Insurance regulation is one of the most complicated areas of legislation, and following the pros and cons of different bills is often a difficult task. Some regulations can actually benefit the free market, while others obviously hinder it. But as often as is the case with legislation, political support for otherwise complex laws can be explained with simple economics.
Generally speaking, most politicians try to support legislation that brings the most money to their districts while spreading the tax costs across…
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Congressional Democrats are pushing hard to complete their health care bill before next week’s recess, but their hopes for a quick passage and the fulfilling of Obama’s goal of signing by October look increasingly bleak–especially since the drafting was done without Republican input, leading, of course, to a political firestorm. The bill would mandate health insurance coverage for all Americans at enormous taxpayer expense and require major employer contributions, though there is not yet full agreement on the specifics of the burdens…
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Obama’s health-care proposals will cost well over a trillion dollars, without providing universal coverage. They are so “eye-poppingly” expensive that even Congressional Democrats have been forced to scale them back. But the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that their bill “would cover just 16 million additional people at a cost of $1 trillion,” reports the Washington Post. That’s more than $60,000 for each additional person covered! Other estimates peg the cost at $1.6 trillion.
The Examiner notes that Obama’s own Council of…
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by Alex Hankins
June 17, 2009 @ 1:21 pm
In an AP interview on Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called for competition in the health insurance market. No, not between private insurance providers free to set their own policies, but between the private sector and the federal government. Failing to understand (or acknowledge) that the top and proper priority of any private enterprise that intends to survive is profit, not service to others, she boldly claimed that the private insurance market “has really failed to provide affordable…
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by VerlanLewis
June 04, 2009 @ 4:55 pm
June has arrived and so has the nation’s official hurricane season. The New York Times called attention, last week, to the political battles associated with hurricanes and the increasing cost of homeowners insurance. Daniel Sutter, professor of economics at the University of Texas Pan American, published a timely paper with CEI yesterday that examines the relationship between climate change, government regulation of homeowners insurance, and property damage caused by hurricanes. Sutter’s important findings show that the increasing cost of homeowners insurance, and increasing costs…
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by Eli Lehrer
June 01, 2009 @ 4:27 pm
GM, of course, declared bankruptcy today. A number of things—bad management, poor products and screwy labor relations—hurt the company. But in the end, the biggest problem GM couldn’t solve related to the company’s liabilities to retirees. The company, which currently employs about 150,000 hourly workers, was responsible for the health care of over 1 million people and pension obligations for over 650,000 people. These pension obligations were probably the largest factor in GM’s demise and public policy should, at minimum,…
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In the March 2009 issue of the Atlantic, Virginia Postrel recounts her recent successful battle with breast cancer and notes that she may not have had such a happy outcome if she lived in New Zealand. Following surgery to remove several tumors, Postrel’s doctors prescribed the monoclonal antibody Herceptin, which regulates cell division and can keep some cancerous cells from dividing uncontrollably. Herceptin has a 95 percent success rate in early-stage cancers like Postrel’s. And, although it’s been just a short…
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by Michelle Minton
February 17, 2009 @ 3:43 pm
Will regulators never learn? You can’t force businesses to actively pursue a business model that is unprofitable. Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist and Insurance regulator Kevin McCarty have been trying for years to force insurance companies in the state to lower their premiums to rates that, frankly, aren’t high enough to cover the damages from hurricanes. Insurers have pushed back and many have simple cashed in their chips and left the state entirely.
Now in a move, like a spoiled child’s tantrum…
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It seems that the state of Florida has overpromised insurance coverage to its citizens in the case of a catastrophic storm, and now is coming to Congress for a bailout, lest a major storm bankrupt the state. Naturally, we had something to say about this in a press release today. The director of CEI’s Florida office, Christian Cámara:
Reliance on a Federal bailout as official state policy is reckless at best. Instead of lobbying Washington politicians for money, Commissioner [Kevin] McCarty and…
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Tomorrow, electric utilities and green groups team up at the National Press Club to ask for billions of new spending on what they term energy efficiency. New versions of such stimulus and bailout proposals appear almost daily.
We spend a lot of time at CEI now proposing wealth-enhancing alternatives to these massive wealth transfers to government contractors and corporations. The right “stimulus” instead liberalizes wealth creation, it doesn’t spread around the dwindling wealth that already exists, like a self-appointed Benevolent Vulture;…
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Maybe not really him, just a new viral email flying around. Pretty funny anyway.
