Tag: ObamaCare

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ideological culture too much government

The “Obamacare” Conspiracy

Some “unintended consequences” aren’t.

The order of the market is an unintended consequence of market participation. By buying and selling, we’re just trying to get what we want. But we also send signals that help other folks accommodate our values and plans, which then allows markets to form some semblance of orderliness.

In government, on the other hand, laws get advanced to help this person or that, or whole groups of people. But economists often note that the actual consequences of many policies are at great variance with their advertised benefits. These often negative outcomes we term (following F.A. Hayek) the “unintended consequences.”

It’s worth noting that sometimes politicians do intend those hidden, bad consequences.

Economist David Henderson brings up an instance of this:

One insurance agent I spoke to speculated that politicians and other government officials who support these regulations not only understand these effects, but also like them. Why? Because they cause more people to go without insurance and thus create a demand for government-​provided insurance.

Henderson then cites a provision of Obamacare, now kicking in: Regulations mandating medical insurance companies to spend a prescribed percentage of premiums “on actual medical care.” The result will be, almost certainly, the demise of whole hunks of the health insurance industry.

Thereby increasing political demands for government-​provided insurance.

Some of the folks who concocted this regulation, and some who voted for it, certainly knew the likely result. And welcomed it.

Politicians are not equally clueless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

The Hewitt-​Romney Rationalization

Those who insist that RomneyCare isn’t as bad as ObamaCare need a reality check.

Both impose new price controls; both impose new taxpayer-​funded subsidies; both force people to buy health insurance; both massively expand government interference in our lives.

Former Governor Mitt Romney seemed to acknowledge the similarities when he suggested, shortly after Obamacare had passed, that he’d “be happy to take credit” for the president’s accomplishment. Now, though, with the glaring parallels so politically inconvenient, he pretends that parsecs of distance separate the two plans.

RomneyCare apologist Hugh Hewitt says that RomneyCare’s mandate forcing people to buy health insurance offends only “a handful of libertarian purists.” (Which I’d submit is far better than being a pure socialist or even a half-​and-​half socialist.) According to Hewitt, if we have no great objection to, say, smog-​emission mandates, what’s the big deal about being compelled to buy a product?! Anyway, he adds, states have the right to impose such mandates, whereas the federal government is constitutionally barred from doing so.

Regardless of how we assess particular attempts to combat pollution, pollution at least conceivably violates the rights of others. Your not buying something does not violate anybody else’s rights; being compelled to buy something does violate somebody’s rights — yours. 

Sure, RomneyCare affects “only” 6.5 million people, whereas ObamaCare affects some 300 million. But expanding governmental interference in the medical industry and into the lives of everyone is, either way, destructive and immoral.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

RomneyScare

As a candidate for the presidency, Mitt Romney has a number of things going for him. He’s rich, handsome, and has a funny first name.

Perhaps more importantly, he’s neither Donald Trump nor Newt Gingrich.

But still, he does have a niggly problem: His experience. He was the Massachusetts governor who signed a medical care reform law that provided the blueprint for the Democrats’ national version, now known (un)popularly as “ObamaCare.”

One of the best reasons to vote “Republican” next year would be to oust the politician who gave us such a bad bill. But, on matters of “health care,” Romney comes off as nothing less than the generic knock-​off of Obama. 

The Wall Street Journal recently published a critique of Romney’s Massachusetts fix, highlighting its “technocratic” (decidedly not “market-​based”) nature, individual mandate, and consequent necessary government mandate to subsidize the uninsurable. Plus, of course, its spectacular lack of cost containment. 

The one thing in the reform’s favor is that the ranks of those covered by medical insurance has grown. 

But that the state’s pre-​reform, utility-​like regulation of the insurance industry had priced so many out of the market? That somehow doesn’t get addressed — most certainly not by the program’s defenders or by Romney himself. Or many others. Pity.

Mitt gave a major speech last night, defending his “RomneyCare,” saying that his position “is not going to satisfy everybody.”

How can it satisfy anyone but big-​government partisans?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Free Markets: Poison or Cure?

Most foes of Obamacare support reform, but reform that liberalizes, rather than further burdening, the health care industry. Individuals have a right to liberty, and free markets prove inherently better than rule-​bound bureaucracies at providing goods and services. Yes, even medicine.

