Lots of people, on both the Left and the Right, want government to plan economic activity. Honest central planners recognize that highly concentrated and well-organized groups of producers and consumers typically hijack the plan’s new taxes, subsidies, and regulations. The central planners are typically horrified to see what their carefully laid plans look like after being put through the political grinder.
Clever central planners look for ways to protect their plans from the influence of their fellow citizens. For example, some planners seek to restrict their fellow citizens’ right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. (I have often remarked that if you can’t implement your plans without taking away someone else’s First Amendment rights, maybe you should rethink your plans.)
Other central planners seek to create special government bodies to execute their plans. These bodies would have the power to tax, spend, and regulate, but their decisions could only be overturned by the people’s representatives with great difficulty. Indeed, the very purpose of these bodies is to allow the planners to govern their fellow citizens without having to worry so much about the consent of the governed.
Certain health care reformers have set about this path. Across the political spectrum, observers acknowledge that government wields enormous power over America’s health care sector, and that those powers are often co-opted to serve private ends. For example, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D‑SD) recently remarked:
Congress is just not capable of being the manager of a health care system and yet it’s largely Congress today that has that responsibility. It hasn’t worked for the last 50 years. It’ll work even less in the next 50.
As a result, Daschle and others propose that Congress create a “federal health board” to manage the health care sector. The Federal Health Board would do things like require you to purchase health insurance, dictate what kind of health insurance you will purchase, set the prices for health insurance and medical goods and services, etc.. In other words, the Federal Health Board would have the power to bankrupt corporations, to force doctors to change the way they do business, to deny medical care to patients, and to shift massive amounts of resources from one part of the country to another. The problem is, some corporations, doctors, patients, and regional interests would try to block parts of The Plan, either on their own or through their representatives in Congress.
Since it would be so hard for the Federal Health Board to do its job with all that meddling by the governed, Daschle et alia want to insulate the Board from the political process. Specifically, they want Congress to model a new Federal Health Board on the existing Federal Reserve Board. That would enable the “health Fed” to focus on the public good, much like the Federal Reserve Board manages the money supply and guides interest rates without any of the unseemly pandering to special interests that goes on in Congress and other government bodies. Because that’s how the Fed operates, right?
Maybe not. Economist Allan H. Meltzer of Carnegie-Mellon University has read the transcripts of every meeting of the Fed’s Open Market Committee going back to 1913, and has written a two-volume history of the Federal Reserve. Interviewed recently for one of Russ Roberts’ excellent EconTalk podcasts, Meltzer dismissed the idea that the Federal Reserve is immune from political pressures:
We talk about an independent Federal Reserve, but in reading and writing the history of the Federal Reserve, there are very few occasions since the 1930s when the Fed actually practiced independence. There was the [Paul] Volcker era; he was certainly an independent central bank governor. But [current Fed chairman Ben] Bernanke is anything but an independent central bank governor. He is being leaned on by the Congress, and he accedes to them. So even though he may worry about inflation … he’s … trying to respond to the short-term pressures instead of thinking ahead and thinking longer-term …
That brings him to the interest rate, because that’s the thing that people in the market see. The Wall Street people … put him under great pressure because they own a lot of bonds and mortgages. And they believe that if he lowers the federal funds rate, it will lower the price of their mortgages and bonds, and they will have smaller losses. And so they are on his back all the time to do more, to cut the interest rate that he controls, hoping that the rates that they see and own will go down, and their … losses will become smaller …
In reading the minutes of the Fed and watching what they do, the Fed has always been very much afraid of Congress. And it took someone with the stamina and arrogance, in a way, of Volcker to be able to get around that … By the summer of 1982, [Congress was] facing an election and they were on his back to ease up … He wouldn’t admit that he was [easing up], but he did …
The idea of having a really independent agency in Washington, that’s just not going to happen … The Federal Reserve derives its power from Congress … The Fed’s power is delegated, and they are very much aware that Congress could always change that … [The Fed] manages to hang on to some measure or vestige of independence, but it is very much concerned — always — about what the Congress is doing, and doesn’t want to deviate very far from that.
What can’t come through in a transcription is that Meltzer chuckled at “the idea of having a really independent agency in Washington.”
So if the central planners seek to insulate their health care reforms from the political process, modeling a new health planning board on the Fed won’t achieve that goal. That’s probably a good thing. Power with accountability is dangerous enough. Power without accountability is truly frightening.
An important advantage of free-market health care reforms is that they provide accountability without allowing anyone to consolidate much power at all. That seems a much happier state of affairs.
