Archive for the ‘Cato Publications’ Category
Wednesday Links
- On immigration, the president offers mostly nice words, not much else.
- The debate about the debt ceiling is important—take the time to get it right.
- When it comes to defense appropriations, it is worth keeping in mind that restraining ambition is the first step in sensibly trimming military spending.
- There is no empirical evidence that national standards improve educational outcomes.
- The tax code is not an appropriate tool for social engineering, despite bipartisan attempts to use it for that purpose.
Law Professors against “Tyrannophobia”
Over at the American Conservative, I have a review of Eric Posner and Adrian Vermuele’s new book Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic. Funny enough, the working title for my book on presidential power was “Executive Unbound,” but P&V have a very different take on the dangers of concentrating power in the executive (they coin the term “tyrannophobia,” for irrational fear of executive abuse).
From the review’s intro:
The New York Times book editors assigned their review to the Straussian political philosopher Harvey Mansfield, the self-styled expert on “manliness” who’s as rabid a supporter of the imperial presidency as you’re likely to find. In the late Bush era, Mansfield wrote a 3,000-word Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The Case for the Strong Executive,” arguing that defects in the rule of law ‘‘suggest the need for one-man rule.”
Yet even Mansfield blanched at Executive Unbound’s case for unbridled presidential power. He began his review by noting indignantly, “Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, law professors at Chicago and Harvard, respectively, offer with somewhat alarming confidence the ‘Weimar and Nazi jurist’ Carl Schmitt as their candidate to succeed James Madison for the honor of theorist of the Constitution.”
Gott im Himmel! A book that embraces a leading “Nazi jurist,” applauds the American presidency’s liberation from law, and is apparently hardcore enough to scare manly Harvey Mansfield? What sort of work is Executive Unbound? A Satanic Bible for worshippers of the strong presidency? The black-metal version of John Yoo?
As I dug into the book—while Tomahawk missiles rained down on Libya in yet another unauthorized presidential war—that’s what I was expecting. But Posner and Vermuele have produced something very different and, quite to my surprise, I liked it.
You can read the rest here.
HHS Plays Chicken Little — Again
USA Today reports on a new Obama administration study:
On average, uninsured families can pay only about 12% of their hospital bills in full. Families with incomes above 400% of the poverty level, or about $88,000 a year for a family of four, pay about 37% of their hospital bills in full, according to the Department of Health and Human Services study.
Oy, where to begin?
This is pre-existing conditions all over again. In the hope of saving ObamaCare from the gallows, the Obama administration is blowing a real but relatively small problem way out of proportion.
The best data indicate that the problem of the uninsured not being able to pay their medical bills is real but relatively small. “Uncompensated care” for the uninsured accounts for just 2.8 percent of health care spending. To put that in perspective, 30 percent of Medicare spending is pure waste, according to the Dartmouth Atlas. Moreover, studies show that the uninsured who do pay their bills pay so much more than private insurance does that they more than make up for the uninsured who don’t pay their bills. That is, total uncompensated care may be negative.
This HHS report adds nothing to our understanding of this problem. Everyone already knows that nearly everybody would have a hard time paying an expensive hospital bill if they didn’t have health insurance.
In fact, this report detracts from our understanding of the problem. It essentially says that if all uninsured people were to experience a hospitalization, only some of them would be able to pay the entire bill for some hospitalizations—not necessarily their own hospitalization—with their liquid assets. That’s as non-illuminating as saying that very few “D” students could afford to pay four years of college tuition (say, $100,000) with the money in their bank account:
- Just like few “D” students are headed to college, very few of the uninsured are going to be hospitalized. Not only are most of the uninsured young and healthy, but most of them buy insurance as they get older.
- The “D” students who do go to college probably won’t be attending the most expensive colleges. Likewise, the uninsured who are hospitalized are likely to have relatively less-expensive episodes of care.
- Of the “D” students who attend college, some would be able to pay for some of their tuition from their bank accounts. But rather than tell us how much of these hypothetical medical bills the uninsured could pay, HHS reports the number that would be unable to pay these hypothetical medical bills “in full,” and that total billings for those hypothetical hospitalizations—not the unpaid amount—account for 95 percent of medical care provided to the uninsured.
- Some of those “D” students could obtain student loans and pay off their tuition over time. Likewise, some of the uninsured will be able to borrow money or sell their houses or cars to pay their medical bills. But HHS doesn’t account for the ability of the uninsured to borrow, nor does it count their ability to tap non-financial assets like cars and houses.
