Check it out. Hopefully this means that we can outsource posts on say, Robert Samuelson's disgusting and wrong column on health care policy? The Samuelson column really is awful, and if Orszag lays into it publicly, perhaps Samuelson will lose so much credibility that he'll shut up. If you do read it, remember that the central problem with health care is not overspending, but price, i.e. we're buying stuff that isn't worth the price we're paying.

Paul Krugman's column today was a little off-base, I think. He basically calls out Sen. Barack Obama for not including a mandate in his universal health care plan, which he thinks will make insurance much cheaper. I think his claims are overblown. The best estimate I've seen puts health care cost overruns at $480 billion. About $100 billion was due to inefficiencies in the insurance system on its own, and administrative expenses and profits make up the bulk of those unnecessary expenses. And I haven't seen anything on how being uninsured significantly raises costs in the delivery system.

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus has a column today on Social Security and fixing it. The column's more or less in response to this Paul Krugman column where he objects to addressing Social Security's projected shortfall now. If Marcus believes Social Security needs fixing, fine. But she should then devote far more columns to projected health care costs, which is an even bigger problem and demands greater effort to solve it, yet policymakers aren't really paying attention to it. This is what CBO basically recommends.

The Center on Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), an agency in the US Department of Health and Human Services, just released a plan to make Medicare's payments to hospitals more efficient.