He's Back, Baby

Ross Douthat has a new blog -- "Evaluations" -- which I'll be adding to my blog roll.

I'm glad that Ross has finally started blogging again. We need more intelligent conservative voices in the blogosphere. (I'm sure that Conor Friedersdorf is ecstatic, as well.)

Here is a taste:

I’ve argued before that while the eventual health care legislation is likely to be a boondoggle, it at least holds out the hope of partially remedying the present system’s worst injustice: Namely, the way the current mix of semi-free markets, tax breaks and government subsidies interact to price millions of Americans — some of them lower-middle class, some of them sick, some of them employees of small businesses, some of them self-employed — out of the insurance market entirely. Obamacare, in whatever form it eventually takes, will pile further regulations, subsidies and perverse incentives atop the existing mess, and probably make our already-dysfunctional system more byzantine and more expensive. But it does promise to make it more equitable along the way.

For some people, at least. The trouble is that for millions of uninsured Americans, the reforms will make the system seem more unjust, not less. So, for instance, while the coverage of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’s assessment of the House health care bill has mainly focused, understandably, on the memo’s predictions about the impact of the projected cuts to Medicare, to my mind the more damning figure is the one that Keith Hennessey flags here — the projection that in 2019, the bill will leave 18 million Americans uninsured and paying a penalty for the privilege.