A bunch of rural hospitals are upset about a provision of Obamacare that benefits Massachusetts above all other states. Forgive the bureaucratese, but you really have to read the Medicare Price Control Payment Advisory Commission’s description to appreciate the situation:

Among the proposed wage index reclassifications or exceptions granted to hospitals for FY2012, the rural floor exception triggered in the state of Massachusetts will have a large impact on hospital payments. Beginning in FY 2012, the conversion of Nantucket Cottage Hospital from a critical access hospital to an IPPS hospital will trigger the rural floor wage index exception for the 60 urban hospitals in the state of Massachusetts, increasing wage indexes for these hospitals from an average of 1.16 in FY2011 to 1.35 in FY2012. Nantucket Cottage Hospital is a rural island hospital, which has 15 inpatient beds and serves approximately 150 Medicare inpatients per year. This hospital will become the only rural IPPS hospital in the state of Massachusetts. As a result of this change in one small hospital’s status, and the subsequent change in the wage index, payment rates for urban hospitals in Massachusetts will increase by 8 percent, or by more than $200 million in FY 2012. These extra payments will be made budget neutral at the national level, and therefore all hospitals—including rural hospitals—will absorb the financial loss.

Got that? One small, rural, island hospital in Massachusetts changes its Medicare status, and—presto!—the other 60 Massachusetts hospitals suddenly qualify for an extra $200 million in Medicare subsidies. Land of the free! A letter from several state hospital associations complains the amount is actually $367 million per year. The best part: Medicare scrounges up that $200-$367 million by reducing subsidies to other states. Thus the nasty letter from the lobbyists for non-Massachusetts hospitals.

Cato adjunct scholar David Hyman writes about this dynamic in his excellent satire, Medicare Meets Mephistopheles:

Geographically based envy has also precipitated a “formula fight” among the states, complete with litigation, coalitions of aggrieved states and senior citizens, coverage in newspapers and editorials, and statements from concerned legislators… [C]ertain state medical societies have been particularly insistent that their states are being shortchanged by the Medicare program. These interest groups have had great success in persuading their elected representatives to change Medicare’s reimbursement formulas, so the Medicare money train unloads their “fair share.”

I’ve written before about how Romneycare solidified layers of corruption whereby Massachusetts officials (with the complicity of the Bush administration) bilked taxpayers in the other 49 states. It turns out that Obamacare also has a sweetheart deal for Massachusetts. Who knew Romneycare and Obamacare had so much in common?

Obamacare’s Sweetheart Deal for Massachusetts is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One of the ways Massachusetts officials have tried to temper RomneyCare’s cost overruns was by denying participation to legal immigrants. Last week, the Commonwealth’s highest court ruled that restriction violates the Massachusetts Constitution:

Massachusetts cannot bar legal immigrants from a state health care program, according to a ruling issued Thursday by the state’s highest court…

The ruling said that a 2009 state budget that dropped about 29,000 legal immigrants who had lived in the United States for less than five years from Commonwealth Care, a subsidized health insurance program central to this state’s 2006 health care overhaul, violated the State Constitution.

“This appropriation discriminated on the basis of alienage and national origin,” wrote Justice Robert J. Cordy of the Supreme Judicial Court, ruling that the action “violates their rights to equal protection under the Massachusetts Constitution.”…

State officials say they will abide by the decision, although they are not yet sure how to pay for the change.

“This decision has significant fiscal impacts for the commonwealth, adding somewhere in the range of $150 million in annual costs to what is already a very challenging budget,” said Jay Gonzalez, secretary of administration and finance.

No doubt their “pay for” will involve another unpopular minority.

Former Romney/Obama advisor Jonathan Gruber has written that RomneyCare  was already costing the state $50 billion more than projected by 2009.  Of course, supporters have been hiding RomneyCare’s costs (and exaggerating its benefits) all along.

RomneyCare Just Got $150 Million More Expensive is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A brand new Harvard University study finds that American students perform very poorly in math compared to their peers in other nations.

