Megan McArdle, “Random Thoughts on Health Care”
fta - “It’s easy to get cynical about the process of the health care bills. At this point, I’d say that conservative and liberal health care analysts both know the score. Everyone knows that this bill won’t work as advertised: it will not cover as many people as promised, and it will run into budget shortfalls, if for no other reason than because Congress is not going to enact the cuts as written—they will get lobbied into repealing many of them. Doug Elmendorf has done everything but hire a skywriter to make it clear that he doesn’t think that any of the various bills will actually be deficit neutral—while doing his job, which is to score what’s written, not his best guess at what will happen.”