Thursday, February 26, 2009

Serious about Health Care

Lakoff on the Obama Code

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

QOTD - Ezra Kelin on the budget: By way of analysis, I'll just add that the big surprise is the size and seriousness of the commitment to education. Health wonks expected their portion of the budget. The emphasis on energy isn't a surprise -- more a return to the priorities that Obama was naming in the campaign. But according to folks in the educational community, even they didn't anticipate such aggressive action on their issues.

Ezra Klein: HEALTH CARE REFORM IN EIGHT EASY STEPS.

This blog has spent a lot of time over the years digging through the details of this or that health care plan. But it's worth taking a moment to appreciate that the language in today's budget is something entirely different: Not an idea, but a directive. Not a document to win a campaign, but a document to kickstart the congressional process.

This is what health reform looks like. This is happening.
.... (= the details, so go to the link)

Ezra: WILL HEALTH REFORM HELP YOU?
The salient fact about health insurance in the United States is not that 15 percent don't have it. It's that 85 percent do. That's not generally been true for reformers who think much more about the uninsured than the insured. But it's doubly true in politics, as the uninsured come from subgroups (the poor, the young) that are less likely to vote. "Look," one of the President's senior health advisers said to me earlier this week, "95 percent of the people who voted for Obama had health insurance. We need to think about what we're doing for them."

That's why the first three health care principles in Obama's budget speak to the concerns of the insured: Choice, affordability, security. But In his latest column at the Kaiser Family Foundation, Drew Altman suggests a metric we should we be watching to see if they're successful. Polls, he notes, generally ask whether you think health reform will make your family better off. Kaiser recently ran one such survey and the results were moderately encouraging: ...

Sudbay: $634 billion for health care in Obama's budget

Obama said he was serious about health care. His budget is serious about health care. Very serious:
...
I'm impressed by the strategy -- and the number.

Benen: HE'S GOING FOR IT.... In his address to Congress this week, President Obama said,

"Health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year." Apparently, he meant it.
...
And while the down payment may only be the first step, this isn't incrementalism -- it's a significant step forward. Jonathan Cohn noted, "How big an investment is that? It's pretty big -- more, I believe, than any president has proposed setting aside for coverage expansions to the non-elderly since Clinton tried for universal health insurance in the 1990s. And it confirms that Obama is serious about pursuing health care reform, beyond small incremental steps."
Igor Volsky emphasized how different this approach is from the early '90s: "Overall, the fund is a good start, but it's certainly not enough to reach universal coverage. Still, the Obama administration has learned from the mistakes of past reform efforts. Unlike the Clinton strategy, which didn't include any money for health reform in the budget, and left Congress to digest a 700+ page health plan, Obama and Congress will fill in the details of reform."

And publius highlighted the broader significance: "Obama is pushing for national health care reform -- the crown jewel of the progressive legislative agenda -- while simultaneously trying to break down the modern political coalitions that Nixon and Reagan built. This guy is swinging for the fences -- and swinging hard."