What’s that? You’ve heard this all before? Not quite.

This study compares the percentages of students scoring at advanced levels across countries, and it controls for the confounding effects of differing populations of disadvantaged groups. When the researchers looked exclusively at white students and at students with at least one parent with a college degree, the results remained largely the same. Among white students, for instance, 8 percent of Americans scored “advanced” in math, landing us in 25th place among nations for which scores were available–behind nearly every other advanced industrialized nation on Earth. And the highest ranked U.S. state, Massachusetts, trails the overall averages of 14 nations.

This may come as a shock to those who imagined that America’s educational shortcomings were restricted to inner cities or disadvantaged populations, but it is entirely consistent with results reported more than a decade ago as part of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, showing that U.S. students taking advanced mathematics and physics classes lagged their peers in other industrialized nations at the end of high school, often by wide margins.

So how, then, have we remained an economic superpower for so long if our school system is so bad? The answer is that we have historically enjoyed one of the freest economies on Earth, a relatively unfettered labor market, and comparatively low taxes–all of which have drawn to our shores many of the world’s best and brightest. Regrettably, our comparative advantage in those areas has eroded over the past several years.

Perhaps, instead of continuing to make our economy more like our failing centrally planned school monopoly, we should allow our education system to benefit from the freedoms and incentives of the marketplace that was always the engine of our prosperity….

“Dear Foreigners, You Do the Math” –USA is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the latest Cato Policy Report, Cato adjunct scholar Arnold Kling‘s essay on the (mis)rule of experts explains why ObamaCare will fail:

Despite the many pages contained in the health care legislation that Congress enacted, the health care system that will result is for the most part to be determined. The design and implementation of health care reform was delegated to unelected bureaucrats, as was done in Massachusetts.

In Massachusetts, the promises of proponents have proven false, and the predictions of skeptics have been borne out. Costs have not been contained; they have shot up. Emergency room visits have not been curtailed; they have increased. The mandate to purchase health insurance has not removed the problem of adverse selection and moral hazard; instead, thousands of residents have chosen to obtain insurance when sick and drop it when healthy. The officials responsible for administering the Massachusetts health care system are no longer talking about sophisticated ways of making health care more efficient.

Instead, they are turning to the crude tactic of imposing price controls.

Once again, we have legislators putting unrealistic demands on experts. This results in the selection of experts with the greatest hubris, shutting out experts who appreciate the difficulty of the problem. When the selected experts find that their plans go awry, they take out their frustrations by resorting to more authoritarian methods of control.

With ObamaCare, that dynamic took hold before the law even took effect.

Giving Power to Experts Is No Way to Reform Health Care is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

So the much ballyhooed Race to the Top program — $4.35 billion out of nearly $110 billion in federal education stimulus and bailouts — is over, with today’s announcement of ten round-two winners. Who knows for sure how the winners were ultimately determined – point allocation was highly subjective — but it’s hard to be impressed by the list: the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island.

New York? Recent revelations about dumbed-down Regents exams hardly make it seem like a paragon of honest reform. Hawaii? How did last years’ school-free Fridays help them stack up so high? Maryland? Fostering charter schools was supposed to be important, but it has one of the most constricting charter laws in the nation. And Massachusetts? Well, it’s easy to see how it won – it just dropped its own, often-considered nation-leading curriculum standards to adopt national standards demanded by Race to the Top.

In the end, though, how states were chosen really doesn’t matter that much. Why? Because the race was based mainly on who could make the biggest, fastest promises of reform, not who was actually, meaningfully reforming things. So, at the very least, we should all hold our applause for both the winners and the race for several years, because promises are easy — real change is tough.

