Ezra Klein

Matt and Kevin tee off my HSA post below with some thoughts on long-term political strategy. Their main point, which is probably correct, is that negotiating with ourselves doesn’t make sense. As Matt says, the onus should really be for GM and Ford and the insurance industry to come to us and admit that health […]

Matt Yglesias and Brad Plumer are discussing Leif Wellington Haas’s plan for universal health care, which breaks down into another one of these individual mandate thingies. Sigh. I feel so left out. There was a time — not long ago! — when I’d have been the first to tear through Haas’s 78-page plan, summarize it, […]

A few days ago I flagged an American Prospect article by Geoffrey Nunberg for its excellent description of the ideologically conservative/operatively liberal divide. Now I want to highlight a different part: Republicans will try to pin a big-government label on the Democrats, but the appropriate response to that is not to apologize for government, as […]

This trend of companies publicly articulating policies to pull all ads from any publication that publishes negative pieces on them is really quite scary. Fact is, we don’t have a free press, we have a press that relies on the goodwill and involvement of advertisers. So long as they’re dependent on an income source that […]

I’ve found an HSA plan I like: Oshkosh Truck Corp. (OSK ), for example, has veered away from the old — and costly — health maintenance organization it used for its 4,500 nonunion employees. The plan’s low copayments encouraged doctor visits and contributed to the double-digit annual growth in Oshkosh’s health-care bill. So in January, […]

Matt’s got a nice post on how health insurers screw the young and why that makes mandated private insurance (a la The New America Foundation, The Century Foundation, and John Breaux) something of a mess. Fun stuff. But hey, here’s a sidebar: While explaining his grand plan to attract young, healthy folk and weed out […]

August is so on fire lately it’s absurd. Read.

Timothy Noah catches Tom Friedman being inconsistent. Really inconsistent. But Tom’s I-voted-against-it-before-I-voted-for-it approach to subscription fees really isn’t the top attention-grabber in the quotes Noah flags. Rather, take a look at the guy’s thinking. Not only does it veer wildly from principle to self-interest, but it’s all intuition, all hunches, all unsupported. He doesn’t offer […]

Last week’s New Republic features a Michael Crowley profile on Lincoln Chafee that, in its weird way, continues to convince me that NARAL is gaming this out: Exasperated as they are, however, Republicans are now riding to Chafee’s rescue as he faces possible challenges from both his left and right. Conservatives are urging Cranston Mayor […]

Crisis averted. Seven Republicans and Seven Democrats brokered a deal (short PDF) averting the nuclear option. Three of the president’s nominees will go to the floor (Brown, Owens, Pryor), two won’t (Myers, Saad). The filibuster is not blocked in future cases and all parties pledge to vote against attempts to end it for the duration […]