Eric Morath of the Wall Street Journal reports today that "U.S. health-care costs fell in May for the first time in almost four decades, the latest evidence that government policies and an expansion in generic drugs are constraining prices."

Maybe. But I'd like to push back on this once again. The chart on the right shows real medical inflation—that is, medical inflation above and beyond overall inflation. As you can see, over the past 30 years it's been on a noisy but fairly steady downward path. Each peak is lower than the previous one, and the same is true of each trough. If anything, though, this trend has slowed a bit over the past decade. It's still on a downward slope, but it strikes me as unlikely that government policies have had an awful lot to do with this.

For a somewhat more pessimistic view, take a look at the chart below, which goes back 60 years. Aside from the noise, what you mainly see is a spike in the 1980s, followed by a reversion to the long-term average of about 1.5 percent. In other words, it's possible that we overreacted to what turned out to be a fairly short-lived swell from about 1983 to 1993 and are now overreacting to the fact that we've returned to our long-term average. If this view is accurate, it means that medical inflation has been outrunning overall inflation by about 1.5 percentage points ever since the 1950s, and, roughly speaking, that's still the case. There's been a bit of a slowdown over the past decade, but only a bit.

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"I can't seem to persuade @ed_kilgore or @kdrum that Boehner may let immig reform pass w/mostly Ds," Greg Sargent tweets today. That's....sort of true. Here's Greg's latest in a series of blog posts making his case. It's a reponse to John Boehner's latest ironclad promise that he will never, ever, let immigration reform come to the House floor unless a majority of Republicans are convinced that it properly addresses border security:

There’s some interesting sleight of hand here. Note that Boehner seems more focused on enforcement and border security than on citizenship. The Speaker is claiming that if a majority of House Republicans thinks the emerging proposal isn’t tough enough on border security, then the House won’t vote on it. But the real Rubicon House Republicans must cross is the path to citizenship. What happens if a majority of House Republicans can’t support the path to citizenship, no matter how tough the border security elements are made? In that scenario, if Boehner holds to his vow, the House wouldn’t vote on anything that includes citizenship, right?....But the pressure on him to allow a vote will be very intense, from powerful GOP stakeholders such as the business community and wide swaths of the consulting/strategist establishment.

....I’m with Jonathan Bernstein: This all turns on whether enough Republicans privately want comprehensive reform to pass for the good of the party, even if they are not prepared to vote for it. If so, Boehner will let it go to the floor. Even if it must pass with mostly Dems. Don’t buy all the tough talk. Boehner himself doesn’t know how this is going to end.

This all relies on having a correct read of the internal machinations of the Republican caucus, and I won't even pretend to have any real insight into that. But just for scorekeeping purposes, here's the Cliff Notes version of Greg's argument:

• The Republican establishment wants immigration reform to pass. The business community wants it because they'd rather have cheap legal labor than cheap illegal labor, and the smarter GOP eminences want it because they think—possibly correctly—that they can't win the presidency in 2016 if Hispanics keep voting overwhelmingly against them. And they really want to win back the presidency in 2016.
• But the base of the party is dead set against immigration reform. They'll only accept it if (a) the border and citizenship requirements are tough, and (b) they believe that Republicans have fought hard to wring every last concession out of Democrats. They'll bolt at the first sign that they're being sold out.
• Given that, Boehner (and Marco Rubio) have to sound relentlessly tough just to give the bill a chance.
• But even if all this happens, lots of Republicans still won't be willing to risk the wrath of the tea-party base by voting in favor. Instead, they'd rather denounce the bill in public, while privately telling Boehner to bring it to the floor and get the damn thing over with. Let Democrats pass it with the help of just enough Republicans in safe seats that it seems plausibly bipartisan, thus salvaging the Hispanic vote. 

For this to work, of course, everyone has to sound genuinely outraged by the bill all the way to the bitter end. Their private acquiescences have to remain completely buried.

So do I buy this? I'm just not sure. It certainly sounds logical, but let's face it: logic is not a strong suit of the contemporary House Republican caucus. And I wonder just how many House leaders are truly convinced that the party is doomed without the Hispanic vote anyway? I have a sense that a lot of them are in the process of convincing themselves that this is just a bunch of elite Beltway hooey. Plus, I'm always sort of generally skeptical of these kinds of 11-dimensional chess arguments. Most politicians just aren't that devious.

But I guess we'll find out soon enough.

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More than likely, you've never heard of TTIP and don't care what it is. Well, it's the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a proposed new trade pact between the United States and Europe. Would it be a good thing if we cobbled together an agreement? Yeah, probably. But Jared Bernstein wisely counsels us not to believe the hype we're likely to hear about it:

I doubt that an actual TTIP (as opposed to the ones you’ll see simulated in coming months) would have a large effect of trade flows between us, because a) the deal will likely accommodate, not eradicate, initiatives like Airbus and their protection of treasured wines (and TV shows!), and b) again, the barriers just aren't that high, so I wouldn’t expect bringing them down to be a huge deal (average tariffs between us are around 3-4%). And of course, let the record show that we too subsidize our farms and our Boeings, and these subsidies have survived many a “free trade” agreement.

I could be wrong and this time trade barriers will fall like never before. My point here is that we don’t know, so we should avoid the usual claims—on either side—that are trotted out the minute some diplomat suggests a treaty. If you really want to get a feel for the impact of a deal like this, you actually have to slog through the negotiations. Assumptions about the textbook benefits of free trade won’t help you because in the real world nothing works like the textbooks, especially in this realm.

If you read any TTIP stories, you'll hear a lot about the nefarious French insistence on maintaining the "cultural exception." This refers to the French desire to protect French moviemakers, which is pitted against the ecumenical desire of Hollywood moguls to fill every theater in Paris with the latest Avengers flick. It makes for good conflict journalism—chauvinistic but art-loving French! greedy but audience-pleasing Americans!—but it's basically a sideshow. If Europeans want to continue resisting the tide of American cultural hegemony, that's not hard to understand. And the amount of money at stake is, in the grand scheme of things, small.

The more serious—and difficult—topics are going to be regulatory harmonization and the removal of various non-tariff barriers. But as Bernstein says, even if we make substantial progress on that stuff it's hardly going to usher in a golden age. It's worth doing, but everyone should keep their expectations about its job-creating power firmly in check.

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Throughout the years-long debate about fate of the Guantánamo prison, there's always been one unanswered question: how many detainees are in permanent limbo? That is, how many of them are considered unquestionably too dangerous to release, but just as unquestionably not prosecutable. Now we know:

The Obama administration Monday lifted a veil of secrecy surrounding the status of the detainees at Guantánamo, for the first time publicly naming the four dozen captives it defined as indefinite detainees — men too dangerous to transfer but who cannot be tried in a court of law.

....Administration officials have through the years described a variety of reasons why the men could not face trial: Evidence against some of the indefinite detainees was too tainted by CIA or other interrogation torture or abuse to be admissible in a court; insufficient evidence to prove an individual detainee had committed a crime; or military intelligence opinions that certain captives had undertaken suicide or other type of terrorist training, and had vowed to engage in an attack on release.

The formal classification for these prisoners is "continued detention pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001), as informed by principles of the laws of war," as you can see in the excerpt below.

There are lots of Guantánamo detainees who have no near-term prospect of being prosecuted or released, but still could be if circumstances change. However, even if we handled every single one of them, there's still a hard nut of 46 prisoners with no recourse at all. They will never be tried, and they will never be released.

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