Leftist M.O. - Screw Up A Market and When It Fails Propose To Fix It With More Government

The Truth About Health Insurance - WSJ.com: "If you develop an expensive condition such as cancer or heart disease, and then get fired or divorced or your employer goes out of business—then individual insurance is going to be very expensive if it's available. But what the President and Democrats won't tell you is that these problems are the result mainly of government intervention.

Because the tax code subsidizes private insurance only when it is sponsored by an employer, the individual market is relatively small and its turnover rate is very high. Most policyholders are enrolled for fewer than 24 months as they move between jobs, making it difficult for insurers to maintain large risk pools to spread costs."

When Leftists tell me the free market has failed in health care, I respond, "How do you know, we haven't tried it!"

Tone Deaf

Dorothy Rabinowitz: Obama’s Tone-Deaf Health Campaign - WSJ.com: "The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans. He knows the crowds—he is at home with those. He is a stranger to the country’s heart and character.

He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans don’t take well, for instance, to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they don’t know they want to go and being told it’s good for them."

The Era Of Special Interests is Over - Part 429

Arlen Specter Goes to Bat for the Trial Bar - WSJ.com: "To show what a loyal tort-lobby servant he is, Mr. Specter has also introduced a bill to let attorneys claim an up-front tax deduction on expenses they incur while building contingency fee cases. Amazing but true: Mr. Specter wants to give a tax cut to sustain the likes of Mel Weiss or Dickie Scruggs in the yachts to which they have become accustomed while they await jackpot jury verdicts. Even Democrats are too embarrassed by this giveaway (estimated cost: $1.6 billion) to pass it as a stand-alone bill, so tort lobbyist Linda Lipsen recently said “we have to tuck it into something” else, such as another “tax vehicle.”"

The Crux of the Matter - Give Patients A Stake In Decisions

In Health Fight, Government and Insurers Are Cast as Villains - WSJ.com: "doctors and patients, left to themselves, often order unnecessary and costly treatments, contributing to soaring national health costs."

The above statement is the health care cost issue in a nutshell. The closest thing to a solution is to design insurance plans that don't make patients and doctors accomplices in unnecessary health spending. If the patient were to question each expenditure, many times a lower cost alternative would be identified. The patient, however, will only do this if he has an economic incentive to do so.

Such economic incentives cannot address all of the challenges of allocating health care. To some degree, there will alway need to be limits imposed from above. Which then begs the question, "who do you want imposing those limits?" The choices are:

1) a government monopoly, under constant pressure from special interests, and perpetually underfunded
2) a choice of insurance companies and plans that compete for your business, and who, in many cases, have to lay out for you in advance what their criteria are going to be for limiting spending.

I can't believe anyone has to pause over such a choice.

Yesterday at a Tea Party Rally, I met a fifty year old four time survivor of breast cancer. Were she a ward of the British NHS, she'd be dead today. The very drugs that have kept her alive here in the US have been declared too expensive for British breast cancer patients.

Phoney Census

John S. Baker and Elliott Stonecipher: The 2010 Census Will Violate the Constitution - WSJ.com: "Next year’s census will determine the apportionment of House members and Electoral College votes for each state. To accomplish these vital constitutional purposes, the enumeration should count only citizens and persons who are legal, permanent residents. But it won’t."

Time to write your Senators and Congressmen again.

Did Porkulus Turn The Economy Around?

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- What's The Stimulus Have To Do With It?: "Claims that higher taxes and a total of $2 trillion in stimulus, TARP and bailout spending this year have turned the economy around are unconvincing. Indeed, they're farcical.

As economist Casey Mulligan noted on the New York Times blog after dissecting second-quarter GDP data, total stimulus at the state and federal levels amounted to about $12 per person. That's stimulus?"

Unprecedented, massive monetary stimulus by the Fed is what is bringing an end to the recession. And the wealth that has been restored in the stock market is going to encourage consumers, who feel wealthier to spend more generously going forward.

But regardless of what brought about this turnaround, since we are now on the mend, why don't we cancel the rest of the $700B+ of Porkulus that hasn't been spent and put a massive dent in the growing deficit/debt picture?

Watch Out - Now Global Warming Is A Security Matter...

Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security - NYTimes.com: "WASHINGTON — The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say."

...a growing number [growing from 1 to 3? ;-)]of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.

