“The Affordable Care Act offers new benefits like preventive care with no out-of-pocket cost and tools to help fight unreasonable premium increases that will save money for consumers.” — Jessica Santillo, a spokeswoman at the Department of Health and Human Services
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Health Care
Pelosi Had to Pass ObamaCare So She Could Find out What’s In It
Bloomberg’s Caroline Baum has a great column on ObamaCare. It leads off with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s oft-repeated remark, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
Truer words were never spoken. Heck, ObamaCare gives HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius so much arbitrary power to reshape the health care sector that Congress had to pass the law so that Pelosi could find out what is in it.
Baum explains why such discretionary power is dangerous:
Discretion may be the better part of valor, but it’s not something businesses can rely on for planning purposes. Corporations are already hunkered down because of (take your pick) weak demand, hurt feelings as a result of presidential persecution, or uncertainty over future health-care costs and tax rates. It won’t help business confidence to learn the HHS secretary can make and break rules on a case-by-case basis.
“The secretary can decide what you have to purchase, but if you are in a presidential swing state, the secretary has the authority to undo everything she just did,” Cannon says.
Wait, how’d that last sentence get in there? Anyway, read the whole thing.
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How ObamaCare Is Destroying Consumer Protections
In this morning’s Charlotte Observer, I explain how ObamaCare is destroying consumer protections. Exhibit A is Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina’s decision to refund $156 million to its policyholders:
BCBSNC’s refunds show that ObamaCare is leaving seriously ill patients with less protection, not more. Health insurance was hardly perfect before ObamaCare, but BCBSNC’s policyholders had insurance that had pre-funded many of their future medical bills.
Now, ObamaCare has effectively transferred those reserves from the sick to the healthy. Seriously ill policyholders now have less protection against BCBSNC reneging on its commitments to them. Competition used to discourage skimping; ObamaCare rewards it.
Due to space considerations, the editors dropped the parts where I explain (A) how research by Harvard economist (and sometime Obama advisor) David Cutler shows that under ObamaCare’s price controls, insurers must compete to avoid the sick, and (B) that ObamaCare is blocking further innovations — such as those foreseen by University of Chicago economist John Cochrane — that would provide even greater protection to the sick.
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Welfare and Fiscal Federalism
The Washington Post recently reported on the federal government’s cash-welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Despite the deep recession, the TANF welfare rolls haven’t seen a dramatic increase. Meanwhile, other federal anti-poverty programs have seen the sizable increases that are to be expected in a recession:
Nationwide, welfare cases grew by 11 percent from the start of the recession through March, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. In contrast, the number of families getting food stamps jumped by 50 percent and the number getting unemployment benefits more than doubled. Medicaid grew by more than 13 percent from late 2007 to late 2009, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
As I’ve noted before, TANF’s tighter work and eligibility requirements have made it a less desirable option for those seeking government assistance. Over the past decade, inflation-adjusted spending on all federal anti-poverty programs has increased by 89 percent. Only TANF saw a decrease in spending.
When TANF replaced the federal government’s open-ended entitlement in 1996, it allowed the states great leeway to set benefits. California, which offers more generous benefits than other states, has seen its TANF rolls increase by almost 25 percent since the recession started. In contrast, Michigan and Rhode Island, which have seen a respective 2 percent increase and 10 percent decrease in their welfare rolls, offer less generous TANF benefits.
The variation in TANF enrollment among the states points to the desirability of handing off all responsibility for anti-poverty programs to the states. The beauty of fiscal federalism is that it enables states to pursue policies that better reflect local preferences, while constraining governments because of interstate competition. Federal policymakers should get out of the anti-poverty business as the Constitution intended.
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Giving Power to Experts Is No Way to Reform Health Care
In the latest Cato Policy Report, Cato adjunct scholar Arnold Kling’s essay on the (mis)rule of experts explains why ObamaCare will fail:
Despite the many pages contained in the health care legislation that Congress enacted, the health care system that will result is for the most part to be determined. The design and implementation of health care reform was delegated to unelected bureaucrats, as was done in Massachusetts.
In Massachusetts, the promises of proponents have proven false, and the predictions of skeptics have been borne out. Costs have not been contained; they have shot up. Emergency room visits have not been curtailed; they have increased. The mandate to purchase health insurance has not removed the problem of adverse selection and moral hazard; instead, thousands of residents have chosen to obtain insurance when sick and drop it when healthy. The officials responsible for administering the Massachusetts health care system are no longer talking about sophisticated ways of making health care more efficient.
Instead, they are turning to the crude tactic of imposing price controls.
Once again, we have legislators putting unrealistic demands on experts. This results in the selection of experts with the greatest hubris, shutting out experts who appreciate the difficulty of the problem. When the selected experts find that their plans go awry, they take out their frustrations by resorting to more authoritarian methods of control.
With ObamaCare, that dynamic took hold before the law even took effect.
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Why Government Should Not Give Nutrition Advice
There are plenty of reasons why politicians and government bureaucrats have no business telling you what you should eat. The Constitution grants the federal government no authority to do so, for one thing. Even if it did, it is simply wrong to force people to pay taxes so that other people can hand down nutritional advice or — God forbid — mandates.
A terrific article by Jane Black in The Washington Post illustrates why, furthermore, the government’s advice isn’t likely to be very good:
[H]istorically, the government has shied away from offering controversial advice. And with food, everything is controversial: A boost for one type of food in the guidelines can be viewed as a threat by providers of competing products. The result, critics say, is a nutritional education system so politically influenced that it is ineffective.
This year’s process appears to be no exception. In public comments, the meat lobby has opposed strict warnings on sodium that could cast a negative light on lunch meats. The milk lobby has expressed concerns about warnings to cut back on added sugars, lest chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milks fall from favor. Several members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation also weighed in against added-sugar restrictions in defense of the cranberry…
In 1977, a Senate select committee led by Sen. George McGovern (D‑S.D.) was forced to beat a hasty retreat after it initially recommended that Americans could cut their intake of saturated fat by reducing their consumption of red meat and dairy products. Its revised guidelines suggested choosing “meat, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.”
McGovern, whose constituents included many cattle ranchers, lost his seat in 1980. Since then, in case after case, the guidelines have refrained from suggesting that Americans eat less of just about anything.
Public health advocates say that kind of vacuum is precisely the problem: By avoiding blunt messages about what not to eat, the government has spoken in a way that baffles consumers.
“The only time they talk about food is if it’s an ‘eat more’ message,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University and a longtime critic of the food industry. “If it’s a question of eating less, then they talk about nutrients.”…
[A]s in the past, translating scientific data into clear and useful recommendations poses political pitfalls. The advisory committee’s emphasis on a “plant-based” diet, for example, has caused much consternation among the powerful egg and meat lobbies who say the term might be misunderstood as advocating a vegetarian diet.
This problem trips up all big-government schemes. Right-wing and left-wing statists think they have a terrific idea: give the government power to do this or that, and Experts will use that power to improve mankind. But then the people with a financial stake get involved, and the effort ends up serving them more than mankind. See also health care, national defense, etc..
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Sebelius: Anonymous Political Speech ‘Dangerous’
In all of Washington, is there a greater enemy of free speech than Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius?
- Her department is forcing millions of Americans to finance speech that they oppose, by using taxpayer dollars to broadcast (misleading) television ads that promote ObamaCare.
- She is using the powers granted her under ObamaCare to threaten insurers with bankruptcy if they publicly disagree with her about the law’s cost.
- Now, she is decrying the growth of anonymous political speech in congressional campaigns.
Would that coerced speech, or government suppression of speech, troubled her as much as anonymous speech.