To hear money managers like Peter Schiff and Marc Faber talk, it's all gloom and doom (capitalism is dying) or a rocket ride to a V-shapred recovery (think bear-turned-bull Jim Grant.)

Forget the hype on both ends of the spectrum, says our guest Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight. "We are in a recovery," Behravesh says. "But in the early stages, it's going to be a very modest recovery, very slow growth."

Behravesh sees U.S. unemployment eventually surpassing 10 percent, consumer spending scaled back, and more paying-down of debt -- all economic headwinds. A slow economic recovery eventually will gain steam, but don't expect 3 percent to 4 percent growth until the end of 2010 -- at the earliest, Behravesh said. 

What really worries the economist? America's mountain of debt, and we’re talking well beyond the short-term stimulus spending. Rising Medicaid and Medicare costs loom large over the U.S. economy. "We have to deal with those to get our debt under control," he says.

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From The Business Insider, Sept. 10, 2009:

There needs to be more competition in the healthcare market, but this idea that a "public option" could fairly compete with private insurers has never really made sense.

Since a public insurer has no obligation to price its services above cost (i.e., it can run at a taxpayer-subsidized loss ad infinitum), it's hard to see what private insurers could do to win over customers.

But what's really ridiculous is the idea that the public option would be funded, in part, by a new tax on private health insurers.

The FT's Lex column rightly takes it to task:

The main distinction between soaking insurers directly and eliminating the tax-free nature of employer health benefits is that the latter proved wildly unpopular, particularly among Democrats’ union allies, while the former is palatable to all but insurers’ shareholders. But the distinction would rob Peter to pay Paul as both would result in higher customer outlays or more limited coverage for those already insured.

Healthcare companies, including drugmakers, would pay a direct levy and people with high-priced health insurance would also pay. Taxing what politicians dub “Cadillac” health plans has other flaws though. It would not distinguish between typical private sector employees who pay nearly a third of premiums out of pocket and those of civil servants who often pay next to nothing. It would also disproportionately hit policies in high-cost states that bar insurers from denying coverage to riskier customers, thus discouraging a key goal of healthcare reform.

More coverage from The Business Insider:

• The Time to Fix Healthcare Is Now
• Hey Bears, Here's Your Revenue Growth

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If at first you don't succeed try, try again. It's a tactic President Obama is now using in an effort to win support for health-care reform. Weeks after a prime-time press conference was greeted with a lukewarm response - from the media and the public - the President takes another shot at health care this evening, in front of a joint session of Congress.

It's a pivotal moment in his young presidency. "If he can't make [reform] happen with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate it will make him look weak, ” Politico.com White House editor Craig Gordon says in the accompanying video, taped Tuesday afternoon.

"Democrats are looking to him for a clear sign" on what Obama will and won't support, something missing to date, Gordon says. The longer the controversy rages and the specifics unclear, the more successful the GOP becomes in defining the debate. "The Republicans have been able to marshal, very effectively, a lot of arguments and criticism of this plan...” Gordon notes. "A lot of that stuff is sticking with the American people who are at a minimum confused."

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From The Business Insider, Sept. 3, 2009:

As healthcare reform prepares to either die down or get severely watered down, the WSJ has a useful history of the recent push to change the healthcare system.

The key point is that Democrats have known for A Long Time that the public would not be receptive to the current proposals, even if they weren't happy with the existing system.

A group called the Herndon Alliance -- a coalition of liberal health-care groups, unions and patient-advocacy groups created in late 2005 -- was only a few months into its work planning a health-insurance overhaul by the time it asked focus groups what they thought of the idea of a government-run plan to compete with private ones.

The public-option was an article of faith for many in the alliance, but the focus groups' reactions were sobering. Skepticism ran high. The chief worry: Giving access to inexpensive government insurance to America's 46 million uninsured would boost costs, or reduce care, for those who were already insured...

See more from The Business Insider:

• How Do You Know That Health Insurers Are Extortionists?
• How to Get Cheaper, Better Health Insurance

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Another day bring another new poll showing what's obvious to all but the most strident Democratic partisans: Obama's health-care reform effort is floundering.

According to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll:

• Obama's overall approval ratings have fallen to 51% vs. 61% in April.
• Only 41% approve of Obama's handling of health-care reform and only 24% believe it will improve the quality of care.
• 54% worry the government will go too far in reforming the system while 41% worry it won't do enough to lower costs and cover the uninsured.

Faced with these poll numbers and a general sense health-care reform is on the ropes, the Obama administration is set to roll out yet another shift to its health-care pitch next month, The Wall Street Journal reports.

And there's the rub...

