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 of the Enron and WorldCom falures, for its unintended consequences on entrepreneurs. In doing so he helped make the cause of Sarbox relief and reform biparisan. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Daschle co-wrote with former Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole, the authors told readers of “small and mid-sized capitalization companies who say that their access to capital from publicly-traded stock markets has been made prohibitively expensive.” They pointed out that “studies have shown that the additional cost per company for compliance averages $1.4 million to $4.4 million,” and explained that “although increased auditing fees amount to a small burden for Fortune 500 companies as a percentage of revenue, the doubling or tripling of auditor bills, accompanied by additional accounting and legal fees, can be the difference between a profit and a loss for emerging businesses.”
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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 the current mixed-economy health-care system that costs a ton but doesn’t provide good care for most Americans.
The current U.S. health care system–which isn’t a free market in any sense of the term or “freer” than most other developed countries’ health care systems–seems largely devoted to cost-shifting rather than actually providing health care. Every party involved–consumers, insurers, the government, hospitals, doctors–tries to get somebody else to pay its bills. The pendulum swings back and forth a bit but nothing really changes in a fundamental way.
Like Daschle, I’d prefer a mostly private system where hospitals remain private, most people pick their own health insurance, and pay for it themselves in a free or mostly free market. Netherlands, Switzerland, and, to some extent, France, have systems like this. (Germany has an employer-based system that’s basically the same as ours with a few more subsidies, mandates, and price controls.) All these systems are far from perfect but have less government involvement than ours (France is about the same) and give individuals more choices than ours. None are a free market but they all move closer to that ideal than what now exists in the United States.
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