Tag Archives

Archive of posts published in the tag: Obamacare

Federalism and Health Care

Healthcare does more to illuminate the divide in political ideology than any other issue. It merges the ideological and pragmatic limits of central power;  the dispersal of interests (and thus the difficulty of consensus) and the dispersal of knowledge, the ‘fatal conceit’ that any central power can know how to manage complex markets for a vast and diversified nation.  Health care challenges the authority and the competence of central power.

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Replacing One Health Care Failure with Another

By defying the relationship of health care to basic economics we passed a bill that defied basic economics- the outcome  was very predictable.   Another example of promising a benefit without paying for it; hiding the cost in a maze of cross subsidies, mandates, proxies and obscure regulations.

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Health Care Reform in 21 Words

In 2010 during the health care debate Democratic Congressman Jim Marshall (GA- my district) published an article in National Review about increasing consumer pressure on health care.  Read Real Health Care Reform- Why America must move away from its third-party-payer

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Organizing Knowledge

From National Review Kevin Williamson writes McHealthcare Deluxe- The Affordable Care Act is a failed political product. Emotionally mature people and highly effective institutions are quick to admit error. The best of them in fact embrace periodic failure as a necessary part

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Failing Better

One of the greatest advantages of market solutions is not that it always picks better solutions, but that it recognizes failures quicker and better. The opposite happens in government. Self serving bureaucracies institutionalize failures. Instead of admitting failure and redeploying assets into better and different solutions we institutionalize failures and increase their funding.

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Pragmatic Liabilities

by Henry Oliner The reason ideology is relevant in the health care debate is that at the core of the difficulty is the separation of pragmatic solutions from sound ideological support. Our health care problem is an accumulation of short

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Permanent Emergency

Another gem from Kevin Williamson, A National State of Non-Emergency in National Review: The recently proffered Republican health-care bill instantiates much of what is wrong with our politics: The bill was constructed through an extraordinary process in which there were no hearings,

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The Failure of Pragmatic Health Care

The health insurance controversy is the pragmatic apex of sharply conflicting ideologies and both will not easily coexist. It will take more than the repeal of Obamacare to fix. Obamacare was just a bad response to a history of bad policies. Trying a different bad response will not fix the problem either.

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Tinkering with a Broken System

from George Will at The Washington Post, Why ‘repeal and replace’ will become ‘tweak and move on’ In 2009, President Barack Obama ignited a debate that has been, for many members of Congress and their constituents, embarrassingly clarifying. Back then,

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Selective Rage

Megan McArdle at Bloomberg View writes Liberals Will Not Like How This Revenge Plot Ends Then Republicans announced that they simply weren’t going to hold a vote on Merrick Garland, the center-left judge that Obama nominated to replace him. They were well

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Untying the Health Care Knot

Kevin Williamson puts some reality on the Health Care Issue: The Health-Care Double Bind in National Review The way to cut this Gordian knot is to treat insurance like insurance. Insurance is not a way to pre-pay for health care, though

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The Price of Contempt

If I could pick one word to describe the upset it would be the word ‘contempt’. This was a Brexit election, a revolt against the elites, but the problem is not elites.  The founding fathers were elites and a large

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ACA Rigor Mortis

From Kevin Williamson at National Review, Obamacare is Dead : Insurance is, by its very nature, always forward-looking, considering events that have yet to come to pass but that may be expected and, to a reasonable extent, predicted with some

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Repellant Legislation

From The Weekly Standard in 2010, The Process is the Substance by Matthew Continetti: Once the shock wore off, the Democrats decided that if they could not pass their reform following normal procedure, they would simply change the procedure. Hence the

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Insurance is Not Access

from Scott Atlas at the Wall Street Journal, Repairing the ObamaCare Wreckage Why is private health insurance so important? Insurance without access to medical care is a sham. And that is where the country is heading. According to a 2014

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Legislative Moral Hazard

Without debating the substance of the ACA or the arguments used in the King vs Burwell ruling, the Supreme Court functions within a gray area.  On one hand it should not be their purpose to correct or reject bad legislation,

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Peter and Paul’s Health Care

From Holman Jenkins at The Wall Street Journal, ObamaCare Beyond the Handouts Excerpts: Of the eight million who have signed up, some 87% are receiving taxpayer subsidies. In other words, they are getting health care partly or wholly at someone

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Just Buy Them Insurance

The ACA (Obamacare) was based on very distorted numbers about the number of uninsured, myopic predictions of its costs, outright deceptions in its presentations (Gruber), and a delusional faith in the competence of the resources to execute it.  It would

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Health Insurance Disincentive

from the Wall Street Journal, Shunning Obamacare by Andy Puzder excerpt:  After two constitutionally dubious delays, ObamaCare’s employer mandate took effect on Jan. 1 for employers with 100 or more full-time employees. The last open-enrollment date for our company, CKE

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A Warrior for the Cause

From Jonah Goldberg in Townhall,  Jonathan Gruber Should’ve Been Time’s Person of the Year For similar reasons, I think Time missed an opportunity in not putting Gruber on the cover. Tea partiers and Wall Street occupiers disagree on a great

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