Barone wrote a brilliant column on this idea yesterday:

The Medicare/prescription drug law of 2003 contained provisions allowing health savings accounts — one reason the Bush administration and most congressional Republicans supported it. Now the administration wants to strengthen HSAs by making premiums on these policies tax-deductible.

This is an attempt to reverse the effect of the World War II decision to make health insurance policies deductible to employers and tax-free to employees. This tended to tie health insurance to employment and has made individuals dependent on large organizations. Since third parties pick up the tab for most health care spending, consumers tend not to be cost-conscious, and the result has been above-inflation cost increases for health care.

The Bush administration, like all before it, shies away from urging that health insurance premiums be taxable — voters would hate that — and instead is trying to level the field by making all premiums deductible. There’s an argument that this is regressive, because the tax deduction is worth more to high-income taxpayers. But that’s true of all tax deductions, and can be compensated for by giving lower-income people deductible tax credits.

Will health savings accounts be an entering wedge to produce a more market-oriented health care sector? Democrats fear that, and Republicans hope so. I confess that I am not sure. What is clear is that health savings account-type policies have been rapidly growing since passage of the 2003 act. There are now 3 million people with health savings accounts, and big employers in increasing numbers are offering high-deductible policies. The employee gets to choose whether to pay more for more coverage or to pay less and be able to keep what he doesn’t spend.

Of course, the health care sector will never be entirely market-oriented. Emergency patients on gurneys can’t make cost-conscious decisions, and the poor will receive care that will in some way be subsidized by others. But health savings accounts have been spreading more rapidly since the 2003 Medicare act than defined-contribution pensions did after the 1978 tax act.

The New Deal and the World War II years produced policies that left people dependent on large organizations — organizations that, we now learn when we contemplate the problems of steel pensioners or Social Security recipients, don’t always deliver. Public policies like Section 401(k) and, perhaps, health savings accounts give more control to individuals and more flexibility to society.

The Clinton health care plan failed in part because we do not have one health care finance system, but many — and it is impossible for even very smart people to design a one-size-fits-all model that will be politically acceptable. The Bush administration’s push for health savings accounts is an attempt to change things not by government mandate, but by opening the way for private actors — employers, employees, insurers, individuals — to make decisions that will increase the power of market forces. Not a headline issue, but an important one.

Many people forget, or don’t know, that the 401(k) plan can be considered the greatest tax loophole of all time:

(It was) a tax-advantaged savings plan the U.S. government didn’t mean to create.

It was a quiet Saturday afternoon back in 1980 when Benna first got the idea for a new plan. He was working on revamping a bank’s cash-bonus plan at the time and knew that paragraph (k) of Section 401 in the tax code had gone into effect that year to give legal stature to savings arrangements already in place.

At the time it was common for employees to be given the choice to defer half or all of their non-salaried compensation, often bonuses, into a company’s cash-deferred profit-sharing plan.

Section 401(k) essentially gave the definitive go-ahead for that type of tax deferral. But Benna suspected its provisions could be interpreted more broadly. He figured instead of employers putting up money and giving workers the choice to defer, why not let employees defer part of their own salary pre-tax and get an employer match as incentive, particularly for low-paid employees.

“I was stretching the law to suit the design I came up with,” Benna said.

In 1981, several months after Benna designed his first 401(k) plan for his employer, Johnson Cos., the IRS issued proposed regulations on Section 401(k) that officially sanctioned pre-tax salary reductions.

In essence, the IRS made it more straightforward for an employer to provide a salary-reduction savings plan with tax incentives for employees, said Dallas Salisbury, president of the Washington-based Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI).

The pre-tax protection of income was a boon given the high marginal tax rates at the time and the fact that one could contribute more to the plan than to an IRA.

There was actually pressure to repeal 401(k) plans in the mid-1980s, but soon it was too late for opponents to even try a repeal. Too many people (i.e., voters) had accounts, and liked them.

It would be nice to think that once enough people have health savings accounts, no politician in his (or her-ahem) right mind, not even those who fantasize about Canadian style nationalized health care, will dare to try and take them away.

NOTE: This post is about media coverage, and not about the politics of the races involved.
____________________________________________

So, what has The Cincinnati Enquirer Invisibler done with the area’s three big local political stories?

Agendagate, and the Non-Coverage of US Senate Challengers

No news, period. There was at least something from an outside source: Tim Holloway, who published a strong criticism of the lack of challenger coverage at his Battleground PAC site, sent a letter to the Invisibler with his concerns, and they did publish it. Hats off to Tim for his efforts, though I’m concerned that with the printing of his letter, the Invisibler thinks it has done everything it needs to. And the pre-scripted nature of the Hamilton County GOP Executive Committee’s endorsement process has not been addressed by the Invisibler, and probably never will be.

The Hackett Hatchet Job

Though the Invisibler did an ain’t-it-a-shame editorial on Hackett’s withdrawal on Thursday, it was AWOL on the war-crimes rumormongering story until today, and, in my opinion, only decided to report on it because of Hackett’s appearance last night on Hardball, which is the event that drives Malia Rulon’s coverage. Why it took a Hardball interview to make the story important enough to cover is a complete mystery. Ms. Rulon does own up to the existence of the Mother Jones story from last week, but doesn’t explain why it was ignored for four days (unlike OH02 and BizzyBlog, to name just two, who were on it within hours).

