Earlier today, Ron Pollack, the director of Families USA, made a nice point before the Senate Finance Committee. "We keep on talking about a level playing field," he said, "but in Medicare, we don't have a level playing field. The payments to private plans in Medicare Advantage are considerably larger than they would be for someone in traditional Medicare." To just take a second to explain this, Medicare offers private insurance options called Medicare Advantage plans. The basic idea was the government would pay them the same amount of money it pays the Medicare program to cover seniors. If the private market could outcompete Medicare, then it could prosper. But it didn't. Instead, it lobbied for more and more reimbursement, until the government was paying private plans 119 percent what they were paying Medicare. That's almost 20 percent more per beneficiary. Which is all to say that the private insurance industry is not interested in level playing fields as a matter of principle. It'...

I should probably feign surprise that yet another study , this time from the University of Illinois, has emerged showing that union intimidation not only isn't a problem, but doesn't appear to exist in any measurable quantities. This bit of research -- which was, in part, funded by the AFl-CIO, but uses public records in ways that can be easily reproduced -- examined majority sign-up in the Illinois public sector. In the past six years, 22,000 workers joined unions, and thousands more worked for agencies that managed to repel an organizing campaign. The researchers used Freedom if Information requests to survey the public records from all of those efforts. There was no evidence of union coercion. Ever. The one complaint filed was dismissed for lack of merit. It consisted of "hearsay statements that [UNION X] representatives came to employees’ homes in an effort to obtain signatures on authorization cards." Even if it had been true, it would have been the intimidation tactics favored...

It's looking like swine flu doesn't have the genetic capability to mutate into anything especially lethal. The high death toll in Mexico may simply be evidence that the disease was much more widespread than was initially understood. All of which is very good news. But it's also a teachable moment of sorts. The influenza might prove relatively harmless. But it could have been a reaper bug. And in that case, if Mexico's aggressive public health response had been a little less effective, the consequences could have been catastrophic. Indeed, in the past couple of years, we've had at least a couple close calls. SARS was incredibly deadly but never became terribly infectious. Swine flu was quite infectious but didn't become particularly deadly. Both originated in relatively poor areas. All of which is to say, there are a lot of issues in foreign aid that are matters of compassion rather than direct national interest. A lack of secondary education doesn't jump borders or kill Americans. But...

Generally speaking, I'm a big Robert Reich fan. But his explanation for why the president is going after a variety of tax breaks that help corporations hide international income makes very little sense. The president needs the cooperation of many big corporations if he's going to get universal health insurance enacted this year. Many of these companies would benefit from lower health costs but they're reluctant to take on Big Pharma, big health insurance companies, and major health providers, all of whom are dead set against a provision in the emerging health insurance proposal that would allow the public to opt for a government health plan. How does it help for him to take on corporate tax havens? Because the president needs as many bargaining chips with the rest of corporate America as possible. The proposed crackdown on foreign tax avoidance is one such chip. He might be willing to take it off the table if big corporations lend him active support on health insurance. The...

There's a tendency to treat Senator James Inhofe as the Republican Party's crazy uncle. You invite him to dinner. You listen to him rant about global warming. You wait out his stories about asking Michael Crichton to testify before his committee as a climate expert. You try not to look away from your peas. But there's a case for taking Inhofe much more seriously than that. He's not the party's crazy uncle. He's it's unrestrained id. What makes him different from other Republicans is that there's little distance between rhetoric and action. But it's his rhetoric, and not theirs, that's actually a useful guide to Republican Party behavior. Take his curious response to Arlen Specter's defection: There is no evidence more visible that the American people are already rebelling against the far-left agenda than Senator Arlen Specter switching parties to become a Democrat. He did this for one reason, and that is his advisers told him he couldn’t retain his Senate seat as a Republican. In...

• Supreme Court tenure is stupid. Change it. • In case you forgot that Libertarianism does, in fact, carry quite radical implications. • Nasty credit card tricks, and the politicians that protect them. • "When you have a lot of people in finance taking home billions, then something has gone badly wrong." • Why white is a more environmentally friendly than green. • Worrying about "Too Big to Fail" before it was cool.

Representative Tom Price has an op-ed in Politico today where he argues: Because of Washington’s inability to deliver high-quality care, the American people remain wholly opposed to turning control of medical decisions over to the government. To overcome this, Democrats in Congress have begun promoting an innocent-sounding “public option.” They claim the public option would simply “compete” with private plans. Proponents of such a plan assert that the inadequacies of our current health care system are the product of a failed free market. Yet the irrefutable truth is there is no free market in American health care. Market mechanisms have been trampled by governmental involvement in care, primarily through Medicare — the government’s public option for seniors. It would seem that the obvious solution would be to get rid of Medicare. Yet Price doesn't advocate that. Which is strange. If that the American people are so set against government-run care and Medicare has proven such a...