The Hill‘s Congress Blog asks, “Will the Senate pass a health care reform bill before it adjourns for the year?”

I answer:

It’s not looking good – nor should it.

The Reid bill becomes less popular with each passing day.  (So too does President Obama’s handling of health care.)

CBS News is reporting that Reid wants to hold a vote before Christmas because he doesn’t want senators to go home and hear from their constituents.

Reid has been systematically suppressing a complete cost estimate of his bill.

Reid’s manager’s amendment will make unknown, countless, and dramatic changes to that 2,074-page bill – and Reid wants to vote on it before anyone knows what those changes are.

Even Max Baucus admits that not a single senator understands the Reid bill.

Our federalist system, the separation of powers, our bicameral national legislature, six-year terms for Senators, staggered Senate elections, and the Senate’s procedural rules all exist precisely to prevent what Reid is trying to do: ram a sweeping piece of legislation through Congress without due consideration.

Our System of Government Exists to Prevent This Kind of Thing is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

So yes, enacting the Obama health plan would be an historic achievement.  But its supporters don’t know if it would be a good historic achievement or one of those bad historic achievements — like slavery, unequal suffrage, Jim Crow, etc.

Oh, and they don’t care.

Baucus: No Senator Understands This Health Care Bill is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yes, you read that right.  And I had to do the same sort of double-take when I read David Broder’s op-ed in The Washington Post this morning.

Broder writes, “Obama has steered the enterprise to the point that odds now favor a bill-signing ceremony.  But the hardest choices still lie ahead….”  Whaa??  How can the odds be better than 50-50 if the biggest fights haven’t even happened yet?

Broder’s optimism continues, “Two things will be needed to reach [a majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate]: first, a plausible plan for making affordable and comprehensive health insurance available to millions…. And second, a way of financing the coverage….”  But that’s been the whole challenge all along.  Is Broder actually acknowledging that Democrats aren’t any closer to a signing ceremony than they were six months ago?

Broder says Democrats can meet the second challenge by taxing high-cost health plans — “a step that would require Obama to face down his labor union allies.”  You mean Obama should lean on Democrats to tax a crucial part of their own base?  One that’s already activating to block that tax?

Broder also thinks Obama should lean on his fellow Democrats to roll the doctors and hospitals in their states/districts by including more (some? any?) “delivery system reforms” in the legislation.

Sure.  No problem.  What could go wrong?  This is practically a done deal.

(Cross-posted, sarcasm and all, at Politico‘s Health Care Arena.)

Broder: Health Overhaul Likely, Because Hardest Part Lies Ahead is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-MT) health care overhaul would cost more than $2 trillion.  It would expand the deficit.  But he has carefully and methodically hidden those facts – so well that he has completely hoodwinked nearly all the major media.

The media are reporting that the Baucus bill would reduce the deficit by $81 billion over 10 years.  Wrong.

The Baucus bill assumes that Congress will allow the “sustainable growth rate” cuts in Medicare’s physician payments to occur beginning in 2012.  Yet Congress has routinely and repeatedly blocked those cuts, making Baucus’s assumption preposterous.  The CBO handled the issue delicately, but essentially said, “Sure, provided that the sun rises in the west in 2012, then yes, this bill would reduce the deficit.”

That means Baucus will come up at least $200 billion short on the revenue side, making his bill a budget-buster.

The media are reporting that the Baucus bill would cost just $829 billion over 10 years.  Wrong.

As Donald Marron observes, that number omits as much as $75 billion in new federal spending.  It also omits a $33 billion unfunded mandate on state governments.

But the worst part is that the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimate omits the cost of the private sector mandates in the Baucus bill.  In Massachusetts, those costs accounted for 60 percent of the total cost of reform.  That suggests the actual cost of the Baucus bill – $829 billion plus $75 billion plus $33 billion, times 2.5 – is well over $2 trillion.

Yet the CBO score pretends those costs aren’t even there.  It’s like a mystery novel that’s missing the last 50 pages.  And the media aren’t even curious.

In the words of Brad DeLong, why, oh why, can’t we have a better press corps?

Cross-posted at Politico’s Health Care Arena.

Baucus Bill Would Cost More than $2 Trillion is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The CBO report that said the health care bill won’t raise deficits makes it clear that the Baucus bill’s reduction in future budget deficits comes not from controlling government spending or reducing health care costs, but because of a rapid escalation in tax revenues.

The bill imposes a 40 percent excise tax on health-insurance plans that offer benefits in excess of $8,000 for an individual plan and $21,000 for a family plan. Insurers would almost certainly pass this tax on to consumers via higher premiums. As inflation pushes insurance premiums higher in coming years, more and more middle-class families would find themselves caught up in the tax.

In fact, overall, the tax increases in the bill are more than double the amount of deficit reduction. This isn’t a health care efficiency bill or a cost containment bill. It is a tax and spend bill, pure and simple.

What They Aren’t Telling You About the CBO Score is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Michael Cannon discussed in an earlier post, the White House is trying to claim that health care “reform” does not mean higher taxes. This is a two-pronged issue. First, there is a mandate to purchase health insurance. Second, there is a tax (the White House calls it a fee) on people who fail to purchase a policy.

The White House claims this mandate is akin to state-level requirements for the purchase of health insurance, and that the newly-insured people will be getting some value (a health insurance policy) in exchange for their money. These assertions are defensible, but that does not change the fact that a tax is being imposed.

It might be plausible to argue that the mandate is not a tax if the value of the insurance policy to the individual was equal to the cost. But since these are people who are not buying policies, their behavior reveals that this obviously cannot be true. So this means that they will be worse off under Obama’s plan and that at least some of the cost should be considered a tax.

