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VIDEO DEBATE: Obamacare One Year Out

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With the one year anniversary of the passage and signing of the Affordable Care Act or “Obamacare” next week, there will be many op-eds and articles trying to capture how things have changed over the last 12 months. Pioneer Institute decided the best way to do a “check-up” was to put two of the nation’s preeminent minds on health policy: Dr. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former adviser to McCain for President, and Dr. Jonathan Gruber, former adviser to President Obama– in one room for a debate. The event naturally built on last year’s Hewitt Lecture delivered by the Dean of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Jeffrey Flier, in which he gave his pessimistic assessment of the newly passed law days after it passed […]

2011 Hewitt Health Care Lecture

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Pioneer Institute’s 2011 Hewitt Health Care Lecture at Harvard Medical School focused on the passage of the federal health overhaul, and featured a debate between two of the nation’s preeminent health policy experts: Dr. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former advisor to McCain for President, and Dr. Jonathan Gruber, advisor to President Obama.

Dumping Massachusetts’ Know-Nothing Amendments: Church, State, and School Reform

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Pioneer released a research paper on Massachusetts Catholic schools, giving them high marks for providing a high-quality education and a safe learning environment for poor and working-class families at a substantially lower cost than the average public school’s per-pupil expenditure.

Boston School Lottery and the Globe

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The Globe is doing a full ‘package’ on the Boston school lottery (a subject near and dear to my heart, see here and here). They’ve done a nice job explaining the very complex lottery and selecting a number of different families to profile (although the West Roxbury family seems like a reach — the pastor of a start-up Evangelical church?). It appears that this series will continue over the next two weeks as lottery results go out to each of the families. A few observations: 1) How many receive their top 3 choices? The introductory Globe piece has graphic (apparently unavailable on-line) that emphasizes the how the vast majority of applicants get one of their choices (but those who don’t […]

The Compensation Conundrum

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While the public and the media have been quick to criticize the “golden parachute” payments by Blue Cross Blue Shield to its former CEO as clearly improper, the broader questions raised regarding compensation paid by tax-exempt organizations—and in particular, when such compensation should be deemed inappropriately excessive—are far from straightforward. The Internal Revenue Code provides for so-called intermediate sanctions in the form of an excise tax when tax-exempt organizations are deemed to have provided an excess benefit to disqualified people (meaning those people in a position to exercise substantial influence over the organization’s affairs, such as its officers and directors). An organization can seek to avoid intermediate sanctions by following prescribed procedures to create a rebuttable presumption that a compensation […]