Harold Pollack

The New York Times features dozens of fabulous pictures today. I especially like the one by Michael Kirby showing several police officers rescuing three-year-old Haley Rombi from dangerous flood waters. When natural disaster strikes, we need people to have our backs. As individuals, each of us is utterly vulnerable to many forces larger than ourselves. […]

In 2004, Lawrence Finer, Lori Frohwirth, Lindsay Dauphinee, Susheela Singh, and Ann M. Moore surveyed women patients at eleven large abortion providers. Their numbers, though imperfect, are pretty compelling when one considers the actual impact of proposed policy changes in the event Roe vs. Wade is overturned. The table below indicates women’s “most important” reason […]

Avik Roy is a Romney outside advisor on health policy who writes for Forbes. He seems like a decent guy. He helped me on a Washington Monthly story. I just believe he’s mightily, mightily misguided regarding the health impacts of Medicaid and other important subjects. (Avik and I have sparred many times before regarding Medicaid, […]

Apparently, they are all welfare recipients. In this clip, FOX News’ anchor Eric Bolling announced that federal spending on welfare has now reached $1.03 trillion. As Senator Jeff Sessions put things, “Welfare Is [the] Single Largest Federal Expense.” I was puzzled by this. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)–traditional cash welfare to single mothers and […]

My Doctors for America colleague Chris Lillis has made a nice video about health reform. Enjoy. [Cross-posted at The Reality-based Community]

Governor Romney has proposed cutting federal income tax rates by 20 percent, and paying for this by removing various loopholes and deductions. The math doesn’t add up, which is a problem. Even if the revenue numbers did work, “broaden the base, lower the rates” provides a seductive but poor guide to tax policy. The approach […]

Governor Romney has proposed a 20-percent cut in federal incone tax rates, and that the numbers don’t add up. Josh Barro*–not exactly a left-winger–posted a withering analysis here. The Romney campaign responded as follows: There’s just one problem; Barro isn’t the first person to analyze Governor Romney’s tax plan using IRS data from 2009. In […]

The first story about Mitt Romney’s Bain years that genuinely angers me. I haven’t paid much attention to the debates over Romney’s Bain years. His behavior struck me as par for the course in that unsentimental neighborhood of American financial entrepreneurship that Bain called home. My own beef concerns the immense psychological distance between Romney’s […]

Pardon the boring title. Until late August, Republicans’ political and policy approach to entitlements rested on four pillars: Deep cuts to Medicaid, accompanied by a block grant structure which shifts costs and risks away from the federal government and onto individuals, states, and local governments. Repealing health reform, and thus forestalling both the Medicaid expansion […]

Former Senator Evan Bayh wrote a September 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed which slammed the 2.3% excise tax on medical devices implemented within health reform. Bayh seems rather critical of the tax: Many U.S. device companies, in response, have already announced layoffs, canceled plans for domestic expansion and slashed research-and-development budgets…. The hit will be […]