There’s a lot more that’s frozen in D.C. this week than the usual fallout from a blizzard. The brains of many Senate Republicans are on ice as well. The House passed a jobs bill in December, but the Senate is dawdling, and worse—threatening to pass bits and pieces, taking apart what should be a comprehensive approach to jobs and turning it into minced cabbage.

In the dysfunctional health insurance market, high-cost does not equal high-value; and it is not comprehensiveness of coverage that is the primary predictor of who will be affected by the excise tax, rather it is the size of the firm they work for or the age of their co-workers. The fact that Chevy plans are about as likely to be taxed as Cadillac plans is one reason to be cautious about relying on such a tax.

Nancy Pelosi’s snippy comment about Obama’s campaign promises was a reference to the White House’s demand that the House accept the Senate excise tax. Yet, the White House has not revisited any of the assumptions it has made about the excise tax that seem to be increasingly dubious–such as that it will end up giving workers a raise.

The Economic Policy Institute provides a much needed counter-weight to those cheerleading the use of Cadillac-as-Chevy taxes to pay for the Senate health care bill. It shows, generally, that the millionaire’s tax used to fund the House bill is far more progressive than the Cadillac-as-Chevy tax used to fund the Senate bill, which ends up taxing those at $20-30,000 more than it taxes those at $500,000 to 1 million a year.