President Obama announced a televised meeting for Thursday to discuss all options for health care legislation. Overnight, the White House released "The Obama Plan: Stability & Security For All Americans," which the President intends to be the focal point for the event. Although this Plan is short, the White House also released a one-page summary.
The January 22 Obama Plan is not accompanied by legislative text. Thus, it can only be analyzed in qualitative terms. We do that below the jump.
Yesterday the White House released the Administration's first annual report on the "stimulus bill" (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or "ARRA"). The Administration and its critics are sparring over how many jobs the bill "created or saved."
Washington Post staff writer Ed O'Keefe says the "Obama administration's economic stimulus program created nearly 600,000 jobs in the final three months of 2009."
Previously, we have noted that the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which is responsible for ensuring accountability and transparency in the reporting of jobs "created or saved" by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, or "stimulus" bill), was not actually performing this task. Further, the underlying data were invalid and unreliable because the Office of Management and Budget did not specify a consistent estimation methodology.
Recently, Washington Post staff writer Alec MacGillis reported that White House Council of Economic Advisers chairman Christina Romer now claims ARRA "has created or saved between 1.7 million and 2 million jobs."
Examining these figures closely reveals that they are not estimates at all, but assumptions built into the Administration's estimation model.
On October 28, 2009, the Office of Management and Budget solicited comments on its implementation of the Paperwork Reduction Act. The purpose of the PRA is to minimize burdens on the public resulting from the federal government's information requests.
Neutral Source managing editor Richard Belzer submitted comments on his own behalf. These comments eventually will be uploaded by OMB to Regulations.Gov, the Federal government's web portal for all regulatory matters. (Clicking on the link above will reveal a fundamental weakness of the web portal: Unless the agency chooses to include information identifying the name and organizational affiliation of the submitter, there is no way to find any specific comment without opening them all.)
In response to numerous requests, a copy of these comment is posted to the Library.
The federal government's reported figures for jobs "created or saved" by the "stimulus" bill (formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or "ARRA") are now known to be wrong. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees these figures, apparently has decided not to correct them.
A scandal has erupted over the federal government's reporting of the number of jobs created or saved by the "stimulus" bill (formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009).
This scandal would have been avoided if the government had complied with the Information Quality Act.
Recently we have posted on the so-called "public option" (see here and here). Today we look at the effect of proposed health care legislation on the private market.
By necessity, it is private insurers that have both the interest and comparative advantage to estimate these effects. The federal government, and especially the Congressional Budget Office, is almost exclusively concerned with federal budget outlays, not social costs and benefits. To keep federal outlays down, legislators focus on shifting costs off budget -- typically, onto private insurers and their customers.
Analyses recently made public by one private insurer are instructive.
It's in the House Energy and Commerce Committee bill, which the Speaker has not brought to the floor for a vote because it lacks enough votes to pass. It's in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions bill. It was in the Senate Finance Committee bill, then it was removed to secure one Republican vote. As the Senate leadership tries to merge these competing bills, news stories say that it's back in. Or back out. Or back in under certain conditions.
The Washington Post's Rob Stein reports some interesting information useful for estimating the magnitude of this risk. Elsewhere in today's Post, others argue that people have a moral obligation to be vaccinated. The moral argument hinges on the fact that vaccination reduces risks to others, but this is complicated by the fact that most of the "others" in question are people who choose not to be vaccinated.
Economic incentive schemes are popular among economists and increasingly embraced by legislators. Cap-and-trade to control greenhouse gas emissions is perhaps the most visible of these incentive schemes. Pigouvian taxes are the other, and news today from an unexpected source provides useful and interesting lessons in how such taxes can work -- and how they can degenerate into plain vanilla taxes.
Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey published a commentary on August 11 opposing the health care legislation proposed by the Obama Administration and Democratic congressional leaders. The op-ed followed an interview with Wall Street Journal reporter Katy McLaughlin, These articles ignited several rounds of controversy. Some Whole Foods customers organized a boycott. Whole Foods created a discussion group on its web site. The Wall Street Journal editorial board criticized the boycotters and published multiple letters to the editor (here, here and here), then a long Saturday interview by Stephen Moore, a member of the editorial board, defending Mackey and giving him a platform to expand on his views. Another letters to the editor followed.
We draw readers' attention to Mackey's opinions about the American diet expressed in the second Journal interview. These opinions appear to have significantly informed Mackey's thinking on the issue, but it not clear how they relate to his proposed alternative and they have not been part of the controversy.
We've been reviewing the House and Senate bills, and have to admit that it's tough going. These bills are lengthy, complex, and have numerous interactions with existing law and regulation.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that the substantive President Obama's health care legislation is in trouble because he delegated to House and Senate Democratic leaders the task of writing the legislation, and they have crafted bills that significantly depart from what Obama proposed during the presidential campaign. We decided to test this by reviewing Candidate Obama's original health care plan. Without such a baseline, it's not possible to evaluate the extent to which the leading House and Senate bills strayed from what Obama wanted.
Today we present a summary, with extensive documentation, of what the Obama campaign proposed, mostly in 2007. Readers in a hurry can review the summary list of programmatic elements at the top. Those with greater patience or fascination with detail can read more.
We also have included the Obama Administration's current position on health care legislation. The text is much shorter and contains few details. It is supported by a series of short "reports" that are better described as summaries intended for media use. As we note, these "reports" are poorly documented. They include a few footnotes that lead to references, but most of these references are appeals to authority rather that citations to scholarly research or specific data. (Typical references consist only of titles of large reports or complex government statistical databases. Page numbers within these reports, for example, are not included.) We've looked at a few references where the underlying source could be identified, and even in these cases scientific, technical, or statistical information has been used in dubious ways.
