‘Obamacare’ health care reform (see contract rules*) to become law before midnight ET 30 Jun 2010:
I think this chart is set up to update automatically. If not, click here or here. If anyone has a reference to how accurate InTrade’s prediction markets are, do link them in the comments.
Colorado Democrat politicians continue their assault on affordable insurance, this time mandating more coverages that policy holders may not want or need. From the Denver Business Journal:
Insurance providers will be required to offer contraceptive coverage in all policies and maternity care in a majority of policies under a bill that received final approval from the Colorado Senate Friday.
House Bill 1021, sponsored by Reps. Jerry Frangas, D-Denver, and Beth McCann, D-Denver, now heads back to the House for concurrence on Senate amendments and then is expected to go to Gov. Bill Ritter. Ritter, a Democrat, has not stated a position on the measure yet. …
The bill passed on a party-line vote, with 20 Democrats supporting it and all 14 Republicans opposing it. Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, was not present for the vote.
Questions:
1. To politicians who voted for this: Why not quit your jobs and start your own insurance company that offers the policies that you think people want? Or just get a controlling interesting in an existing company. It can be called “Democrat health plans,” or “Canadian-style health plans”, or whatever. In a free-market for insurance, people could have a health plan modeled after the country of their choice. Well, except that they could not force people to enroll. Or is compulsion an essential part?
2. Is right to make someone’s insurance policy illegal? If someone does not want a policy that covers maternity care and contraceptives, and an insurer is willing to sell that product, why is it OK to prohibit this transaction?
3. Colorado politicians forbid Coloradans from buying insurance available in other states. If we could, we’d be more likely find a policy more to our liking. Why oppose this? No, such competition would not be a “race to the bottom.”
4. If someone breaks up a robbery or an assault (or calls a police officer to do so) - that’s admirable, right? But if you call in law enforcement to break up a voluntary transaction between consenting adults, is that admirable?
Here’s a summary of arguments against so-called health care “reform,” specifically, the Senate Bill, HR 3590. It might be useful when contacting a member of Congress (e.g., those on the fence). The bracketed numbers refer to the reference list at the end. (To keep your e-mail short, you can omit the reference list and link to this post.)
Progressives are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens. …
“I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”
Note his aesthetic criterion of elegance, by which he probably means sublime complexity. During the yearlong health-care debate, Republicans such as Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee have consistently cautioned against the conceit that government is good at “comprehensive” solutions to the complex problems of a continental nation.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Frederic Bastiat is more biting. He wrote in The Law (1850):
Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social combinations. This is so true that, if by chance, the socialists have any doubts about the success of these combinations, they will demand that a small portion of mankind be set aside to experiment upon. Read the rest of this entry »
[T]he governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. …
The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless. …
Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life …
Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.OK, then what? You’ll roll it back – like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you’ve undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel’n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter?
Should we expect more of this if politicians expand government-run health programs? From CNN:
When you think of low-paying jobs, doctor doesn’t usually come to mind.But with a 21% cut in Medicare payments slated to take effect later this month, physicians who say they are making an OK living may be reduced to income levels that no longer make their profession viable.
… [Dr. William Schreiber of Syracuse NY] expects the cuts to take away $3 out of every $5 he currently earns. And, as a primary care physician, he already wasn’t earning anything near the salary of a specialist.
“After the costs of my own benefits are deducted, that will leave me with the equivalent of a minimum wage job,” he said.
Unless Congress acts to adjust Medicare payments without considering the impact of rising health care costs, Schreiber said he could be forced into bankruptcy or shut his practice. …
Overall, Medicare pays between 63% and 72% of the costs for one of Schreiber’s patients — although the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services applies different payment rates in different states.
“We allow the insurance industry to run wild in this country,” President Obama declared on Monday. “We can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people.”
Yet Obama’s plan to tame health insurers would boost their business, protect them from competition, and guarantee their profits, all at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. It is therefore not surprising that the insurance companies, while they object to the president’s rhetoric and quibble over some of the details, are happy to be domesticated. Here are five ways in which Obama would help insurers while pretending to fight them.
Sullum lists the following:
The individual mandate.
The employer mandate.
Subsidies.
Regulations.
Limits on competition.
Sullum continues:
As [Obama] himself notes, “they’re going to have 30 million new customers” thanks to the government’s mandates and subsidies. …
… Obama’s plan would use money forcibly extracted from taxpayers and policyholders to keep insurers healthy. He says this arrangement means “insurance companies would finally be held accountable to the American people.”
The collectivist language is telling. I don’t want insurance companies to be “accountable to the American people”; I want them to be accountable to me, as a consumer.
Read the whole article; it’s great: Insurers Gone Wild! Why health insurers welcome Obama’s plan to tame them.
The key is Obama’s declaration, “I don’t know how this plays politically, but I know it’s right.” Ultimately, Obama and his liberal base believe that government-guaranteed health care is a “moral imperative” — i.e., “it’s right.” And that will also be the key to defeating it.
As Leonard Peikoff once wrote, “So long as people believe that socialized medicine is a noble plan, there is no way to fight it. You cannot stop a noble plan — not if it really is noble. The only way you can defeat it is to unmask it — to show that it is the very opposite of noble. Then at least you have a fighting chance.”
‘Obamacare’ health care reform (see contract rules*) to become law before midnight ET 30 Jun 2010:
I think this chart is set up to update automatically. If not, click here or here. If anyone has a reference to how accurate InTrade’s prediction markets are, do link them in the comments.
Tracy Walsh survived her fight with breast cancer because of early detection. The testing that saved her life is being discouraged by government bureaucrats and could become more common with a government take over of health care
