Health Reform Update
CBO to Orszag: Medicare reform idea won’t save money.
Some folks in the business community actually have a spine.
Wall Street Journal endorses Obama lite.
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Not sure what the Kucinich amendment means. Could a state government outlaw private health insurance? Could it prohibit the private purschase of medical care? Scary.
I don’t think the general public realizes how devastating the CBO report was.
Obama lite still seems quite radical to me. The particular tax credits mentioned require the health exchange scheme, and most likely a mandate for some form of community rating and guaranteed issue to be feasible. Which in turn implies an individual mandate and penalties for noncompliance, etc.
A less extreme proposal would be for a modest tax credit applicable toward premiums for coverage that meets minimal standards for rate adjustment and issue, roughly comparable to the requirements for employer plans. Then the tax credit takes the place of a mandate, loss of the credit is the only penalty for individual, and consumers are still free to forgo the credit and shop for cheaper underwritten coverage if they desire.
Obama lite means an insurance exchange — an artificail market where everyone faces perverse incentives because there is no such thing as a real price.
Obama lite refers to the compromise proposal suggested in the WSJ piece– an exchange, a tax credit paid for by a cap on tax-free benefits, and various benign cost-saving proposals.
The tax credits being bandied about will never become law without some sort of mandate for community rating and guaranteed issue, along with everything else those imply. My suggestion was that rather than an unconditional tax credit plus a mandate, a more cautious approach would be for a conditional tax credit and no mandate.