Conservative groups including the Heritage Foundation are circulating a proposal that builds on legislation by Sens. Lindsay Graham (R‑SC) and Bill Cassidy (R‑LA) to overhaul ObamaCare. Even though I don’t know whether Graham and Cassidy have endorsed these updates, I will go ahead and call this proposal Graham-Cassidy 2.0. The proposal seems ill-advised, particularly since there is an alternative that is not only far superior in terms of policy, but also an easier political lift that would deliver more political benefit.

The key to evaluating any proposal to overhaul ObamaCare is to understand the law’s centerpiece is its pre-existing conditions provisions. Those provisions are actually a bundle of regulations, including a requirement that insurers offer coverage to all comers, restrictions on underwriting on the basis of age, an outright prohibition on underwriting on the basis of health, and a requirement that insurers treat different market segments as being part of a single risk pool. ObamaCare’s preexisting-conditions provisions have the unintended and harmful effect of penalizing high-quality coverage and rewarding low-quality coverage. ObamaCare contains other harmful regulations, but its preexisting-conditions provisions are by far the worst. Unless a proposal would repeal or completely free consumers from ObamaCare’s preexisting-conditions provisions, it is simply nibbling around the edges.

From what I have seen, Graham-Cassidy 2.0 nibbles around the edges.

To its credit, Graham-Cassidy 2.0 would zero-out funding for and repeal the entitlements to both ObamaCare’s premium-assistance tax credits (read: Exchange subsidies) and benefits under the Medicaid expansion. Unfortunately, it would not repeal that spending. Instead, it would take that money and send it to states in the form of block grants. The aggregate spending level for those block grants would grow more slowly over time than Exchange subsidies and federal Medicaid-expansion grants would under current law.

Limiting the growth of those spending streams seems like a better idea than letting them grow without limit, as current law allows. However, there is more downside than upside here.

First, Graham-Cassidy 2.0 would transform a purely federal spending stream into a intergovernmental transfer. At present, Exchange subsidies are payments the federal government makes to private insurance companies. Under Graham-Cassidy 2.0 (and 1.0), the feds would send those funds to states, which would use them to subsidize health insurance in various ways. Roping in a second layer of government diffuses responsibility and reduces accountability, regardless of whether the feds send those funds to states in the form of a block grant. Voters who don’t like how those funds are being spent would have difficulty knowing which level of government to blame, and whichever level of government is actually responsible could avoid accountability by blaming the other. Intergovernmental transfers are so inherently corrupting, there should be a constitutional amendment prohibiting them. And yet Graham-Cassidy 2.0 would substitute an intergovernmental transfer for spending with clearer lines of accountability.

Second, Graham-Cassidy 2.0 also diffuses accountability for ObamaCare’s preexisting-conditions provisions. Those provisions would continue to operate (with slight modifications). As a result, they would continue to destabilize the individual market, punish high-quality coverage, and reward low-quality coverage. The purpose of the Exchange subsidies is to mitigate that instability. Today, it is clear that Congress is responsible for any harm those provisions inflict, and the success or failure of the Exchange subsidies to mitigate those harms. Graham-Cassidy 2.0 would give that money to states and task them with mitigating those harms. When states fail to do so, as at least some states inevitably will, whom should voters blame? Congress, which started the fire? Or states, to whom Congress handed the fire extinguisher?

Third, while Graham-Cassidy 2.0 would eliminate two federal entitlements, eliminating entitlements is desirable only to the extent it limits government control over economic resources—in this case, spending. And while Graham-Cassidy 2.0 proposes to hold the growth of this repurposed ObamaCare spending below what it would be under current law, there is reason to doubt such a spending limitation would hold.

When examining the merits of any policy proposal, one must also consider the political dynamics the proposal would unleash. Generally speaking, states are a more politically powerful and sympathetic constituency than the current recipients of Exchange subsidies (private insurance companies). States have been able to use that political clout to get Congress to disregard the spending limits it imposed on SCHIP, for example, when so-called emergencies led states to blow through their initial allotments. Moreover, since Graham-Cassidy 2.0 would preserve ObamaCare’s preexisting-conditions provisions, it would come with its own built-in emergencies. As sure as the sun rises in the East, states will come to Congress and claim their block-grant allocations were insufficient to mitigate the resulting harms. Congress would be unlikely to say no—members rely on state officials for political support, after all—which means the spending restraints in Graham-Cassidy 2.0 are less than guaranteed.