At least one health-​care commissar admits this superiority … but then promptly suppresses that knowledge.

Donald Berwick, President Obama’s Medicare czar, opines in the Wall Street Journal that the “right way” to bring down health care costs is by improving health care. 

“Computers, cars, TVs and telephones today do more than they ever have, and the cost of these products has consistently dropped,” says Berwick. “The companies that make computers and microwaves didn’t get there by cutting what they offer: They achieved success by making their products better and more efficient.”

They did, eh? And did profit incentives, competition, and the coordinating functions of prices that are characteristic of market processes have anything to do with it? Are the firms that sell these improved products mere departments of the government — or profit-​seeking companies obliged to satisfy consumers or go out of business?

Berwick points to one of the least subsidized and regulated sectors of modern life, and yet the idea of a freer market for health-​care products and services doesn’t occur to him. The key to emulating freer, more successful industries, he burbles, is to further hamper an already hobbled medical market. 

It’s like saying we’ll cure a guy with pneumonia by also giving him emphysema.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

Moolah for Media

Has Congress rescinded the Obamacare yet? No?

Bad news if you favor free-​market medicine. Nifty news if you’re a doddering corporate dinosaur of old media — like the Washington Post and CBS New and NBC News — with millions, or billions, in the kitty. And zero compunction about holding out a tin cup for funds extracted from taxpayers.

The Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon alerts us to the emergency resuscitation these institutions are receiving from Obamacare’s “Early Retiree Reinsurance Program.” The Post got $570,000 in extracted-​from-​taxpayers payoffs (some critics call ERRP a “slush fund”); CBS got $720,000; and General Electric, one of the owners of NBC Universal, got $37 million. Verizon, AT&T and sundry labor unions are also snatching up the subsidies.

There’s $5 billion allotted to this Obamacare slush fund for early retirees, which is not supposed to run out until 2014. But almost $2 billion have been distributed to corporations already. (To be fair, everybody knows that early projections of the long-​run costs of wondrous new government programs tend to be conservative, understated, modest, even bashful.)

Cannon and others argue that when reporting on Obamacare, journalists at such outfits should disclose that their employers have received the massive subsidies. Let viewers know about the bribes so that they can better evaluate the pro-​interventionist spin typical in these venues. 

Fine. But I have an even better suggestion for the wealthy corporate mendicants: Don’t take the cash to begin with.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Fine-​Tuning the Shackles

Loathe handcuffs and leg irons? No problem. We’ll adjust the restraints slightly. Shave a gram off the weight. Paint them a new color. And throw away the key.

Feel liberated?

Nobody in a chain gang would be fooled.

But the Obama Administration expects phony “concessions” in the implementation of last year’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare,” for short) to be treated as a sign of generous and reasonable compromise. The president supports an amendment to the health care law that, according to the New York Times, would “allow states to opt out of its most burdensome requirements three years earlier than currently permitted.”

If you dislike the program’s taxes and mandates, which after all constitute Obamacare’s most burdensome requirements, you’d approve. Right? All we need do is move in 2014 to some state that has opted out …

Not so fast. The state programs would have to cover just as many people and be just as “comprehensive and affordable” as the federal program. How to do this except by forcing people to participate?

The amended legislation would also allow states to establish single-​payer systems in which the state government is the only insurer of health care. Compromise?

As Michael Cannon observes, “President Obama’s move is not about giving states more flexibility. It’s about moving the nation even faster toward his ideal of a Canadian- or British-​style single-​payer health-​care system.” Which is where Obama and many Democrats have been hankering to go all along.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

Enslaved for Your Own Good

If government is “justified” in forcing you to buy health insurance for your own good — the fabled and perhaps fatal conceit of Obamacare — is it also justified in forcing us to keep up with “good” TV shows?

That’s the nutty notion floated at the satirical site The Onion, which drily reports: “FCC to Fine Americans Who Don’t Keep Up with TV Shows.” Seems too many office hours are spent explaining what happened on some iconic television show a co-​worker missed. So the FCC is fining anyone who falls behind.

Hyuk, hyuk, get it? The government would never actually mandate television watching! No, it just makes us pay for boring documentaries on PBS.

Nor would the government ever issue commandments about when you can smoke on private property or even in your own homes. Or … would it?

