When I was a kid, I once stumbled upon the movie The Ten Commandments on TV. Exposed mostly to cartoons and sit-coms, I sat there in bleary-eyed awe as the 3 hr 40 minute film just kept on going and going and going. Characters disappeared, story arcs rose and resolved, and the thing still wouldn’t [...]

Keith Hennessey offers a post in which he pairs one headline about the health care overhaul from this year and one from last and asks you to guess which is which. The article links, which provide you with the correct answers, are in the post itself. Politico: President Obama takes reform on the road AP: [...]

No, that’s not a confession at a 12-step meeting for pariahs. It’s the title of a long thread on Reddit, part of the social bookmarking site’s “IAmA AMA” feature, which stands for “I am a X, ask me anything.” The concept is simple: “Post what you are, have people ask you about yourself.” Here’s the [...]

Not so fast there, Ayn Rand fan. That graphic comes from a January 22 post called “It’s dead”, written by former Bush White House economist Keith Hennessey, a few days after a Republican had vanquished the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s would-be Democratic successor in Massachussetts, becoming the 41st, filibuster-enabling vote in the Senate against health care reform. At the time, Hennessey wrote this:

Yesterday I compared the comprehensive bill to Schrödinger’s cat: it was both alive and dead, and this uncertainty would be resolved only when we could see inside the box of the House Democratic Caucus. Speaker Pelosi opened the box for us yesterday:

“In its present form without any change, I don’t think it’s possible to pass the Senate bill in the House.”

But the House folding and passing the Senate bill was the highest probability path to a signed comprehensive law. The path the Speaker is pursuing instead, of getting the Senate to act on a separate second bill, is too hard to execute logistically, substantively, and politically…

I wrote yesterday that the bill is not dead until the Speaker says it’s dead. I think she in effect did so yesterday. Based on this development I have increased my prediction of collapse to 90%, and I believe the comprehensive bill is dead.

However, Hennessey also wrote that one possible option for Democrats was a parliamentary maneuver called “reconciliation,” but that “neither the White House nor Congressional Democrats appear to have seriously considered using reconciliation as a substitute for the work already done.” But that has changed, and reconciliation is now at the heart of the Democratic game plan. The current proposed path to passage involves the complicated two-step of the House passing the Senate’s health care bill — substantially different than the House bill and anathema to some Democratic representatives — then bringing the bill into line with President Obama’s compromise legislation via reconciliation.

From a recent post titled “What Are These Three Numbers” on the economics blog Econbrowser comes this chart:

These numbers, represented in billions of 2010 dollars, were taken from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

Not that kind of reconcile. Time magazine has a good summary of a possible path to passage of the health care bill, which stalled after the Massachussetts special election last month resulted in the loss of the 60th vote for Senate Democrats to block a Republican filibuster. Now that it is clear that yesterday’s big [...]

“Health insurers are not that profitable; as an industry, net profits were 2.2% in 2008…(T)his is in large part due to a lack of creativity and foresight…Most insurers are not much more than transaction processors and provider aggregators.” Two interesting posts from the blog Managed Care Matters on Anthem Wellpoint, the company that became the [...]

Following the health care summit on Twitter is as good a way as any… One Tweet puts its finger on one potential problem of an event like this: Some parts of the Health Care Summit that I have been listening to, have sounded like the adults in Peanuts- Wonk Wonk Wonk

Some healthcare-related content from around the Web: Do We Need Federal Antitrust Law for Health Insurance? (John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog) With the so-called health “reform” on life-support, Speaker Pelosi has suggested she might attempt to declare victory by crafting a bill focused on one narrow objective: eliminating health insurers’ so-called “exemption” from antitrust laws. [...]

The Rude Pundit suggests two pro-healthcare reform ads:

Where Are the Pro-Health Care Reform Ads When We Need Them?:
F***, the Rude Pundit will just do the work for you, DNC and other groups:

Ad #1: We’re in a grocery store. POV of being behind a shopping cart, rolling down an aisle. Camera turns to a loaf of bread. Close-up on a sign: the price “$2.99″ has been crossed out with a black marker. A new price, “$4.15,” is written in. As the cart moves up aisles filled with similar signs, all with prices that have been raised, a voice says, “This past month, Anthem Blue Cross sent out notices to 800,000 individual health insurance policy holders informing them that their premiums were going to rise as much as 39%.”