5:08 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (9)
Categories:  Financial Regulation  
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Netanyahu's odd Iran strategy

Back when I wrote about things that weren't health-care reform, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about Israel. And now that we're slowly reaching a time when I can write about things that aren't health-care reform, Israel...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 4:26 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (22)
Categories:  Israel/Palestine  
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Can we control costs without Congress?

It is a sad commentary on Congress that the most promising cost control in the Affordable Care Act is the one that takes much of the responsibility for controlling costs away from Congress and hands it off to an independent...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 2:46 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (33)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform  
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Lunch break

Is this the future of text? Commentary here....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 12:00 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (9)
 
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Looking to the midterm election

Zooming out a bit, the midterm elections are still more likely to be about the economy than health-care reform, and Dan Gross thinks Democrats are headed for a better-than-expected performance. "Fast-forward to October 2010," Gross writes. "Assuming recent trends continue,...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 10:54 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (39)
Categories:  2010 Midterms  
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Rounding up the post-passage health-care reform polls

Nate Silver looks at the post-passage polling on health-care reform. The USA Today/Gallup poll that showed a sharp jump looks to have been an outlier. The emerging picture is that the bill got a bit more popular, Obama's handling...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 10:38 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (10)
Categories:  Polls  
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What do conservatives believe about health care?

Conservative strategist Patrick Ruffini has a searching and skeptical post on his party's approach to health-care reform. "On health care, I have no idea what our basic guiding principle is," he writes. "Seriously, I don't." He compares that to...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 10:12 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (71)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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Mark McClellan on the Affordable Care Act: 'It's an important step.'

Mark McClellan is the director of the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution. Before that, he served on George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. Bush subsequently appointed him head of the Food and Drug Administration,...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 9:02 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (24)
Categories:  Health Reform , Interviews  
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Beneath the Obama agenda, the Obama agenda

Last night, the House of Representatives passed the reconciliation fixes. "And oh, by the way," writes Jon Cohn, "they managed to completely revamp the student loan program along the way. At any other time in recent memory, that would...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 26, 2010; 7:48 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (21)
 
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Reconciliation

Today, I tried to clearly explain how the individual mandate will work, made some predictions for health-care reform and lamented the right's rejection of Frum-ism. Here's what I didn't get to: 1) CBPP wades into the debate over double-counting and...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 7:10 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (17)
 
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Conservatives reject Frum-ism

Looks like David Frum has been fired from the American Enterprise Institute. The sin appears to be his recent criticism that lockstep Republican opposition to the health-care bill sacrificed conservative policy goals at the altar of short-term electoral incentives. This,...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 5:20 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (103)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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Relationships would be more straightforward this way

The trailer for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is pretty great:...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 4:37 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (11)
 
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Some thoughts on hyping the fringes

Ben Smith makes some very good points about how Democrats are hyping the death threats and vandals and extremists in order to define conservative opposition to the bill as nuts. This is in sharp contrast, he argues, to the Obama...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 3:28 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (32)
 
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11 predictions for the health-care reform bill

I'm a little confused by this post Megan McArdle has written saying that I refuse to make testable predictions regarding the eventual impact of health-care reform. As I told her in the e-mail exchange that led to her post, I...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 2:30 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (39)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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Senate passes reconciliation fixes 56-43

Of the Democrats, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, and Mark Pryor voted against the package. Now, because it's slightly changed from the version the House considered, it will held back there for final passage. The House vote is expected to be...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 1:54 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (12)
 
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Will health-care reform change the politics of financial regulation?

I got some questions about this in my chat, and various senators are making the argument, so here's my bold take: yes and no. In the "yes" category: If health-care reform had failed, Democrats would've been desperate going into financial...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 1:49 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (7)
Categories:  Financial Regulation  
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Chat transcript: We get deep into the bill in this one

New York, NY: Hi Ezra: I am an emergency physician in New York and have been following your reporting with great interest. Many of my patients are asking me about the future of "pre-existing conditions" and denial of coverage to...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 1:09 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (11)
 
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Lunch break

I'm liking the new Broken Bells album....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 12:30 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (8)
 
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How does the individual mandate work?

So long as legal challenges to the individual mandate are in the news, we might as well be clear about what the mandate is, and how it works. The individual mandate is a requirement that all individuals who can afford...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 11:55 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (74)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform  
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Tom Toles is worth a thousand words

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 11:52 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)
 
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Live chat today

Submit questions here....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 11:40 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)
 
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'Garbage, in one word'

James Galbraith is not impressed with Alan Greenspan's defense of his record: In 66 pages, Mr. Greenspan fails to use the word "responsibility" even once. The word "blame" does not appear. The word "mistake" occurs once; financial firms made them....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 10:00 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (16)
Categories:  Financial Crisis  
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Court v. Health Care?