Race to the Top ‘Winners’ Declared is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The hard-nosed, content-at-all-cost folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation have been warned, and warned, and warned some more: Get the national curriculum standards you think are so incredibly important, and they will almost certainly be captured by the pedagogical progressives who have dominated education for decades — and whose notions you disdain. Well, if what’s being reported by Common Core’s Lynne Munson – and reiterated in this lamentation for Massachusetts by the Pioneer Institute’s Jim Stergios – is accurate, that is already happening. (Actually, some prominent analysts have long said that the national standards — created by the Council of Chief State School Officers and National Governors Association — are already nothing the Fordhamites should embrace.) Writes Munson:

This is strange. P21 is being subsumed into CCSSO. There’s nothing to be read about this on either CCSSO’s or P21′s websites. But according to Fritzwire the two organizations have formed a “strategic management relationship” that will commence December 1.

So what is P21 –  the group cozying up with the standards-writing CCSSO — you ask? Let the Fordham Institute tell you:

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has some powerful supporters, including the NEA, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft. Fourteen states have also climbed aboard its effort to refocus American K-12 education on global awareness, media literacy and the like–and to defocus it on grammar, multiplication tables and the causes of the Civil War. Its swell-sounding yet damaging notions have been plenty influential–but the unmasking and truth-telling have begun, thanks in large part to a valiant little organization named Common Core. And new research validates this and other skeptics’ criticisms. Today the contest resembles David vs. Goliath–but remember who ultimately prevailed in that one.

Uh-oh. It might be time to end the biblical references — it looks more and more like Goliath is going to win.

Uh-oh: Here Comes Edu-Goliath! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a recent post on how RomneyCare is increasing health insurance costs in Massachusetts (by encouraging healthy residents to purchase coverage only when they need medical care) and how ObamaCare will do the same, I linked to a Boston Globe article where an insurance-company spokeswoman made this odd claim:

We believe…the gaming in the system…is adding as much as $300 million dollars to the health care system in Massachusetts.

It’s hard to know what she meant. Taken literally, this claim is obviously untrue.  The gamers aren’t adding revenue to “the system” — they’re withholding revenue.  Nor are they adding costs, in the sense of additional medical spending.  If anything, overall spending falls because the gamers are less often insured, and therefore consume less medical care.

She might have meant that the premiums the gamers aren’t paying (or the difference between what they pay and the medical care they receive) amounts to $300 million, and that the gamers are imposing that cost on non-gamers in the form of higher premiums. But that doesn’t hold water, either.  The gamers have zero power to impose costs on non-gamers; only the government has that power. All the gamers are doing is responding rationally to the incentives RomneyCare creates and avoiding — lawfully, I might add — a $300 million tax.

So if that was her meaning, this spokeswoman should have said:

RomneyCare is imposing a $300 million tax on insured Massachusetts residents by encouraging other residents to game the system.

Instead, she blamed consumers and argued for laws that make it harder for consumers to avoid RomneyCare’s private-insurer bailout individual mandate.

So now we’ve got President Obama, who signed a law requiring health insurers to pay for more stuff, blaming insurers for rising premiums.  We’ve got pro-RomneyCare politicians doing the same in Massachusetts.  And we’ve got health insurers, who support laws forcing consumers to buy their products, blaming consumers for the cost of those laws.

Remember how RomneyCare and ObamaCare were supposed to promote responsibility?

Under Romney/ObamaCare, Even the Scapegoats Scapegoat is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times editorialists are at it again.  June 12th’s lead editorial, “The Latest Work Dodge: A Shutdown,” frets over the specter of the New York state government being shut down because Albany’s legislators can’t agree on a budget.  Well, the Times must have breathed a collective sigh of relief late Monday (June 14th).  That’s when the State Senate passed Governor Paterson’s 11th temporary budget extender, which allowed state offices to hang out “open for business” signs on Tuesday.

But, the Times wants a final state budget and claims that more taxing and borrowing and maybe some cuts in school aid will do the trick.  One item that the Times wants off the table in Albany is property taxes.  According to the Times, Democratic state senators outside New York City should stop pushing for restrictions on the rate of growth of property taxes.  I agree.  Instead, the legislators should start pushing for sharp cuts in New York’s oppressive property taxes.  When every U.S. county is ranked according to its average property-tax bill, as a percent of home values, 14 of the highest 15 are in New York state.

