Health Care Blogging!

One of the great pleasures of being abroad is that you get to do less health care blogging. Still, some bullet points:

— Igor Volsky’s roundup of proposed amendments to the Baucus bill is very helpful.

— The huge problem with Olympia Snowe’s proposed public plan trigger is it’s state-by-state nature. Even if you assume away the various issues with the whole idea of a trigger, creating a North Dakota only public option isn’t going to accomplish anything. A meaningful public option needs to be national or at least regional, with a “region” being something big. Otherwise it has no clout and can’t do any good.

— Was talking to some German rightwingers who were complaining that taxes are too high, that Germany’s on a slippery path to socialism, that labor markets need to be liberalized, that the state needs to get out of the way, that the FDP needs to get into the coalition, etc. Nevertheless, nobody said “what we need is to make it so that if you get sick, you stand a good chance of going bankrupt and if you’re poor and get sick you might just die.” Nobody outside the U.S. ever describes the lack of medical bankruptcies as something that makes them really sad or diminishes their freedom.

— America really is a different place in terms of people’s generalized suspicion of the state in a way that obviously makes health reform very difficult.

— It’s still the case that Senate Democrats should seriously consider returning to the Obama administration’s original proposal to curb itemized deductions for rich people. That’s a highly progressive tax measure, and as far as progressive tax measures go it’s the most efficient way to raise revenue.

You can read all about German health care here.