In short, HHS bent over backward to make this problem appear bigger than it is. Moreover, they couched their misleading findings in ways that lent themselves to even greater exaggeration. For example, the above quote from USA Today,
uninsured families can pay only about 12% of their hospital bills in full.
paints a far darker picture than what HHS actually found:
On average, uninsured families can only afford to pay in full for about 12% of the admissions to hospital (hospitalizations) they might experience. [Emphasis added.]
It’s almost as if HHS was hoping reporters would misreport their findings in a way that made the problem sound worse.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Attention Students: Internships and Cato University
What’s harder to get into than Harvard? The Cato Institute summer internship. Harvard just announced that “an all-time low of 6.2 percent of applicants were offered admission to the Harvard College Class of 2015, beating records for the sixth consecutive year.” Harvard’s acceptance rate is slightly lower than the rate at Princeton, Stanford, and Columbia.
But not lower than the Cato summer internship rate! Cato’s incoming interns survived an application process more selective than Ivy League universities, with about 4 percent of applicants offered an internship. The process is a little less competitive for Fall and Spring internships, and we encourage students to check out the application deadlines for those upcoming classes.
Also note: There are no more summer internships available, but you can still apply for a scholarship to Cato University this summer until Friday.
Of course, non-students are also welcome at Cato University, which is being held this year in beautiful and historic Annapolis, Maryland, the city where George Washington returned his military commission to the Continental Congress and became, in the words of George III, “the greatest man in the world” by giving up power and establishing the new country on the firm path to republican government. We’ll have a mix of people of all ages from all over the country and indeed the world, and we hope you’ll sign up today.
More on Cato’s internships here, including last year’s comparative acceptance rates.
Monday Links
- If you are a nonlawyer looking to understand what is going to be argued in the appellate courts regarding the health care legislation in the coming weeks, beginning with the Fourth Circuit in Richmond VA tomorrow, start right here.
- Just how libertarian is the 2012 Republican field?
- The U.S., not China, walks the green walk.
- Please join us Tuesday, May 10, at 4:00 p.m. for a Book Forum on America’s Allies and War: Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, featuring the author Jason W. Davidson, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Mary Washington; with comments by Charles Kupchan, Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations and Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University; moderated by Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute. Complimentary registration is required by noon, eastern, Monday May 9, 2011. We hope you can join us in person, or online.
Want to Repeal ObamaCare? Stay On Message
Yesterday, I reluctantly dinged House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) for veering off-message after bravely introducing and winning House passage of badly needed Medicare reforms. Each said ill-advised things to the media that undermined the long-term goal of Medicare reform. I even emailed some colleagues, “Why can’t they stay on-message, as they have with ObamaCare?”
As if on cue, it appears that House Ways & Means Committee chairman David Camp (R-MI) may have outdone both Cantor and Ryan. Huffington Post reports that Camp used the word “dead” to describe the effort to repeal ObamaCare.
I know, I know, he probably only meant that repeal is dead in this Congress. Yes, yes, he was backed into it by a reporter. Yeah, he will probably push for repeal in the next Congress, just as he did in this Congress. Is Huffington Post seizing on the word dead and painting an inaccurate picture of just how much Camp really, really wants to get rid of this intolerable law? No doubt all of this is true. None of it matters one bit.
Camp is the chairman of a powerful congressional committee. He should know that’s exactly what reporters are trying to do. And he should know how to stick to the script. Rather than use his comments to signal once again how committed he is to ensuring that ObamaCare never takes full effect in 2014, he gave us a news cycle — hopefully no more than one — where the words ObamaCare, repeal, and dead appear in the same sentence.
Yes, Cut Medicaid – It Won’t Be as Painful as You Think
That’s the title of my latest Kaiser Health News column. An excerpt:
The budget blueprint passed last month by House Republicans… would encourage states to cut their Medicaid rolls. As it should: the evidence shows there are millions of people enrolling in Medicaid who don’t need taxpayer subsidies to obtain coverage, and experience shows that Medicaid cuts will not be as painful as you might think….
The president and the Republicans agree that balancing the federal budget is impossible without restraining Medicaid spending. That will be much easier, Mr. President, if we could stop pretending that every single Medicaid enrollee needs to be there.
Read the whole thing here.
Want Medicare & Medicaid Reform? Stay On Message
This morning’s tempest-in-a-teapot concerns an internally inconsistent and now-corrected Washington Post story that claimed House Republicans had abandoned the badly needed Medicare reforms contained in the budget plan they passed the other week.