But the government would never declare what you can and can’t eat, or what foods you can and can’t dish out. Right? Unless, that is, you’re a kid in a government-​overseen cafeteria or a chef in a New York City restaurant prohibited from serving dishes containing the allegedly alarming ingredient of trans fat.

Well, the government would never require you to dutifully read even so salutary an e‑letter as Common Sense, eh? (I’m pretty sure about this one.)

Whether the policy-​makers’ notion of “the good” comports with your own doesn’t matter, of course. They’re the government, and they’re here to help.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies too much government

What Gets Lost in Washington

The current battle over “health care reform” is a great example of why representative government frustrates. 

It’s not just that the vast majority of Americans who oppose the Democrats’ bill didn’t get their way. It’s that the proponents of socialized medicine (and that’s the real goal, here: The eventual complete government takeover of medicine) are playing a sort of obstacle-​course race … as I argued yesterday.

Meanwhile, how the anti-​Obamacare message hits Washington vexes, too. 

Some partisan pundits and pollsters go so far as to say that the Democrats’ reform legislation suffers because it lacks a good name. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” is not a catchy moniker. “Obamacare,” used primarily by its opponents, is super-​catchy. And the Republicans repeal effort is pretty clever: “Repealing the Job-​Killing Health Care Law Act.”

Though “job-​killing” may reference a hot, current topic, it is far from the most salient thing one might say against the Democrats’ rushed-​through plan.

Standard politics: Even when politicians do the right thing, they push it for the wrong reason.

Media folk are now beginning to spin the popular opposition to Obamacare. Carefully worded polls “prove” that Americans aren’t overwhelmingly against the plan.

Which misses the real point: Incredulity. Democrats ballyhooed the notion that further government intervention into medicine would reduce costs. Nonsense, of course. And Americans know it. 

That common-​sense skepticism is precisely what gets lost in all the politics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

The Ratchet Still Holds

Government grows by a ratchet effect. 

When Democrats gained unified control over Congress and the Executive Branch in 2009 they understandably moved to increase the size and scope of government, rather than, say, swiftly follow through with President Obama’s various promises to withdraw from foreign interventions. Adding new stuff? More politic. 

Thus the legislation called (by opponents) “Obamacare.”

Democrats hoped that the wide number of people who would bear the initial costs would soon forget about them (the reform is already causing substantial increases in private insurance rates) while the smaller group of people who make obvious gains in services would solidly rank behind the reforms. 

A slight miscalculation. Americans reacted against Obamacare immediately, and gave control of the House back to the Republicans. 

Who, yesterday, voted to repeal Obamacare.

But since Democrats control the Senate, the bill will die there. If by some miracle it passed, the president will veto. 

In the ratchet they trust. 

Hoping dispersed costs will eventually be lost sight of, and feeling certain that the concentrated effects will indeed nurture a voting bloc, progressive Democrats see a bright future for ever-​expanding government incursion into medicine. As with most government encroachments, if it doesn’t work as advertised, more intrusiveness will be the next proposal for “reform.”

So far Democrats have plied their obvious advantage, reducing the repeal effort to symbolic action. Let’s hope Republicans can muster something more.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Commerce, Compulsion and the Constitution

Every once in a while a judge attends to the Constitution, and freedom lovers cheer wildly as if this were very strange, even wondrous. I guess it is, considered in light of the sweep of human history.

Should the Democrats’ “health care reform” package kick in fully, it would compel people to purchase medical insurance by punishing abstainers with a steep, extra tax. So hurray for Judge Henry Hudson of the federal district court in Richmond, according to whose recent decision the Commerce Clause of the Constitution does not empower Congress to point a gun to our heads and force us to buy health insurance.

If the Constitution could be honestly read that way, it would mean that the Founding Fathers had fought to replace British tyranny with an even worse home-​grown one. But no, no Founder thought that giving the federal government power to smooth trade relations among the states equaled authorization for universal, compulsory purchase of books, booze, bobby pins — or whatever Congress-​Approved “health care” delivery system some future central planners might concoct. Nor does it.

We’re not out of danger yet, obviously. There are many more battles to come, many other provisions of “Obamacare” that have yet to be challenged and quashed in courts or in Congress. But in any tough job, you need to accomplish the first step. 

Judge Hudson’s common-​sense conclusion sounds like a great first step to me.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.