As Prof. Steve Walters and I concluded in “A Property Tax Cut Could Help Save Buffalo” (Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2008),  New York should follow California and Massachusetts and cut property taxes.  Voters capped property taxes in California at 1% of market value with Proposition 13 in 1978. That forced San Francisco to cut its rate by 57% overnight and brought forth a tidal wave of investment, even amidst a recession. By 1982, inflation-adjusted city revenues were two-thirds higher than they had been before Prop. 13. Massachusetts voters passed Prop 2 ½ in 1980, forcing Boston’s property tax rate down by an estimated 75% within two years. Massive reinvestment, repopulation and urban renewal followed.

New York State Should Cut Property Taxes is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Massachusetts Treasurer Tim Cahill, who is running for governor as an independent, claims that former governor Mitt Romney’s 2006 health care law “has created a huge hole in our budget,” and has this to say about ObamaCare:

If the federal plan is the Massachusetts plan writ large, then we should stop it, because we’re going to be in the same place four or five years down the road.

Indeed, ObamaCare is the Massachusetts plan writ large.

Repeal the bill.

Massachusetts Treasurer on ObamaCare: ‘We Should Stop It’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, MIT health economist and Obama administration consultant Jonathan Gruber responds to claims that ObamaCare will increase health care costs.  Gruber acknowledges the Obama administration’s estimates that ObamaCare will increase health care spending, but compares that to the administration’s estimate that 34 million otherwise uninsured U.S. residents will obtain coverage under the law:

[B]y 2019, the United States will be spending $46 billion more on medical care than we do today. In 2010 dollars, this amounts to only $800 per newly insured person — quite a low cost as compared (for example) with the $5,000 average single premium for employer-sponsored insurance.

What a bargain!  Of course, Gruber is being sneaky.  The cost per newly insured person is not $800.  It will be higher than $5,000.  But only $800 of that cost will appear as new health care spending.  The rest of that cost will be borne largely by people who already had coverage, but find their access to care reduced.  These include Medicare enrollees who will receive fewer benefits through (or who will be ousted from) their private Medicare plans; Medicare enrollees who will have a harder time accessing care because some hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies and other providers “might end their participation in the program,” according to the Obama administration; and maybe even some (currently) privately insured people who find themselves in Medicaid.  (The administration itself says it is “probable” that ObamaCare “could result…in some of this demand being unsatisfied.”)  Other costs include the economic growth and opportunity that is destroyed by ObamaCare’s tax increases, and the costs associated with trapping workers in low-wage jobs.

And that’s if everything goes as planned.  Gruber remains convinced that future Congresses will not undo ObamaCare’s tax increases or downward adjustments to Medicare’s price controls, as Congress has consistently undone scheduled reductions in the prices that Medicare pays physicians.  Gruber’s sometime employer — the Obama administration — itself contradicts his argument when it writes that the bulk of those reductions in Medicare spending are “doubtful” and “unrealistic.”  Gruber inadvertently shows why critics are right to be skeptical about the tax increases and spending reductions when he writes:

The cuts in spending and increases in taxes are actually “back-loaded,” with the revenue increases rising faster over time than the spending increases, so that this legislation improves our nation’s fiscal health more and more over time.

The fact that the austerity measures had to be backloaded is a sign of their implausibility.  If they were popular, they could take full effect tomorrow.  But their implementation had to be delayed to head off significant political resistance — resistance that will express itself between now and when those austerity measures take effect.

On the broader issue of reducing the growth of health care spending, Gruber claims that ObamaCare “cautiously pursue[s] many different approaches toward cost control and stud[ies] them to see which ones work best.” Yet each approach is all but guaranteed to fail. The tax on high-cost health plans? Unlikely to survive. (But at least Gruber now admits it is a tax.)  The rationing board designed to curtail each congresscritter’s ability to keep the money flowing to health care providers in their districts? Also unlikely to survive, for obvious reasons.  Pilot programs experimenting with different government price and exchange controls? Even successful pilot programs get nixed.  Comparative-effectiveness research?  A pipe dream that fails every time the government tries it.

