Market-Based Medical Care for All

My latest article for the American Institute for Economic Research is "Market-Based Medical Care for All."

Repeal the Obamacare Taxes

My latest article for the American Institute for Economic Research is "Repeal the Obamacare Taxes."

My Latest

My latest articles for the American Institute for Economic Research are:
"Competition: Just What the Doctored Ordered"
"Why Obama's Overtime Rule Will Backfire"

TGIF: Things to Keep in Mind During the Health Care Debate

As the debate proceeds over what should succeed the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), here are a few basic ideas to keep in mind.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

Obamacare Continues Its Predicted Slide

All the negatives predicted for Obamacare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) are coming to pass. But what would you expect of a program in which the government defines the insurance product that (licensed) companies must offer, sets the terms of coverage, issues strict price rules, subsidizes buyers and sellers -- and calls the resulting crazy-quilt scheme marketplace competition? Obviously, when the scheme finally collapses, it is assuredly will not be a market failure. It will yet be another government failure.

Read the rest at The Libertarian Institute.

Man's Inhumanity to Man

Customer: Hello, Home Warranty Co.? My A/C system broke down. I'd like coverage for it.
Home Warranty person: Do you have a policy with our company?
Customer: No. That's why I'd like one now.
Home Warranty person: But your A/C is already broken?
Customer: Yes.
Home Warranty person: I'm sorry but we don't cover breakdowns that occur before you buy a policy.
Customer: You don't cover preexisting conditions? How cruel! Does the government know about this?

TGIF: The Economic Way of Thinking about Health Care

I realize Mike Lupica is a sports columnist — and that Howard Cosell called sports “the toy department of life” — but maybe that’s what makes Lupica’s recent declaration about Obamacare all the more representative a reaction. Appearing on a morning cable news program, Lupica declared that “health insurance for all is a noble idea.” He repeated this a few times, apparently to make sure we all heard it. 

What’s curious is that it was all he felt he needed to say. It’s a noble idea. Period. If you can’t say something nice about it, say nothing at all. 

Apparently it’s of no interest to him what the term health insurance actually represents today. Of even less interest is how this noble idea is to be achieved under the Affordable Care Act, namely, through the exercise of force, specifically the government’s taxing power.

Read it here.

Hobby Lobby Ruling Falls Short

As far as it went, the Supreme Court generally got it right in the Hobby Lobby-Obamacare-contraception case. Unfortunately it didn’t go nearly far enough.

The court ruled that “closely held corporations” whose owners have religious convictions against contraceptives cannot be forced to pay for employee coverage for those products.

I wish the court could have said this instead: (1) No one has a natural right to force other people to pay for her (or his) contraception or anything else (with or without the government’s help), and by logical extension, (2) everyone has a right to refuse to pay if asked.

For people about to celebrate the Fourth of July, these principles ought to be, well, self-evident.

Here's the rest.

Obamacare: The Wrong Test

The core objection to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was never the glitchy website or the deficient number of sign-ups. (It you subsidize it, they will come.) It was the predictable harm of combining government-subsidized demand, controlled supply through administered pricing, and mandated standardized insurance products (i.e., a "market" without entrepreneurship and full, free competition). These consequences will take time to reveal themselves, but they will do so in due course. The laws of economics guarantee it. (Note: Obamacare merely intensified the antimarket features of the reigning corporatist system.)

Ignoring the real objection has distorted the debate and set the success bar absurdly low.

The Obamacre Contraception Controversy Boiled Down

"My birth control. My choice. (Your money)."

Liars and Fools

We already knew this, but it's good to see it documented in the February issue of Reason: The advocates of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- Obamacare -- were willing to say anything -- ANY GODDAMN THING -- to get the bill passed. Those who were not outright conscious liars -- and that accounts for many of them -- were so guilty of irresponsible wishful thinking that they should never be trusted with anything of importance for as long as they live.

There will always be people like that. It's the state that gives them power over us. Let's not make it that easy for them.

This Week's Scribblings

TGIF: "Dump the Contraception Mandate and All the Rest"
Op-ed: "Let's Make 2014 the Year of Freedom for Low-Wage Workers"

Kinsella, Tucker, and Me on IP and Obamacare

Here's the video of my Liberty Talk with Stephan Kinsella and Jeff Tucker. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

 

Government-Industry Revolving Door

Not that we thought it would be any different, but revolving door between government and industry spins just as fast in Obama's Washington. Read about it in my latest article at the Project to Restore America.

Incoherent Romney

Mitt Romney says he wouldn't repeal all of Obamacare. He'll keep the rule forbidding exclusion for preexisting conditions, i.e., he'll maintain guaranteed issue. But he is going to find that he can't do just that. If all that's mandated is guaranteed issue, what's to stop insurers from charging premiums to already-sick clients that amount simply to prepayment for the medical expenses they are certain to incur (plus administrative overhead)? At that point the coverage is no longer insurance. Also, that won't fly politically, which is why guaranteed issue is always coupled with community rating--the requirement that insurers charge people in the same area the same premiums regardless of their health. That requirement raises premiums for younger healthy people so they will cross-subsidize older and sicker people.

But that leads to a new problem. (See Mises's Critique of Interventionism.) Younger and healthier people will leave the insurance market: Why pay inflated premiums when you can put off buying coverage until you are sick?

There's only one solution to this problem if the other interventions are to be maintained: an individual insurance mandate, the centerpiece of Obamacare, which Republicans and conservatives say they hate. Except that they don't really. Romney enacted a mandate in Massachusetts, and the conservative Heritage Foundation proposed one in the 1990s after the Clintons proposed their health care overhaul.

Is this Romney capitulation to Obamacare enough to keep the GOP base home and assure Obama the election?

Was the Constitution Meant to Limit Government Power?

While I don't agree with Robert Parry on what would be desirable, he makes some excellent historical points in "How Scalia Distorts the Framers." I've made my own contributions in "Was the Constitution Really Meant to Constrain the Government?,"  "The Constitution or Liberty?," and "That Mercantilist Commerce Clause."

Latest Scribblings

Two on the Supreme Court's ruling on Obamacare:
TGIF: "Obamacare and the Court"
Op-ed: "Supreme Court’s Word Game Saves Obamacare"

The Taxing Power and the Mandate

Not withstanding what I said below, I see nothing objectionable in the Supreme Court's mandate ruling when judged in conventional--as opposed to libertarian--terms. The government plausibly contends that people without insurance impose some burden on others (through cost-shifting due to uncompensated care or government assistance). Therefore it proposes to tax uninsured people to make up those costs (in advance). If you buy insurance, there is no reason to tax you. If you don't, there is. (This doesn't mean I accept the analysis. The system that induces most people to have comprehensive health insurance actually puts a burden on those without it.)

Thus if you accept the State and the taxing power as legitimate, what's wrong with the argument that the mandate "penalty" is indeed a tax and not merely punishment?

To reject Roberts's reason, you have to reject a lot of premises. If you reject those premises, you just may be an anarchist.

Where’s the Win for Freedom?

Randy Barnett, Steve Chapman, and no doubt others are actually celebrating last week’s ruling on Obamacare. Why? Because Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion that the government can’t force us to buy health insurance under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Thanks goodness, Barnett, et al. say, that the Court did not allow a dangerous expansion of the commerce power that would permit the government to force us to buy things.

Does that mean the insurance mandate fell? Oh no. The Court found another (and long-established) ground for the mandate: the taxing power. Anything the government can do through the Commerce Clause it can do through taxation.

So is June 28 really to be a great libertarian holiday from now on? Not for me. I’ll be too busy actually promoting individual freedom.

Latest Scribblings

TGIF: “The Power to Tax Is THE Power” (regarding the Supreme Court and Obamacare)

Op-ed: “Are Americans Not Submissive Enough?”