warren buffet

[driveby]

Democrat senator on using reconciliation for a health care bill.

meh, he's just a senile old grand wizard.

[driveby]

Democracy by Slaughter [Daniel Foster]

 

 

The sense around here for the last week or so has been that "only the House vote matters" in deciding the fate of Obamacare. But what if the Democrats can pass the bill with no House vote at all?

 

Astoundingly, House Democrats appear to be preparing to do just that:

 

House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the chairwoman said Tuesday.

 

Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version.

 

Slaughter has not taken the plan to Speaker Pelosi as Democrats await CBO scores on the corrections bill. "Once the CBO gives us the score we'll spring right on it," she said. . . .

 

House members are concerned the Senate could fail to approve the corrections bill, making them nervous about passing the Senate bill with its much-maligned sweetheart deals for certain states.

"We're well beyond that," Pelosi said Tuesday, though she did not clarify.

 

That the Democrats could take this extraordinary step to avoid passing the Senate bill tells you that they have zero trust in the Senate to pass reconciliation "fixes," and zero trust in the president not to sign the Senate bill should it reach his desk and a reconciliation effort collapse. But most crucially, it gives the lie — in a big, big way — to the Democratic narrative that health-care reform should and will be finished via simple "majority rule," and not bound up in the arcane rules of the United States Senate.

[driveby]

Obama’s Proposed Medicaid Expansion: Lessons from TennCare [brian Blase]

 

 

From the beginning of the debate over health-care reform, President Obama has advocated a major expansion of Medicaid — already a rapidly growing entitlement. Congress took heed: The Senate bill, which is currently before the House, would put millions of additional Americans onto Medicaid. In an analysis of this bill, the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services claimed Medicaid expansion would be responsible for about 50 percent of the reduction in the uninsured population, at a projected 10-year cost of $395 billion.

 

Fortunately, we already have ample evidence of how expanding Medicaid affects taxpayers and the quality of health care. TennCare, enacted in 1994, was Tennessee’s attempt to reduce the number of uninsured individuals through a major expansion in Medicaid. In addition to traditional Medicaid beneficiaries, TennCare enrolled individuals who were uninsurable because of pre-existing conditions and individuals not eligible for insurance through either their place of employment or the government.

 

The idea was that the state would squeeze savings out of its Medicaid program through the use of managed care, thus offsetting the cost of this vast expansion in coverage. In essence, Tennessee officials promised a free lunch — an expansion of insurance coverage without increasing costs to the state.

 

Within months of the implementation of TennCare, enrollment swelled by half a million individuals, so that more than a quarter of the state’s 5,000,000-plus population was enrolled. Although private insurance was somewhat crowded out by government insurance, the number of uninsured individuals in Tennessee dropped substantially.

 

At the same time, costs exploded. While inflation-adjusted per-capita Medicaid spending in other states increased by an average of 71 percent between 1994 and 2004, the corresponding increase in spending on TennCare was 146 percent. Democratic governor Phil Bredesen was forced to restructure TennCare dramatically beginning in 2004, calling the program “a disaster” and stating he wouldn’t “let TennCare bankrupt our state.”

[Jimmy Neutron]

I would love to play poker with some of you cats.