1. The US has made a new weapon that destroys people but keeps the building standing,. Its called the stock market - Jay Leno
2. Do you have any idea how cheap stocks are ?? Wall Street is now being called Wal Mart Street - Jay Leno
3. The difference between a pigeon and a London investment banker. The pigeon can still make a deposit on a BMW
4. What’s…
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by Eli Lehrer
December 02, 2008 @ 9:18 am
Doug,
The situation you describe in the UK here is outrageous however one looks at it. Indeed, it provides a strong case why the United States should not switch to the type of single-provider health care system that exists under the UK’s National Health Service. But I’d take issue with your conclusion:
But turning the entire system over to government ensures that Americans will lack the health care they need and will end up paying a lot more for whatever care the…
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President-Elect Barack Obama just nominated former Senate Democratic Leader Tom to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services. Much is being written about Daschle being a Washington insider, which he certainly is, but after leaving the Senate after his defeat in 2004, Daschle has commendably taken on the Beltway conventional wisdom on an important issue: The Sarbanes-Oxley accounting mandates.
In late 2005, Daschle became one of the first Democrats to criticize the 2002 law, rushed through Congress in the wake…
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President-elect Obama has named Tom Daschle to head the Department of Health and Human Services. By some measures the largest department in the government, Daschle is sure to take center stage in Obama’s inevitable effort to reform the U.S. Healthcare system. So what of the choice? Well, Daschle has some good ideas, one wrong idea, and one really bad one. A quick rundown:
Good Ideas: Daschle believes that individuals, mostly, should have to pay for their own health care and opposes…
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by Doug Bandow
November 01, 2008 @ 5:25 am
Who would have thought it? Provide free health care and people drop their private coverage. It seems that politicians are uniformly slow learners. But after seven months Hawaii has dropped its program providing free health insurance for kids.
Writes Grace-Marie Turner in the New York Post:
HAWAII just had a vivid les son in health-care eco nomics, learning that if you offer people insurance for free - surprise, surprise - they’ll quickly drop other coverage to enroll.
As a result, Hawaii is ending…
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by John Berlau
July 26, 2008 @ 8:41 am
The new book America’s Health Care Crisis Solved has been praised as providing a detailed, free-market solution for healthcare’s future. This it does, but what’s almost as fascinating about the book is its description of what is going on in the present, with consumer-driven health savings accounts (HSAs). Almost without notice, HSAs have grown dramatically and have solved for millions of Americans the problem of healthcare’s lack of portability.
First, some background. In the 2003 law that was rightly derided for massively…
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by Hans Bader
May 07, 2008 @ 12:57 pm
At Slate, Eric Posner explains why the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act is a bad idea as a basic concept. The law nevertheless recently passed the Senate 95-to-0 and the House 414-to-1 because politicians’ thinking is controlled by labels, not logic or substance, and no one (especially not sanctimonious people) wants to be labeled as being in favor of “discrimination,” as Richard Ford notes.
Prior to its passage, I criticized GINA’s ban on employment discrimination in the National Law Journal for lacking a “direct threat” exception for public safety. The Economist’s…
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by Hans Bader
May 05, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
by Hans Bader
April 29, 2008 @ 10:22 am
A Chicago Tribune story notes that a few jurisdictions now ban discrimination against fat people (generally as part of general bans on discrimination based on physical appearance), and that Massachusetts is now considering specifically banning discrimination against fat people (as some municipalities do). (The only federal law touching on the subject is the Americans with Disabilities Act, which some courts have said may cover “morbid obesity” (see Cook v. Rhode Island), but which does not cover ordinary fatness; moreover, some courts say that obesity is not a…
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by Hans Bader
April 26, 2008 @ 3:35 pm
On April 24, the Senate voted 95-to-0 to pass the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (GINA), which bans insurers and employers from taking genetic information into account. The Economist blog suggests it could doom private individual insurance in the future, as people who test negative for genetic risk factors for diseases refuse to buy health insurance policies that are priced the same for them as for riskier people who test positive for those genetic risk factors, effectively forcing those with lower risks to subsidize those with…
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