As I predicted back in December, the fight over Obamacare has moved to the states. Several big developments have hit recently which do not bode well for supporters of unconstitutionally government-run health care.
First, a Federal District Court Judge Henry Hudson rejected the government’s attempt to dismiss Virginia’s lawsuit against Obamacare (full decision here). The establishment line was that legal challenges to Obamacare were just partisan grandstanding, and that of course government has the power to tax a non-economic non-activity through the Commerce Clause. They were wrong as Judge Hudson noted that Obamacare’s constitutional argument “literally forges new ground and extends Commerce Clause powers beyond its current high watermark.” Whether or not the court eventually reaches the right conclusion and declares Obamacare’s individual mandate to be unconstitutional remains to be seen, but this is an important first step.
On top of this, the voters in Missouri turned out yesterday to give Obamacare their disapproval.
Tuesday’s 71 to 29 percent blowout vote on Proposition C left no doubt where voters stand as they handed President Obama’s health care law a stunning rejection.
The proposition attempts to protect Missourians from the new federal mandate to buy insurance.
It also tries overturning the new federal prohibitions on insurance companies selling insurance directly to people.
This is just the beginning of the long fight against massive government expansion and government-run healthcare. But so far, the battles are being won by the side of smart policy and Constitutional governance.
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I’ve heard a few economic whoppers in my time, especially from the mouths of politicians, but this statement by Speaker Pelosi has got to be one of the most foolish yet.
Talking to reporters, the House speaker was defending a jobless benefits extension against those who say it gives recipients little incentive to work. By her reasoning, those checks are helping give somebody a job.
“It injects demand into the economy,” Pelosi said, arguing that when families have money to spend it keeps the economy churning. “It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.”
This is the same Keynesian clap-trap that claims you can “stimulate” the economy through government spending. It’s the same theory that created a “lost decade” in Japan as they tried one Keynesian stimulus after another throughout the 1990’s. It’s the same theory behind the 2008 Bush rebate checks, which did not spur growth, and the Obama stimulus, which did not spur growth.
You don’t have to be completely against some degree of unemployment insurance, as a cushion against economic hardship, to recognize that there has to be a balance between safety nets and the danger of creating a disincentive for work. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. When you pay people not to work, you’re going to have more people not working. Jobless benefits have to be finite; they can’t simply go on forever.
The length of the unemployment benefits granted so far is already unprecedented, so it’s not surprising that we’ve seen evidence that people are choosing to stay on the dole rather than to take work. It is ludicrous for Speaker Pelosi to now argue that further encouraging such mooching is actually creating jobs. The only real job she’s interested in creating (or saving in this case) is her own. She clearly thinks that continuing to handout other people’s money is the best way for her and her party to stay in power. Only time well tell whether she is right on that account.
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I write at Big Government:
It was an article of faith among Obamacare supporters that worry over so-called death panels was simply a cynical ploy by conservative leaders to scare the peasants. Blatant fearmongering, they claimed. Now it’s looking more and more like a valid concern. Writing at the Daily Caller, Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute highlights quotes from Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama’s nominee to be director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which suggest that death panels might be on his wish-list.
“I am romantic about the National Health Service. I love it,” he has said about the British health care system. His favorite part of British health care seems to be its rationing arm, the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE). NICE is responsible for determining whether or not the life-extending benefits a patient receives are worth the cost to the government. Dr. Berwick calls this institution a “global treasure.”
Read the entire article.
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Obama promised to help businesses with his health care plan. They are bearing the burden of our high cost system, he said. Well, businesses don’t feel helped:
The benefits consultant surveyed 661 companies this month and found that 94 percent of those that responded believe the law passed by Congress this year will raise costs. Eighty-eight percent plan to pass the increases on to employees, and 74 percent anticipate reducing health benefits and programs.
…The survey also found that 43 percent of employers that offer retiree benefits expect to reduce or eliminate them.
With help like this, who needs harm?
Hat-tip: HotAir
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The nannies have set their sights on another target: salt.
The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.
