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obamacare Archive

Thursday

28

June 2012

0

COMMENTS

The World Has Not Ended

Written by , Posted in The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

I know many liberty advocates are greatly disappointed in today’s Supreme Court ruling, where Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberal justices in upholding the individual mandate through the taxing power. But the world has not ended today. The truth of the matter is that not much has changed for our longterm fiscal outlook. It’s still decidedly negative, and would have been no matter what today’s decision held. Because of this, there’s still going to have be another political bite at the health care apple.

First, the way the case was decided shouldn’t be overlooked. The limit that was placed, such that it is, on the reach of the Commerce Clause is not insignificant. With a five member majority believing that Congress has reached the bounds on how far they can stretch the clause, they may begin to chip away at some past Commerce Clause decisions. We can certainly hope so, anyway.

But from a policy perspective, health care remains a mess just as it would have been had the law been struck down. It’s a worse mess now, for sure, but all the central problems with health care are the same regardless of either decision the court could have made: the third party payer problem, the excessive coverage mandates by the state (and now federal) governments, the limitations on interstate insurance purchases. Eventually, these problems will have to be addressed. Obamacare will inevitably fail to reduce the explosive growth in the cost of health care because it does not address these fundamental causes, and that will force the hand of politicians. That is assuming that Obamacare even survives before the mandate takes effect in 2014, which based upon today’s reactions may very well not happen.

Tuesday

3

April 2012

1

COMMENTS

Obama Desperately Lashes Out at SCOTUS

Written by , Posted in Health Care, Welfare & Entitlements, The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

Indicating just how serious the White House is taking the Supreme Court’s review of Obamacare after the government’s dismal performance during oral argument, President Obama has lashed out with a populist and ignorant scolding of the court for daring to consider the Constitutionality of his signature legislation.

“I am confident the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically-elected congress,” President Obama said at a White House event in the Rose Garden today.

“I just remind conservative commentators that for years we have heard the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example and I am pretty confident that this Court will recognize that and not take that step,” Obama said to the White House press.

Is the President really so ignorant of both the facts regarding his legislation (it was not passed with a strong majority, for instance, but instead by an extremely narrow, party-line vote), and the Court’s history? There is nothing unprecedented about overturning unconstitutional legislation. Overturning unconstitutional acts is precisely the job of the court. Or is our law professor President not familiar with Marbury v. Madison?

And as I’ve previously written, judicial activism is a red herring. The job of the court is to actively defend the Constitution.

The President later urged the court to look at the “human element,” as if liberal feel-good intentions trump the Constitution. This is typical of the left, where the ends are frequently used to justify any means. If a law is good and necessary to advance some liberal goal then it must be Constititional by virtue of the fact that the left has deemed it good and necessary. But of course that’s not how it works, and a President supposedly schooled in Constitutional law should know better.

Thursday

29

September 2011

0

COMMENTS

Nothing Hurts Quite Like Government Help

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Government Meddling, Health Care, Welfare & Entitlements

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'

Ronald Reagan

Some think that conservatives oppose bigger government because we’re heartless and don’t want to help people, but really it’s because we understand that government solutions are quite often worse than the supposed problems. Here are a couple stories highlighting the joy of being on the receiving end of government ‘help’:

Bank of America announced Thursday it will charge its debit card users a $5 monthly fee beginning in early 2012…

The bank, the largest in the nation by assets, blamed its decision on the so-called Durbin Amendment, a provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law put into place by Democrats in 2010 that set limits on the fees banks could charge retailers for swiping their debit cards.

Bank of America said the economics of debit cards has been altered by the fee limit, which will take effect Oct. 1. Banks say the fees go to pay indirect costs of providing debit cards, such as fraud and overdraft protection.

This result should not be at all surprising from a policy that was really just a special interest handout for merchants. By making it less profitable for banks to offer debit cards, government just forced banks to change their model, and Bank of America is not the only one doing so. I knew exactly what the cause was – government meddling – when I get a letter from Suntrust a couple months ago instituting the same policy. I didn’t blame them, though it is nonetheless causing me, as the consumer, to reevaluate my own banking choices. And this is what government meddling does – it disrupts.

Former Sen. Dodd, one of the namesakes of the financial regulation bill which housed the Durbin Amendment, managed to momentarily stumble on the truth of unintended consequences from government actions when he admitted before passage that “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works.” Well, now we know.

