It is never a good idea to get focused on the politics instead of results of your policy. When you do you wind up making bad policy and still get hammered politically.

I’m a little confused by Erza Klein’s mostly helpful post showing, once again, the US paying much higher public and private costs than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries for health care. Congress and the Administration should be reminded of that every day.

Klein is surely correct in noting that other developed nations rely much more on government-sponsored plans than purely private systems. As a result, they achieve not only lower total health care costs, as a percentage of GDP, but more universal coverage (and equal or better care) than does the US. The lesson to draw is fairly obvious: we need to move towards Medicare for all or some variation of a government-sponsored single-buyer model.

No. It probably isn’t. Probably just some more wishful thinking on my part. Nevertheless, I was quite surprised this morning to see a few pieces around the web pointing out that a “new Republican Jobs bill” was just another tired rehash of the same failed policies of the last thirty years.

“Paul Ryan Gets a Boost from Catholic Bishops” said the headline in Politico yesterday, describing a letter from USCCB President Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York. But reading the article makes me wonder if the reporter read the earlier letter from Ryan to Dolan, or an earlier letter from two prominent Catholic bishops to members of Congress last month.

Ryan’s letter is very, very misleading, and misrepresents the papal encyclical he quotes. Given that he’s writing to a bishop about Catholic teachings, he probably ought not to be telling lies. Dolan’s apparent endorsement of Ryan’s letter, then, becomes quite troubling indeed. Either Dolan is aware of Ryan’s misleading approach and is endorsing it to give Ryan political cover with Catholics, or Dolan has been snookered by the guy Paul Krugman labeled “The Flimflam Man.”

Neither is terribly flattering to Archbishop Dolan.

It is nice to see both Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias openly admitting that the Affordable Care Act is about as right-wing any insurance coverage expansion “reform” could be. From Yglesias’s The Sensible Conservative Alternative To The Affordable Care Act Is The Affordable Care Act: If you simply do what Ponnuru and Levin propose, every [...]

Health insurance is extremely complex and people just don’t have the knowledge about how an insurance policy works and the statistical likelihood of developing medical problems to know what is the best deal for them. This task is made even more difficult by the fact that insurance companies have a huge profit incentive to make their products difficult to understand (for example, hiding the cost of care to give them the lower sticker price on the exchanges).

Today, Ezra Klein made the logical and concise case for why Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan wasn’t about health care cost control but just saving the government money by shifting more of the health care cost burden onto regular people.

Not only is Republican Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan using basically the same general premium-supported exchange design that Obama’s health care revision does for the uninsured under 65, but both Ryan’s budget and “Obamacare” are nearly totally reliant on almost the same pathetic accounting trick of using poorly indexed caps on federal health care spending in the distant future to produce the bulk of their supposed deficit reductions.

A major provision of the health care law is the excise tax, which was actually designed for the exact purpose of making employer-provided insurance less generous.

Going back 100 years, not once in the last 50 elections has control of the House switched to one party while control of the Senate switched the other way. For the most part, partisan movement in each chamber is highly correlated with the other. There just hasn’t been a modern example of a national party making large gains in one chamber while suffering big loses in the other.