Things must be going poorly for President Obama if he wants to change the subject to ObamaCare.
Today, most of Washington is questioning whether the U.S. government was derelict in its handling of the September 11, 2012 assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which heavily armed assailants injured 10 Americans and murdered four, including the U.S. ambassador. However, over at the White House, President Obama is launching a PR defensive of ObamaCare, at which he will basically ask mothers to nag their kids to waste their money on ObamaCare’s over-priced health insurance.
The contrast brought to mind this passage from University of Chicago law professor M. Todd Henderson’s article in the latest issue of Cato’s Regulation magazine:
When the president sought to make birth control a mandatory part of all insurance plans, this was a political decision regarding health care. This is not to disparage political decisions in general, but merely to point out this feature of them, that they bind those who disagree…
A relatively simple, low cost, and widely accepted practice like birth control became a firestorm when individual choice and local variation were overridden on the grounds of improving social welfare. The airwaves and print media were filled with analysis, name-calling, and hyperbole. Kitchen tables, like my own, were filled with debate about how we should vote about the financing of other peoples’ use of birth control… Just imagine what the debates will look like when the stakes become—as they inevitably will—whether expensive cancer therapies, surgeries, or other procedures will be paid for, or whether more controversial matters like abortion, gender reassignment, and the like will be paid for…
When … matters are decided by experts or politicians, mistakes can be made and made in ways that necessarily are coercive. This coercion does not admit easy exit, as one can exit an insurance policy, especially if done at the federal level. The central lesson is that centralized power over complex matters risks making larger mistakes than decentralized power, admits less innovation, provides for less tailored satisfaction of preferences, and generates greater political conflict. Ironically, those risks may undermine the important work that government must do to improve the world we live in.
Every minute the government spends trying (and failing) to improve people’s health is a minute it cannot spend making them safer.
Read the rest of Henderson’s article, “Voice and Exit in Health Care Policy.”