Scott Lemieux has a sensible take on the Supreme Court's likely response to legal challenges to health-care reform, and how much Bush v. Gore should or shouldn't play into our thinking on that....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 8:46 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (4)
 
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Vote-a-rama update

The Senate worked pretty through last night, with exhausted Democrats fending off amendments from exhausted Republicans. "These [amendments] have only one purpose," tweeted Sen. Claire McCaskill. "Obstruct and delay. This is just a game. Hope they will figure out it's...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 25, 2010; 8:25 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (11)
 
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Reconciliation

Today I looked at how the health-care law might evolve, explained the "vote-a-rama" that's happening in the Senate tonight, and looked again at the Supreme Court and health care. Here's what I didn't get to: 1) Tom Friedman's got the...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 7:22 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (5)
 
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We have something to fear from fear-mongering itself

I don't want to exaggerate the importance of the death threats being made against congressmen who voted for health-care reform. Nuts are nuts. But there is a danger to the sort of rhetoric the GOP has used over the...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 5:50 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (192)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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The risk of health-care reform

The polarizing forces of a legislative debate have a tendency to amplify the certainty of supporters and magnify the doubts of advocates. So I'd recommend Ruth Marcus's skeptical, pro-reform column. I think she actually overstates the amount of disagreement there...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 4:20 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (18)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform  
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A primer on 'too big to fail'

David Min offers perhaps the clearest explanation of the "too big to fail" problem that you'll find anywhere: “Too big to fail” is best understood as a bank panic problem, and has arisen as the result of two developments in...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 3:16 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (7)
Categories:  Financial Regulation  
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The Supreme Court, nominations and the individual mandate

Now this is unexpected: In oral arguments for New Process Steel v. National Labor Relations Board, Chief Justice John Roberts and deputy solicitor general Neil Katyal got into a dispute over the three vacancies on the National Labor Relations...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 2:50 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (22)
Categories:  Health Reform , Legal  
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Health care and the election

I'm pretty skeptical that the GOP's strategy to force Senate Democrats to take embarrassing votes on the reconciliation bill will mean much in the November elections. Most voters don't follow the minutiae of congressional procedure, but nor are they stone-cold...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 12:43 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (59)
Categories:  2010 Midterms , Health Reform  
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Lunch break

I've never forgotten Stephen Waldman's admonition that "one of the great errors in modern policy is to confuse disclosure with information." The fact that we're forcing, say, credit card companies to disclose things doesn't mean anyone can understand what they're...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 12:38 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (5)
 
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Some thoughts on how the health-care law will evolve

The Internet is alive with the sound of health-care reform scenarios. See Douthat, Cowen, Yglesias, etc. It's difficult, of course, to predict what the system will look like in 20 years. About the only confident prediction is that there will...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 12:07 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (30)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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An attack on inequality

"For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform," writes David Leonhart, "at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 11:07 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (35)
Categories:  Inequality  
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Time to stop talking about the Senate bill

A reader gently corrects me: Your posts today keep referring to it as the health-care reform "bill." But it isn't a bill any longer--it's the LAW! So you might want to try to adjust your mindset. Noted....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 10:54 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (10)
 
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Vote-a-rama cometh

Yesterday, the Republicans' gambit to derail the vote on the reconciliation fixes was thrown out by the Senate parliamentarian. That's not the end of their options, but it means they're left trying to slow the bill down rather than stop...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 10:35 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (20)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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More trouble for the repeal effort

"There is non-controversial stuff here like the preexisting conditions exclusion and those sorts of things," Sen. John Cornyn said. "We are not interested in repealing that. And that is frankly a distraction." As Ramesh Ponnuru points out, that's basically game...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 9:33 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (14)
 
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Senate Republicans refuse to work past 2 p.m. [Updated!]

