A Valentine (not mine) for an insurance exec
The WSJ sent an early Valentine to Wellpoint CEO Angela Braly in the form of an adoring interview. There she is, “the very Midwestern Mrs. Braly,” telling the interviewer of her heroic efforts to curb spiraling health-care costs. They involve cutting what she pays hospitals but not letting the taxpayers regulate what her company must provide in return for the millions of new customers they would be covering.
Unmentioned is her $10-million-a-year compensation package, or the private jet that chauffeurs Braly and her family to and fro. Thank you, premium payers.
The biggest bouquet was permission to lie. Braly says that health insurers could “could make [this system] work from an affordability point of view” but only if there is “a meaningful requirement that people join the in the pool.”
Both the House and Senate health-care bills happen to contain individual mandates that require everyone to buy coverage, that is, join the pool. Given the volume of complaint about these mandates, they are “meaningful,” indeed.
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Tags: Health care, health insurance, Media
The problem with Republicans, part II
Bruce Bartlett, an official in Reagan’s Treasury and Republican-turned-Independent, really does have his former party nailed. On Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty:
Like all Republicans these days, Pawlenty wants to have it every possible way: complain about the deficit while ignoring everything his party did to create it (Medicare Part D, two unfunded wars, TARP, earmarks galore, tax cuts up the wazoo, irresponsible regulatory and monetary policies that created the recession that created the deficit, etc.), illogically insisting that tax cuts are a necessary part of deficit reduction, and never proposing any specific spending cuts.
Here’s the whole post.
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Tags: Conservatives, deficits, economy, Washington
The Republican Party has no shame
The GOP doesn’t do fiscal responsibility. Stan Collender at Capital Gains and Games counts the ways.
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Tags: Conservatives, deficits, economy, Republicans, Washington
Honorable mention
The Financial Times’s Clive Crook recommends my column on health reform, post-Massachusetts. He deems it “not a bad idea…but.”
I’ll take the honorable mention, buts and all.
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Tags: Democrats, Health care, Massachusetts, Washington
America without health reform
The Congressional Budget Office projects:
54 million without health coverage in 10 years.
From the Medicare actuary:
The Medicare hospital insurance fund down to zero by 2017
In addition:
Spending on health care will close to double by 2019
And so will the cost of employer-provided health coverage
The collapse of health-care reform is an economic disaster for the United States.
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Tags: economy, Health care, Medicare
No, taxes on bank profits won’t get passed on
A friend at lunch made this point about my call to tax bank profits:
Banks will not pay the taxes. The taxes will be passed on to the consumer.
You hear this a lot. And here is my response:
Banks will pass those taxes onto consumers only if consumers let them. We have a free enterprise system enshrining competition. If Bank A raises fees, then we can go to Bank B. This is not a situation where bank profit margins are thin, and a tax will put them into the red. On the contrary, they are at record levels.
And profits are enormous largely because taxpayers bailed out the banks in half a dozen ways. Rather than call this a tax on banks, let’s call it “profit-sharing with the taxpayer.”
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Health reform interrupted…
I’m running out of words on this subject. Enormous disappointment in Obama’s lack of courage on health-care reform has worn me down. The words will come back.
In the meantime, let this latest column suffice.
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Tags: Health care, Massachusetts, Obama, Washington
A thin silver lining
The thin silver lining in the Scott Brown takeover of “Ted Kennedy’s seat” is that people will stop calling it Ted Kennedy’s seat. The line that the seat belongs to no party, and certainly not the Kennedy family, was the high point of Brown’s campaign.
When I read John Kerry’s message to Democrats that they should vote for Coakley in honor of Ted Kennedy — plus the barrage of Coakley TV ads by Ted’s widow – I thought, uh, oh.
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Tags: Democrats, Kennedys, Massachusetts
Avatar not even Best Movie of the Night
I didn’t love Avatar. Actually, it was fairly boring after the first half hour.
No surprise though that the James Cameron extravaganza walked off with “Best Picture,” Golden Globes. After all, Cameron’s other file cabinet of movie clichés, Titanic, had done magnificently at prize time.
Well, I sat there in those silly 3D glasses. Were the special effects super? They were. Oysters are super, also, but after the tenth one, they lose their specialness.
After a while, the video-game scenarios wore on me. An occasional witty line somewhat livened the petrified-in-Hollywood plot about a boy and girl overcoming enormous differences and ending up hitched after the male performs some stupendous feat.
Let me say that I’m happy I went, but Best Movie of the Year? Not even the best movie of the night for me. I went home and watched the superior 1944 classic Laura, courtesy of Netflix.
Guess you can see where I’m coming from.
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Tags: Hollywood
Ruth Marcus on Kennedy entitlement
It pleased me greatly to read Ruth Marcus poo-pooing the Kennedy entitlement machine. She writes in her blog:
Democratic candidate Martha Coakley ran a terrible campaign — while Washington slept, assuming that Ted Kennedy’s seat was a Democratic entitlement.
If she doesn’t think that seat is a Democratic entitlement, then by extension, it’s not a Kennedy entitlement, either. Right?
Then how explain her support for Caroline, as Uncle Ted unsuccessfully attempted to slip her into a New York Senate seat. In a column entitled “A Vote for Senator Caroline,”Marcus discussed Caroline’s personal trials, and, skipping over whether she had the slightest qualifications for the job, ended thusly:
I know it’s an emotional — dare I say “girly”? — reaction. But what a fitting coda to this modern fairly tale to have the little princess grow up to be a senator.
I do prefer a Coakley win, but one consolation would be the end of Kennedy worship, and all the anti-democratic tendencies it promotes.
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Tags: Democrats, Kennedys, Massachusetts