Fourth, also pushing the direction of bigger government, Graham-Cassidy 2.0 would expand the constituency for ObamaCare spending. At present, the money the federal government spends on ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion does not enjoy the support of the 19 states that have not implemented the expansion. The block grants in Graham-Cassidy 2.0, by contrast, would go to all states. As a result, non-expansion states like Texas would go from not caring about whether that federal spending continues to insisting that it does. At the same time, Graham-Cassidy 2.0 would expand the constituency of voters who want to preserve that spending. At present, able-bodied, childless adults in non-expansion states receive no benefit from ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion or its Exchange subsidies. Graham-Cassidy 2.0 would allow (and in some cases require) states to provide subsidies to such adults below the poverty level, thereby creating another constituency that will reliably vote to expand those subsidies.

Fifth, a provision of Graham-Cassidy 2.0 that supporters consider a selling point would expand the constituency for more spending yet again. The proposal would require all states to allow all able-bodied, non-elderly Medicaid enrollees to use their Medicaid subsidy to purchase private insurance. Since greater choice would make Medicaid enrollment more valuable, and since roughly one third of people who are eligible for Medicaid are not enrolled, this would perversely lead to a large “woodwork effect,” where people who were previously eligible for Medicaid but not enrolled begin to enroll in the program. When Medicaid enrollment increases, so will Medicaid spending, and so will the population of voters who are willing to vote for higher Medicaid spending and the higher taxes required to finance it.

Since Graham-Cassidy 2.0 would preserve ObamaCare’s preexisting-conditions provisions, it is hard to see what would justify taking these one or two uncertain steps forward and multiple steps backward.

This is particularly true since there is a much better alternative on the table: strongly encouraging the Trump administration to allow insurers to offer short-term health insurance plans with renewal guarantees that protect enrollees from having their premiums increase because they got sick. Doing so would allow consumers to avoid all of ObamaCare’s unwanted regulatory costs, particularly those imposed by its preexisting-conditions provisions. The Trump administration can create this “freedom option” by administrative rulemaking—comments on the administrations proposed rule are due April 23—which is a much easier political lift than garnering 217 votes in the House and 51 votes in the Senate. Expanding short-term plans would also create salutary political dynamics that would force Democrats begin negotiating a permanent overhaul of ObamaCare.

As of today, Graham-Cassidy 2.0 just can’t compete with that cost-benefit ratio. Every ounce of energy spent on it, rather than on expanding short-term plans, is a waste.

Economist Steven Horwitz writes in USA Today about President Trump’s proposal to reduce legal opioid prescriptions by one third. Such a drastic reduction would inevitably harm people like Horwitz, who relates his experience with excruciating back pain and how opioids were essential to relieving his agony and helping his body heal:

People who wish to drastically limit access to opioids need to know the reality of this kind of pain. Getting out of bed took 10 minutes or more because even one small wrong movement while getting to a sitting position would cause severe back spasms, making me shudder with pain. Walking around my house required balancing myself on walls and door frames.

The pain from sitting down and standing up from the toilet required that I use a chair to hold my weight like one would use a walker. I had visions of being found in the bathroom, stuck on the toilet or even unable to get up off of the floor. Every little twist and turn of my body risked those spasms and shuddering.

Eventually I realized my mistake and got a prescription for opioids. The quality of my life quickly and dramatically improved, as within two or three days, the pain was reduced substantially and my mobility and mood were significantly better. I could walk comfortably and hug my kids again.

It’s important to understand that this kind of debilitating pain not only causes unnecessary suffering, it prevents patients from healing. It takes every bit of energy you have to fight it, and your body has little to nothing left to use to heal. Some medical professionals call pain “the fifth vital sign” because of the way in which it matters for a patient’s health. Opioids enabled me to relax, to sleep and to heal.

I too am one of the people Trump’s policy might harm.

I suffer from episodic back pain. Everything Horwitz describes I have experienced. If anything, I would say he understates the agony. In my experience, the pain can be more like torture—as if someone were deliberately trying to inflict as much pain as possible, for the purpose of breaking me emotionally and leaving me trembling in fear of its return.