[comment in brackets mine]

...And we know how much the left cares about national security. This might be a potent argument for crap and trade except that:

1) evidence points more strongly to us being in a global cooling than a global warming
2) a warmer planet is a richer planet
3) no serious link has been made between global warming and "violent storms"
4) even if there were evidence of 1 and 3, above, you would also have to believe that:
a) man is causing global warming
b) US carbon reductions, though more than offset by massive carbon output increases in the thrid world, will materially impact global warming

We are all nearly consumed with the health care debate. But we need to spend the recess debunking crap and trade as well.

Suckers

Charles Krauthammer - Obama Will Settle for Less on Health Care - washingtonpost.com: "But wouldn't this bankrupt the insurance companies? Of course it would. There will be only one way to make this work: Impose an individual mandate. Force the 18 million Americans between 18 and 34 who (often quite rationally) forgo health insurance to buy it. This will create a huge new pool of customers who rarely get sick but will be paying premiums every month. And those premiums will subsidize nirvana health insurance for older folks.

Net result? Another huge transfer of wealth from the young to the old, the now-routine specialty of the baby boomers;"

Today's 18 - 34 year olds better get their heads out of their, er, out of the clouds, and into the political game, or the boomers are gonna rob them blind. They and their children will end up share-croppers on the big government-run cotton plantation, always owing more at the end of the year than they made.

I Didn't Know That!

Charles Krauthammer - Obama Will Settle for Less on Health Care - washingtonpost.com: "The CBO put in writing the obvious: In its second decade, Obamacare significantly bends the curve upward -- increasing deficits even more than in the first decade.

This is obvious because Obama's own first-decade numbers were built on arithmetic trickery. New taxes to support the health-care plan begin in 2011, but the benefits part of the program doesn't fully kick in until 2015. That excess revenue is, of course, one time only. It makes the first decade numbers look artificially low, but once you pass 2015, the yearly deficits become larger and eternal."

Doesn't it make you nostalgic for a straight-talking President like Bill Clinton?

Real Health Care Reform

Charles Krauthammer - A Better Plan for Health-Care Reform - washingtonpost.com: "Defensive medicine, estimates the libertarian/conservative Pacific Research Institute, wastes more than $200 billion a year. Just half that sum could provide a $5,000 health insurance grant -- $20,000 for a family of four -- to the uninsured poor (U.S. citizens ineligible for other government health assistance)."

Krauthammer has a simple, two-point plan to reform health care:

1) Tort Reform
2) Real insurance reform, including ending the subsidization of employer-provided health care and giving the tax deduction/credit to the individual

I've advocated the same policies in prvious posts on this blog. Until such reforms are tried, the Left can't truly claim that the free market has been tried and found wanting.

Conformity is the New Dissent

OCRegister.com: "'Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help,' continued Commissar Phillips.

'If you get an e-mail or see something on the Web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.'

Reporting dissent is the highest form of patriotism! Is your neighbor suspiciously 'well-dressed'? Is he mouthing off about cancer survival rates under socialized medical systems while wearing a cravat? Give us his name, and we'll give you his spats! Just go to flag@whitehouse.gov, not to be confused with flagging@whitehouse.gov., which is the e-mail address for reporting President Obama's latest approval rating."

Thanks, Mark Steyn, for keeping us laughing through it all.

Another Profile In Courage

Transcript: "So they can’t hold town hall meetings now. They’re having to hold them in safe facilities. I think one of these guys is holding his town hall meeting in a children’s hospital. In effect, the children are acting as human shields to prevent the citizens expressing their anger toward him."

All Animals Are Equal, Some Are Just More Equal Than Others

Congress Gets an Upgrade - WSJ.com: "WASHINGTON -- Congress plans to spend $550 million to buy eight jets, a substantial upgrade to the fleet used by federal officials at a time when lawmakers have criticized the use of corporate jets by companies receiving taxpayer funds

Why does Congress need to fly in private jets while CEO's are expected to fly commercial? This is just disgusting. Congress has an UNLIMITED travel budget. Must be nice.

France Fights Universal Care's High Cost - WSJ.com

France Fights Universal Care's High Cost - WSJ.com: "France claims it long ago achieved much of what today's U.S. health-care overhaul is seeking: It covers everyone, and provides what supporters say is high-quality care. But soaring costs are pushing the system into crisis. The result: As Congress fights over whether America should be more like France, the French government is trying to borrow U.S. tactics.

In recent months, France imposed American-style 'co-pays' on patients to try to throttle back prescription-drug costs and forced state hospitals to crack down on expenses... And service cuts...are prompting complaints from patients, doctors and nurses that care is being rationed."