In other news, Obamacare is already driving up health premiums, despite not even being fully implemented yet:

Yesterday the Kaiser Family Foundation released its Employer Health Benefits Survey. The most unsettling finding is that premiums for family coverage jumped 9% in 2011 after last year’s 3% rise. How much of that is due to ObamaCare is debatable, but it’s not exactly a promising start.

Another interesting finding is that “an estimated 2.3 million adult children were enrolled in their parent’s employer-sponsored health plan due to the Affordable Care Act.” At the New Republic, Jonathan Cohn sees this as good news…

…Cohn seems to celebrate what is actually rather bad news. If more young adults are getting better coverage — i.e., more benefits and less cost-sharing — then costs are going to increase. For a few, it may mean better coverage for a serious illness. Yet since the 18 to 26-year-old population is among the healthiest, it will likely mean they will use more health care that they don’t really need or could be paying for out of pocket. In the long run, that means higher insurance premiums and higher overall health care costs.

Saturday

23

July 2011

0

COMMENTS

No Such Thing as a Free Contraceptive

Written by , Posted in Health Care, Welfare & Entitlements

To bastardize Milton Friedman: There’s no such thing as a free contraceptive. This seems obvious, but apparently not everyone understands:

A panel of healthcare experts said Tuesday that the federal government should require insurance plans to offer free coverage for contraception.

The healthcare reform law requires plans to cover certain preventive care without charging a co-pay. An Institute of Medicine committee on Tuesday issued a highly anticipated report that recommends eliminating co-pays for eight categories of women’s health services, including contraception.

…If HHS accepts the IOM’s recommendations, they’ll apply to all plans except the small number that are exempt from most healthcare reform requirements.

This is exactly why Obamacare will raise, and not reduce, health care costs. All of us will be forced to pay higher insurance premiums to cover these costs, regardless of whether or not we use the products involved. Too old to reproduce? Too bad, your insurance will be forced to include coverage for contraceptives, which means you’ll be forced to subsidize the consumption of others.

In addition, those who do use contraceptives will be far less discriminate in their usage as they won’t be sensitive to the costs. The result will be over-consumption. This is not bending the cost curve down as Obamacare proponents claimed they would do, it’s perpetuating the third-party payer problem that has rendered health care unaffordable for so many.

Thursday

14

July 2011

1

COMMENTS

Obama Lied, Health Care Died

Written by , Posted in Health Care, Welfare & Entitlements

Do you remember when then-candidate and later President Obama told that tear-jerking about his mother, who spent her last months of life battling evil Big Insurance over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition? Yeah, I didn’t either, because I try not to listen to stump speeches full of lies, but apparently he said it…a lot. Only it wasn’t true (Hat-tip: Megan McArdle):

During his presidential campaign and subsequent battle over a health care law, Mr. Obama quieted crowds with the story of his mother’s fight with her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition that disqualified her from coverage.

In offering the story as an argument for ending pre-existing condition exclusions by health insurers, the president left the clear impression that his mother’s fight was over health benefits for medical expenses.

But in “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” author Janny Scott quotes from correspondence from the president’s mother to assert that the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument.

But really, this isn’t the big lie. The big lie is that banning disqualification over pre-existing conditions is a good thing. Even Republicans have for the most part bought into this lie, because it’s such an easy, emotional issue to demagogue. The problem is that such a ban completely destroys the entire insurance model.

What is insurance? It is a pool of people who share a common trait: they have a very low chance of incurring extremely high costs. Rather than risk being stuck in a position where they incur medical costs they cannot afford on the off chance that they suffer a tragic accident or equally expensive medial disaster, they hedge their bets and pool their resources so that they can replace their low-odds, high cost risk with a high-odds (100%, in fact!), low cost alternative. In other words, by sharing the risk they are guaranteed to pay some cost, but avoid the potential of paying the astronomical cost if they should be unlucky.

Here’s where the issue of pre-existing conditions comes in. This system only works if the initial odds of incurring a high cost are low. If the risk is high, meaning the higher costs are incurred more frequently, then there simply are not enough resources to pay the high costs. The entire model thus breaks down, putting everyone’s financial future at risk. It would be like getting homeowner’s insurance after you’ve already been robbed, and then expecting everyone else with the same policy to pay your replacement costs. I’m sure you can guess why this wouldn’t work. Though in fairness, this is the problem which Obama and the Democrats attempted to address with the individual mandate. The problem there is that it’s not only unconstitutional, but also fails to address the real issue.

