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 CT20/I-91 Interchange
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Via tweets from @eddie_smith and @PrezMike2010 (SOA President Mike McLaughlin), I came across a blog post at Newsweek highlighting a difference between the House and Senate health reform bills which could be contributing to the unwillingness of House Dems to just vote for the Senate bill. It’s a factor which hasn’t received much attention in [...] 
I feel disappointed in myself for not having caught this news earlier, but it seems that one casualty of the Senate’s backlog may be flood insurance. According to Insurance Journal, the NFIP is not accepting new business since an omnibus bill which includes yet another temporary reauthorization is stuck in queue with the Senate. The IJ [...] 
So, yesterday I listened to much of the health care summit in Blair House. The comments I tweeted during the summit are aggregated in this post, but I thought I would share a few post-mortem thoughts. From a naïve, idealistic point of view, you would think that getting a group of responsible leaders together to discuss [...] 
This weekend, the New York Times has carried two op-ed columns which merit reading by anyone interested in federal politics. Senator Bayh (D-IN) wrote a column discussing his reasons for choosing not to run for re-election, while former Senator Chafee (R/I-RI) reflected on his own decision to retire from the Senate and to run for [...] 
Monday’s New York Times op-ed by Krugman caught my attention: A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its [...] 
Via the newswires: The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday to a senator who had asked for an antitrust review. In the letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch, obtained by The Associated Press, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote [...]
If you lack an effective party structure within the state, outsource. As I head to bed, it looks like the Massachusetts special election is being called. With 93% of the vote in, it’s Brown (R) 52%, Coakley (D) 47%, and Kennedy (L) 1%. And the health care reform effort in Congress just became a bit more interesting
Via @JohnLobert I came across an article in the Salt Lake Tribune reminding us that if/when Congress passes health care reform, the political battle won’t be over; it’ll just change venues: Republicans, led by Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, are challenging the very constitutionality of the health reform bill, focusing on a requirement that every American buy [...]
Yesterday, I mentioned a Bob Herbert column highlighting some issues with the proposed tax on “Cadillac Health Plans”. In the Washington Post, Ezra Klein has written a response. The entire article is worth reading and thinking about, but there is one passage in particular I want to comment on: [Herbert] doesn’t really argue that the excise tax [...]
Although I and a few other folks (including Medicare’s Chief Actuary) have mentioned some of the points raised previously, it’s good to see them raised in a higher-profile medium such as the New York Times op-ed page, where Bob Herbert (who generally writes in support of the administration) takes note of the "Cadillac" plan excise [...] |
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