The Social Security payroll tax allows a good analogy. Labor economists correctly argue that the payroll tax functions, in part, as a “premium” for what can be considered a government-provided annuity. As such, when we try to measure the disincentive effect of the payroll tax, it is appropriate to include the perceived value of future Social Security benefits (for most Americans, especially with average or above-average incomes, the “rate of return” is very low or negative, so a substantial share of the payroll tax is a tax both in the legal sense and economic-distortion sense). The same is true of a mandatory health insurance policy (even if the money does not go through the government’s hands).

On the broader issue of paying money and getting something of value in return, another analogy is helpful. A share of the gasoline excise tax is used for road construction and maintenance. We all benefit from roads, even if we don’t drive (let’s set aside issues such as whether the benefits equal the costs, whether the federal government should be involved, etc). Does that somehow mean the gasoline excise tax is not a tax? Of course not.

Turning now to the excise tax, the Administration’s argument that this is a fee is even less defensible. The Baucus legislation in the Senate Finance Committee explicitly references an excise tax. Equally revealing (and even more ominous), the IRS is charged with collecting the fee. The White House can argue that the tax – in the economic sense – is lower than the fee if something of value is exchanged. But the tax is still there.

Rather than play games, the White House should make an open argument for bigger government. The fact that the Administration prefers to be deceptive says a lot about the underlying merits of their proposal.

The President’s Health Care Tax is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• A new T-shirt for Senator Baucus: I worked for six months with half a dozen members of the Senate Finance Committee, and all I got was this lousy 223-page summary of what I hope the new health care bill will look like.

• Why should evidence even matter in education policy? I mean, we’re doing this for the children.

• Videos reveal tax-funded organization being used to help those who want to open a brothel and illegally bring underage girls into the United States as “sex workers.” Meet the two 20-somethings who exposed it.

• It’s time to narrowly define the mission in Afghanistan. “The United States does not have the patience, cultural knowledge or legitimacy to transform what is a deeply divided, poverty stricken, tribal-based society into a self-sufficient, non-corrupt, and stable electoral democracy.”

• Podcast: The future of health insurance: You buy it, or else.

Thursday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Wall Street Journal notes that Sen. Max Baucus’s allegedly moderate health care plan “would increase the cost of insurance and then force people to buy it, requiring subsidies. Those subsidies would be paid for by taxes that make health care and thus insurance even more expensive, requiring even more subsidies and still higher taxes.” Other than that, it’s not so bad. The Journal also digs up a great graphic produced by the 2008 presidential campaign of a little-known Illinois senator named Barack Obama:

And speaking of health care mandates and how much they’re going to cost young people, as the Washington Post was yesterday, I just had lunch with Clark Ruper, program manager for Students for Liberty, who told me he’d be on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS tonight. In the interview he told them that as a young healthy person he has voluntarily chosen not to purchase health insurance and instead invests in his own savings. And he thinks a lot of young people make such choices and don’t want a government mandate requiring them to buy government-approved insurance. Check it out tonight on PBS.

That Costly Mandate is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In their attempt to defeat Obamacare, Republicans have focused their criticism on the public option, painting it as the most objectionable feature of existing proposals. Senator Max Baucus, (D-Mont.), has now proposed a plan without the public option. This leaves the Republicans in an awkward position, especially since Baucus’s plan is projected to cost less than earlier proposals.

If Republicans oppose the Baucus plan, they surely risk the ire of voters who will be told during the mid-term elections, “The Republicans blocked a plan that would have covered the uninsured and reduced the deficit.”

The problem is, the public option was never the crucial issue; instead, it was the mandate to purchase insurance. Once government mandates insurance coverage, it gets to define what constitutes insurance, which means it can ban pre-existing condition clauses and the like. The mandate also”justifies” large subsidies for insurance, to avoid non-compliance with the mandate. So, an individual mandate, which the Baucus plan includes, implies a rapid takeover of the entire health care system by the federal government.

Something like the Baucus plan will pass. It will either cost far more than existing projections, if government administrators fail to impose the restrictions on reimbursements that generate the projected cost savings, or it will involve massive rationing of care.

The Democrats played it perfectly. The Republicans got sucker-punched.

C/P Libertarianism, from A to Z

Have the Democrats Outsmarted the Republicans on Health Care? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Quantifying misery in Iran.

• Why sending more troops to Afghanistan would only weaken the authority of Afghan leaders and undermine the U.S.’s ability to deal with security challenges elsewhere in the world. Plus, an exit strategy for Afghanistan.

• Grading the Baucus health plan: The good, the bad and the ugly.

• Who’s really indoctrinating the nation’s schoolkids.

• Podcast: How to quietly tax the poor, anger a giant nation, and reward a labor union, all at the same time!

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Though it’s not yet available, word has it that a bill to revive the REAL ID Act has been introduced in the Senate.

Its sponsors are an unlikely group: Senators Akaka (D-HI), Tester (D-MT), Baucus (D-MT), Carper (D-CT), Leahy (D-VT), and Voinovich (R-OH). REAL ID was dead in the water, but with a name change and a few burrs taken off, these five senators may just give it life once again.

Watch this space for posts as I analyze the bill and the politics. I’ll examine closely the substance of the “PASS ID Act.” I’ll try to figure out how both Senators from Montana – a state that rejected REAL ID flat out – became leaders in the fight to revive it.

More on the politics: As the stars lined up for repealing REAL ID outright, the Senate negotiated a compromise . . . with nobody. And I’ll look at something everyone is studiously ignoring – whether a national ID (by any name!) would actually do any good for the country!

REAL ID Revival Bill Introduced in Senate is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog