Perhaps you have now heard that today ObamaCare’s primary author, Sen. Max Baucus (D‑MT), predicted a “huge train wreck” when the law takes full effect later this year. Here’s the video:
Edited for you by the folks at American Commitment. They even coined a hashtag: #trainwreck.
An article in Politico reports that some policymakers are already using the tragedy in Boston to criticize the sequestration spending cuts that went into effect in March. With the nation’s nerves frayed, policymakers should choose their words more carefully.
At a press conference held yesterday morning, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D‑MD) told reporters that he doubted that sequestration had “any impact presently.” He should have left it at that. Instead, he strayed far from the issue of national security and sequestration by lumping in other issues that didn’t have anything to do with the bombing:
“I think there are multiple reasons for ensuring that we invest in our security — both domestic and international security. That we invest in the education of our children. That we invest in growing jobs in America. And don’t pursue an irrational, across-the-board policy of cutting the highest priorities and the lowest priorities essentially the same percentage.… I think this is another proof of that — if proof is needed, which I don’t think frankly it is.”
There’s a time and a place to discuss education spending and “growing jobs in America.” At a press conference less than 24 hours after a tragedy is not the right time.
Take it, Janet Adamy:
A labor union representing roofers is reversing course and calling for repeal of the federal health law, citing concerns the law will raise its cost for insuring members.
Organized labor was instrumental in getting the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, but more recently has voiced concerns that the law could lead members to lose their existing health plans. The United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers is believed to be the first union to initially support the law and later call for its repeal.
“After the law was passed, I had great hope…that maybe the rough spots would be worked out and we’d have a great law,” said Kinsey Robinson, international president of the union, which represents 22,000 commercial and industrial roofers…
Mr. Robinson says the union’s concerns about the law began to pile up in recent months after speaking with employers.
The roofers’ union’s current insurance plan caps lifetime medical bill payouts at $2 million for active members and $50,000 for retirees. Next year, the plan has to remove those caps in order to comply with the health law. Other aspects of the retiree plan must become more generous in order to meet the law’s minimum essential coverage requirements next year. All that will increase the cost of insuring members, Mr. Robinson said, and has prompted the union to weigh eliminating the retiree plan.
Adding to those cost concerns is a new $63-per-enrollee fee on health plans that pays insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions next year. Looking ahead to 2018, when the law levies an excise tax on high-value insurance plans, Mr. Robinson predicts that at least some of the union’s plans will get hit by it…
Over time, Mr. Robinson says, his optimism that regulators or lawmakers would address the union’s concerns diminished. “I don’t think they are going to get fixed,” he said. On Tuesday, the union called for a repeal of the health law or a complete reform of it.
Will the last ObamaCare supporter please turn off the lights?
Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D‑MT) was the primary author of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known colloquially and affectionately as ObamaCare. Today, he predicted his own law would cause a “huge train wreck” when the federal government begins implementing it fully later this year. He’s not the only one who’s worried. Other Democratic senators have expressed concerns. An Obama administration official recently offered this vote of confidence:
We are under 200 days from open enrollment, and I’m pretty nervous…The time for debating about the size of text on the screen or the color or is it a world-class user experience, that’s what we used to talk about two years ago…Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.
How could Baucus come to fear his own bill? Maybe because he never read it, as he admitted to his Libby, Montana, constituents in 2010:
Naturally, a Baucus flack later clarified what he meant:
Senator Baucus wrote the bill that passed the Finance Committee and then worked with his colleagues to write the health care bill that is law today. He has spent years crafting this policy and hundreds of hours reading and perfecting it. There is simply no question that he understands the provisions in the health care law…
If so, perhaps Baucus could explain the law to his colleague, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D‑WV). Rockefeller may have spent more time studying health care than any other U.S. senator, Baucus included. For example, Rockefeller founded the Alliance for Health Reform and headed the organization for more than a decade. And yet Rockefeller finds ObamaCare to be “the most complex piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress” and “just beyond comprehension”:
But can we really blame Baucus if ObamaCare supporters — including himself — didn’t understand the bill they were passing? After all, he warned us that not all of them would understand it:
So to recap: Baucus wrote an early draft of the law, helped to write subsequent drafts, didn’t read the final law, totally understands it, and now fears it.
Will the last ObamaCare supporter please turn off the lights?
