he Wall Street Journal reminds us:
Natural experiments are rare in politics, but few are as instructive as the prototype for ObamaCare that Massachusetts set in motion in 2006. The bills for "universal coverage" are now coming due, and it appears the state political class is prepared to ...
Some reactions to president Obama's health care reform proposal released February 22, 2010:
Keith Hennessey has a summary and analysis of possible political strategies behind it:
Somebody in the Administration put a lot of work into this proposal. It is extremely detailed, and it reads like a best effort to find ...
President Obama has wants empower the federal government to forbid insurers from increasing their premiums more than the authorities allow. Two reactions to this part of the president's health care proposal:
Don Boudreaux, Cafe Hayek on price controls:
What cool adventures await us if Mr. Obama succeeds in giving Uncle ...
A Cato podcast on the insurance company price controls in the House and Senate health care bills:
As I summarized in a previous article, when government forces insurers to issue policies to high-risk customers (guaranteed issue), but to also charge the same premiums as they to lower-risk customers, bad things happen:
Insurers ...
Pajamas Media published my article today:
Health Insurers’ ‘Sins’ Don’t Justify Reform
Are health insurance companies evil? A web search for the phrase turns up almost a million hits. The common reasons for this passionate indictment are insurance company profits, denial of claims, and rescission of policies. But these do not justify ...
From a new Cato Institute policy analysis, Bending the Productivity Curve: Why America Leads the World in Medical Innovation:
The health care issues commonly considered most important today — controlling costs and covering the uninsured — arguably should be regarded as secondary to innovation, inasmuch as a medical treatment must first ...
David Harsanyi summarizes it nicely:
You will, of course, need to be plastered to buy Pelosi's fantastical proposition that 450,000 words of new regulations, rules, mandates, penalties, price controls, taxes and bureaucracy will have the transformative power to "provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in ...
Section 211-213 of HR 3962 basically says that insurance companies must offer coverage (guaranteed issue) and charge the same premium (community rating) to everyone regardless of their medical history. The November 8 Daily Camera (Boulder, CO) printed my brief opposition to such political controls:
Should government force you to pay more ...
Pajamas Media was kind enough to publish my article about the Democrats' "Bizarro" health care reform. Here's the first few paragraphs:
Expect less, pay more. It’s not the slogan for some “Bizarro World” Target store in a comic book; it’s an accurate slogan for congressional Democrats’ health care “reform” proposals. They ...
From Grace-Marie Turner:
For example, the bill requires employers to pay at least 72.5 percent of insurance premiums for an individual and 65 percent for families. Data from a 2009 Kaiser Family Foundation survey suggest that at least 30 percent of firms with fewer than 200 employees that now offer insurance ...
