health insurance

Is Cognitive Dissonance an Insured Condition?

by Ryan Young on October 21, 2009

in Economy, Healthcare, Legal, Regulation

Rep. Diana DeGette is, without any apparent cognitive dissonance or trace of irony, proposing:

1) Require, by law, that people buy health insurance.

2) Remove health insurers’ antitrust exemption. But only after legally requiring everyone to buy their product.

You figure it out. Insurers are set to receive one of the largest coroporate welfare grants in history. No wonder so many firms are salivating over this year’s health care legislation. But they may pay an antitrust price for their legally mandated windfall.

Perhaps this is a warped Washington version of what one hand giveth, the other taketh away.

Markets vs. Special Interests

by Ryan Young on October 12, 2009

in Bailout Watch, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Environment, Global Warming, Healthcare, Insurance, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Stimulus to Nowhere

Detractors of capitalism decry that it caters to special interests. The opposite is actually true. Just look at what’s happened in the last year.

Most of Wall Street came to government asking for a bailout when the government-created housing bubble popped.

The Big Three automakers also went to Washington for largesse when their customers came to prefer Toyotas and Hondas.

Health insurance companies stand to make a killing if Obamacare passes.

T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore would make millions from environmental legislation.

Ludwig von Mises explained the reason for all of this corrupt behavior with a single sentence back in 1949: “It is precisely the fact that the market does not respect vested interests that makes the people concerned ask for government interference.”
-Human Action, 4th Edition, p. 337.

Obama Losing Youth on Health Care

by Greg Conko on September 25, 2009

in Culture, Healthcare, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Zeitgeist

The National Journal had an interesting article this week describing the difficulty Democrats have been having getting young adults interested in the health care debate.  Two-thirds of voters 18 to 29 pulled the lever for Barack Obama last November, and over 40 percent of the uninsured are young adults age 18 to 34.  So, the Dems assumed they would be big proponents of the Obama agenda, including his hallmark proposal on health reform.  It turns out, though, that America’s youth were a lot more interested in high-falutin’ notions of Hope and Change–and defeating that old geezer running on the Republican ticket–than they were about tangible policy proposals.

Reform advocates have chalked up the under-30 set’s indifference about health care reform to an “information gap”.  But, with the White House’s extensive outreach on Twitter and other social networks, a full-court press by the DNC’s Organizing for America to reach young adults, and even an ad campaign by Rock the Vote featuring celebrities like Zach Braff and Perez Hilton, it’s hard to believe anyone in America has too little information.  More likely, we can chalk this indifference up to … well, youthful indifference to almost every sort of public policy debate.  No matter what the topic, when it comes to policy–as opposed to politics–young adults as a general rule just tend not to get involved.

Indeed, if they did learn more about the health care proposals being debated on Capitol Hill, one might imagine young adults would be pretty upset to learn that the Democrats want to force everyone in America to purchase an expensive health insurance policy that covers not just the benefits they most want, but the benefits a bunch of Washington bureaucrats decide they should have.  And, if they or their employers don’t buy such a health insurance policy, they’ll get hit with monetary penalties as high as $950 under the Senate Finance Committee plan or 2.5 percent of their income under the House proposal.

But one reason why so many young adults are uninsured is that they have chosen to forgo very expensive existing health insurance policies that have prices inflated by too many state and federal benefit, coverage, and premium regulations.  Those prices won’t come down under the Democrats’ proposals either.  Instead, they’ll climb even higher as the young and healthy get stuck in insurance risk pools with older and sicker Americans whose costs they’ll have to subsidize.  Indeed, to the extent that a mere 34 percent of those age 19 to 34 actively oppose the reform proposals (with another 34 percent in favor and 31 percent not sure), this probably CAN be attributed to an information gap–one in which America’s youth don’t fully understand what a raw deal this would be for them.

Public Option Is Not The Worst Aspect Of ObamaCare

by Greg Conko on September 17, 2009 · 1 comment

in Culture, Healthcare, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Zeitgeist

Much of the hullabaloo over President Obama’s health care speech to Congress last week focused on his endorsement of a “public option” — that is, a government-run, not merely government regulated health insurance plan for the non-elderly middle class.  Throughout the August congressional recess, it appeared as though the White House was ready to abandon the public option, since that was a major source of contention among congressional Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats, and a sizeable portion of the American public.  In his speech, Obama paradoxically came out firmly in support of a public option, while acknowledging that his support was not so firm that he wouldn’t be willing to bargain the public option away.

