March 16, 2010
Will Health Reform Pass this Week?
That is the big question; the hour of reckoning is near. Will the House have the votes to pass the Senate bill as is? What will House lawmakers put into the reconciliation bill? Will the Senate pass it? How will the Senate parliamentarian rule???
Here is the Washington Post’s roadmap; C-SPAN has more on the deliberations related to reconciliation.
Oh, the suspense is too much to take. Well, not really, but this is one of the most fluid legislative processes I can remember.
So will health care reform will pass this week? I don’t think we know.
Read about the possible cost of failure; among other things, 67.6 million uninsured by 2020.
March 12, 2010
Science Friday: String Theory
How to make a guitar. Below and here.
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March 11, 2010
Policy Nerd Alert: GPO Launches Podcast Service
Do you ever just want to sit down and listen to researchers talk about national cybersecurity initiatives? If so, you’re in luck: the Government Accountability Office (GPO) has launched a new podcasting service featuring interviews with its crack team of researchers. For policy nerds like me, this is like manna from heaven and frankly, these don’t all sound boring: there is one on prevention of sexual assaults in the military, on FDA’s oversight of ingredients “generally recognized as safe,” and on use of funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Go on and listen. You know you want to.
CBO: Senate Health Care Bill Cuts Deficit by $118 Billion
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) today released a revised cost estimate of the Senate-passed health care bill (H.R. 3590), finding that it would reduce the federal deficit by $118 billion from 2010 through 2019. An earlier estimate found that the reduction would have been $132 billion.
This will be another talking point for supporters of reform, who want the House to pass the Senate bill as is, and then make small fixes to the measure in a budget reconciliation package that requires on a majority vote (50+1). The reconciliation move is being used to avoid a conference committee to work out the differences in the House- and Senate-passed bills because any resulting conference bill would need to be voted on by a supermajority in the Senate—votes that health care supporters don’t have. As it is, reconciliation isn’t even a sure thing, as Sam Stein points out at the Huffington Post.
Just another chapter in the interminable health care debate.
Here’s how the CBO numbers shape up, according to snippet from the blog post:
“The gross cost of the proposed expansions in insurance coverage over those 10 years is now projected to be $875 billion, reflecting subsidies provided through insurance exchanges, increased net outlays for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and tax credits for small employers. Those costs are partly offset by revenues from an excise tax on high-premium insurance plans and net savings from other coverage-related sources, leaving a net cost of $624 billion for the coverage provisions. Other provisions affecting direct spending save $478 billion, on net—mostly in Medicare—and other provisions affecting revenues reduce the deficit by $264 billion, on net. Thus, the net effect on deficits of the bill as a whole equals $624 billion less $478 billion less $264 billion, or a reduction of $118 billion over the 2010-2019 period. In total, CBO and JCT [Joint Committee on Taxation] estimate that the legislation would increase outlays by $355 billion and increase revenues by $473 billion between 2010 and 2019.”
March 9, 2010
Lower Presence of High-Calorie Drinks in Schools
First lady Michelle Obama, who has taken on the cause of childhood obesity prevention, will be happy to hear this: fewer high-calorie drinks are being shipped to the nation’s schools.
The Alliance for a Healthier Generation (a partnership of the William J. Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association) in 2006 worked with Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, and other soda and juice makers to limit portion sizes and reduce the number of beverage calories available to kids during the school day.
In its third and final report on the impact of the 2006 guidelines, the American Beverage Association said since the start of the 2004-2005 school year, the number of beverage calories shipped to schools has dropped by 88 percent.
The president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey said in a statement that the results are “encouraging” but that more has to be done to reduce the number of obese children and youth, said to total 23 million or nearly one in three young people.