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Will the President abandon the public health insurance option in order to pass some kind of health-care reform? That’s the latest decision being bandied about in the West Wing. For now, the White House says, President Obama "believes the public option is the best way" to reform health care.

The fact that they’re now debating this point hints at the President’s willingness to bend his views in order to pass some kind of legislation. Will he get something passed or will it be a redux of the "Clinton-Care" failure? Megan McArdle, business and economic editor at the Atlantic Monthly, says it's too early to tell.

However, McArdle -- who doesn't back health-care reform -- thinks there's a distinct possibility the bill gets “bogged down in committee and drags on forever." And that, she says, is a major problem in Washington.

A failure to pass any version of a bill, she believes, speaks to a larger, more troubling political issue.

"You can’t reform Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare," she says, referring to previous reform movements. "The one thing that you can do is sometimes pass a program that usually gives things to seniors or go to war. But other than that we don’t have much scope for making any kind of major reforms to the system. We need some way to address that" before the system crumbles.

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After President Obama and two key aides backtracked this weekend on the need for a public option, a lot of critics - including many Democrats - are saying health-care reform is a good idea falling victim to bad execution.

Megan McArdle, business and economics editor for The Atlantic Monthly, says the Obama administration is suffering not so much from tactical errors - like bending over backwards to do the opposite of whatever Clinton did -- but because of their bungling of the stimulus bill last winter.

"They thought somehow if they passed one big problem it would give them the political capital to pass more big programs," McArdle says. In fact, they had one shot to spend a lot of money and they spent it on whatever we got in the stimulus package. That's part of the problem."

The other part of the problem, at least from McArdle's point of view, is that major overhaul of the health-care system isn't necessary.

"I'm a big fan of not doing anything if you can't think of anything good to do," she says. "That's not very popular with the government, obviously. "

McArdle's view is that the number of "chronically uninsured" people who actually need access to health care is much smaller than the 40 to 50 million figure often cited by reform proponents...

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Talk about a case of the 'Mondays.' Stocks around the world are taking a serious tumble today. Continuing a global trend, U.S. stocks are trading sharply lower midday, after a major sell-off in overseas markets.

The only sector that seems immune to the drop are health-care stocks which are rallying on the news the Obama administration may drop the 'public' health insurance option. The decision is angering some liberals in Washington but it's good news for investors says Uri Landesman, who oversees about $2.5 billion as head of global growth for ING Investment Management Americas. "An interesting sector where I've been finding a lot of value recently - almost regardless of your outlook for the market - is health care," he states.

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After Tim Geithner and Larry Summers opened the door to higher taxes to fight rising deficits and fund health-care reform on Sunday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs scrambled to clear up the situation on Monday: "I don't think any economist would believe that, in the environment that we're in, that raising taxes on middle-class families would make any sense."

In other words, the White House is trying to stick to Obama's campaign pledge that 95% of Americans "will not see their taxes increased by a single dime."

Maybe that's good politics, but Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says it's bad policy: raising taxes once the recovery is well underway may help solve our long-term problems, he tells Tech Ticker.

"If we get a more balanced view of our balance sheet we’ll realize that if we spend our money well then these great extra expenditures are going to actually make our economy more productive in the future," he says. Spending on technology, education and infrastructure "will generate revenues that will allow us in the future to pay back any borrowing or lower taxes."

Besides, when it comes to health-care reform...

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Most Americans agree our current health care system is a mess.  Few, however, agree on how to fix it.

How to control runaway costs?  How do you ensure that the tens of millions of uninsured Americans have access to quality care (without running to emergency rooms)?  How do you remove the incentive for doctors to order unnecessary tests?  How do you stop clobbering businesses with skyrocketing insurance premiums?

A good place to start is the Mayo Clinic, a not-for-profit medical practice based in Rochester, Minn. Our guest, Kent Seltman, author of “Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic” says, "if more health care in America today were delivered in the way Mayo delivers it, we wouldn't be in the situation  that we're in today."

Why is Mayo so successful?

• One-stop approach to care, with doctors and other parties all working for one employer – not in competition.  As Seltman puts it: "They are all pulling oars in the same direction."
• Each patient has a single medical record available to all doctors and health care providers. "The amount of communication and calibration that has been able to take place in the Mayo Clinic is part of what makes it an important model for how a community system should work," he claims.

Seltman, who worked for the Mayo Clinic, notes the Mayo model already has been successfully implemented in community hospitals in the Midwest. Meanwhile, the proposed health care legislation is far from a slam dunk. President Obama has said he’s “OK” with the Senate’s decision to delay a health care vote until after the August recess.

How would you fix our health-care system?

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