Ezra Klein

I just got off the phone with Andy Stern, head of SEIU. For the past few years, Stern has been manically building coalitions. This, it seems, was the payoff: The ultimate health care coalition. Every major industry group. And SEIU was at the table with them. Stern acknowledged that the early release is light on […]

Obama just left the meeting with the stakeholders and gave some quick remarks. The key bit: [N]one of these steps can be taken by our federal government or our health care community acting alone. They’ll require all of us coming together, as we are today, around a common purpose — workers, executives, hospitals, nurses, doctors, […]

There’s an emergent argument that the real import of today’s letter is that it serves as a club against the Congressional Budget Office. As Igor Volsky writes: The signers — the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the American Hospital Association (AHA), the American Medical Association (AMA) and Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of […]

All this fuss over one little letter. I’ve got the full document for download here. And the early reports are true. It’s signed by the presidents of Pharma, Advamed (device manufacturers), the American Medical Association (doctors), the American Hospital Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, and SEIU’s Health Care project. It promises that “we will do […]

Ryan Avent — demonstrating once again that some enterprising publication should hire him immediately — offers the smartest commentary you’ll read on the stock market today: Today’s conventional wisdom seems to be that the recent market rally has hit an apex. My assessment is that it has either hit an apex or hasn’t, in which […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about James Surowiecki’s argument that the administration’s critics have developed “a fetishization of boldness.” I’d put this a little differently: I think the administration’s critics assume timidity. Government is a constrained institution. Geithner has to deal with pressure from critics, yes, but also a bitterly divided Congress, a filibuster-prone Senate, […]

To counterbalance the crankiness of the previous post, Peter Orszag’s announcement that the administration is not only continuing to support is $635 billion health care fund, but actually adding pieces to it, is important news. The key issue in health care reform is, quite simply, financing. Right now, the policy exists. The money doesn’t. In […]

Jon Cohn is enthused. Paul Krugman is excited. Maybe I’m just churlish. Maybe I’m getting cranky as I age. But I can’t shake my skepticism about today’s big health care announcement. First, the announcement: At about 12:30 today, representatives from the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, Advamed, […]

Minutes two through five of this skit sort of read like an old Celebrity Jeopardy script that they dusted off and applied to Tim Geithner and Citibank. But minute one is very good.

Lawrence O’Donnell was co-hosting, and O’Donnell wanted to talk about the problems with using budget reconciliation. And so we did. I think he’s probably right about the problems of using reconciliation for health care policy, but he’s underplaying its importance as a threat. It makes a bipartisan bill more, not less, likely. I make this […]