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The Concord Coalition’s Fiscal Wake-Up Tour made its second stop in Denver on Thursday, drawing around 700 people of all ages for a day-long collection of events. 

The message of fiscal responsibility found receptive audiences as college students and others heard experts discuss the country's long-term fiscal problems and some possible solutions. The sense of concern in the audience was palpable, as was the frustration with government officials who have failed to take effective action.

Early in the day, nearly 300 Colorado college students participated in “Paying for America,” a student summit held at the the Cable Center on the University of Denver campus. (You can watch the summit panels here.)

They heard from a collection of budget experts, student activists, and filmmakers including: ...

Well, it took a couple months, but those with a stake in health care reform have finally figured out that the idea of an excise tax on insurance companies instead of an any alternative tax on “real people” was no magic cure for the want-more-revenue-but-don’t-want-higher-taxes blues. From a story by Ben Smith and Patrick O’Connor in today’s Politico (emphasis added):

More than half of the Democrats in the House have signed on to a letter denouncing a key element of the Senate Finance Committee’s health care legislation as labor unions draw a line in the sand on paying for reform.

The Democrats are attacking a plan to finance expanded health care by taxing expensive health insurance plans. The plan, sometimes cast as a tax on “Cadillac” plans, would in fact include the health care plans of many public employees and union members and has triggered a revolt from Obama’s labor supporters and their many allies on the Hill.

The letter from 154 House Democrats to Speaker Nancy Pelosi urges her “to reject proposals to enact an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans that could be potentially passed on to middle-...

The big news this week on the health care front was the release of the Senate Finance Committee's initial draft of its health care legislation. The big interest in the budget world with this development is that it marked the first complete reform legislation with a score from CBO that shows deficit reduction, not only during the 10-year budget window but also in the years beyond.

While this is encouraging, there are a lot of caveats to keep in mind about where we are in the process. One is that the bill leaves out a quite expensive item--a fix to doctor payments under Medicare--that costs hundreds of billions. That "fix" is included in the House bill where it is not paid for. Another caveat is that the proposed Medicare Commission, an idea we at Concord support, is seemingly having more restrictions placed on it at every turn. Finally, the legislation still has a long way to go and just one amendment at some point could change the CBO scoring dramatically. Furthermore, the other bills the Finance Committee's have to be merged or conferenced with do not appear as fiscally responsible (...

Ezra Klein has a good post today discussing the problem with the costs of health care reform and how to pay for them. His point is that the structure of the bills being discussed so far lead them to not do enough to control long-term costs, and that efforts to scale them back further either achieve a lower price by delaying implementation--which just allows cost to dramatically diverge from the "pay-fors" outside the budget window--or they simply leave the currently unaffordable system relatively intact.  As David Brooks seconds in the New York Times, the effort to make reform politically palatable--in that it didn't try to dramatically change how most Americans get their health care--instead left us with proposals that are not very popular, but also don't provide the change needed to begin to fix our health care cost problems.

In some sense this is because the problems with our health care system are so dramatic, that the broader in scope the reform, the greater the chance that reform has to actually cut costs. But it is also because members of Congress have a hard time doing the right thing from a policy...