Important article in today's Wall Street Journal on OMB's Peter Orszag.
Here's how it begins ...
As the presidential candidates and Congress rev up the debate over the future of health care, Peter Orszag is already playing one of the toughest positions: referee.
Mr. Orszag, a 39-year-old economist, is the director of the Congressional Budget Office, the influential agency charged with toting up congressional bills' impact on the federal budget. Such scoring can sink bills that can't offset their costs with savings -- a serious risk for proposals that aim to expand federal health programs to cover more citizens.
Mr. Orszag increasingly is focusing on health issues, taking an unusually high profile for his nonpartisan office. He has become a prominent speaker at health conferences and co-wrote two pieces in the New England Journal of Medicine. He has launched a blog, cboblog.cbo.gov/, boosted the number of staffers who work on health to 47 from 31 and is seeking to add more. The agency has 235 employees.
"This actually is our fiscal future, and policymakers do not have as much analysis and options as they would need to make sound long-term decisions," says Mr. Orszag.
Here’s a link to the complete article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120874132955630171.html?mod=hps_us_inside_today
The CBO's health-care work "will be very instructive to members when we attempt to take steps to right the ship," says Sen. Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Democrat who chairs the Senate Budget Committee.
Indeed – but let’s also add to the equation short-term versus long-term issues. And as obvious as that sounds, long-term often gets glossed over – particularly during a national election cycle – when "tough problems" (like safety and cost and rationing of care) don’t necessarily support more populist sound-bites like “importation” and “universal coverage.”
