Today the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual estimate of the uninsured. While there is always valid discussion and debate over the number of uninsured (for recent analyses click here and here), an important component that gets overlooked is the emerging trend within existing sources of coverage. This year’s census numbers expose a troubling shift: government programs continue to gain ground while private insurance is on the decline. There are a variety of reasons for this change — including expansions of public programs, like Medicaid and SCHIP, and the early …
President Obama’s address to a Joint Session of Congress on health care reform included a range of urgings, pleadings, and partisan jabs, and a single bright line in the sand dealing not with health care per se but with the deficit. The President said, “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period.” Before we get too carried away cheering the President’s sudden fealty to fiscal sanity we need to remember he did say the bill should come …
As President Obama reads press accounts of his speech on health care reform last night, he is likely to skip over an important editorial on foreign policy appearing in today’s Washington Post: Mr. Chavez was in Tehran again this week and offered his full support for Mr. Ahmadinejad’s hard-line faction. As usual, the caudillo made clear that he shares Iran’s view of Israel, which he called “a genocidal state.” He endorsed Iran’s nuclear program and declared that Venezuela would seek Iran’s assistance to construct a nuclear complex of its own. …
Last night President Barack Obama promised: “Add it all up, and the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten years.” What are the chances that Obama will keep this promise? ReasonTV examines how the actual price of government programs almost always shoots far beyond the advertised price: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZEVBogXFFg[/youtube] The Senate Joint Economic Committee recently released a study examining the federal government’s track record of measuring the future costs of health care programs specifically. Here is what they found:
Today, the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual poverty report. Every year for nearly three decades, in good economic times and bad, Census has reported more than 30 million Americans living in poverty. What does it mean to be “poor” in America? In reality, the average person, as identified as “poor” by the government, has a living standard far higher than the public imagines. According to the government’s own surveys, the typical “poor” American has cable or satellite TV, two color TV’s, a DVD player or VCR. He has air …
Politico-Heritage chat: Stuart Butler on healthcare
“There remain some significant details to iron out.” Thus spoke the President of the United States last night, in an address in which, with a straight face, he told an awaiting nation that he was finally delivering not lofty rhetoric, but his grand plan on health care. On that score President Obama was right. It may have been, however, a bit of an understatement. Absent, of course, was how exactly all the savings he confidently predicted would materialize, how exactly the government would prevent employers from dumping all their employees …
During tonight’s address to Congress, President Obama is expected to repeat his contention that health care reform should reduce federal health care costs and not expand the budget deficit. The House health bill (as amended by the Energy and Commerce Committee) fails those standards according to a new Lewin Group study commissioned by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. According to the study, the House bill: Would run a $39 billion deficit in the first decade, and a $1,010 billion deficit in the second decade; Faces a gross cost (excluding tax …
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary analysis of the proposed changes to Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit for seniors, under the Ways and Means version of H.R. 3200, the House Democrats’ health care bill. The bill would make a number of changes to the Medicare program and its drug benefit, including phasing out the infamous doughnut hole or gap in drug coverage that some seniors have run up against. In a recent letter, the CBO estimated: “That enacting the proposed changes would lead to an average …
Writing yesterday for the National Review’s blog, The Corner, Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky wrote on the 2010 Census and coming immigration battles: The Boston Globe reports that advocates for illegal aliens are urging their followers to boycott the 2010 census. They want illegal aliens to “protest the government’s inaction on immigration legislation.” Translated from liberal Boston Globe-speak, they mean legislation that would provide amnesty for the 15 million who are here illegally and would end the federal government’s half-hearted efforts to enforce our immigration laws.