To the extent that these spending cuts fail to materialize, health care spending will rise, and deficits will deepen. Congress will need to impose additional tax increases, and/or find sneakier ways to ration medical care curb health care spending.  Gruber’s Massachusetts enacted ObamaCare four years ago, and that’s exactly what state officials are doing.

Since President Obama signed this law, the Congressional Budget Office has announced that its cost, including the so-called “doc fix” and spending subject to appropriations, is already about $200 billion higher than previously believed.  As I’ve written elsewhere:

ObamaCare would create new constituencies for government spending, hook existing constituencies on even more government spending, and promise implausible cuts in existing subsidies to constituencies that are highly organized and vocal.

Gruber gets chutzpah points for arguing that the same law would actually contain health care costs.

A Response to Jonathan Gruber on ObamaCare & Health Care Costs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Despite nearly two decades of state and federal standards-and-testing, as well as big increases in spending, today’s reading results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress – the so-called “Nation’s Report Card” — continue to tell a tale of stagnation.  Nationally, the average fourth-grade score was 217 (out of 500) in 1992. In 2009 it was only 221. For eighth grade, the average score in 1992 was 260. In 2009 it was just 264. Oh, and eighth-graders had hit 264 by 1998, which means there hasn’t been even a smidgen of improvement since then.

“But,” will say the standardizers, “the problem is that we just haven’t set really high standards and been unrelenting in forcing schools to meet them.” You know, we haven’t been like Massachusetts, which has shown the rest of the nation the way.

Think again. It turns out there very well might be a Massachusetts Mirage.

The average eighth grade score in the Bay State went up just one, tiny point between 2007 and 2009, going from 273 to 274, and it has been stuck around 273 since 2003. Worse yet, in fourth grade the average score dropped from 236 to 234 between 2007 and 2009, and the Bay State had hit 234 as early as 2002.    

Now, can we tell definitively from either the national or Massachusetts scores that centralized standards-and-accountability regimes don’t work? Nope. There are far too many variables involved in education, from child nutrition to the weather on test day, to make such a pronouncement. But we can say that those who are trying to sell us centralized control of education had also better not point to national scores, or scores in the sainted state of Massachusetts, as any kind of evidence that centralized standards-and testing works.

I’m not getting my hopes up.

Bad News for the Education Standards Crowd is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Massachusetts state treasurer and recent Democrat Timothy Cahill has harsh words for the health plan foisted on his state and the identical plan that President Obama is trying to foist on the nation.  From The Boston Globe:

“If President Obama and the Democrats repeat the mistake of the health insurance reform here in Massachusetts on a national level, they will threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years,” Cahill said in a press conference in his office.

Echoing criticism leveled by congressional Republicans in recent weeks, Cahill said, “It is time for the president, the Democratic leadership, to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new plan that does not threaten to bankrupt this country.”

[T]he state’s health insurance law…Cahill said, “has nearly bankrupted the state.”

Cahill said the law is being sustained only with the help of federal aid, which he suggested that the Obama administration is funneling to Massachusetts to help the president make the case for a similar plan in Congress.

“The real problem is the sucking sound of money that has been going in to pay for this health care reform,” Cahill said. “And I would argue that we’re being propped up so that the federal government and the Obama administration can drive it through” Congress.

Commonwealth Connector, the independent state agency established to help residents find the health insurance, has “totally failed,” to create competition and connect people with affordable insurance, Cahill said, pointing out that 68 percent of the residents it serves receive subsidized care.

“We haven’t done anything about driving down costs,” Cahill said. “We haven’t helped small business. We haven’t changed the way we pay for health care and the way we deliver it.”…

Asked for solutions today, Cahill said he would seek to “level the playing field” between hospitals that charge different rates for similar procedures, seek to increase competition by allowing health insurance companies plans to sell plans across state lines, and would slash benefits mandated under state law.

