This tiny comment was drafted initially as a proposed comment to snarky post on upcoming State of the Union.

Given the overlapping political demands can you actually expect him to come up with anything else that steers clear of stepping on anyone's toes? (That is, other than the poor.) It really does embody public-private partnership, in classic Sten-style formulation; like calling Landlord Subsidies instead Affordable Housing (to properly pimp-the-poor).

I try to banter with Rob Kremer on the local health care price issue here; where I would like to invite Kari to pipe up.

One nugget is this:

Here is a proposed remedy for the inequity of the tax break thing for a health care savings account, but that remains neutral as to the common gripe of the rich that they subsidize the working poor on health care:

From the outset of the creation of a savings account tax inducement, allow every person to alternatively accumulate a cumulative theoretical deduction to be used at some future time in the event of their use of medical services as a direct reduction on their taxable earnings. And make it retroactive to the calculation of their taxable earnings for prior years, going back as far as is necessary to exhaust the accumulated deduction that they could have availed themselves of if they had disposable income, but no further back than the effective date of the matching HSA account "opportunity." I would not make the lack of disposable income a precondition, thus allowing even the rich to accumulate the very same cumulative theoretical deduction as an alternative to actually putting money into a special savings account (for which the professional money managers are surely eager to receive, as evidenced by lots of TV adds trumpeting the tax benefits).

UPDATE Jan 30, 9:40AM:

See, Loaded Orygun: Healthy Kids Plan: If not a cig tax, then what?

This should be a must read --Health Care Reform--Richard Posner's Comment. One clip is as follows:

I cannot think of a good reason for subsidizing health insurance, or, indeed, for the demand for noncatastrophic health insurance. The economic explanation for insurance is that because of diminishing marginal utility of income, people will pay to avoid a big financial loss (e.g., will pay $2 to avoid a 1/100,000 prospect of a $100,000 loss, even though the actuarial cost of such a prospect is only $1), but most medical expenses are modest. So if there were no tax subsidy for health insurance, probably much less would be purchased, which would be fine. People might even be healthier, because diet and other life-style choices are substitutes for medical care and thus for health insurance.