Health

Ladder vs. Safety net

When designing economic policies there is often a trade-off between our desire to provide immediate financial assistance to those who have our sympathy and our desire to maximize the opportunities for their long run success. If you give financial assistance to someone in need but tell them…

ObamaCare’s trap makes it harder to reach the middle class

I will give you, fresh from the oven, either a home-baked Toll House chocolate chip cookie or a Krispy Kreme donut. Your choice.

Another unforced error?

I didn’t think it was possible for Team Obama to make their problems with the individual insurance market any worse.

I was wrong.

In an interview with Chuck Todd yesterday, President Obama spoke about the 8–10 million Americans whose…

Ensuring presidential accuracy & honesty

Three recent articles and columns prompted me to write about President Obama’s oft-repeated false promise, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period.”

Flowchart of President Obama’s “You can keep your plan, period” defenses

Please click on the image for a larger, more readable version.

Lame Ducks and Fiscal Cliffs (part 1)

This is the first of a few posts on the policy decisions stacking up for the end of this year. In this post I will simply list the moving parts, deadlines and timeframes, and which election scenarios are most important to analyze. To some extent this is just a…

Why not expand Medicaid?

Correction: I got the match rates in my example wrong because I ignored the second law which overrode the ACA on the match rates. The text below is now accurate. My error doesn’t change any of my substantive arguments.