The Do-Lots Congress

Guess what—it accomplished big things.

by Ezra Klein
Newsweek
November 06, 2010

The votes are (mostly) counted. The Republicans have clearly and decisively won. But did the Democrats actually lose?

They lost the election, certainly. And many of them lost their jobs. But the point of legislating isn’t job security. It’s legislation. And on that count the members of the 111th Congress succeeded wildly, even historically.

There was health-care reform, of course. The bill is projected to cover 32 million Americans while cutting the deficit by about $140 billion in the first 10 years—and by hundreds of billions more after that. It creates competitive insurance markets in every state and makes it illegal for insurers to turn you away or jack up your premiums because you have a preexisting condition. It empowers an independent commission to cut Medicare’s costs and ratchets back the tax break for employer-sponsored health-care insurance that’s been at the root of many of our system’s dysfunctions. It begins paying doctors for quality rather than volume. Even Mark McClellan, who directed the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services under George W. Bush, says the bill is “an important step.”

Oh, and next year, chain restaurants will be posting calorie and nutritional information on their menus and drive-through windows. That was the health-care bill, too.

(More here.)