For more on the Massachusetts health plan, see “The Massachusetts Health Plan: Much Pain, Little Gain.”

Massachusetts Treasurer Blasts RomneyCare and, Equivalently, ObamaCare is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

What does it say that the American polity has consistently rejected a wholesale government takeover of health care for 100 years?

What does it say that public opinion has been consistently against the Democrats’ health care takeover since July 2009?

What does it say that Democrats are having this much difficulty enacting their health care legislation despite unified Democratic rule?  Despite large supermajorities in both chambers of Congress, including a once-filibuster-proof Senate majority (see more below)?  Despite an opportunistic change in Massachusetts law that provided that crucial 60th vote at a crucial moment?  Despite a popular and charismatic president?

What does it say that 38 House Democrats voted against the president’s health plan?

What does it say that Massachusetts voters elected, to fill the term of Ted Kennedy, a Republican who ran against the health care legislation that Kennedy helped to shape?

What does it say that the only thing bipartisan about that legislation is the opposition to it?

What does it say that 39 senators voted to declare that legislation’s centerpiece unconstitutional?

What does it say that health care researchers — a fairly left-wing lot — think the Senate bill is unconstitutional?

What does it say that the demands of pro-life and pro-choice House Democrats, each of which hold enough votes to determine the fate of this legislation, are irreconcilable?

What does it say that House Democrats are actually contemplating a legislative strategy that would deem the Senate bill to have passed the House — without the House ever actually voting on it?

Given that ours is a system of government where ambition is made to counteract ambition, what does it mean that the only way to pass this legislation is for the House to trust that the Senate will keep the House’s interests at heart?

Questions for Thoughtful ObamaCare Supporters is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Hoping to revive his increasingly unpopular health care overhaul, President Obama has invited Republicans to a bipartisan summit this Thursday and plans to introduce a new reform blueprint in advance of the summit.  On Sunday, the White House announced that a key feature of that blueprint will be premium caps, a form of government price control that helped kill the Clinton health plan when even New Democrats rejected it.

The New York Times reports on President Obama’s blueprint:

The president’s bill would grant the federal health and human services secretary new authority to review, and to block, premium increases by private insurers, potentially superseding state insurance regulators.

It bears repeating what Obama’s top economic advisor Larry Summers thinks about price controls:

Price and exchange controls inevitably create harmful economic distortions. Both the distortions and the economic damage get worse with time.

For example, as I have written elsewhere, artificially limiting premium growth allows the government to curtail spending while leaving the dirty work of withholding medical care to private insurers: “Premium caps, which Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is currently threatening to impose, force private insurers to manage care more tightly — i.e., to deny coverage for more services.”  No doubt the Obama administration would lay the blame for coverage denials on private insurers and claim that such denials demonstrate the need for a so-called “public option.”

As the Progressive Policy Institute’s David Kendall explained in a 1994 paper, the Clinton health plan contained similar price controls.  Kendall explains why they would be a disaster:

In spite of the late hour in the health care debate, Congress has not yet decided how to restrain runaway health care costs. The essential choices are a top- down strategy of government limits on health care spending enforced by price controls or a bottom-up strategy of consumer choice and market competition. History clarifies that choice: Previous government efforts to regulate prices in peacetime have invariably failed. Moreover, government attempts to control prices in the health care sector would undermine concurrent efforts to restructure the marketplace…

The idea of controlling costs by government fiat is seductively simple. But it rests on a conceit as persistent as it is damaging: that government bureaucracies can allocate resources more wisely and efficiently than millions of consumers and providers pursuing their interests in the marketplace. The alternative — one rooted in America’s progressive tradition of individual responsibility and free enterprise — is to improve the market’s ground rules in order to decentralize decision-making, spur innovation, reward efficiency, and respect personal choice.