The Invisibler has a full transcript of the Hardball interview at its Politics Extra blog today. Matthews brought out three points I wasn’t sure of until he mentioned them (presented in order) — that Hackett only entered when called (so much for the egotism theory); that he (Matthews) had never seen anything done to a politician like the about-face national Democratic leaders did in their support, and then non-support, of Hackett; and that Hackett has been told by multiple sources that Sherrod Brown (personally) is the source of untruths about his (Hackett’s) war service:

MATTHEWS: I’m serious, you were called into the mission by the top guys, you wouldn’t have done it without their call, right?
HACKETT: Absolutely correct.
+++++++
MATTHEWS — You know, I’ve watched politics for 30 some years now and I have never heard of a candidate being urged by party leaders to run and then told not to run once they told him to run.
+++++++
MATTHEWS: Would you swear on a stack of bibles right now that Sherrod Brown has told untrue things about your war service?
HACKETT: Well I would swear that many people have come to me and said that, because that is a fact.

But The Invisibler is still running behind, even beyond not revealing the historical significance of the Hackett betrayal (as Matthews did):

• First, as reported by The Toledo Blade yesterday (and as far as I can tell not reported by the Invisibler), someone in the Hackett campaign released research indicating that Sherrod Brown’s votes show him to be weak on national-security issues. Though that is not exactly a shocker, the fact that the information was released, and the deep divide between party regulars and the grass roots (illustrated in posts and comments found here, here, and here) are significant things that newpaper readers should know.
• Second, in an op-ed in today’s Columbus Dispatch (HT OH02), Dale Butland, who served as senior adviser to the Hackett for Senate campaign, tells us that “The attempted (war crimes) “swiftboating” soon was followed by another whisper campaign falsely claiming that Hackett was expelled from college for sexual harassment.”
  (What’s next? He burned crosses?)

Cleveland.com’s Openers blog was much more on top of stories relating to Greater Cincinnati’s former US Senate candidate yesterday. Zheesh.

The Straw Poll Coverage Takes the (Pan)cake

In a sudden burst of excess, the Invisibler carried Howard Wilkinson’s report on the results of Saturday’s Northeast Hamilton County Republican Party Pancake Breakfast at the top of Page 1 (yeah, THE Page 1) of its Sunday print edition, and almost treated it as the equivalent of the Iowa Presidential caucuses for the Ohio Governor’s race and the 2nd Congressional District contest.

Puh-lease.

Mr. Wilkinson, in the print edition piece, stated that there were about 220 people in attendance, and that about 160 voted because:

Only members of the club, though, cast ballots.

A quick review of the comments at Wilkinson’s Politics Extra blog entry on the Pancake event should at least raise suspicions about the accuracy and completeness of that statement.

Of course, mostly anonymous blog entries aren’t enough to punch holes in a story. But correspondence with a reliable source who attended the event is. What I have learned from that source is that there were not effective controls in place to ensure that:

• Votes for Congress would only be cast by those who lived in The 2nd district, or conceivably even that votes for Governor would only be cast by those living in Ohio.
• That voters who truly were eligible vote had adequate opportunity to cast their ballots before the voting was cut off.

Additionally, it appears that attendees whose origins could not be determined were able to “join” and therefore become eligible to vote on the day of the event (making Wilkinson’s “only members” description superficial at best).

I’m not able to determine who was or wasn’t helped by what from all appearances was a lack of adequate controls over the voting process. I’m only able to say that there is a great deal of reason to believe that those controls were inadequate. Perhaps current Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell should have been more involved in the design (haha).

Wilkinson’s implicit treatment of the voting process as being pure as the driven snow is either ignorant or deceptive. The Invisibler’s prominent placement of the story without addressing the doubts raised gave the reported results much more significance than they deserved.

Free Links:

• This Is “Ironic,” and Remarkable (HT S.O.B. Alliance member Weapons of Mass Discussion) — “High school senior discovers ironing deactivates anthrax.” “Central Catholic High School senior Marc Roberge discovered truth in the urban legend that ironing can kill anthrax spores in contaminated mail. His findings will appear in the June edition of the Journal of Medical Toxicology, which publishes peer-reviewed research papers. It is an accomplishment usually reserved for Ph.D.-level scientists and physicians.“
• Bomb, schmomb — Something I learned while researching something else is that the annual growth rate of the world’s population has steadily decreased, from a peak of 2.19% in the early 1960s, to 1.15% now, to a projection of less than 0.5% about 40 years from now. Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” has been a bust; yet how many people still believe that the world’s population (currently about 6.5 billion) is growing at an “unsustainable” rate?
• “Step away from the keyboard….. Does that search engine have a license?” (HT Drudge)
• Well trained? Maybe. Well tanned? Definitely (HT Americans for Prosperity) — A Jacksonville, NC Daily News editorial cites Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, noting that “A survey by the senator’s staff found that federal agencies spent more than $1.4 billion since 2000 sending employees to such conferences — many at top-notch hotels in exotic locales. ….. And what taxpayers get in return for all the travel, lodging and room service is hard to determine — besides a well-tanned federal workforce.”
• You have to wonder — if this story had been about profits going up 62% instead of down 62%, would this resignation have been forced?
• I question whether there’s enough money in the satellite radio business for one company, let alone two. Sirius reported another big quarterly loss on Friday, shorty after XM came in with similarly bad news.
• Blogging on immigration is so frustrating, because for nearly 20 years it’s been a “nothing ever gets done” issue. This story from Dmitri Vassilaros at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has me convinced that border agents are going to have to die at the hands of Mexicans committing border incursions before anything gets done about them. Sometimes I think even that won’t move our in-denial government to do anything.

It’s a good idea to get kids interested while they are impressionable, and many museums are doing just that:

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