…Officials have not determined the salt limits. In a complicated undertaking, the FDA would analyze the salt in spaghetti sauces, breads and thousands of other products that make up the $600 billion food and beverage market, sources said. Working with food manufacturers, the government would set limits for salt in these categories, designed to gradually ratchet down sodium consumption. The changes would be calibrated so that consumers barely notice the modification.
The legal limits would be open to public comment, but administration officials do not think they need additional authority from Congress.
Not only has the conventional wisdom on salt flip-flopped repeatedly over the decades, but even the most recent research is entirely ambiguous.
It’s also disturbing that the FDA thinks they can do this without additional Congressional authority. It’s even more disturbing in that they may be right according to modern Constitutional understanding.
Remember, Obamacare has only given them more excuse to regulate your choices regarding anything that might plausibly be said to affect your health.
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Tax Day has come and gone. Naturally, this means Tea Parties have successfully been conducted across the nation. Not that the horse needs any more beating, but the Tax Day Tea Party event I attended in DC once again blew away the left’s racism narrative (which is not stopping them from doubling down with a new smear).
If the popularity of black speakers such as Rev. C.L. Bryant wasn’t enough, take this account from Politico:
Brooks Alexander, a 23-year-old Olney, Md. hotel worker and Obama supporter who wore an Obama tee-shirt to the evening rally, said infiltrators were being disrespectful.
“They’re doing a disservice not only to themselves, but to the people who are here trying to express their views,” said Alexander, who is African American and said he traveled to the rally to verify for himself liberal accounts blasting the tea party as racist.
“All my friends told me I was crazy to come down here in an Obama shirt,” he said. “Obviously I have political disagreements [with the tea party], but I cannot lie. I cannot say that people have been anything but nice to me. They have been shaking my hand. One guy told me I had a lot of [guts] for coming down here. I will definitely walk away from this with a new understanding of the tea party.”
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According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the black box health care bill comes with big tax increases on the middle class:
Taxpayers earning less than $200,000 a year will pay roughly $3.9 billion more in taxes — in 2019 alone — due to healthcare reform, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official scorekeeper.
The new law raises $15.2 billion over 10 years by limiting the medical expense deduction, a provision widely used by taxpayers who either have a serious illness or are older.
…Once the law is fully implemented in 2019, the JCT estimates the deduction limitation will affect 14.8 million taxpayers — 14.7 million of them will earn less than $200,000 a year. These taxpayers are single and joint filers, as well as heads of households.
Barack Obama from the campaign:
“Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”
Honesty fail. In fact, Mike Pence laughed at silly Democrat tax spin on the House floor:
Nor is the health care bill likely to be the last of the tax increases:
Leading voices in the Senate are considering a new tax on gasoline as part of an effort to win Republican and oil industry support for the energy and climate bill now idling in Congress.
…It is shaping up as a critical but controversial piece in the efforts by Graham, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to write a climate bill that moderate Republicans could support. Along those lines, the bill will also include an expansion of offshore oil drilling and major new incentives for nuclear power plant construction.
Environmental groups have long advocated gasoline taxes to reduce fossil fuel consumption; the oil industry has spent heavily in recent years to fight taxes, which it says would harm consumers.
Don’t get me wrong, if we’re dead set on doing harm to the economy in order to encourage less use of fossil fuels and more use of “alternatives,” then such a Pigovian tax is the least bad solution. It will make investment in alternative fuels more attractive, but without getting the government too much into the business of picking specific winners and losers.
The problem is that much of the reasoning used to establish that there is a significant enough negative externality for fossil fuel use to justify such a tax (such as global warming) is flimsy or questionable. Raising such a tax now, moreover, will have very negative consequences for an economy that is already struggling to recover from decades of government missteps.
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More hidden goodies discovered in the health care bill that no one bothered to read before passing:
Nursing mothers will now get additional support, thanks to page 1239 of the health care bill that President Obama recently signed into law. It requires employers to provide “a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from co-workers and the public, which may be used by an employee to express breast milk.” Only companies with less than 50 employees can claim it’s an undue hardship.