As centrally planned economies crumble around the world, many in the United States seem bent on erecting a command and control economy in health care. This policy briefing examines the reasons why government price regulation would fail to constrain health care costs and create many adverse side effects…

Ultimately, government price regulation will always fail because it does not change the underlying economic forces driving up prices. If we are serious about slowing the growth of health care costs, we have to change the ways we consume and provide medical care. Price controls evade the hard but essential work of structural reform in health care markets: They are a quintessentially political response to an economic problem. The alternative is to allow well-functioning markets to set prices and allocate resources, while ensuring that all Americans have access to affordable health care coverage. The market-oriented approach leaves decisions to cost-conscious consumers and health care providers rather than bureaucrats.

Any of that sound familiar?  It’s worth reading the whole thing.

This is not hope.  This is not change.  (Much less a game-changer.)  It is, to pinch a phrase, a return to “the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis.”

Obama’s ‘Best’ Idea? Rationing Care via Clinton-esque Price Controls is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today Politico Arena asks:

State of the Union:  What Should Obama Say?

My response:

Obama’s in a difficult spot:  His head tells him to tack right, but his heart’s not in it — and he’s not the first Democrat to be in that spot.  That’s brought out today in a CNN Opinion piece, “When liberals revolt,” written by Arena’s (and Princeton’s) Julian E. Zelizer.  Tracing similar dilemmas that Johnson, Carter, and Clinton faced, Zelizer shows how they all paid a price for tacking right, which it looks like Obama may do.  Johnson faced primary challenges that led him to withdraw from the 1968 race.  Carter was challenged by Ted Kennedy.  He prevailed; but weakened, he then lost to Reagan in 1980.  And Clinton’s move to the center after the disastrous 1994 midterm elections helped him win reelection, Zelizer argues, but it also left him with a thin legislative record on domestic policy.

In short, moving right has its costs, Zelizer claims.  Many liberals are “deeply unhappy with the president, believing that he has already drifted too far away from the promises that animated his supporters in 2008.”  He’ll need those liberals in 2010 and 2012.  Pointing to the “long tradition of Democratic presidents taking the left for granted at a cost to their administrations,” Zelizer notes that they learned “that the ire of the left — a constituency that is very vocal, highly mobilized and politically engaged — can cause enormous damage.”

That it can.  But can the left do more than cause enormous damage?  In particular:  Can it govern?  Zelizer cites Ted Kennedy castigating Carter, saying that ”the Democratic Party needed to ‘sail against the wind’ of conservative public sentiment by using the federal government to help alleviate social problems.”  Fine speechifying.  But will it get you (re)elected — much less enable you to govern?  The evidence is not encouraging.  In fact, the deeper problem the left is facing is that self-identified conservatives in America outnumber liberals by better than two to one.  Cambridge may have voted against Scott Brown by 84 to 14, but that just shows how out of touch Harvard is with the rest of Massachusetts — to say nothing of the rest of the country.  Obama won not because the country was enthralled with his vague message, but because his opposition, like Clinton’s in 1996, was so uninspiring.  In sum, the left’s problem — and Obama’s — is that the country isn’t buying the message, now that it’s clearer.  And that’s the heart of the matter.

Obama’s Dilemma is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday, Cato released a new study, “The Massachusetts Health Plan: Much Pain, Little Gain,” which showed that official estimates overstate the gains in health insurance coverage resulting from a 2006 Massachusetts law by at least 45 percent.  The study also finds: supporters understate the law’s cost by nearly 60 percent; government programs are crowding out private insurance; self-reported health improved for some but fell for others; and young adults are responding to the law by avoiding Massachusetts.

Given that the Massachusetts health plan bears a “remarkable resemblance” to the Obama plan, the study should serve as a warning sign to members of Congress, says Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies.

The study has received coverage in Investor’s Business Daily, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Detroit News, The Washington Times, the Reason Foundation and the Pioneer Institute.

Trouble in Massachusetts is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• The back story behind the Citizens United free speech case. (Or if you don’t have time to read about it, this short video clip explains it all.)

