Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag took to his blog yesterday afternoon to respond to questions from right-leaning critics (Mickey Kaus, in a post titled “Premature Orszagism”, Richard Posner and Virginia Postrel) of the Administration’s health reform plans. This is the first time that Orszag has directly taken on critics of reform at his OMB blog instead of his usual content describing the thought process behind many of the administration’s health care and spending priorities. 

Orszag first responds to questions about how health reform will be paid for:

Let me stress again: these are not “speculative cost savings.”  We are not “hop[ing]…that the $120 billion annual cost will not have to be funded at all, but instead will be offset by various reforms that the Administration proposes.”  What we are proposing are real, scoreable proposals that have been deemed by CBO (which has a good reputation for analytical rigor and a healthy skepticism about such proposals) to save money or raise revenue. 

Orszag then takes on the question of innovation, saying, “we need to align incentives toward quality rather than intensity.”  Perhaps most intriguing is the third charge Orszag chooses to respond to: “Won’t the system be unable to respond to changes in health care because of the intensity of health care politics?” This is less in the purview of Orszag’s usual ecnomics arguments, but he still has an answer: the new proposal to give MedPAC authority to set Medicare rates. 

Note to Blog Watch readers: I’ll update later today if/when the aforementioned critics respond.

Elswhere, Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reports that conservative Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., “has told a local official in his state that he could support cloture on a public plan for insurance coverage even if he opposed the bill itself,” increasing Democratic support for a key Administration priority.  On the flip side, another HuffPo piece today says some 20 “Blue Dog” Democrats, who are generally politically moderate but fiscally conservative, are “backsliding” on a pledge they had previously made to “support the public health care option as a fallback measure that would be triggered sometime down the road if private insurers don’t meet a particular set of goals.”  Ryan Grim writes, “A senior Blue Dog staffer, however, said that when the coalition first met to discuss (a) set of principles, they decided to stake out a negotiating position rather than draw a firm line.”