Rather than destroy the entire idea of insurance by replacing it with a dysfunctional medical pre-payment system (an objective which the government has actually been working on for decades now through price-controls, mandatory coverage and community rating systems), we should look at why so much medical care is such a financial burden, and thus making insurance necessary in the first place: out-of-control-costs. The excessive medical costs stem from the fact that government has unshackled the industry from the free market, leaving now downward price pressure mechanisms. The third-party-payer system, perpetuated by government programs such as Medicare and distortionary tax policy which encourages employer provided insurance, should be solved and the market made free. The result would be lower costs and greater access. For those few who remain either too poor, or were born with an expensive ailment (which doesn’t fit into the insurance model), help could be provided within the framework of the market (through vouchers or other redistribution that doesn’t involve restructuring the industry), rather than through it’s destruction.

Unfortunately, so long as sad stories about evil insurance companies that deny Grandma coverage can win votes, politicians will have incentive to keep using them, even making them up when necessary, instead of actually solving the problems at hand.

Tuesday

28

June 2011

0

COMMENTS

Predictions Coming True: Government Control Over Health Care is Control Over Everything

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Health Care, Welfare & Entitlements, The Nanny State & A Regulated Society

Since I don’t like to repeat myself if I don’t have to, here’s a point I made in April (and no doubt have made previously) in a post titled, “Government Health Care Leads to Tyranny“:

Forget all that compelling  wonkish stuff against government sponsored health care, like the third-party-payer problem, regulatory capture or public choice theory. The most compelling argument, and simplest to understand, is that it inevitably leads to tyranny. Once you decide that the health of an individual is of collective interest, and funded by collective dollars, you give that collective the authority to interfere in any individual act which impacts a person’s health, and it turns out that’s just about everything.

With that in mind, read this excerpt from a story titled, “Feds look to regulate food similar to tobacco, with hopes of saving money on health care“:

The federal government has a growing interest in the eating habits of Americans for the same reason it has an interest in tobacco consumption, said Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The reason is money, because three-quarters of medical-spending is driven by chronic diseases, such as obesity and tobacco-related diseases, she said.

…In April, the FDA published a new set of rules requiring restaurants to show the calories in each menu item, and the Federal Trade Commission released a set of guidelines for food that is marketed to children. These steps were mandated by the 2009 Obamacare health-sector law.

…Sebelius deflected questions about whether food officials would mandate distressing pictures on food they consider unhealthy. Tobacco is unique, she said, because it is “the number one cause of preventable death.” But Sebelius did not rule out tobacco-style treatment for food. “It has a lot to do with underlying health costs and overall health of our nation … the work around obesity and healthier, more nutritious eating, more exercise, will continue to be I think an ongoing focus,” she said.

No mandates or heavy handed regulations yet, but this is how it starts. And mark my words, it won’t stop at food.

Friday

3

June 2011

0

COMMENTS

Obama Administration Has Easy Solution to Avoid Individual Mandate

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy, Health Care, Welfare & Entitlements, The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

Don’t want to be forced to purchase government-approved health insurance? Worry not, the Obama administration has an easy opt-out (Hat-tip: Committee for Justice):

During the Sixth Circuit arguments, Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, asked Kaytal if he could name one Supreme Court case which considered the same question as the one posed by the mandate, in which Congress used the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution as a tool to compel action.

Kaytal conceded that the Supreme Court had “never been confronted directly” with the question, but cited the Heart of Atlanta Motel case as a relevant example. In that landmark 1964 civil rights case, the Court ruled that Congress could use its Commerce Clause power to bar discrimination by private businesses such as hotels and restaurants.

“They’re in the business,” Sutton pushed back. “They’re told if you’re going to be in the business, this is what you have to do. In response to that law, they could have said, ‘We now exit the business.’ Individuals don’t have that option.”

Kaytal responded by noting that the there’s a provision in the health care law that allows people to avoid the mandate.

“If we’re going to play that game, I think that game can be played here as well, because after all, the minimum coverage provision only kicks in after people have earned a minimum amount of income,” Kaytal said. “So it’s a penalty on earning a certain amount of income and self insuring. It’s not just on self insuring on its own. So I guess one could say, just as the restaurant owner could depart the market in Heart of Atlanta Motel, someone doesn’t need to earn that much income. I think both are kind of fanciful and I think get at…”

First of all, I think the court got Heart wrong. Private businesses and individuals (unlike government) do have the right to discriminate for whatever reason they please, disgusting as some of those reasons may be – and we recognize a similar right to disgusting political speech. I also disagree with the typical leftist refrain which holds that, without such judicial findings, discrimination would still run rampant. I don’t think the courts were the real catalysts at all, but rather reflected already changing social mores. Courts rarely, if ever, jump out in front of political attitudes. This is not to say that they serve no purpose, but they tend to reflect popular opinion, or emerging popular opinion, more than they create it.