Still, the public option is not the worst aspect of the various Democratic health reform proposals, the mandatory purchase requirement is.  Under each of the three bills moving through Congress, every person living in the United States would be required by law to have insurance.  And, if your employer doesn’t provide you with it, you’ve got to buy it yourself or pay a fairly stiff monetary penalty.  What’s more, each of the proposals would eliminate some of the options that are available now — particularly the low-cost insurance plans that cover only catastrophic health events and have substantial cost-sharing features.  And, depending on which bill would eventually be enacted into law, Congress, state insurance commissioners, and/or a federal Health Choices Commissioner would be empowered to determine whether any given plan even “qualifies” as health insurance.  The end result will be higher, not lower costs, for almost every person living in the country.

President Obama knows this, of course.  During the presidential campaign, he roundly criticized Hillary Clinton for proposing essentially the same thing.  As today’s Wall Street Journal points out:

“The political irony here is rich. If liberal health-care reform is going to make people better off, why does it require “a very harsh, stiff penalty” to make everyone buy it? That’s what Senator Obama called it in his Presidential campaign when he opposed the individual mandate supported by Hillary Clinton. He correctly argued then that many people were uninsured not because they didn’t want coverage but because it was too expensive. The nearby mailer to Ohio primary voters gives the flavor of Mr. Obama’s attacks.

And the Baucus-Obama plan will only make insurance even more expensive. Employers will be required to offer “qualified coverage” to their workers (or pay another “free rider” penalty) and workers will be required to accept it, paying for it in lower wages. The vast majority of households already confront the same tradeoff today, except Congress will now declare that there’s only one right answer.”

LibertyWeek 60: The Man Who Fed the World

by Richard Morrison on September 14, 2009 · 1 comment

in CEI Projects, Features, Podcast

Host Richard Morrison and co-host Jeremy Lott welcome special guests Lee Doren and Greg Conko to Episode 60 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with a recap of the 9/12 D.C. Tax Protest, look into union rules that hurt minority contractors and consider the alleged ethics violations of former California Assemblyman Mike Duvall. We then turn to Greg Conko for his thoughts on free market healthcare reform and finish with a tribute to The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived, Norman Borlaug (1914-2009).

Obama Backs Costly Health-Care Status Quo, and Limits on Choice and Competition

by Hans Bader on August 15, 2009 · 3 comments

in Healthcare, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Germany is a lot smaller than the U.S., but it has a lot more health insurers to choose from, and cheaper health-care costs. One reason might be more competition: in the U.S., you can’t buy individual health insurance from an out-of-state insurer, since an obsolete federal law lets states block purchases across state lines, taking away interstate-shopping rights that citizens would otherwise enjoy under the the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause. That leaves patients with fewer choices, higher prices, and less competition among insurers, who may control as much as 80 percent of the market in a particular state. In Germany and France, by contrast, you can buy from an insurer anywhere in the country.

The so-called health-care “reform” bills backed by Obama actually worsen this situation, by extending the reach of this anti-consumer restriction on competition beyond individual health-insurance policies to many employer-based health-insurance policies. They do this by gutting the preemption provisions of a federal law known as ERISA.

When John McCain proposed cutting the cost of health insurance by letting Americans shop for cheaper insurance across state lines — the way they can buy almost any other product across state lines — he was bashed by the Obama campaign and Joe Biden.

Washington Post columnists explain how ObamaCare would make the status quo even worse in many other ways as well, while exploding health-care costs. ObamaCare will cost far more than its predicted trillion-dollar price tag. Charles Krauthammer explains how the cost-savings Obama keeps talking about are mythical and non-existent.

Fact checkers say Obama is lying about health care.

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. Obamacare will take away 5 important freedoms, notes a CNN commentary. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises.

ObamaCare also contains costly racial preferences and affirmative action, subsidies for left-wing community organizers, and preferences for illegal aliens, who are exempt from its taxes and penalties, but could access its benefits due to lack of meaningful eligibility verification safeguards.

Obama is also reenforcing the corrupt political status quo that helped trigger the financial crisis and mortgage meltdown. He wants to create a new bureaucracy to increase the pressure on banks to make risky, low-income loans.

Tim Carney on State-Level Insurance Protectionism

by Ivan Osorio on August 14, 2009

in Insurance, Regulation

In one regulated area of the economy after another, it’s exasperating to hear journalists and pundits claim that, “The market has failed,” when in fact it hasn’t been allowed to function. That’s especially true in the case of insurance, which operates under a regime of state-level protectionism, as former CEI Brookes Fellow Tim Carney makes clear in his Washington Examiner column today:

Rep. John Shadegg, a conservative Republican from Arizona, has proposed a bill to allow interstate purchase of health insurance. Blue Cross has fiercely opposed this idea that could introduce more competition. Currently, Blue Cross companies typically have only a handful of competitors in each state.

Property and casualty insurers operate under a similar state-level protectionist arrangement.

CEI adjunct Ned Andrews argues for interstate insurance choice here.

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