What If Post

What Health Reform Means for Small Businesses

At an economic roundtable last week, President Obama called small businesses the “backbone of our economy and cornerstones of our communities.” It’s true: small business accounts for about half of America’s GDP and more than half of all employment. They create two out of every three new jobs- especially important these days, while unemployment is [...]

Check out the new History of Health Reform timeline!

Just wanted to let you know about a couple of changes we have made, or will be making soon, on What If Post. First, we’ve updated our History of Health Reform timeline. The new version should be easier to use– it looks more like a timeline now and we’ve added some pictures. Even better, it’s [...]

Where are they now? Public Option Edition

When it was released last summer, it instantly became the big hit of the 2009. Some said it was too controversial, but most Americans said they liked it. For months, you couldn’t turn on a television or a radio without hearing about it. There were times when we were told it was dead, that we [...]

TARP vs. The Stimulus

Following up on our coverage of state and federal budget issues: we’ve noticed that there seems to be some confusion over the difference between the Stimulus and the bank bailouts. Part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009– better known as the Stimulus– gave state governments extra funding to help deal with the [...]

Great graph about health care and debt

There’s not much we like more than a good graph. You might remember a couple months ago we talked about the best health care graph we’ve seen. It shows how the cost of health care per person in the United States is more than double what other industrialized countries pay, yet our life expectancy is [...]

What is the national debt anyways?

Since we’ve been talking about the national debt a lot lately, we thought a quick primer might be helpful. What is the national debt? When the U.S. government spends more than it collects in taxes, it has to borrow the difference. It borrows money by issuing treasury bonds– it’s basically the same as taking out [...]

The Real National Debt Problem

The debate over what to do about the economy tends to get dumbed down into two positions: Stimulus Spending vs. Reducing the Deficit. In this simplified version, the Democrats want to spend money like crazy to get the economy going, but aren’t concerned about adding to the national debt. The Republicans, meanwhile, say they want [...]

Medicaid and the “anti-stimulus”

The latest employment numbers came out last week, and the numbers weren’t good: Payrolls dropped by 125,000. In another one of those unwanted lessons in how we calculate unemployment data, the unemployment rate dropped from 9.7 percent to 9.5 percent — but not because people got hired. Instead, 652,000 people gave up and stopped looking [...]

HealthCare.gov

One of the first provisions of the new health care law to take effect said that the Department of Health and Human Services had to build a website for comparing insurance plans by July 1. Well, the deadline is here, and yesterday HSS unveiled a great-looking, easy-to-use site: www.HealthCare.gov The Washington Post explains how it [...]

Health care reform and your W2

Passage of health care reform may have ended the debate in Congress, but the misinformation continues. Here are some of the recent bogus claims examined by the nonpartisan website, Factcheck.org: Requires patients to be implanted with microchips. (No, it doesn’t.) Cuts benefits for military families and retirees. (No. The TRICARE program isn’t affected.) Exempts Muslims [...]