…About 49 percent of companies have some kind of space for nursing mothers to express milk, Galinsky said. In companies with 100 employees or more, it’s 53 percent; in 1998, it was 37 percent.
The part of the law addressing breastfeeding spaces is “a win for the family and a win for the company — they have less absenteeism, and the children are healthier,” Galinsky said.
Nannies always say that their mandates are good for business. This is laughable. If it really were “a win for the company,” they’d be doing it already. Maybe the reason 53 % are doing it is because 53% have a sufficient size population of breast-feeder workers that make it worthwhile. Placing an additional burden on the remaining 47% means higher prices for customers. That’s why this is really just another tax.
Hat-tip: Snark and Boobs
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Not just electorally, but literally:
In a new report, the Congressional Research Service says the law may have significant unintended consequences for the “personal health insurance coverage” of senators, representatives and their staff members.
For example, it says, the law may “remove members of Congress and Congressional staff” from their current coverage, in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, before any alternatives are available.
The confusion raises the inevitable question: If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans?
Of course, the New York Times had no use for this question when it might have actually mattered.
Hat-tip: Hot Air
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David Leonhardt of the New York Times has discovered that health care is not a free and unlimited good. Some way or another, a certain amount of demand will not be met. People cannot get all that they want because it is a scarce good and is restrained by the same laws of supply and demand – and physics – as all goods.
What is interesting, though, is that the New York Times suddenly finds denying care to be a great development. But isn’t this exactly what the left has long condemned insurance companies of doing? What they could not afford to admit before the bill passed they now find commendable: government is taking over the function of insurance companies as the primary mechanism for determining the allotment of care. For those of us who understand not only that government is least qualified for this role out of all possible institutions, but also that political power is uniquely corruptible, this is a frightening prospect.
It’s not that the author is wrong that we often times overuse health care. We overtest, overtreat and just generally overreact to every possible physical ailment. What he fails to do is recognize the fundamental reason behind this: the patient is not the consumer. Current “insurance” is more like a medical prepayment plan, often taken out of our paychecks with little choice. At no point does the patient have to consider the costs versus benefits of expending resources on a particular test, because the resources being expended have long ago been forfeited by him. He lost them as soon as the government gave a tax advantage to businesses for providing employee insurance, making a dollar of health care compensation less expensive than a dollar of wages.
Leonhardt offers a “three-step process” so that government institutions can learn to “say no.” “The first,” he says, “is learning more about when treatments work and when they don’t.” Next is giving patients more information and facts about treatments. These two issues are closely related. The problem is that neither is solved by introducing government into the equation.
The question of information in health care is inherently problematic. Often times we don’t know what works best. Other times, what works best for one might not for another. Yet other times, what we once thought worked best turns out to be quite harmful. This is simply the nature of the beast. Government is in no better position to deal with this than anyone else, and will necessarily run into the same issues, along with introducing its own inherent inefficiencies.
As for giving patients more information, that’s a laudable goal. But why do they not get more information now? Ultimately, it’s because it doesn’t matter. Their choice simply isn’t important. The choice of insurance companies to approve or deny treatment is what matters to doctors, and so they are the ones who are most informed. This, again, will not be solved by government bureaucrats. It can only be solved by making the patient important.
Finally, he suggests “changing the economics of medicine, to reward better care rather than simply more care. Health reform doesn’t go nearly far enough on this score, but it is a start.” I agree completely. Where we differ is on how to accomplish this.
Replacing insurance companies with government will not fundamentally change the economics of the system, nor produce the reforms Leonhardt desires. It is simply not capable of it. Rather, it will make government bureaucrats the new bad guys instead of insurance companies. Real innovation in health care would mean empowering consumers with the choice on how to direct their resources, while consigning insurance to its proper role as that of mitigator against catastrophic financial risk. More importantly, it would return the responsibility to consume health care thoughtfully and diligently to the only person with the incentive to do so wisely: the patient.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science and work in public policy, but please don't hold that against me.