Like Horwitz, I did not want to treat my back pain with opioids. I had previously used them to recover from knee surgery and I disliked the experience so much that after my second knee surgery, I refused them. Like Horwitz, I feared addiction. So I tried stretching. I tried physical therapy. I tried non-prescription analgesics.

Nothing worked until I broke down—until the pain broke me—and I tried opioids. They worked. They eliminated my pain and, as Horwitz says, that allowed me to heal. My pain could come back at any time, and so I too could be one of the people Trump’s policy would leave to suffer in excruciating pain. 

People who have never experienced back pain have no business making opioid policy.

On March 30, Sally Satel, a psychiatrist specializing in substance abuse at Yale University School of Medicine, co-authored an article with addiction medicine specialist Stefan Kertesz of the University of Alabama Birmingham School of Medicine condemning the plans of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to place limits on the amount of opioids Medicare patients can receive. The agency will decide in April if it will limit the number of opioids it will cover to 90 morphine milligram equivalents (MME) per day. Any opioids beyond that amount will not be paid for by Medicare. One year earlier, Dr. Kertesz made similar condemnations in a column for The Hill. While 90 MME is considered a high dose, they point out that many patients with chronic severe pain have required such doses or higher for prolonged periods of time to control their pain. Promoting the rapid reduction of opioid doses in such people will return many to a life of anguish and desperation.

CMS’s plan to limit opioid prescriptions mimics similar limitations put into effect in more than half of the states and is not evidence-based. These restrictions are rooted in the false narrative that the opioid overdose problem is mostly the result of doctors over-prescribing opioids to patients in pain, even though it is primarily the result of non-medical opioid users accessing drugs in the illicit market. Policymakers are implementing these restrictions based upon a flawed interpretation of opioid prescribing guidelines published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2016.

Drs. Satel and Kertesz point out that research has yet to show a distinct correlation between the overdose rate and the dosages on which patients are maintained, and that the data show a majority of overdoses involve multiple drugs. (2016 data from New York City show 97 percent involved multiple drugs, and 46 percent of the time one of them was cocaine.)

Not only are the Medicare opioid reduction proposals without scientific foundation, but they run counter to the recommendations of CMS in its 2016 guidelines. As Dr. Kertesz stated in 2017:

“In its 7th recommendation, the CDC urged that care of patients already receiving opioids be based not on the number of milligrams, but on the balance of risks and benefits for that patient. That two major agencies have chosen to defy the CDC ignores lessons we should have learned from prior episodes in American medicine, where the appeal of management by easy numbers overwhelmed patient-centered considerations.”

In an effort to dissuade the agency, Dr. Kertesz sent a letter to CMS in early March signed by 220 health professionals, including eight who had official roles in formulating the 2016 CDC guidelines. The letter called attention to the flaws in the proposal and to its great potential to cause unintentional harm. CMS will render its verdict as early as today.

Until policymakers cast off their misguided notions about the forces behind the overdose crisis, patients will suffer needlessly and overdose rates will continue to climb. 

President Donald Trump has dismissed Secretary of Veterans Affairs Dr. David Shulkin amid disagreement within the administration over the future of the beleaguered Veterans’ Health Administration, a single-payer health system whose closest analogue is the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. 

In a farewell printed in the New York Times, Shulkin criticizes proposals to improve health care for veterans by privatizing the VHA:

The private sector, already struggling to provide adequate access to care in many communities, is ill-prepared to handle the number and complexity of patients that would come from closing or downsizing V.A. hospitals and clinics, particularly when it involves the mental health needs of people scarred by the horrors of war. Working with community providers to adequately ensure that veterans’ needs are met is a good practice. But privatization leading to the dismantling of the department’s extensive health care system is a terrible idea. The department’s understanding of service-related health problems, its groundbreaking research and its special ability to work with military veterans cannot be easily replicated in the private sector.

Actually, Shulkin is probably right. The VHA has built expertise in treating the special challenges veterans face (which is not to say the VHA always treats veterans well). If privatization “dismantl[es] the department’s extensive health care system,” it could take the private sector years to fill in the gap. Simply “closing or downsizing V.A. hospitals and clinics” could well be “a terrible idea.”

