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WYDEN ON OBAMA. Just got this press release from Wyden's office, which surprises me by making some fairly sharp criticisms of the Obama plan, at least in its current form:
There also are, however, some key differences between our plans: first, the Obama plan calls for a single, national health insurance exchange to monitor insurance companies offering coverage. While it's important to have minimum national standards, I'm not sure creating a new federal bureaucracy is the best approach. By contrast, the Wyden-Bennett legislation would allow each state the flexibility to innovate as long as minimum federal standards are met.The Obama plan also relies heavily on the current employer-based system which leaves workers at risk of losing their health care if they lose or change their jobs. It also puts U.S. companies and workers at a disadvantage in the long-term when they have to compete in a global economy against overseas companies whose workers get their health care paid by their government.Finally, it's not clear if the Obama plan does anything to change the current Federal tax code that gives the biggest tax breaks for health care to the affluent and subsidizes inefficiency.I'm pretty sure the Obama plan does have provisions for states' to improvise, but Wyden is right that Obama's regulatory agency is federal rather than state-based. That's a good thing. In fact, it's pretty similar to the Wyden plan, which has sharp requirements insurers must abide by -- no community rating, benefits equal to Blue Cross/Blue Shield's standard plan, etc -- which are laid out in the text of the legislation. Indeed, as a snap judgment, I'm more sympathetic to robust federal regulation on this than to letting Mississippi or Texas try and inventively evade the minimum standards. The other two criticisms in the press release, however, seem more on-target. The Obama plan isn't nearly so vicious to the employer link as I'd prefer, and some of the more technical issues, like tax deductability, remain unclear.--Ezra Klein