The AP’s Donna Cassata is reporting today on a study commissioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which purports to calculate the costs of the U.S. military presence overseas. This is a hot topic, but it isn’t exactly a new one. Americans have long been frustrated by inequitable burden sharing, with many of our wealthy allies spending a fraction of what we do on defense. On Monday, Cato published a new infographic on the subject to coincide with tax day (see below).
Unfortunately, the committee’s estimate that the permanent stationing of U.S. troops overseas costs us $10 billion each year is too low–in all likelihood, much too low. I have not yet had a chance to read the entire report, but the DoD’s own estimate of overseas military costs includes the costs of personnel, and is more than twice that amount, $20.9 billion (see p. 207 in the latest budget submission). Even the DoD’s figure, however, understates the true cost of our commitments to defend other countries that can and should defend themselves, because it doesn’t fully account for the additional force structure that is required to maintain a presence many thousands of miles away from the United States. If the U.S. military operated chiefly in the Western Hemisphere, with regular expeditionary operations far afield, we could safely have fewer people on active duty, and mobilize a large and well-trained reserve for genuine emergencies. This smaller military would require ships and planes to take them where they were needed, when they were needed, but not as many planes and ships as we have today. And no report can actually assess the costs and risks when and if our security commitments compel us to become embroiled in a distant war that does not engage vital U.S. interests.
Other studies have attempted to assess all of the costs of these various global commitments, and the estimates vary widely. Graham Fuller and Ian Lesser of the RAND Corporation, for example, estimated in 1997 that the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf cost between $30 and $60 billion per year. A more recent study by Mark Delucchi and James Murphy estimated costs between $47 and $98 billion. Several of us at Cato have been compiling these estimates, and coming up with our own, as part of a comprehensive study of the costs of our global military presence. We will publish our key findings when they become available.
In the meantime, this much is clear: our security commitments, many of them holdovers from the Cold War, induce other countries to spend less than they could on their own defense. And they compel Americans to spend more than we should.
In an email this morning, Institute for Justice President William “Chip” Mellor was crowing, and rightly so, about IJ’s latest win for economic liberty – a decision by Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Jane Carroll striking down the city’s 20-year-old taxicab law prohibiting competition in the taxi market. That adds one more city to the string: IJ’s attorneys have brought an end to similar taxi monopoly statutes in Denver, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Minneapolis.
What caught my eye here, however, was the attorney who won the case, Anthony Sanders, working out of IJ’s Minneapolis office. Back in the summer of 2002, after his first year of law school, Anthony did a bang-up job at Cato helping us put together the very first volume of the Cato Supreme Court Review.
But that’s hardly the only IJ/Cato connection. The one I’m most proud of goes back to 1989 and my very first summer intern, Scott Bullock, now an IJ senior attorney. Just last January Scott won an important civil asset forfeiture case up in Boston – that’s an obscure issue we’ve worked for years to bring to the fore. And in March, Scott won a crucial Fifth Circuit economic liberty case, resulting in a circuit split on the issue and hence a good chance that the Supreme Court will at last revisit its jurisprudence concerning this “second-class” right.
We train ’em, Chip sends ’em out to do battle in the courts, and little by little we pare back Leviathan.
Drawing from my white paper “50 Vetoes: How States Can Stop the Obama Health Law,” Reason’s Peter Suderman highlights six reasons why states should refuse to implement any part of ObamaCare. Here are two:
3. Refusing to create an exchange potentially protects a state’s businesses from the law’s employer mandate.Obamacare fines any business with 50 or more employees that does not offer health coverage of sufficient value—as determined by the federal government—$2,000 per employee (exempting the first 30 workers). The employer penalties, however, are triggered by the existence of the law’s subsidies for private health insurance. And as Cannon notes, the text of Obamacare specifically states that those subsidies are only available in states that choose to create their own exchanges. The IRS has issued a rule allowing for subsidies in states that reject the exchanges, but a lawsuit is already under way to challenge it.
4. States also have the power to protect as many as 12 million people from the law’s individual mandate—the “tax” it charges individuals for not carrying health insurance. Obamacare requires that nearly everyone maintain health coverage or pay a penalty—a “tax,” according to the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the law last year. But Obamacare also exempts individuals who would have to pay more than 8 percent of their household income for their share of their health insurance premiums. So if states bow out of the exchanges, and as a result the law’s private insurance subsidies are no longer available, then the mandate will no longer apply to the low and middle income individuals who would have to pay more than 8 percent of their income to get health insurance. Cannon estimates that if all 50 states were to decline to create exchanges, a little more than 12 million low and middle-income individuals would be exempt from the law’s mandate.