Fortunately, that is not what privatization means. To privatize does not mean to dismantle. It means to transfer ownership of a resource from the government to private individuals. 

Privatization of the VHA need not dismantle any aspect of that unique system. All that privatization would or need do is transfer ownership of VA hospitals and clinics–of all the system’s physical capital–to the people that system exists to serve: veterans. The VHA would continue to exist as the nation’s largest integrated health system, and would preserve its capacity to meet the unique needs of veterans, but under the control of veterans themselves rather than politicians who persistently renege on the commitments they make to veterans.

Cato Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy studies Christopher A. Preble and I explain in the New York Times how privatization can have bipartisan appeal:

The alternative system we propose combines the universal goal of improving veterans’ benefits with conservative Republicans’ preference for market incentives and antiwar Democrats’ desire to make it harder to wage war. 

Read more about this bipartisan VA privatization proposal in Chapter 14, Veterans Benefits of Cato’s Handbook for Policymakers (8th ed.).

Martha Bebinger reports for National Public Radio station WBUR about the rise in fentanyl-laced cocaine. She cites numerous accounts of college students using cocaine to stay awake while studying for exams, or while attending campus parties, and then falling into a deep sleep after the initial cocaine rush. Some don’t wake up. Others get revived by the opioid overdose antidote naloxone.

Massachusetts state police recorded a nearly three-fold increase in seizures of cocaine laced with fentanyl over the past year. And the Drug Enforcement Administration lists Massachusetts among the top three states in the US for seizures of cocaine/​fentanyl combinations. The DEA says the mixture is popularly used for “speedballing.” The original recipe used heroin mixed with cocaine in order to minimize the negative effects of the “come-down” after the rush of cocaine. Cocaine mixed with heroin is very unpredictable and dangerous. When it is mixed with fentanyl—five times the potency of heroin—it is even more dangerous.

There is a debate among law enforcement as to whether the cocaine is accidentally laced with fentanyl by sloppy underground drug manufacturers, or whether the mixture is intentional. There have been several reports of cocaine users who were unaware that the cocaine they were snorting or smoking contained fentanyl.

Connecticut state health statisticians keep track of opioid overdoses that included cocaine. While the majority of the time the overdose is from the classic “speedball” combination of heroin and cocaine, they have noted a 420 percent increase in fentanyl/​cocaine in the last 3 years. However, Massachusetts does not register drug combinations when it records “opioid overdoses,” so it is unknown just what percentage of the 1,977 estimated opioid overdose deaths in Massachusetts last year were in combination with cocaine or other drugs. New York City keeps detailed statistics. In 2016, cocaine was found in 46 percent of the city’s opioid deaths, heroin and fentanyl were involved in 72 percent of opioid overdose deaths, and 97 percent of all opioid overdose deaths involved multiple drugs.

Meanwhile, President Trump and most state and local policymakers remain stuck on the misguided notion that the way to stem the overdose rate is to clamp down on the number and dose of opioids that doctors can prescribe to their patients in pain, and to curtail opioid production by the nation’s pharmaceutical manufacturers. And while patients are made to suffer needlessly as doctors, fearing a visit from a DEA agent, are cutting them off from relief, the overdose rate continues to climb.

The overdose crisis has always primarily been a product of drug prohibition—not of doctors treating patients.

In their highly influential book describing behavioral economics, Nudge, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sustein devote 2 pages to the notion of “bad nudges.” They describe a “nudge” as any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. The classic example of a nudge is the decision of an employer to “opt-in” or “opt-out” employees from a 401(k) plan while allowing the employee to reverse that choice; the empirical evidence strongly suggests that opting employees into such plans dramatically raises 401(k) participation. Many parts of the book advocate for more deliberate choice architecture on the part of the government in order to “nudge” individuals in the social planner’s preferred direction.

Thaler and Sunstein provide short discussion and uncompelling examples of bad nudges. They correctly note “In offering supposedly helpful nudges, choice architects may have their own agendas. Those who favor one default rule over another may do so because their own economic interests are at stake.” (p. 239) With respect to nudges by the government, their view is “One question is whether we should worry even more about public choice architects than private choice architects. Maybe so, but we worry about both. On the face of it, it is odd to say that the public architects are always more dangerous than the private ones. After all, managers in the public sector have to answer to voters, and managers in the private sector have as their mandate the job of maximizing profits and share prices, not consumer welfare.”