But let’s get back on topic.

This is a rather remarkable admission that the administration will no doubt be forced to start walking back. Obamacare is “a penalty on earning a certain amount of income and self insuring.” Maybe I’m just crazy, but aren’t these things we ought to be rewarding? Why are we penalizing people for being productive members of society, or being responsible enough to prepare for their own health needs? This kind of attitude toward productivity certainly goes a long way toward explaining the current economy.

Tuesday

24

May 2011

0

COMMENTS

Consequences

Written by , Posted in Health Care, Welfare & Entitlements

A PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of 1,700 employers across 32 different sectors of the U.S. economy reveals troubling consequences in store thanks to passage of government-run health care. NCPA summarizes:

  • More than four in five (84%) are likely to make changes — e.g., raise premiums, deductibles, and co-payments — to offset increased costs thanks to the law;
  • More than five in six (86%) of employer respondents are likely to re-evaluate their overall benefits strategy;
  • More than half (51%) of employers did not expect to maintain “grandfathered” health status — meaning employees will forfeit their current health coverage, and pay higher premiums as a result of federal mandates introduced on their new coverage;
  • Nearly two in three employers (65%) expect to be affected by the “Cadillac” tax on employer health plans;
  • Almost half (45%) of companies “indicated they were likely to change subsidies for employee medical coverage” as a result of the law — quite possibly “dumping” their employees on to government-run Exchanges; and
  • Exactly one-half (50%) are considering “significantly changing or eliminating company subsidies for dependent medical coverage.”

Thursday

17

February 2011

3

COMMENTS

Obamacare: Now Exempting Entire States

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy, Health Care, Welfare & Entitlements

Another day, more Obamacare waivers:

The Obama administration said Wednesday that it had granted broad waivers to four states allowing health insurance companies to continue offering less generous benefits than they would otherwise be required to provide this year under the new federal health care law.

The states are Florida, New Jersey, Ohio and Tennessee, the administration told Congress.

Lawmakers said that many other states, insurers and employers needed similar exemptions from some of the law’s requirements and would seek waivers if they knew of the option.

Why do we need to exempt people from a law that was supposed to make things better? The question answers itself: because it doesn’t.

These new waivers are being handed out because the fantasy of Obamacare has run into the reality of economics. Requiring “more benefits” means higher costs. Higher costs mean some people that previously had coverage will not be able to afford the new plans. There’s no reason why people should be denied the opportunity to buy plans that are appropriate to their situations and needs, instead of forcing them to buy plans some bureaucrat in Washington DC decides is appropriate.

This was all obvious at the time the law was passed, and plenty of us said so. Are we to believe that Obama honestly didn’t know, or was he simply lying when he said people would be able to keep their plans, even as he artificially made them more expensive?

Friday

4

February 2011

1

COMMENTS

Obama’s Contempt

Written by , Posted in The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

A federal judge has held Obama’s Interior Department in contempt of court for refusing to comply with an order to end the government’s illegal drilling moratorium (Hat-tip: Conservative Outlooks):

A federal judge in Louisiana held the Interior Department in contempt late Wednesday, citing the agency for “dismissive conduct” by blocking offshore oil drilling during last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Judge Martin Feldman of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana last summer blocked the Obama administration’s first attempt to place a moratorium on offshore drilling, only to have Interior come back with a second ban.

That didn’t go over well with Feldman, who Wednesday also ordered Interior to pay attorneys’ fees for oil companies challenging the drilling ban.

“Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the reimposition of a second blanket and substantively identical moratorium and in light of the national importance of this case, provide this Court with clear and convincing evidence of the government’s contempt of this Court’s preliminary injunction order,” Feldman wrote in his eight-page order.

This seems to be a developing pattern from the Obama administration, which doesn’t much care for what the courts say. Following Judge Vinson’s ruling that Obamacare is unconstitutional in its entirety, which an anonymous White House official whined was “thoroughly odd and unconventional,” the White House has announced its intention to flaunt the binding ruling and implement the law anyway, declaring on the White House blog that “Implementation will continue.”

I will say this: Judge Vinson was plainly wrong about one thing; it is not safe to assume that this administration will follow the law.