By almost any measure, the 2006 universal care law Governor Mitt Romney championed in Massachusetts has been a clear success. A bipartisan bill which Ted Kennedy worked closely with Romney to pass, the law has reduced the ranks of the uninsured from 10 percent to a national low of two percent. Massachusetts residents overwhelmingly favor […]

Suppose you are a candidate for President of the United States. Suppose further that you know that over the past 40 years, the per-beneficiary cost of Medicare rose 40% less than private health insurance. Say you also know that studies consistently show that the Veteran's Administration (VA) health care system provides "the best care anywhere," […]

"Reality," Stephen Colbert famously told President Bush to his face, "has a well-known liberal bias." That inconvenient truth is at the heart of the expanding Republican war on the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Increasingly frustrated by CBO analyses showing that the 2009 economic stimulus worked as designed, that the Paul Ryan GOP Medicare rationing […]

As the Congressional "super committee" approaches its deadline to deliver $1.5 trillion in debt reduction over the next decade, the best plan may well be doing nothing. That is, absent any action by Congress, the Bush tax cuts extended in December will expire as of January 2013 and so produce roughly $4 trillion over the […]

In the wake of Monday's Tea Party Republican presidential debate, all eyes have been on Social Security. But while politicians and pundits parsed the candidates' assertions that America's retirement program for the elderly is a "Ponzi scheme" (Rick Perry), akin to a criminal enterprise (Mitt Romney) and a "tremendous fraud" (Michele Bachmann), the real story […]

Republicans frontrunner Rick Perry raised some eyebrows during Wednesday's GOP presidential debate by blaming the federal government for his state's staggering number of uninsured. As it turns out, those jaws were dropping with good reason. After all, just months ago Perry advocated opting out of the federal Medicaid partnership, a move which would cost up […]

Over the past week, Republican White House hopeful Michele Bachmann unleashed a tidal wave of campaign promises aimed at washing away the American social contract. After pledging to get gas under $2 a gallon, Bachmann announced she would make the U.S. the "king daddy dog" of energy by shutting down the EPA. And while Rep. […]

Earlier this month, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) neatly summed up the Republican platform for 2012, declaring that Americans must "come to grips with the fact that promises have been made that frankly are not going to be kept for many." Yesterday at the Reagan Library, Tea Party darling and GOP rock star Marco […]

As the debate over health care reform heated up in the fall of 2009, Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander called Medicaid "a medical ghetto" that "none of us, or any of our families, would ever want to be a part of for our health care." As it turns out, Alexander and his GOP colleagues were […]

At the heart of the Ryan budget plan backed by 98% of Republicans in Congress are two very bad ideas whose time has never come. Privatization of government services and the devolution of their federal funding to the states promise to dramatically raise costs and slash benefits for millions of Medicare and Medicaid recipients. But […]