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<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" style="font:inherit"><div><div><br></div><div>You're probably being facetious when you said the Chinese will be paying for the $250 senior giveaway (not the kind where they give seniors away:)</div>
</div></td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote><div><br></div><div>What I meant is that the senior giveaway was a pretty bad idea. It's not paid for 'til 2012, when some of the (small) associated taxes, like the tax on class 1 medical devices, come online. However, given the low year-to-year costs of issuing treasury bills, especially given the international rush to buy American currency, our float of the costs is likely to cost only a couple tens of million dollars. Tens of millions of dollars are a lot of dollars on an absolute scale; on a relative scale, it's peanuts. </div>
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<br></div><div>Apart from all the deals they had to make to get this bill passed.</div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote><div><br></div><div>The two largest of those deals are going to be repealed in reconciliation these week. </div>
<div><br></div><div>There's no good reason for the Nebraska deal. There's a good argument, however, that the Louisiana deal should stay. There's a peculiar reason for it. After Hurricane Katrina, the combination of federal disaster-relief money and private insurance payouts increased the median on-paper income in Louisiana by 40%. When this number was inserted into the Medicaid funding formula, it resulted in a drastic reduction in Medicaid funds to Louisiana. From a rational perspective, the insurance payouts weren't "real" income; they were compensation for a massive statewide destruction of wealth. What the "Louisiana Compromise" does is zero out that phantom 40% increase, restoring Medicaid funding at the prior level.</div>
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<div>The unanimous
partisan nature of the passage.</div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote><div><br></div><div>It passed on a unanimously partisan vote because the Republicans made a practical decision to oppose any plan the Democrats proposed, whatever the cost and whatever the plan. From a purely mercenary political perspective, this was a good idea: their unanimous opposition held up the bill for eight more months than it ought to have been. It did, however, prevent even good Republican ideas from being inserted into the bill.</div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/nj_20100320_9241.php">http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/nj_20100320_9241.php</a> </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" style="font:inherit"><div><div>And of course the INSURANCE MANDATE (which pisses a lot more than right wingers off (I'm more aligned with dems than repubs so I don't want to see them in power again).</div>
</div></td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote><div><br>I get that, Garrett. But I can't think of a way to preserve an insurance market without a mandate. To do so, you have to work within a 3.3% profit margin while moving the most expensive cases into the market. In order to balance those risk pools out without drastically driving up costs to the consumer (or the government), there needs to be compulsory participation for healthy people. </div>
<div><br></div><div>If that doesn't happen, the most rational market participation strategy is to wait until you get sick (and thus have a pre-existing condition) to join the market. That means that the insurance market is a de facto single-payer system, subsidized by the government, where the profits go to private corporations.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Do you have a better idea?</div><div><br></div><div>-- ACS</div></div>