In my recent work (with Jim Marton and Jeff Talbert), we show how bad nudges by public officials can work in practice through a compelling example from Kentucky. In 2012, Kentucky implemented Medicaid managed care statewide, auto-assigned enrollees to three plans, and allowed switching. This fits in with the “choice architecture” and “nudge” design described by Thaler and Sunstein. One of the three plans – called KY Spirit – was decidedly lower quality than the other two plans, especially in eastern Kentucky. For example, KY Spirit was not able to contract with the dominant health care provider in eastern Kentucky due to unsuccessful rate negotiations. KY Spirit’s difficulties in eastern Kentucky were widely reported in the press, so we would expect there to be greater awareness of differences in MCO provider network quality in that region.

Given the virtually identical and non-existent financial differences across the three Medicaid plans (they were essentially free to Medicaid clients), the standard economic framework with rational consumers and trivial transaction costs would predict all enrollees would switch out of lower quality plans. In this case, it would suggest mass defections from KY Spirit. In contrast, the “nudge” framework suggests enrollees would be for more likely to remain in inferior plans. The nudge – in this case a bad nudge – worked. In each of the other two plans – both of higher quality – approximately 95% of those assigned to those plans stayed in them. For KY Spirit, the percentage was lower, but very far from the prediction of full-scale exit. Specifically, 57% of those assigned to KY Spirit remained enrolled in the plan in 2012, despite its well-documented problems. For sicker individuals, 44% remained in KY Spirit, despite the serious problems in accessing healthcare providers. Very few individuals who opted out of their assigned health plan made the active choice to enroll in KY Spirit, consistent with the notion of its low quality. Of more than 37,000 individuals in eastern Kentucky assigned to the other two health plans, slightly more than 100 actively moved into KY Spirit.

Why would public officials assign Medicaid enrollees to a low quality health care plan? After all, virtually all examples of government nudges in the Thaler and Sunstein book portray officials as steering clients in the right direction. In the Kentucky context, the underlying motivation appears to be program costs. The state paid different reimbursement rates to each of the three health plans, and most of the time, KY Spirit was the “low cost, low quality” plan. In reality, this “bad nudge” – from the Medicaid enrollee’s perspective – was a cost saving from the taxpayer’s point of view. Compare to an objective of maximizing the quality of plans for Medicaid enrollees, the actual plan assignment which included some “bad nudges” reduced program costs by approximately 5%.

Although policymakers might be applauded in this case for reigning in program costs through behavioral economics, it is far from the optimistic framework portrayed in Thaler and Sunstein about maximizing client interest.

ObamaCare turns eight years old today. Some opponents had hoped to mark the occasion by giving supporters the birthday gift they’ve always wanted: a GOP-sponsored bailout of ObamaCare-participating private insurance companies. Fortunately, a dispute over subsidies for abortion providers killed what could have been the first of many GOP ObamaCare bailouts.

ObamaCare premiums have been skyrocketing. All indications are this will continue in 2019, with insurers announcing premium increases up to 32 percent or more just before this year’s mid-term elections. Some Republicans fear voters will punish them for the effects of a law every Republican opposed and most still want to repeal.

Senate health committee chairman Lamar Alexander (R‑TN), Sen. Susan Collins (R‑ME), and House Energy & Commerce Committee chairman Greg Walden (R‑OR) hope to avert calamity by expanding on a proven failure. For months, they have been pushing legislation that would resurrect ObamaCare’s expired “reinsurance” program with $30 billion of new funding.

ObamaCare’s architects knew the law’s preexisting-conditions provisions would effectively destroy the individual health insurance market. They added the reinsurance program in an attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

ObamaCare’s preexisting-conditions provisions both increase health-insurance premiums and reduce health-insurance quality. They achieve the former, first, by requiring insurers to cover patients with uninsurable preexisting conditions, and again by unleashing adverse selection. Those factors in turn reduce quality by literally punishing insurers who offer high-quality coverage for the sick.

