Senator Max Baucus

Baucus wants border measures in climate bill

by Fran Smith on November 10, 2009

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, International, Nanny State, Trade

Uh-oh.  Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana) is raising the stakes on a U.S. climate bill by endorsing the idea of some sort of tariff on goods from countries that haven’t taken steps to suppress fossil fuel use.  According to Reuters, Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, yesterday said:

“We must push our trading partners to do their part to curb harmful emissions and we must devise a border measure, consistent with our international obligations, to prevent the carbon leakage that would occur if US manufacturing shifts to countries without effective climate change programs.”

Currently the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by Senator Barbara Boxer, has rushed through its own bill without minority input to try to catch up with the House, which passed its cap-and-trade bill – H.R. 2454 — on June 26, 2009. The House bill contains a border tax adjustment measure, while the Senate bill does not.  At least, yet.  But Baucus’ comments are a strong signal that the Senate bill will also include tariffs or border “adjustments,” i.e., taxes.

This unfortunate idea is gaining greater traction among global warming advocates as a way to maintain U.S. competitiveness for industries, such as steel and cement, that would be facing higher costs if an energy suppression bill to address global warming is passed.  Proponents of “border measures” also see this as a way to curtail so-called leakage of carbon-intensive industries and related jobs to other countries without similar constraints. Of course, the common justification for those who want to hobble their competition is the refrain: “Level the playing field.”  In Washington politics, that usually means bringing your competitors down to your level.  Check out this article for some possible consequences.

These endorsements could portend a carbon tariff push in Copenhagen when world climate pukkas gather on December 7, 2009. Luckily for people in the U.S., it’s not likely that a newly minted global warming bill will be in their pockets.

New Version of Obama Health-Care Plan Relies on Imaginary Savings, Costs More Than $2 Trillion, and Will Explode Federal and State Budget Deficits

by Hans Bader on October 15, 2009 · 1 comment

in Healthcare, Insurance, International, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Sanctimony

Health-care “reform” always costs more than predicted, as ObamaCare provisions have at the state level.  So the claim that the new, cheaper version of President Obama’s health care plan will cost only $829 billion, while not increasing the deficit, should be taken with a grain of salt.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid admitted that the actual cost will be more like $2 trillion, and health-care experts have given it a similar price tag of more than $2 trillion.

The reason for the lower $829 billion price tag was that the bill’s supporters promised to offset its costs by making massive cuts in Medicare that no one actually expects politicians to follow through on, since Medicare cuts infuriate seniors and doctors.

Year after year, Congress waives “the annual cut in fees paid by Medicare to physicians” mandated by an earlier law. Yet, now, backers of ObamaCare claim they will cut Medicare by much more to finance coverage of the uninsured. The most recent version of ObamaCare drafted by Senator Max Baucus of Montana claims it will also make “$240 billion in cuts to hospitals, home care providers, nursing facilities and hospices.” Based on Congress’s past track record, the chance of this happening is zero.

As economist and former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin notes in the Wall Street Journal, the promised cuts to pay for ObamaCare will not happen: “Congress will not allow doctors to suffer a 24% cut in their Medicare reimbursements. Senate Democrats chose to ignore this reality and rely on the promise of a cut to make their bill add up. Taking note of this fact . . . destroys any pretense of budget balance.”

As Holtz-Eakin notes, some “middle-class families would get hit with a double-digit increase in their marginal tax rate” under this version of ObamaCare.

Moreover, state budget deficits and state taxes will increase under ObamaCare, which outsources costs to the states by requiring states to expand their Medicaid programs for poor people.

Backers of ObamaCare have refused to cut medical costs through tort reform, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid saying it will save “only” $54 billion. Yet they justify ObamaCare partly on the alleged need to prevent uninsured people from not paying their medical bills — even though unpaid medical costs are only 2 percent of all medical costs, a small multiple of the amount Reid admits could be saved from tort reform. (Tort reform would cut the wealth of trial lawyers, who are some of the biggest supporters of the Democratic Party.) In reality, tort reform would save far more than $54 billion.

The Pacific Research Institute estimates that just one type of cost that could be reduced through malpractice-lawsuit reform — defensive medicine — costs around $200 billion annually (which is almost as much as France spends annually on health-care for all of its citizens; France has no punitive damages, few lawsuits against doctors, and “loser-pays” rules).

One reform — setting up specialized health tribunals to hear malpractice cases — would be particularly helpful.  Using specialized health courts, rather than continuing to use uninformed juries, would provide more consistent rulings from case to case, eliminate meritless cases, reduce defensive medicine, and more speedily compensate injured people who truly are victimized by doctors’ carelessness. Such tribunals already exist in countries like “Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and New Zealand.”

Comprehensive tort reform would also reduce lawyers’ wages, resulting in some additional students choosing to go to medical school (where a critical shortage of doctors is projected over the next decade) rather than to law school (there are already too many lawyers, who sometimes can make work for themselves by bringing “creative” lawsuits).  At least two of my law school classmates had already gone to medical school before going to law school (one decided to become a medical malpractice lawyer). At least a dozen that I know of had considered going to medical school instead.  But life is easier as a lawyer, and you don’t get sued as much if you are a lawyer rather than a doctor.   As long as professionals like lawyers get paid a lot, doctors will have to be, too — greater “wage inequality” in the U.S. means that we have to pay doctors more than other countries do to get the same number of people to become doctors.  (The looming shortage of doctors is aggravated by arbitrary restrictions placed on highly-qualified immigrant doctors, who have to repeat their residencies all over again  in the U.S. even if they manage to immigrate to the U.S.)

