When Mitt Romney signed the Massachusetts health care plan into law, he bragged that it would provide universal health care coverage. In fact, he still says that on the campaign trail. After all, the plan does mandate that everyone in the state buy health insurance. The state has done pretty well at the welfare aspects of the bill, signing up some 150,000 people for subsidized insurance (families of four earning as much as $62,000 are eligible for subsidies). But the latest reports from Massachusetts indicate that of 170,000 people who are uninsured but have incomes too high for subsidies, only 17,500 have complied with the mandate so far. Someone should have pointed out that the Massachusetts mandate is probably unenforceable and almost certainly not going to achieve universal coverage. Oh, that’s right, we did.

Yesterday, I posted to this blog regarding a paper by Michelle Bucci and Bill Beach of the Heritage Foundation. My post consisted almost entirely of one sentence from that paper; I offered no context.

Taken by itself, that lone sentence could be interpreted to mean that the authors support an income tax increase. I never for a moment considered that to be the authors’ position; the sentence was interesting to me for that ambiguity, not because I thought the authors support such a thing.

I have since been informed that my post read like an accusation, rather than something playful. A cheap shot, really. That was not my intention, and I apologize to Bucci, Beach, and their colleagues at Heritage.

I sometimes disagree with Heritage scholars, but it is important to me to keep those disagreements friendly and respectful. Here it seems I failed, and it wasn’t even over a disagreement. Sorry, guys. Yeeeouch, indeed.

A devastating column in the Wall Street Journal calculates the death toll caused in part by the bureaucrats at the FDA. The paper-pushers refuse to let critically ill patients have access to experimental new drugs — even when those drugs already have cleared some clinical tests. In a free and just society, individuals would have the right to make those decisions:

The Alliance began pushing for access to investigational drugs for terminal patients after its founding in mid-2001 upon the death of Abigail Burroughs, who was denied an investigational drug (Erbitux) that an early trial showed might have helped her. She and her doctor were right, but she never got the drug. Over the past five years, the Alliance has pushed for access to 12 exceptionally promising investigational cancer drugs which have subsequently been approved by the FDA and now represent standard care. At the time we began our advocacy, each of the drugs had cleared at least preliminary Phase 1 testing, and in some cases more-advanced Phase 2 or Phase 3 trials. In other words, they obviously worked for some patients. …

In sum, these 12 drugs — had they been available to people denied entry to clinical trials — might have helped more than one million mothers, fathers, sons and daughters live longer, better lives. We have actually underestimated the number of “life-years” lost at more than 520,000, because we have not included other safe and effective uses of these drugs that the FDA has yet to approve. …

The American Cancer Society reports that some 550,000 cancer patients die annually, making the number of cancer deaths from 1997 to 2005 about 4.8 million. Over that same period, the FDA reports granting individual access to an investigational drug to not more than 650 people per year for all diseases and drugs — a pathetic, even cruel, pittance. A few thousand more patients managed to gain access by enrolling in relatively small clinical trials or exceedingly rare expanded access programs. The other 4.7 plus million cancer patients, not to mention millions more with other diseases, were abandoned to die, denied access to progress by their own FDA when they needed it most.

Hugo Chavez is the latest public official to join the effort to roll back term limits. He will soon be free of the limits on his terms as president of Venezuela as well as other constraints on his drive toward total power. If you ever wondered whether term limits contravened excessive ambition, perhaps President Chavez suggests an answer.

Chavez is seeking to end his term limit and other measures to increase his power “to guarantee to the people the largest amount of happiness possible.”

Is he so different from American politicians? He offers the voters happiness (not liberty) and demands power adequate to that end. Constraints on power like term limits are so, you know, neo-liberal, so pre-New Deal.

Here’s an excerpt from the Americans for Tax Reform blog:

Many debates in health care over the last decade (or five) have focused on the best way to universally insure all Americans.

The Left believes in a single-payer health care system where all Americans are covered by a single government health care plan.

The Center-Left believes in some combination of socialized medicine and heavily government-subsidized private sector health care.

The broad Center-Right coalition believes in individual choice and control, in particular via use of health savings accounts (HSAs).

But maybe we’re getting the question wrong.

It is rather disappointing that so many religious figures think that compassion should be a function of the state and that bigger government is good for the less fortunate. This approach not only undermines personal responsibility, but it also is anti-empirical because of the ever-growing body of evidence showing that high tax rates and excessive spending hinder growth and thus make it harder for poor people to climb the economic ladder.

Notwithstanding this real-world evidence, the UK-based Times reports that the Pope is about to attack tax havens as part of broader call for more redistribution. Not surprisingly, Italy’s Prime Minster is delighted that his nation’s taxpayers are being told to behave like sheep:

In his second encyclical – the most authoritative statement a pope can issue – the pontiff will denounce the use of “tax havens” and offshore bank accounts by wealthy individuals, since this reduces tax revenues for the benefit of society as a whole. …In it the pontiff focused on “those peoples who are striving to escape from hunger, misery, endemic diseases and ignorance and are looking for a wider share in the benefits of civilisation”. He called on the West to promote an equitable world economic system based on social justice rather than profit. …[Italian Prime Minister] Mr Prodi asked, adding: “If memory serves, St Paul exhorted the faithful to obey authority.”

The International Monetary Fund is urging higher taxes in Japan, though this is not exactly newsworthy since the IMF routinely endorses higher taxes in its country reports (Article IV consultations). To be fair, the IMF does say that it would be a good idea to control spending. And the international bureaucracy wants taxes to be raised in a less-destructive manner. Nonetheless, the notion that Japan will be more prosperous with a higher tax burden (which would be used to finance a bigger government) is rather fanciful. Tax​-news​.com reports:

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) last week published the conclusions reached by its assessment team during the recently completed Article IV consultation with Japan. …The Article IV report continued: “Most Directors considered that given the size of the task at hand, additional revenue measures will be needed, including for base broadening. They indicated that revenue measures could be best identified in the context of a broad reform of the tax system that addresses the challenges posed by Japan’s aging society and globalization. Among possible measures, increasing the consumption tax has the benefit of being less detrimental to growth and equitable across generations. Some Directors, however, viewed the authorities’ focus on expenditure adjustments as broadly appropriate at this juncture.”

This story, which is so similar to hundreds of other reports on IMF-endorsed tax hikes, raises an interesting question: Does anybody know if the IMF has ever recommended that a country reduce its tax burden?