The original headline read: “Medicare dropped from GOP budget proposal,” even though the article clearly states, “[House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor [R-VA] said, he would press for all the provisions in the Ryan proposal, including changes to Medicare and Medicaid.” The Post has since changed the headline to: “Budget talks: Republicans offer to seek common ground with Democrats.”
The confusion appears to stem from comments such as these by Cantor and House Budget Committee Paul Ryan (R-WI):
The biggest mandatory programs — often called “entitlements” — are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But Cantor said negotiators could avoid the “big three,” which Democrats have vowed to defend, by focusing on changes in other areas. “If we can come to some agreement [and] act to effect those savings now, this year, it will yield a lot of savings in subsequent years,” he said.
At a breakfast for reporters hosted by Bloomberg News, Ryan echoed that view, saying, “We’re not going to get a grand-slam agreement . . . because of just the political parameters” set by Obama. But Ryan said his budget offers a “menu of options . . . that I think we could get that are not necessarily the global agreement on, say, Medicare or Social Security.” That menu includes proposals from Obama’s budget request, such as ending grants for worsted-wool producers and requiring graduate students to pay interest on college loans while they are still in school.
Thus the problem appears to be that Republicans are rising to the media’s bait and trying to predict for reporters how the budget negotiations will play out in the end. Instead of staying on message — Making Medicare look more like Social Security is the only alternative to government rationing and higher taxes…Reform Medicaid the way Congress successfully reformed welfare in 1996…What’s your plan? — Republicans are negotiating with themselves, in public. So instead of getting a pro-reform message before the American people, we get news cycles that make reformers look weak by falsely reporting that Republicans have abandoned the field. This isn’t media bias: if Republicans care about entitlement reform, they need to be more disciplined.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Soros, Epstein, and Caldwell on Hayek
Last Thursday must have been Hayek Day. In the morning was the release of the rap video, “Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two.” And then in the afternoon a distinguished panel convened in the Cato Institute’s F. A. Hayek Auditorium to discuss Hayek’s great work The Constitution of Liberty, just released in a new definitive edition by the University of Chicago Press. The forum was moderated by Cato fellow in social thought Ronald Hamowy, who edited the new edition. Panelists were Hayek’s intellectual biographer and editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Bruce Caldwell; the brilliant legal scholar Richard Epstein; and the hedge-fund billionaire and Open Society Foundations founder George Soros. (Find video and transcript here; easier-to-search video here.)
How Not to Criticize Medicare Vouchers
Over at The Incidental Economist, Austin Frakt challenges a couple of claims I made on NPR about Medicare reform. (Here’s how NPR reported my comments in print.)
My claims are pretty simple.
- If Medicare subsidizes enrollees by giving them a fixed amount of money, much like Social Security does, they would be more cost-conscious than they are under the current open-ended subsidy, because enrollees who avoid wasteful spending would themselves get to keep the savings. Put more plainly, people spend their own money more carefully than they spend other people’s money.
- Health insurers and health care providers would compete to serve these cost-conscious Medicare enrollees on the basis of both cost and quality. Prices would fall while quality improves.
I’m not really sure to what extent all this would occur under the Medicare reforms the House passed a couple of weeks ago, because we don’t yet know to what extent each enrollee’s subsidy would resemble a fixed amount of money.
Here’s what Frakt does with my claims:
[A]s I heard these words I wondered if we had any evidence on hand about the relationship between lower premium subsidies and health care cost inflation. Indeed we do! Premiums in the commercial market are subsidized by the government at a lower rate than those in Medicare. [Emphasis added.]
He then throws up the chart, shown below the jump, showing that for common benefits, the rate of growth in per-enrollee spending is “pretty similar” in Medicare and private insurance. He concludes: “With data like this, I think we need to reexamine some of our theories about what lower premium subsidies can do.”
Wednesday Links
- Osama bin Laden’s death gives us a chance to end what might have become an era of permanent emergency and perpetual war.
- The Cold War ended–what are we doing in Korea?
- Two cheers for President Obama for ending eight (well, three) tax breaks to oil companies.
- Does Osama bin Laden’s death mean an end to U.S.-Pakistan relations?
Please join us next Tuesday, May 10 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern for a Cato Book Forum on America’s Allies and War: Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, by University of Mary Washington political scientist Jason W. Davidson. Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and Georgetown University international relations professor Charles Kupchan will join Professor Davidson in a discussion of the book and its themes, particularly U.S. relations with NATO allies, moderated by Cato director of foreign policy studies Christopher A. Preble. Complimentary registration is required of all attendees by Monday, May 9 at noon Eastern. We hope you can join us in person, but we encourage you to watch online if you cannot attend personally.
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