"There is a little-known rule in the Senate stating that hearings can’t happen after 2:00 p.m. each day without unanimous consent," explains Amanda Terkel. "However, every day, at the start of business, the Senate generally agrees, by unanimous consent, to...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 9:14 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (53)
 
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Tom Toles is worth a thousand words

By Ezra Klein  |  March 24, 2010; 9:09 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (7)
 
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Reconciliation

Today I wrote about why legal challenges to the health-care reform bill are unlikely to work and wouldn't much matter even if they did, looked at whether the Republican strategy of opposition to health-care reform served them well, and watched...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 7:25 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (19)
 
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Repeal drive loses steam

Republicans were using the word "repeal" a lot in the hours after the House voted to pass the health-care reform bill. But as the hours turn to days, they're talking about repeal less, qualifying it more, and even finding...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 6:33 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (63)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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What does the bill do for prevention?

Dr. Jeff Levi is executive director of the Trust for America’s Health and a member of the faculty at the George Washington School of Health Policy. I spoke to him today about the prevention components of the health-care bill. So...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 6:28 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (11)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform , Interviews  
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Poll: Health-care reform more popular after passage than before

One of the predictions that I and many others had about the health-care reform bill was that it would become more popular after passage than it was before passage. Voters like success, the media covers winners more positively than...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 4:57 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (39)
Categories:  Polls  
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Sen. Judd Gregg explains the Republican strategy on reconciliation

My colleague Frank Ahrens chats with Sen. Judd Gregg about the GOP's strategy for obstructing the reconciliation package. It looks grim for Gregg. His big play was to scare the House Democrats by saying 310(g) over and again. Gregg...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 1:54 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (14)
 
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Republicans might reform health-care reform, but they won't repeal it

When people think about the GOP's threats to repeal the health-care bill, they need to think about the actual votes that Republicans would need, and when they would take place. In the short term, they'd need not just a...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 12:54 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (45)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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Health-care reform is now law

The president has signed the bill. I know this has confused some, but health-care reform is now law. The Senate's vote on the reconciliation fixes will modify that law, but President Obama just signed a universal health-care structure into...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 12:00 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (75)
 
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Transparency and the health-care reform bill

Merrill Goozner points out another little-noticed provision in the bill: "Drug and device companies will soon have to report payments to physicians in a national database, thanks to a little noted section of the health care reform bill called the...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 11:26 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (12)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform  
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Menu labeling coming next year

The prevention proposals in the health-care bill haven't gotten enough attention, including from me. But Marion Nestle makes a good catch here: One of the bill's provisions is a menu labeling proposal for chain restaurants with more than 20...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 10:08 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (28)
Categories:  Food  
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Is there a legal case against the health-care bill?

With the votes counted and the legislative battle finishing, conservatives are turning to a different branch of government to fight health-care reform: the courts. Their most promising tactic was to argue that "deem and pass" would be unconstitutional because the...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 9:56 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (240)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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FinReg headed to the Senate floor

Weird news out of FinReg yesterday, as a party-line vote in the Senate Banking Committee sent Chris Dodd's bill to the Senate floor after 21 minutes of consideration and no changes. Republicans are saving their amendments for later, and so,...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 8:53 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (2)
Categories:  Financial Regulation  
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Tom Toles is worth a thousand words

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 8:44 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (7)
 
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The costs and benefits of the Republican strategy on health-care reform

David Frum's post lambasting the Republicans for their unyielding obstructionism has been getting linked around, and for good reason. Whether you think it's right in the sense that Republicans should indeed have done something different, it's undoubtedly right in...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 7:55 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (29)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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What the health-care reform bill means for you

The Washington Post's calculator is actually really good....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 23, 2010; 7:44 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (11)
 
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Reconciliation

Just one link today, because I've got to run: The Speaker's page has the most complete set of documents and summaries you'll find on the health-care bill. They're obviously slanted toward the bill, but if you're looking for information on...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 7:38 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (5)
 
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Uwe Reinhardt: We are not 'off the hook' on costs

Uwe Reinhardt is a Princeton health-care economist, a longtime member of the Institute of Medicine and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Economix blog. I spoke to him earlier today about the cost controls in the bill. The...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 6:43 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (27)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform , Interviews  
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How do the exchanges work?

Throughout the health-care debate, I've been steadfast in my belief that the exchanges are the most important element in the plan. They are, in effect, the bridge between the system we have and the system we want. So how, in...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 5:49 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (13)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform  
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Ron Pollack explains how the bill might cover even more than 95% of the country

Ron Pollack heads Families USA, an influential health-care advocacy group that focuses on coverage and access issues. So he seemed like a good choice to explain those parts of the bill. A transcript of our interview follows. Explain to me...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 5:36 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (17)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform , Interviews  
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An interview with Kaiser's Drew Altman

Drew Altman is chief executive of the Kaiser Family Foundation, the largest and most respected health-care foundation in the country. He also writes the "Pulling It Together" column. So he seemed like a good guy to ask about the...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 4:59 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (15)
Categories:  Interviews  
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Who is left uninsured by the health-care reform bill?