Another reform opposed by Obama that would make health insurance cheaper would be to let people buy cheaper insurance across state lines, which an antiquated federal law now prevents.  Countries with cheaper health insurance permit national competition among insurers.

Martin Feldstein, one of Obama’s own advisors, has said that Obama’s health-care plan would explode the federal budget deficit and lead to “crippling deficits,” as well as “higher taxes, debt payments, and interest rates” that would cut America’s standard of living.  Feldstein also noted that Obama’s health-care plan would harm people with insurance, and predicted that it would lead to massive tax increases.  Other analysts have predicted that it will drive up medical costs and inflation.

Obama is relying on $2 trillion in imaginary savings to pay for his health care plan.   He is also relying on tax increases, which breaks Obama’s campaign promise not to raise taxes on the middle class.

Fact-checkers say Obama is lying about health-care.  CNN Money says ObamaCare would take away 5 freedoms.

Obama Slaps Unconstitutional Gag Order on Critic of His Health Care Plan

by Hans Bader on September 25, 2009

in Bailout Watch, Healthcare, International, Labor, Legal, Nanny State, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Sanctimony

While Obama ally ACORN attempts to gag whistleblowers who exposed its role in a recent scandal, the Obama administration is trying to gag critics of its health-care plan, which the Congressional Budget Office says could wipe out many Medicare Advantage programs relied on by the elderly.  (“The Obama Administration wants to seriously curtail or end Medicare Advantage.”)

It has issued a gag order to Humana, a health insurer that provides Medicare Advantage services, ordering it not to tell customers about how Obamacare could reduce the availability of such services.  The gag order clearly violates the First Amendment, according to law professor Eugene Volokh, the author of a leading treatise on First Amendment law, and a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.  The gag order has also been criticized by the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Examiner, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, yet the administration obstinately insists on enforcing it.

The Supreme Court has said the First Amendment protects the free speech rights of businesses like Humana even when they are government contractors, in cases like Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr, 518 U.S. 668 (1996).

Liberal Obama supporters hypocritically claim Humana should shut up because it’s receiving federal funds (an argument they would never make regarding artists funded by the National Endowment for the Arts), and because its claims are supposedly false (never mind that its truthful claims are echoed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which is headed by Democrat Douglas Elmendorf).

But as Professor Volokh and the Washington Supreme Court have recently noted, “false statements of fact about the government are generally protected” by the First Amendment.

Humana’s statements are predictions about the future, and thus by definition not provably false.   Moreover, they are chillingly accurate predictions, which is why Obama ally Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who is drafting Obama’s health-care plan, asked Obama to ban them:

“On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office director told Mr. Baucus’s committee that its plan to cut $123 billion from Medicare Advantage—the program that gives almost one-fourth of seniors private health-insurance options—will result in lower benefits and some 2.7 million people losing this coverage. Imagine that. Last week Mr. Baucus ordered Medicare regulators to investigate and likely punish Humana Inc. for trying to educate enrollees in its Advantage plans about precisely this fact.”

The fact that Humana is a government contractor doesn’t make this censorship any more acceptable, since the government simply has no business policing criticism of itself as “false”:  federal courts have ruled that even false speech by government contractors and employees on matters of public concern can be protected, as cases like Johnson v. Multnomah County, 48 F.3d 420 (9th Cir. 1995) show.

Nor is there any evidence that Humana is using federal money to disseminate its message.  And any subsidies Humana might be receiving would not justify the Obama administration’s blatant viewpoint discrimination against it, since Obama allies that receive lots of federal subsidies are being allowed to trumpet their support for Obamacare freely.  Under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rosenberger v. Rector of the University of Virginia, viewpoint discrimination is a forbidden, “egregious” form of discrimination even when the government is subsidizing a speaker; here, the federal government is plainly engaging in viewpoint discrimination, since it is letting AARP make blatantly false claims in favor of Obamacare that contradict CBO finds and basic budget math, while blocking Humana from criticizing Obamacare based on reasonable arguments echoed by the Congressional Budget Office).

The Obama administration’s position contradicts the position of the Clinton administration, which admitted that Medicare contractors have free speech rights.  (But then, Obama is well to the left of Bill Clinton and past presidents).

Obama’s health care plan would raise taxes, break promises, harm people with insurance, explode the budget deficit, destroy many inexpensive health-care plans, and take away important freedoms.

Obama earlier showed contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law by radically expanding Bush’s  auto bailout, violating federal bankruptcy laws and the TARP statute in the process.  (The Obama administration ripped off taxpayers and retirees in the General Motors and Chrysler bailouts, in order to enrich the left-wing United Auto Workers union, in unnecessary bailouts that have cost at least $70 billion, drawing criticism even from the liberal Washington Post. Many commentators argued that the auto bailouts were illegal, such as the Heritage Foundation and Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich.)

He also demanded that a small country in Latin America (Honduras) violate its constitution by allowing the return to power of its left-wing ex-president and would-be dictator, imposing travel sanctions on its ordinary citizens as punishment for a ruling by its supreme court refusing to reinstate the ex-president, who was removed for violating his country’s constitution.  (The ex-president, Mel Zelaya, is a paranoid, erratic bully who claims he is being subjected to “mind-altering radiation and poison gas” and targeted by “Israeli mercenaries.”)