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Analysis of Effects of House GOP Health Care Plan on Pennsylvania

  By ACA, Health Care, PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts

The following is an analysis of how the recently-released House GOP proposal, the “American Health Care Act,” would affect Pennsylvanians: The health care legislation introduced by the House Republicans late yesterday is a devastating and dishonest attack on not only the Affordable Care Act, but on the Medicaid program. When fully implemented, it will have horrible consequences not only for the health of low- and moderate- income Pennsylvanians, but on long-term care for all but our wealthiest senior citizens. We will be providing a thorough analysis of the legislation soon. But our preliminary analysis suggests that when the program is fully implemented, around 1 million low- and moderate- income Pennsylvanians will lose health insurance; the state budget will lose at least $2.5 to $3 billion in funding; at least 60,000 Pennsylvanians will lose their jobs, and over 4,000 Pennsylvanians per year will die prematurely. Some key points: The bill would… Continue reading

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The Russian Connection? It’s Not a Distraction.

  By Uncategorized

I see a lot of folks saying don’t get distracted by the Trump’s “craziness” and / or the investigations of his connection to Russia when the Republicans in Congress are about to pass a series of horrible pieces of legislation. It’s certainly important to keep fighting against all that legislation, especially, the attacks on the ACA and Medicaid which will lead to to thousands of premature deaths and enormous  suffering if they are successful. But… 1. That the President of the United State might have conspired with a foreign power to take power is not a distraction from more important issue. If Trump did what many suspect, he betrayed the core of political life, our republican form of government. Everything else we care about, including our freedom, the future of the earth, and economic justice depends on protecting that form of government. The mere possibility that Trump conspired with Russia… Continue reading

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Early Returns Look Good in Philadelphia’s Nation-leading Fight for a Soda Tax

  By PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts, Sugary Drink Tax

I wasn’t surprised by the substantial revenues that the soda tax is bringing in, even while there is some reason to believe that soda consumption is down in the city, as we predicted it would be. For me, the soda tax has two aims–to bring in revenue and to discourage the over-consumption of soda, which contribute  to diabetes and heart disease. The second aim will  over five or ten years become more important as the tax plus public education teaches people consume to a lot less soda. Revenues will decline then, and our healthier city will need to replace some of them  raised by the tax. But at present, it looks like  revenues will be substantial to pay for the expansion of pre-K education and the community playgrounds and recreation centers for which the tax is dedicted. It will  take a month or two for these new revenues  to ramp… Continue reading

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Health care must be provided communally

  By Health Care, Published Op-Eds

This piece originally ran in Newsworks on January 26, 2017. You can find the original here.  Every once in a while, when I write something in defense of the Affordable Care Act, or point out, as the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center recent reported, that repealing it will lead 1.1 million Pennsylvanians to lose their insurance and 3,425 to die each year as a result, someone comments, “I pay for my own health insurance. Why should I pay taxes for anyone else’s?” I often ignore those comments for two reasons. First, unless the writer has an individual income over $200,000, or a family income over $250,000, he or she is not paying taxes for the ACA. And, second, if someone doesn’t share the notion that we all have a moral responsibility to guarantee that everyone has access to high-quality, affordable health care, I’m not sure what I can say to change their… Continue reading

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Devastation, Death, and Deficits:The Impact of ACA Repeal on Pennsylvania

  By ACA, Health Care, PA Budget and Policy Center, Policy reports

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 is one of the most important pieces of domestic legislation enacted since the 1960s. It has had a dramatic impact in reshaping the provision of health care in the United States at a time when health care amounts to 18% of the United States economy. This report aims to quantify the benefits of the ACA to Pennsylvanians, in part by showing just how costly repeal of it will be. Click here to print or read full screen.   Continue reading

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What ACA Repeal Means in Pennsylvania

  By ACA, Health Care, PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts

We have seen politics in America take strange turns in the last few years, turns that often seem to reflect an almost total disregard of the basic facts of political and economic life. It is critical that we don’t allow this to happen in the debate about the Affordable Care Act. The consequences of repealing the ACA in Pennsylvania will be not only devastating, but deadly. We at PBPC are working on a detailed report about the consequences of repealing the ACA in our state. It will be ready soon. But the preliminary information we have compiled is so horrifying that we don’t want to wait to give you the broad outlines of what we are finding: ACA repeal will cause over 1 million Pennsylvanians to lose health insurance.Many of our fellow citizens will face dire health consequences for lack of health insurance as a result. ACA repeal will be… Continue reading

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Is this the year Pa. resolves its perennial budget crisis?

  By Budget, PA Budget and Policy Center, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Budget, Published op-eds, Taxation

This piece originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, December 28, 2016. Many of us who write about budget politics have a keyboard shortcut to enter “Pennsylvanian Budget Crisis” into a document. Year after year, we write in December about the upcoming crisis and again in July (or sometimes far later) about how the crisis has been temporarily averted. It is crisis time again. But perhaps this is the year we can change the script. There are new ways to do something that has eluded us in the past – solve the crisis on a long-term basis without imposing harsher new taxes on working people and the middle class.   Before coming to our long-term solution to the crisis, first a word about its dimension and cause. The Independent Fiscal Office has projected that the deficit for the current fiscal year, ending June 30, will be $500 million while the deficit… Continue reading

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Two Approaches to the State Budget

  By PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts, Pennsylvania Budget

It’s becoming more and more rare to see serious attempts on the part of newspapers (and their virtual counterparts) to compare policy proposals meant to deal with a serious public issue. That’s one reason I was so happy to see Tim Stuhldreher’s excellent piece, “Pennsylvania think tanks battle over remedies for $1.7 billion state budget deficit” in LancasterOnline. The other reason I was happy is that the article demonstrates the difference between a serious proposal that actually tries to find a solution to the budget deficit—our Fair Share Tax Plan—and the Commonwealth Foundation’s right wing wish-list, which barely even gestures towards a solution. What, according to the piece, does the Commonwealth Foundation propose to close our state budget deficit? And what’s wrong with those ideas? They propose: Putting new state employees in a 401(k) pensions—even though Republicans have failed time and again to find such a proposal that actually reduces… Continue reading

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About the DNC

  By Elections, Politics

People who are new to working in US politics often assume, wrongly, that US political parties are, like, some European parties, highly centralized, top-down entities. They are the exact opposite.  First, there is no one national party organization. In addition to the DNC, the House Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (D-trip) and the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee play a role in Senate and House elections.  Second the national Democratic Party is a federation of fifty state parties that are largely independent of the national party. The members of the DNC are elected by those state parties. Those state parties are run by a committee that in most states are elected by the voters. But in a some cases—fewer than in the past—local party organizations influence those elections. In any case, local party organizations are usually independent of the state parties and vary a great deal in type, strength, and efficacy. In… Continue reading

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Is This the Year PA Resolves its Perennial Budget Crisis?

  By Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Budget

Originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, December 28, 2016. Many of us who write about budget politics have a keyboard shortcut to enter “Pennsylvanian Budget Crisis” into a document. Year after year, we write in December about the upcoming crisis and again in July (or sometimes far later) about how the crisis has been temporarily averted. It is crisis time again. But perhaps this is the year we can change the script. There are new ways to do something that has eluded us in the past – solve the crisis on a long-term basis without imposing harsher new taxes on working people and the middle class. Before coming to our long-term solution to the crisis, first a word about its dimension and cause. The Independent Fiscal Office has projected that the deficit for the current fiscal year, ending June 30, will be $500 million while the deficit for the next… Continue reading