From 2014 until it expired at the end of 2016, ObamaCare’s reinsurance program gave participating insurers extra taxpayer subsidies to cover the claims of high-cost patients whom its preexisting-conditions provisions require them to cover at a loss. The extra subsidies were supposed to reduce premiums, and prevent a race to the bottom fueled by ObamaCare’s penalties on quality coverage.

If ObamaCare’s reinsurance program was supposed to keep premiums from skyrocketing, it was an utter failure. Premiums increased 18–25 percent per year from 2013 through 2016, well above the trend of 3–4 percent from 2008 to 2013. By 2017, premiums had doubled—a cumulative increase of 99 percent or 105 percent, depending on the source—from pre-ObamaCare levels. ObamaCare’s preexisting-conditions provisions were the driving force behind these premium increases.

Likewise, ObamaCare’s reinsurance program failed to prevent its preexisting-conditions provisions from triggering a race to the bottom on health-insurance quality. Research indicates the penalties those provisions impose on high-quality coverage are indeed making coverage increasingly worse for patients with multiple sclerosis and other high-cost conditions, with no end in sight. All the king’s reinsurance and all the king’s men cannot put Humpty together again.

At this point, ObamaCare supporters might object that premiums would have risen even more without the reinsurance program in place. But this is false. Reinsurance programs do not reduce premiums at all.

To illustrate, take Sen. Collins’ claim that $30 billion in reinsurance subsidies would reduce ObamaCare premiums 40 percent. The claim is complete nonsense. Giving insurance companies $30 billion of taxpayer money would not magically make them 40 percent more efficient. If that were true, a $75 billion bailout would make ObamaCare totally free.

ObamaCare’s reinsurance program did not reduce premiums by a single penny, and neither would a Republican reinsurance program, because government subsidies do not reduce premiums. Giving taxpayer dollars to private insurance companies merely shifts part of the premium from enrollees to taxpayers. If a $30 billion insurance-industry bailout causes the amount ObamaCare enrollees pay for their coverage to fall 40 percent, it is because that 40 percent is being shifted to someone else—i.e., you. (If anything, government subsidies increase premiums through moral hazard.)

Nevertheless, the idea that subsidies reduce premiums is the kind of falsehood Washington will forever exclaim as gospel because it serves the economic interests of insurance companies, and the political interests of politicians who want to be seen as Doing Something, without actually solving anything.

The only thing reinsurance subsidies are guaranteed to do is hand even more taxpayer dollars to private insurance companies. ObamaCare already hands more than $50 billion in explicit government subsidies to participating insurance companies each year. It hands insurers billions more by forcing healthy enrollees to overpay for health insurance. If the first $50 billion didn’t solve the problem, why should we expect another $30 billion would? And if it doesn’t, how much more good money will Congress throw after bad?

Fortunately, a dispute over whether these subsidies could go to insurers that cover abortion prevented the Alexander-Collins-Walden bailout from passing as part of the massive $1.3 trillion spending bill Congress passed to avert a government shutdown today.

Alexander, Collins, and Walden should take the hint and stop trying to bail out ObamaCare, which would just double (or triple, or quadruple) down on a failed system. If Congress is unwilling to repeal and replace ObamaCare yet, opponents should be pushing states to allow individuals and employers to purchase health insurance licensed by U.S. territories, which are exempt from ObamaCare’s costliest regulations, and pushing HHS to reverse its administrative ban on “renewal guarantees” in short term plans. These steps would provide relief for the vast majority of those in the individual market, before the mid-term elections, and disproportionately in areas where the GOP is defending congressional seats. They would also give ObamaCare opponents greater leverage in Congress, and even force supporters to the negotiating table.

If instead Alexander, Collins, and Walden succeed in delivering an ObamaCare bailout, it would mark a stunning reversal for the GOP. Republicans spent seven years promising to repeal ObamaCare and one year trying to replace it, while supporters of the law refused to help—or even to acknowledge ObamaCare’s fundamental flaws. A bailout would hand supporters what they have always wanted but Republicans have heretofore refused to give: more government spending, zero reform, and a bipartisan imprimatur on ObamaCare. One thing is certain: the GOP’s first ObamaCare bailout would not be their last.