Irony! Get Your Red-Hot Health-Care Irony!
Someone forwarded me an email update from our friends at the Center for American Progress Action Fund (motto: “Disagree with us? Then you hate progress.”).
In one blurb, CAPAF’s crack team of spin-disclosers chides Republicans for discussing health care reform using the language recommended by pollster Frank Luntz, who “advised Republicans to fearmonger” Obama’s proposals to death! Or something.
The same email had another blurb titled, “INSURANCE COMPANIES AT THE TABLE?” There, CAPAF’s crack team of spin-disclosers describe how “health insurance companies and lobbying groups” stood beside President Obama last week to announce their support for reducing spending growth. The blurb continues:
However, days later, the insurance companies tried to walk back their promises, saying Obama had overstated their commitments. Richard Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association, wrote to his company’s state and local affiliates to “clarify” that “[t]he groups did not support reducing the rate of health spending by 1.5 percentage points annually.” However, the letter to Obama signed by Umbdenstock and the other insurance leaders specifically pledged…
“Umbdenstock and the other insurance leaders”?? Since when do we classify hospitals as insurance companies? And if “the insurance companies…sa[y] Obama had overstated their commitments,” why not quote the insurance companies? Could they not find such a quote?
It’s as if CAPAF’s crack team of spin-disclosers has decided to blame every development that might threaten a — ahem — government take-over of health care on the insurance companies. Now why might they want to do that? Could it be because insurance companies are less popular than hospitals?
And how would CAPAF’s crack team of spin-disclosers know that? By listening to a . . . pollster?
How Does It Feel to Be at the Table Now?
On Monday, the Obama administration held a well-publicized love-fest with lobbyists for the health care industry. It turns out that rather than a “game-changer,” the event was a fraud. And the industry got burned.
At the time, President Obama called it a “a watershed event in the long and elusive quest for health care reform“:
Over the next 10 years — from 2010 to 2019 — [these industry lobbyists] are pledging to cut the rate of growth of national health care spending by 1.5 percentage points each year — an amount that’s equal to over $2 trillion.
By an amazing coincidence, $2 trillion is just enough to pay for Obama’s proposed government takeover of the health care sector.
Yet The New York Times reports that isn’t the magnitude of spending reductions the lobbyists thought they were supporting:
Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending… [C]onfusion swirled in Washington as the companies’ trade associations raced to tamp down angst among members around the country.
Health care leaders who attended the meeting…say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts…
My initial reaction to Monday’s fairly transparent media stunt was: “I smell a rat. Lobbyists never advocate less revenue for their members. Ever.” The lobbyists are proving me right, albeit slowly. (Take your time, guys. I don’t mind.)
Cato and the Bailouts: A Correction for the NY Times ‘Economix’ Blog
At the New York Times Economix blog, economist Nancy Folbre of the University of Massachusetts writes:
The libertarian Cato Institute often emphasizes the issue of corporate welfare, but it’s remained remarkably quiet so far on the topic of bailouts.
Excuse me?
Since she linked to one of our papers on corporate welfare, we assume she’s visited our site. How, then, could she get such an impression? Cato scholars have been deploring bailouts since last September. (Actually, since the Chrysler bailout of 1979, but we’ll skip forward to the recent avalanche of Bush-Obama bailouts.) Just recently, for instance, in — ahem — the New York Times, senior fellow William Poole implored, “Stop the Bailouts.” I wonder if our commentaries started with my blog post “Bailout Nation?” last September 8? Or maybe with Thomas Humphrey and Richard Timberlake’s “The Imperial Fed,” deploring the Federal Reserve’s help for Bear Stearns, on April 14 of last year?
Cato scholars appeared on more than 90 radio and television programs to criticize the bailouts during the last quarter of 2008. Here’s a video compilation of some of those appearances.
Folbre complains that some people seem more concerned about welfare — TANF, in the latest federal acronym — than about welfare for bankers — TARP. Google says that there are 138 references to TANF over the past 13 years or so on the Cato website, and 231 references to TARP in the past few months.
Now she has a legitimate point. Welfare for the rich is at least as bad as welfare for the poor. And as much as welfare for the poor has cost taxpayers, the new welfare for banks, insurance companies, mortgage companies, and automobile industries is costing us more. Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times has written that “reassignment,” an economic policy that changes individuals’ ranking in the hierarchy of incomes, is far more offensive than a policy of redistribution, which in his idealized vision would merely raise the incomes of the poorest members of society. By that standard, taxing some businesses and individuals to subsidize the high incomes of others is certainly offensive. Of course, Brittan underemphasized the harm done by welfare to people who become trapped in dependency. But there’s good reason to oppose both TANF and TARP, and Cato scholars have done both.
Lest the good work of Cato’s New Media Manager Chris Moody go under-utilized, here’s a probably incomplete guide to Cato scholars’ comments on the bailouts of the past few months. (Note that it doesn’t include blog posts, of which there have been many.) Quiet? I don’t think so:
‘Health Status Insurance’ Provides Real Alternative to Universal Care
So screams the headline of John Cochrane’s oped in today’s Investor’s Business Daily. An excerpt:
Markets can provide long-term, secure health insurance while enhancing choice and competition. Given the chance, they will…
This is not pie in the sky. The market for individual health insurance is already innovating to provide better long-term insurance. Well before it was required by law, insurance companies started offering “guaranteed renewable” policies.
Once you buy in, you have the right to continue coverage even if you get sick, and your premiums do not rise if you get sick.
UnitedHealth Group recently announced a product that gives customers the right to buy medical insurance in the future, at a premium that depends only on their current health status.
For a small premium, you can protect yourself against the risk that your health premiums will escalate. This is only a small step away from full health-status insurance.
The oped is based on Cochrane’s recent Cato policy analysis, “Health-Status Insurance: How Markets Can Provide Health Security.”
You can also hear Cochrane and Johns Hopkins University health economist Brad Herring discussing health-status insurance at this Cato policy forum, held today.
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