The French system's fragile solvency shows how tough it is to provide universal coverage while controlling costs, the professed twin goals of President Barack Obama's proposed overhaul.

Click the link above and read this article. One of the most persistent arguments I get from people defending the ObamaCare agenda is, "it works well in Europe, Europeans love their health care." Well, after I point out the Americans overwhelmingly love their health care too, I point out that the Europeans are living on borrowed time. As the article points out, the French system is running persistent deficits and health care costs are climbing steeply. Unfortunately, after decades of French citizens considering health care a God-given right, it has become politically impossible to implement reforms to bring costs back in line.

France has a nice system - lot's of choice - limited central planning. But, it does not have any free market mechanisms to help reduce costs at the margin. There are only two choices for the French going forward: 1) accept free-market reforms like co-pays, health savings accounts, etc, or 2) create an ObamaCare central authority to ration care. The health care free lunch is over.

America Spends "Too Much" On Health Care

"America spends more per capita on food than Zimbabwe. America spends more on vacations than North Korea. America spends more on lap-dancing than Saudi Arabia (well, officially)."

Mark Steyn skewers the tired argument that there is something inherently more with spending more of GDP on health care than other nations do.

ObamaCare Doesn't Even Beat the Straw Man

Arthur B. Laffer: Obama’s Health-Care Proposals Won’t Make Health-Care Better - WSJ.com: "a $1 trillion increase in federal government health subsidies will accelerate health-care inflation, lead to continued growth in health-care expenditures, and diminish our economic growth even further. Despite these costs, some 30 million people will remain uninsured.

Implementing Mr. Obama’s reforms would literally be worse than doing nothing."

Obama loves to offer straw man choices, like we can either do ObamaCare or do nothing. By design, the straw man alternative is the clear loser. But in this case, it's not. It turns out doing nothing is better than doing ObamaCare.

Straw Man 1, ObamaCare 0

Arthur B. Laffer: Obama’s Health-Care Proposals Won’t Make Health-Care Better - WSJ.com: "a $1 trillion increase in federal government health subsidies will accelerate health-care inflation, lead to continued growth in health-care expenditures, and diminish our economic growth even further. Despite these costs, some 30 million people will remain uninsured. Implementing Mr. Obama’s reforms would literally be worse than doing nothing."

Obama loves to offer straw man choices, like we can either do ObamaCare or do nothing. By design, the straw man alternative is the clear loser. But in this case, it's not. It turns out doing nothing is better than doing ObamaCare.

True Health Care Reform

Arthur B. Laffer: Obama’s Health-Care Proposals Won’t Make Health-Care Better - WSJ.com: "A patient-centered health-care reform begins with individual ownership of insurance policies and leverages Health Savings Accounts, a low-premium, high-deductible alternative to traditional insurance that includes a tax-advantaged savings account. It allows people to purchase insurance policies across state lines and reduces the number of mandated benefits insurers are required to cover. It reallocates the majority of Medicaid spending into a simple voucher for low-income individuals to purchase their own insurance. And it reduces the cost of medical procedures by reforming tort liability laws.

Sounds a lot like my post from last month. Make the patient a participant in the process of allocating scarce health care resources and you have a fighting chance to allocate them optimally.

Profiles In Media Courage

Howard Kurtz - Rahm Pushes the Networks - washingtonpost.com: "The networks 'absolutely' feel pressured, says Paul Friedman, CBS's senior vice president: 'It's an enormous financial cost when the president replaces one of those prime-time hours. The news divisions also have mixed feelings about whether they are being used.'"

Not enough spine to resist, but they have the guts to whine about it after the fact. Impressive.

That Was Then, This Is Now

EXCLUSIVE: No. 3 at Justice OK'd Panther reversal - Washington Times: "Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, the No. 3 official in the Obama Justice Department, was consulted and ultimately approved a decision in May to reverse course and drop a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party of intimidating voters in Philadelphia during November's election, according to interviews.

The department's career lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division who pursued the complaint for five months had recommended that Justice seek sanctions against the party and three of its members after the government had already won a default judgment in federal court against the men.

Front-line lawyers were in the final stages of completing that work when they were unexpectedly told by their superiors in late April to seek a delay after a meeting between political appointees and career supervisors"

Remember the endless hearings and hoopla over the Bush Justice Department exercising the President's prerogative to replace District Attorneys (political appointees)? Knowing how sensitive Congress is about politicization of Justice department decision-making, we can expect there to be twice as many hearings to investigate Obama political appointees over-ruling the advice of career Justice lawyers in a politically-charged case.

Right.