Ezra Klein writes that, given it's modest goals, Massachusetts' health-care plan has been a modest success:
Covering this many adults has cost a fair amount of money, and the Massachusetts plan is coming in at about $150 million over budget. The reason? There are more uninsured people in Massachusetts than experts originally thought, and the response has been more enthusiastic than expected. Some of the plan's opponents have used this to blast the plan as a typical case of inefficient government. "They make it sound like the Big Dig," complains Jon Gruber, an MIT economist heavily involved in the plan's creation. "It's not. We're covering the uninsured and it turns out there's a lot of the uninsured. If you were doing the Big Dig and it turned out the tunnel was six times as long, you wouldn't be surprised it cost six times as much."
And Sarah Posner has the latest on the religious right:
Barack Obama has gone to great lengths to appeal to evangelicals. He's talked about his walk with Christ, met with Christian leaders and convinced them of his faith, launched his Joshua Generation project to reach younger evangelicals, had his campaign staff participate in weekly telephonic prayer with clergy, and this week traveled the country talking about faith, values, and faith-based government funding of community projects to lift people out of poverty and despair. He promised that the proposed initiative would have no religious litmus tests, no proselytizing, and no discrimination in projects funded by the government, but good luck policing that.
Subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.
--The Editors
