Today's Wall Street Journal online profiles Peter Orszag, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, and shows how prominently Orszag figures in the debate over health care reform.
As the presidential candidates and Congress rev up the debate over the future of health care, Peter Orszag is already playing one of the toughest positions: referee.Mr. Orszag, a 39-year-old economist, is the director of the Congressional Budget Office, the influential agency charged with toting up congressional bills' impact on the federal budget. Such scoring can sink bills that can't offset their costs with savings -- a serious risk for proposals that aim to expand federal health programs to cover more citizens.
Mr. Orszag increasingly is focusing on health issues, taking an unusually high profile for his nonpartisan office. He has become a prominent speaker at health conferences and co-wrote two pieces in the New England Journal of Medicine. He has launched a blog, cboblog.cbo.gov/, boosted the number of staffers who work on health to 47 from 31 and is seeking to add more. The agency has 235 employees.
Read the full article here. Regular Supraspinatus readers are already on to Orszag; we added a component to our right-hand column a couple of months ago that pulls in the most recent five posts from Orszag's blog.