The graph atop this post shows the predicted insurance situation (numbers come from this CBO report) for non-elderly Americans if health-care reform didn't pass. It's not a pretty graph, but it'll do the trick. You're seeing 162 million people...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 3:29 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (32)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform  
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Will insurers raise rates before health-care reform?

Katerina asks: Is there anything in the bill that will put increased pressure on insurers like Anthem to back away from their intended 40-50% increases this year or will exchange oversight over such increases only begin years from now? (In...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 2:29 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (60)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform  
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How it's playing in Peoria

My friend Ben Wikler has pulled images of the country's front pages to see how the health-care reform bill is playing around the nation. The word "historic" comes up a lot....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 2:27 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (9)
 
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An example

A reader writes in: I do not understand how this bill will affect my family and me. I am a self-employed single mother. I cannot afford health care for myself and my children. I made $38,000 last year and I...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 11:58 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (46)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform  
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The five most promising cost controls in the health-care bill

It's hard to overstate how important the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) -- which makes the official judgments on how much bills cost and save -- is in Washington. But the rest of the country doesn't know what the CBO is,...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 11:46 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (54)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform  
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What does the health-care bill do in its first year?

As most of you know, the bulk of the bill kicks into effect in 2014. But it's become a common GOP talking point to say that there are 10 years of taxes for six years of spending. The graph...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 11:02 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (23)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform , Health Reform  
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How big is the bill, really?

We should start by putting the health-care bill into proper perspective. Opponents and supports of the bill have both profited immensely from exploiting the average person's inability to put billions and trillions into context. So let's begin by breaking down...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 10:00 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (131)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform , Health Reform  
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A bill becomes a law

Almost, anyway. According to Rep. Henry Waxman, Barack Obama will sign the Senate bill within the next two days. At that point, the decades-long struggle to pass a universal health-care system into law will finish, and the decades-long work...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 22, 2010; 1:22 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (161)
Categories:  Explaining health-care reform , Health Reform  
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Hollow reconciliation threats

According to ABC's “The Note,” "Senate Republicans say they can get the whole package of reconciliation fixes – the fix-its that make the Senate plan palatable to House Democrats – thrown out with a trump card procedural motion." That trump...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 21, 2010; 8:38 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (90)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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Another programming note

Will be on MSNBC from 9pm eastern to whenever the the vote actually happens....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 21, 2010; 8:30 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (8)
 
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The Stupak deal

The Stupak negotiations have been vaguely farcical from the beginning, as the bill is already very restrictive on abortion. But the upside of the farce is that the deal they've reached isn't particularly objectionable: Barack Obama will sign an executive...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 21, 2010; 4:42 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (16)
 
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Programming note

I'll be on MSNBC from 5pm to 7pm Eastern. Since it looks bad for me to commentate (punditize?) while staring at the computer in my lap, coverage may switch to my Twitter feed for a bit....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 21, 2010; 4:39 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (3)
 
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Republicans and the Nelson deal

The GOP has spent much of the last hour attacking Democrats for the Nelson deal and its compatriots. But this is a mess they created. No filibuster from the Republicans? No Nelson deal, because Democrats can pass the legislation with...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 21, 2010; 3:56 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (18)
 
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Health care and freedom

"Today is the death of freedom as a cause for celebration," Rep. Marsha Blackburn just said as she opened the House Republicans' argument against the health-care bill. Her stem-winder was quick and clean. This bill, she argued, will make...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 21, 2010; 3:02 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (91)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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MSNBC reporting that Bart Stupak is a 'yes'

If so, that's the game. The bill will pass tonight. This, incidentally, is why I don't do whip counts in the days before a vote. Even the most troublesome "no" votes can become supporters as the days wear on....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 21, 2010; 1:01 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (15)
 
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Vote scheduled for 9pm

I wouldn't put too much weight on this, but House leadership is aiming to vote about 9 p.m. tonight....

By Ezra Klein  |  March 21, 2010; 12:33 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (4)
 
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Who does health-care reform help?

Jon Cohn spent part of Saturday wandering through the patches of protesters on Capitol Hill. What surprised him, however, was that the protests seemed less about health-care reform than about redistribution itself. To the protesters, Jon says, health-care reform is...

By Ezra Klein  |  March 21, 2010; 12:18 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (79)
Categories:  Health Reform  
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