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Health Care reform is moving quite quickly on the Hill and it is almost impossible to keep up with all of the developments in Congress and all of the great reporting in the media on what is needed for fiscally responsible health care reform. So, over the next 90 days as health care dominates the political agenda, we are going to try to briefly highlight developments as they occur by linking to other sources and throwing in Concord material as it is published.

The links brought to you today cover the fundamental cost control issues being discussed (or unfortunately not discussed) as legislation makes its way through the House and Senate Committees.

• The big news today, as reported in The Washington Post, CNN and elsewhere, is that CBO director Elmendorf testified in front of the Senate Budget Committee and proclaimed that the legislative developments he has seen (the House bill and the Senate's HELP committee bill) seem to "significantly expand the...

It has almost become axiomatic that growing health care costs, rather than population aging, is the overwhelming cause of a projected spike in federal spending. That notion was dispelled in CBO’s Long-Term Budget Outlook published last week. As explained in the report:

“Federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will grow relative to the economy both because health care spending per beneficiary is projected to increase and because the population is aging. Spending on Medicare and Medicaid will be driven by both factors, while Social Security spending will rise because of the population’s aging. Between now and 2035, aging is projected to make the larger contribution to the growth of spending for those three programs as a share of GDP. After 2035, continued increases in health care spending per beneficiary are projected to dominate the growth in spending for the three programs.”

Later in the report, CBO quantifies the relative effects of aging and health care growth on projected...

On June 15 and June 16, leaders from various youth organizations traveled to Washington, D.C. for a youth conference hosted by The Concord Coalition and the Youth Entitlements Summit (YES), and underwritten by The Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The event aimed to encourage public discourse among the "Millennial generation" about the nation's fiscal challenges and to generate a collective plan of action for grassroots efforts to do the same. 

Last month, at an event for young activists, I found myself on the spot once I mentioned The Concord Coalition’s work on fiscal awareness. A fellow attendant replied, “Look, I’m not trying to be rude, but I just don’t think the debt matters.” Such indifference concerned me until I watched America’s future leaders passionately discussing the need to fix this imbalance to save our economic futures.

On the first day of the conference, we heard from politicians and scholars who are heavily involved in the fiscal policy arena, including the...

I looked at the Treasury Department’s “green book” on the Administration’s revenue proposals only a few days ago, curious to see how the Bush (soon-to-be Obama) tax cuts would be described, considering that they comprise the single most costly policy in President Obama’s proposed budget (about $2 trillion over ten years according to CBO). Seems like a pretty significant “revenue proposal” to describe, right? The Treasury green book is 131 pages long, with each tax proposal described fairly thoroughly, over the course of 1 to a few pages each, in terms of current-law treatment, reason for change, and the specifics on the President’s proposal. Yet the extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts is described in exactly two places–first, as a footnote in the table of contents (note, through the emphasis added, how...