Notes on Heath Care Econ and the Mandate

In reality, the mandate has almost nothing to do with cost-shifting. The targeted population—the young, healthy and not poor who choose to forgo coverage—has a minimal role in the $43 billion of uncompensated health-care costs. In 2008, for example (the latest figures available), the Department of Health and Human Service's Medical Expenditure Panel Survey showed that the uncompensated care of the mandate's targeted population was no more than $12.8 billion—a tiny one-half of 1% of the nation's $2.4 trillion in overall health-care costs. The insurance mandate cannot reasonably be justified on the ground that it remedies costs imposed on the system by the voluntarily uninsured.
The government's other defense is that the health-care market does not exhibit textbook competition. No market does. The economic features relied upon by the government—externalities, imperfect information, geographically distinct markets, etc.—are characteristic of many markets.
The presence of externalities and other market imperfections does not justify a departure from the normal rules of the constitutional road. Health care is typically consumed locally, and health-insurance markets themselves primarily operate within the states. The administration's attempt to fashion a singular, universal solution is not necessary to deal with the variegated issues arising in these markets. States have taken the lead in past reform efforts. They should be an integral part of improving the functioning of health-care and health-insurance markets.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304459804577285991632128670.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

If what is driving health care costs and insurance disfuction is government, then you can bet that Obamacare will worsen the problems, not ameliorate them.  The fact that man cannot engineer a functional "health care system", which exceeds that which  might evolve over time without coercoion, has become so obvious to me, I forget that others still it may be done.

Starting points - remove the tax incentives associated with employer "provided" health care plans which are more pre-paid service plans than insurance.  Remove restrictions on cross-state-border plans.  Remove "mandates" which require providers to cover this, that or the other, according to the influence of rent seeking constituencies; instead, let folks buy what they need, which for most, is catastrophic coverage. 

Every federal and state intervention creates negative unintended consequences, which justify further interventions, etc, a classic reinforcing loop of government regulation, perverted incentives, and ineffective, inefficient, care. 

Classic Quote: Rand

The government's only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud ... to protect men from foreign invaders ... to settle disputes among men according to objective laws ... The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly.  Ayn Rand

HT:  http://mikemiller.net/quotes/liberty617.html

This is perhaps the least well understood idea in what used to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave."  Anything above and beyond the description above is a violation of liberty by the government's legal coercive force.  That we no longer notice this is troubling.

Parallels - Science and ... Libertarianism?

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-03-18/ron-paul-libertarians-science/53617108/1

Interesting parallels indeed.  That's why Libertarians do so poorly, though, since they are not so obsessed with winning that they are willing to give up on truth to win.

Just Wait Here, He'll Be Back

Of course, the administration’s pandering argument would be more convincing if Obama hadn’t engaged in the same tactic as a candidate in 2008, criticizing George W. Bush for the fact that gas prices had more than doubled during his eight years in office.

Meanwhile, the inconvenient truth that oil is a global commodity whose price is not entirely dictated by U.S. energy policy is one you will rarely hear in campaign ads.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/gas-prices-and-snake-oil-20120318

There's an old joke about a football player facing a team with a running back nicknamed "rabbit."  I was always told as a youngster that if you could get a good rabbit dog in hot chase of a rabbit, you just had to stand there and wait, because the rabbit would always run in a circle.  The football joke was told in the context of a heroic effort make which resulted in a missed tackle on "The Rabbit", and the punchline was "I'll just lie here and wait, he'll be back directly."

It's kind of like that with politicians.  If you wait long enough, they'll double back on their trail, as noted above.  There's no real point in noticing since voters clearly do not vote based on fact, but rather on who they consider to be the lesser of the two evils. 

Solution? Or Trade Off?

The only solution. So why aren’t politicians competing to see who can lower oil consumption more? Republicans are going after programs they once supported to seed the advanced battery and auto industries. They’re fighting to protect oil subsidies and slash transit funding. They’re scolding the military for trying to use less oil. They love oil, love oil companies, and love sprawl.
Dems, meanwhile, have managed to hang tough on fuel-efficiency standards and fight off serial attacks on EPA, for the most part anyway. But that’s about it. When gas prices go up, they panic, and it’s the usual cacophony about speculators and strategic oil reserves and Big Oil profiteering.
http://grist.org/energy-policy/the-only-solution-to-high-gas-prices-with-charts/

The lack of ability to stay out of linear thinking is a curse on all of our houses. 

First off, there's no "solution" that will lower oil consumption and therefore prices.  As the price of oil decreases, the relative utility increases, and the number of ways oil may be productively, profitably employed increases.  In short, there's little reason to think that decreasing demand, and therefore short term price reductions, won't result in increasing demand.

Nevermind that all this green energy nonsense ignores a fundamental reality - when you build a car, you expend as much oil as the car will burn in its lifetime on the manufacturing process for the car.  IOW, if you want to reduce consumption, you will have to reduce manufacturing - of cars and most other stuff too.  Pretending you can influence these matters by looking only at something like "efficiency" in the product is half baked thinking.

What one would have to do to begin to know whether there's more benefit than cost - in other words, to evaluate trade offs instead of pretending that there's a "solution" - is a comprehensive analsis of multiple variates. 

But the truth is, no one knows what will happen when these ideas become legislation.  Coercive manipulations of human choices ALWAYS have unintended negative consequences, and ususally they are borne by the least capable, least adaptable of us.  In this way, while the elites dole out goodies with their right hand to the "disenfranchised" to make themselves feel better, they smack them in the back of their heads with the left hand.  This is the hubris of men who think they can play god.

Higher Prices Baby! Yeeaahhh!

Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Tuesday walked away from his oft-quoted pre-Cabinet statement that the United States should deliberately raise gasoline prices to discourage consumption.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal before he was appointed President Obama’s energy secretary, Dr. Chu, then the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels of Europe.”
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/an-inconvenient-statement-retracted/

You would have to be asleep at the switch not to think this is what they want.  Nevermind the cost to the "most vulnerable" members of our nation and the world.

Gratitude

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/arlington-national-cemetery-tells-the-story-of-two-wars/2012/03/13/gIQA34mRAS_story.html

Read and find a way to be grateful, and to "earn it", with thanks again for Saving Private Ryan.