Obamacare: Looking for job growth in all the wrong places

Come September, National Journal will host a policy summit titled “Prescription For Growth,” funded by Eli Lilly, that will probe “the potential impact of recently passed health care reform as an economic engine” and ask whether “health care reform [will] serve as a jobs creator and accelerate growth in health-related industries?”
Oy, where to begin?

I suppose I could start with how a news organization that bills itself as “the leading source of nonpartisan reporting” could lend ObamaCare a positive gloss by calling it “reform” — a term that even NPR declines to ascribe to actual legislation (for that reason).

Next, there’s this inane question of whether ObamaCare will spur job growth in the health care sector. With two new health care entitlements and maybe a trillion dollars of new health spending…gosh, d’ya think?

But then there’s the presumption that creating new health care jobs is a good thing. You’d think it would be. After all, unemployment is near 10 percent. But one of our biggest health care problems is that there are too many health care jobs. The Dartmouth Institute’s Elliot Fisher has quipped, “In theory, we could send a third of the U.S. health care workforce to Africa and improve the health of both continents.” ObamaCare will just make this country’s health care sector even more bloated and inefficient.

Wrap your head around all that this summit aims to accomplish. It could give a boost to an unpopular and low approval rating on the economy — never mind that ObamaCare is stifling the right kind of job creation.

Of course, I may have this summit all wrong. It may give all these issues a fair hearing.

Did I mention the summit’s sponsor is one of the biggest special-interest beneficiaries of ObamaCare? (Tim Carney, call your office.)

Charlie Cook: In 2010 election, House is "teetering on the edge"

...when you home in on those people in this survey who are most likely to vote, the numbers are devastating. The NBC/WSJ survey, when combined with a previously released NPR study of likely voters in 70 competitive House districts by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger, point to an outcome for Democrats that is as serious as a heart attack. Make no mistake about it: There is a wave out there, and for Democrats, the House is, at best, teetering on the edge.

To be sure, things could change in the four months between now and November 2. The GOP's failure to get Republicans to vote in the May 18 special election in Pennsylvania's 12th District underscores that the party can't just sit back and await spontaneous combustion in terms of turnout. Still, the potential is here for a result that is proportional to some of the bigger postwar midterm wave elections. These kinds of waves are often ragged; almost always some candidates who looked dead somehow survive and others who were deemed safe get sucked down in the undertow. That's the nature of these beasts. But the recent numbers confirm that trends first spotted late last summer have fully developed into at least a Category 3 or 4 hurricane.

Given how many House seats were newly won by Democrats in 2008 in GOP districts, and given that this election is leading into an all-important redistricting year, this reversal of fortune couldn't have happened at a worse time for Democrats.

National Journal ranks congress on L-C scale

Sens. Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut, and Blanche Lincoln, of Arkansas, have something in common. Both fall into the moderate category in the Democrat Party.

National Journal has ranked all representatives and senators on a liberal, conservative, or moderate scale. For the full listing, click on the headline of this post.