• RomneyCare: Obama’s OTHER Massachusetts problem.

• Tim Geithner’s lifelong love of bailouts.

• How substantial and meaningful change can be brought to Haiti.

• Podcast: “Supreme Court Affirms First Amendment” featuring John Samples.

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

In this new video, Cato’s David Boaz and John Samples evaluate what Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts means for Democrats and Republicans in the near and far term. Samples and Boaz contend that Tuesday’s election sent a message to Democrats that they have clearly overreached, but Republicans need to be careful and realize that they’re still not very popular either.

Watch:

John Samples is the author of the forthcoming book, The Struggle to Limit Government, available soon at the Cato store.

Lessons from the Brown Victory in Massachusetts is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• David Boaz on Obama’s first year: “From this libertarian, Obama’s first year looks grim. …He may well end up like Lyndon Johnson, with an ambitious domestic agenda eventually bogged down by endless war. But I don’t think his wished-for FDR model — a transformative agenda that is both popular and long-lasting — is in the cards.”

• The message from Massachusetts: “There can be no denying that this election was a clear cut rejection of the Democratic health care bills.”

• Attacks from all sides: See what happens when the Right takes on free enterprise.

• A new dictator in Iraq?

• Podcast: Daniel Ikenson discusses Obama’s trade policy.

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

Today, Politico Arena asks:

The message from Massachusetts

What now for the Democratic agenda?

My response:

Listening to Scott Brown’s long, barely scripted acceptance speech last night, you had the refreshing sense that you were listening to an ordinary American, not to some political cut-out.  Here’s a guy who campaigned in a pick-up truck with over 200,000 miles on the odometer, who listened to the voters and understood that they wanted not simply to block tax hikes but to lower taxes (and the last thing they wanted was for their taxes to pay terrorists’ lawyers bills!), who understood that even worse than the health care bill now before Congress were the back-room deals that brought it about, who’s served proudly for 30 years in the National Guard — in short, here’s guy you’d be comfortable having a beer with because, as he said, “I know who I am and I know who I serve.”

Which brings to mind the famous Rose Garden beer the president and vice president shared with Prof. Gates and Sgt. Crowley — speaking of (dis)comfort.  And that brings to mind Cambridge, which stayed true blue, 84-15, Walter Russell Mead informs us this morning in his delightfully tongue-in-cheek Arena post.  (“First, some good news for Democrats: the base is secure.”)  As goes Harvard, so goes Berkeley.

But to today’s Arena question.  The Democratic left is predictably outraged that “the people” they so love in the abstract have so disappointed them in the concrete.  Exhibit A is last night’s Arena post by The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel.  Railing against “the Tea Party’s inchoate right-wing populism” (if it’s infested Massachusetts, shudder to think of it in Idaho!), Katrina tells Obama to “get tough, get bold, kiss ‘post-partisanship’ goodbye,” and “put yourself squarely back on the side of working people” by “passing the strongest possible healthcare bill as quickly as is feasible.”  And there’s the cliff, Katrina.

Lanny Davis has more sober advice for Obama in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.  To those who are pointing fingers at Martha Coakley, Lanny says, “This was a defeat not of the messenger but of the message” — the unrelenting leftism that has come from this White House and this Congress.  And he points, by way of instruction, to Bill Clinton’s response to the disastrous elections of 1994, though he doesn’t mention Clinton’s ringing, albeit inaccurate, description of his course-change — “The era of big government is over.”  Is it in Obama’s DNA to make such a course correction?  Does he have a reset button?

On health care, Obama and his party are in an almost impossible situation.  If they press ahead, as Nancy Pelosi and others are urging, the cliff awaits them in November.  But if they abandon their project, what will they run on in November?  It’s a mess of their own making, of course, so completely did they misread the election of 2008.  What better evidence of the endurance of principles of sound, limited government that some two centuries later, The Tea Party has come home to Boston.

The Tea Party Comes Home is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog