Last night, Newt Gingrich praised the Chilean Social Security system, which allows workers to save for their retirements in personal accounts, rather than contribute to the government pension scheme. Several of my Cato colleagues are far more qualified than I am to comment on that system, including Mike Tanner, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Jose Pinera–who designed and implemented it. But personal accounts are as important for reforming compulsory health insurance schemes like Medicare as they are for reforming compulsory pension schemes.

In 2010, I traveled to Chile to deliver an address to the International Federation of Pension Fund Administrators (FIAP).  I detailed the harms caused by compulsory health insurance schemes and explained how personal medical accounts would improve health care and generate wealth even for the poor:

In designing health care markets, perfection is not an option. Under any system, whether state-run or the free market, some patients will inevitably fall through the cracks.

Personal medical accounts can help fill in those cracks by enabling innovations that improve medical care and bring it within reach of the poor. Yes, some will not earn enough to provide for themselves. And when we are free to make our own decisions, a small number of people will make poor decisions. I believe we have a moral duty to care for patients who could not or would not provide for themselves. Personal medical accounts will make it easier for us to meet that moral duty.

Under compulsory health insurance schemes, those cracks widen, and more people fall through. Price and exchange controls block innovation. Governments waste resources on low-value medical care. Some would describe these as the unavoidable costs of creating an equitable society. But those wasted resources do not purchase solidarity. They purchase sickness and poverty.

FIAP turned my address into this book chapter, which also explains how to craft a system of personal medical accounts.

For current enrollees, who have not built up savings in a personal medical account, Congress should make Medicare look more like Social Security. That is, the government should subsidize Medicare enrollees by giving them cash, rather than creating a complex health-insurance scheme that effectively lets government officials shape the entire health care sector.

Personal Accounts–for Medicare is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Roger Pilon has been doing good, quick work on New Gingrich’s pronouncements on the role of the judiciary in interpreting the Constitution. (Roger read Newt’s 54-page “white paper” so you don’t have to!)

I have nothing to add to that assessment of the former House Speaker’s legally questionable and politically unwise views. Instead, I want to share a snippet from this lighter take by Mark Steinberg:

The Supreme Court today held that the United States Congress is unconstitutional and must vacate the Capitol no later than January 1, 2012.

The 8-1 vote followed closely on the heels of statements by Newt Gingrich, now leading the race for the GOP presidential nomination, that as president he would ignore decisions by the courts if he was having “a really bad day”; that Congress should have the power to subpoena and impeach federal judges whose jibs the legislators found un-seaworthy; and that the judiciary is “a twig on the governmental tree that the president and Congress can prune and burn in the backyard.”

The piece reads like something from The Onion.

Funny, when I heard that Gingrich was discoursing on the law, I thought he’d be proposing the appointment of sentient robots to be our judicial overlords…

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction, Gingrich Division is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Can Gingrich rein in “judicial activists”?

My response:

As I wrote in the Daily Caller a week ago, Newt Gingrich’s attack on the judiciary in chapter nine of his 21st Century Contract with America is a mass of constitutional confusions. It’s a direct assault on judicial review and on “judicial supremacy,” in particular — the idea that it falls to the courts to say what the law is. Newt would have us believe that that idea was invented by the Supreme Court in its 1958 decision in Cooper v. Aaron, where a unanimous Court told Arkansas officials resisting a school desegregation order that they couldn’t “nullify” a Court decision. But the power of courts to say what the law is far predates that decision. It’s implicit in our written Constitution with its independent judiciary. It was discussed explicitly and at length in the Federalist Papers. And it was secured by the Court in 1803 in Marbury v. Madison.

Gingrich Agonistes is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The front page of yesterday’s New York Times features a story on Newt Gingrich’s “doomsday vision:” an attack over the United States’ airspace known as an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. Gingrich and a cadre of concerned national security analysts worry that terrorists or rogue states—Iran and North Korea—could detonate a nuclear device over the United States that theoretically could disrupt electrical circuits, from cars to power grids.

The Times does a commendable job of questioning Gingrich’s arguments and whether this is a legitimate national security concern. Despite the fact that a “National EMP Recognition Day” exists, the threat is in fact very, very low. But it may be unfortunate that such extravagant doomsday scenarios get placed on the front page of the Times.

I addressed the EMP threat in my 2010 book Atomic Obsession and I included a discussion of the views of Stephen Younger, the former head of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos National Lab, as forcefully put forward in his 2007 book, Endangered Species:

Younger is appalled at the way “one fast‑talking scientist” managed in 2004 to convince some members of Congress that North Korea might be able to launch a nuclear device capable of emitting a high‑altitude electromagnetic pulse that could burn out computers and other equipment over a wide area. When he queried a man he considers to be “perhaps the most knowledgeable person in the world about such designs” (and who “was never asked to testify”), the response was: “I don’t think the United States could do that sort of thing today. To say that the North Koreans could do it, and without doing any testing, is simply ridiculous.” Nevertheless, concludes Younger acidly, “rumors are passed from one person to another, growing at every repetition, backed by flimsy or nonexistent intelligence and the reputations of those who are better at talking than doing.” [Emphasis in original.]

The 2012 presidential election should certainly contain a legitimate discussion of national security issues. But I don’t think it really needs to include a lot of breast-beating about the EMP “threat.”

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

Newt Gingrich and the EMP Threat is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This new video, narrated by yours truly, discusses a proposal to solve Medicare’s bankrupt finances by replacing an unsustainable entitlement with a “premium-support” system for private insurance, also known as vouchers.

This topic is very hot right now, in part because Medicare reform is included in the budget approved by House Republicans, but also because Newt Gingrich inexplicably has decided to echo White House talking points by attacking Congressman Ryan’s voucher plan.

Drawing considerably from the work of Michael Cannon, the video has two sections. The first part reviews Congressman Ryan’s proposal and notes that it is based on a plan put together with Alice Rivlin, who served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Bill Clinton. Among serious budget people (as opposed to the hacks on Capitol Hill), this is an important sign of bipartisan support.

The video also notes that the “voucher” proposal is actually very similar to the plan that is used by Members of Congress and their staff. This is a selling point that proponents should emphasize since most Americans realize that lawmakers would never subject themselves to something that didn’t work.

The second part discusses the economics of the health care sector, and explains the critical need to address the third-party payer crisis. More specifically, 88 percent of every health care dollar in America is paid for by someone other than the consumer. People do pay huge amounts for health care, to be sure, but not at the point of delivery. Instead, they pay high tax burdens and have huge shares of their compensation diverted to pay for insurance policies.

I’ve explained before that this inefficient system causes spiraling costs and bureaucratic inefficiency because it erodes any incentive to be a smart shopper when buying health care services (much as it’s difficult to maintain a good diet by pre-paying for a year of dining at all-you-can-eat restaurants).  In other words, government intervention has largely eroded market forces in health care. And this was true even before Obamacare was enacted.

Medicare reform, by itself, won’t solve the third-party payer problem, but it could be part of the solution – especially if seniors used their vouchers to purchase real insurance (i.e., for large, unexpected expenses) rather than the inefficient pre-paid health plans that are so prevalent today.

Who’s Right on Medicare Reform, Ryan and Rivlin or Obama and Gingrich? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In 1995, shortly after becoming Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich mulled a radical overhaul of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.  As he put it to a room full of health insurers, “Maybe we’ll take out FDA.”

What made Newt likable to advocates of freedom is sadly no longer part of his schtick.  Here’s how Andrew Stiles reports on Newt’s appearance on Meet the Press yesterday:

“I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” he said when asked about [House Budget Committee chairman Paul] Ryan’s [R-WI] plan to transition to a “premium support” model for Medicare. “I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.”

As far as an alternative, Gingrich trotted out the same appeal employed by Obama/Reid/Pelosi — for a “national conversation” on how to “improve” Medicare, and promised to eliminate ‘waste, fraud and abuse,’ etc.

“I think what you want to have is a system where people voluntarily migrate to better outcomes, better solutions, better options,” Gingrich said. Ryan’s plan was simply “too big a jump.”

He even went so far as to compare it the Obama health-care plan. “I’m against Obamacare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change.”

If you close your eyes, it’s like listening to The Princess Bride. Medicare and Medicaid are nothing if not social engineering.  So by Newt’s logic, we should get rid of them.  But Newt also says that radical change is bad, which means we can’t.  That leaves incremental changes.  But incremental changes to massive social-engineering experiments are themselves social engineering, so we clearly cannot make incremental changes, either.  ObamaCare is both social engineering and radical change.  Again by Newt’s logic, ObamaCare is bad, and we must get rid of it, but we can’t.  Truly, he has a dizzying intellect.

Newt’s objection to Paul Ryan’s Medicare reforms is no less incoherent.  It appears to be that the reforms approved by the House would eliminate the traditional Medicare program as an option for Americans who enroll after 2021.   So far as I can tell, Newt’s opposition to this feature is consistent with his past positions on Medicare reform.  He wants to let people stay in traditional Medicare if that’s what they prefer, and would have traditional Medicare compete against private insurance companies for Medicare enrollees.

But it is completely inconsistent with Newt’s opposition to President Obama’s call for a so-called “public option” to compete with private insurance companies. In 2009, Newt told Good Morning America:

I guarantee you the language they draft for the public plan will give it huge advantages over the private sector or it won’t work…what they will do is rig the game…I mean, anybody who’s watched this Congress who believes that this Congress is going to design a fair, neutral playing field I think would be totally out of touch with reality.

Newt may not realize this, but he was actually explaining why his preferred Medicare reforms would fail: Congress would rig the game to protect the “public option” that Congress offers to seniors — i.e., traditional Medicare.  House Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, rather bravely stuck to their guns when they kept a “public option” out of their proposed Medicare reforms.  Ryan is offering Republicans credibility and success.  By his own admission, Newt is offering them failure.

What’s up with Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich?  Does the Republican presidential nomination race have some sort of prize for insincerity or incoherence that I don’t know about?

Finally, Newt endorsed a “variation of the individual mandate” (tell me again why he opposes ObamaCare?) and said there is “a way to do it that make most libertarians relatively happy.” He must have meant to say leftists rather than libertarians. Regardless, I invite Newt to come to the Cato Institute so he can explain to people who actually care about freedom just how happy he’s going to make us.

Newt Tries to Out-Romney Romney, Endorses ‘Public Option’ in Medicare is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

What do these federal agencies and programs have in common?

Agricultural Research Service, Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service, Rural Development programs, Women, Infants & Children, Foreign Agricultural Service, National Institute of Standards & Technology, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, Economic Development Administration, National Telecommunications & Information Administration, Small Business Administration, State Department foreign aid, Fund for African Development, International Development assistance, Economic Support Fund, Peacekeeping Operations, Trade Development Agency, Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Reclamation, National Forest System, Appalachian Regional Commission, Department of Energy administration, Fossil Energy Research & Development, energy conservation programs, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, Community Service Employment for Older Americans, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, Low Income Home Energy Assistance, Administration on Aging, Youthbuild, Adult Education, programs for K-12 and higher education, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Highway Administration, rail subsidies, Federal Transit Administration, Financial Management Service, Veterans Affairs construction projects, Housing Counseling Assistance, public housing programs, Community Development Financial Institutions Funds, Corporation for National & Community Service, Legal Services Corporation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics & Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

They were all cut in 1995 under a rescissions package engineered by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and cut last week in the budget agreement reached by Republican and Democratic leaders.

The lesson here is that there’s a big difference between spending cuts and terminating entire agencies and their programs. Like the mythological Hydra, the stump has to be burned after the head is cut off or else it’ll grow back.

Just as they did back in 1995, Republicans are doing a lot of talking about cutting the size of the federal government. However, they aren’t doing much talking about reducing the scope of the federal government’s activities. The Gingrich Republicans failed to reduce the scope of federal activities, and the result was a bipartisan spending orgy that has left the country’s finances in shambles. We literally can’t afford for history to repeat itself.

Budget Cuts Look Familiar is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times highlights the zigging and zagging of some leading Republican presidential contenders when it comes to war with Libya.

Particularly noteworthy is Newt Gingrich. “Two weeks ago,” McManus writes: 

the former House speaker and possible presidential candidate denounced Obama for not intervening forcefully against Kadafi.

“This is a moment to get rid of [Kadafi],” he urged. “Do it. Get it over with.”

Then Obama intervened in Libya. Was Gingrich pleased?

“It is impossible to make sense of the standard for intervention in Libya except opportunism and news media publicity,” Gingrich said Sunday. “Iran and North Korea are vastly bigger threats…. There are a lot of bad dictators doing bad things.”

That sounded like a flip-flop, so I asked Gingrich what he meant. He responded with an e-mail: “The only rational purpose for an intervention is to replace Kadafi. That is what the president called for on March 3, and after that statement anything less is a defeat for the United States.”

Actually, Gingrich was wrong both before and after Obama (inexplicably) chose to follow his advice. The only rational purpose for the use of the U.S. military is to advance U.S. national security. The Libya operation has never been justified on those grounds — it is a humanitarian mission to protect civilians — and it might actually make a minor and manageable problem far worse.

Qaddafi is a clown and thug; and no one will shed a tear if and when he leaves Libya – feet first or otherwise. But declaring Qaddafi’s ouster to be a suddenly vital U.S. interest, when a few mere months ago he was our supposed great ally in the fight against al Qaeda, epitomizes absurdity. If nothing else, Gingrich and other boosters of military action in Libya should have pondered — before we risked the lives of our troops, and committed the country to a potentially open-ended mission — whether some of the vaunted rebels might, in fact, be even worse than Qaddafi.

But I guess that never occurred to them.

They Were for the War before They Were Against It is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a column for Kaiser Health News, Michael L. Millenson, President of Health Quality Advisors LLC, laments that conservatives in the U.S. House are approaching ObamaCare like, well, conservatives.  He cites comments by unnamed House GOP staffers at a recent conference:

The Innovation Center at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services? “An innovation center at CMS is an oxymoron,” responded a  Republican aide…”Though it’s great for PhDs who come to Washington on the government tab.”

There was also no reason the government should pay for “so-called comparative effectiveness research,” another said.

“Everything’s on the chopping block,” said yet another.

No government-funded comparative-effectiveness research?  The horror!  For my money, those staffers (and whoever hired them) should get a medal.

Millenson thinks conservative Republicans have just become a bunch of cynics and longs for the days when Republicans would go along with the left-wing impulse to have the federal government micromanage health care:

After all, the McCain-Palin health policy platform in the 2008 presidential election called for coordinated care, greater use of health information technology and a focus on Medicare payment for value, not volume. Once-and-future Republican presidential candidates such as former governors Mike Huckabee (Ark.), Mitt Romney (Mass.) and Tim Pawlenty (Minn.), as well as ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, have long promoted disease prevention, a more innovative federal government and increased use of information technology. Indeed, federal health IT “meaningful use” requirements can even be seen as a direct consequence of Gingrich’s popularization of the phrase, “Paper kills.”

He even invokes the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, as if Buckley would disapprove of conservatives standing athwart ObamaCare yelling, Stop!

Millenson’s tell comes toward the end of the column, when he writes:

traditional GOP conservatives… [have] eschewed ideas in favor of ideological declarations.

Eschewed ideas in favor of…ideas?  My guess is that what’s really troubling Millenson is that congressional Republicans are eschewing left-wing health care ideas in favor of freedom.

Better late than never.  Now if only GOP governors would do the same.

How Dare Conservatives Stand athwart ObamaCare Yelling, Stop! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this week:

• Sen. Rand Paul bucks the trend of wimpy spending cut proposals with a more serious plan.
• Perhaps Charlie Sheen’s agent should consider getting him a gig with HUD.
• A Senate Democrat supports a plan that would focus on spending cuts and not tax increases.
• Policymakers should roll back the punishing regulations and taxes that make it difficult for businesses of all races and sizes to succeed.
• Federal energy policy, Newt Gingrich, and “rank gooberism.”

This Week in Government Failure is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The other day, The Wall Street Journal provided a public service by lambasting Newt Gingrich for his absurd speech to the ethanol lobby in Des Moines last month (money line:  ”Obviously big urban newspapers want to kill it because it’s working, and you wonder, ‘What are their values?’”).  Today, Gingrich and fellow ethanol-maven James Woolsey struck back in those very same pages.  In doing so, Gingrich provided yet more evidence that he’s intellectually unfit for office.

“It is in this country’s long-term best interest,” he said, ”to stop the flow of $1 billion a day overseas.”  Really?  So money sent overseas is gone forever.  News to me.  The only thing you can buy with dollars earned from oil sales to the U.S. is to buy things denominated in dollars or to exchange them so that someone else can.  And we sell a lot of stuff to foreigners that are denominated in dollars (treasury bills for one) and that money comes right back to the good old U.S. of A.

But put that aside.  If Gingrich really believes this, then why not just ban all imports all together?  Is that what the GOP is about these days – rank gooberism on trade?

And one other thing; the U.S. does not spend $1 billion a day on foreign oil.  It spends about half that; $530 million a day (in 2009 anyway).

Gingrich & Woolsey on Energy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Andrew Sullivan points us to this report that Newt Gingrich is going to tell an audience at AEI that the Obama administration is engaging in “willful blindness” and “self-deception” about the threat posed to the United States by Islam.  In the wake of his remarks urging the United States to emulate Saudi Arabian standards of religious freedom, Gingrich has promised to deploy “the lessons of Camus and Orwell” to illuminate our present predicament.

“Evading the confrontation with Evil may bring a second Holocaust. The mistakes made by the White House will exact a terrible price.”

What’s interesting is that this sort of thing is a long-standing trope in Gingrich’s rhetorical repertoire, although he has reserved it mostly for Israeli audiences.  In 2007, Gingrich went to Israel and informed a group gathered at the Herzliya Conference that Israel was facing the prospect of a “second Holocaust.”  Perhaps drawing on the lessons of Habermas, Gingrich explained that

We don’t have right language, goals, structure, or operating speed, to defeat our enemies. My hope is that being this candid and direct, I could open a dialogue that will force people to come to grips with how serious this is, how real it is, how much we are threatened. If that fails, at least we will be intellectually prepared for the correct results once we have lost one or more cities.

This year, Gingrich published a commentary in a right-wing Israeli tabloid owned by Sheldon Adelson repeating these arguments, with the paper promising readers that

The behavior of the Obama administration regarding Iran and terror is characterized by a complete disconnect from reality. Gingrich, a prominent Republican Party leader, warns that the Western Elites are evading a confrontation with Evil and that the flight from reality could bring a second Holocaust to the Jewish People. An alarm bell, before it’s too late.

Israel faces a range of important international security problems.  Israelis have much more reason to be concerned about their national security than do Americans.  And it’s entirely reasonable that people would disagree about the nature and breadth of the threats to Israel, let alone what to do about them.  But this sort of thing is absolutely irresponsible.  I find it striking that Gingrich has repeatedly lectured Israeli audiences and informed them–presumably based on his knowledge as a Washington insider–that his own government’s policy threatens a second Holocaust on the Jewish people.  Is this a view he really holds?  If so, I would think he would be much more alarmed than he is acting at present.

While Gingrich is claiming that his current proclamations are grounded in Orwell and Camus, it seems to me that his overall Friend-Enemy politics of late owe a good bit to Carl Schmitt.

Is Newt Gingrich Drawing on Camus or Carl Schmitt? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

My Washington Examiner column this week begins with a look back at the Disco Era:

In his high school yearbook photo, President Barack Obama sports a white leisure suit and a Travolta-esque collar whose wingspan could put a bystander’s eye out. Hey, it was 1979.

Maybe that explains the rest of young Barry’s yearbook page, with its “still life” featuring a pack of rolling papers and a shout-out to the “Choom gang.” (“Chooming” is Hawaiian slang for smoking pot.)

Survey data suggest some 100 million Americans have tried pot, including political elites and drug war supporters Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. So the point here isn’t to play “gotcha” by calling the president out on some harmless fun three decades ago. It’s to ask why he isn’t doing more to change a policy that treats people engaged in such activities as criminals.

As I note in the column,

in his new National Drug Control Strategy [.pdf], Obama “firmly opposes the legalization of marijuana or any other illicit drug” and boasts of his administration’s aggressive approach to pot eradication. Watch your back, Choom Gang.

This may present Obama with a serious moral dilemma if and when California votes to legalize recreational use of marijuana this November. (More here in this podcast).

Barack Obama’s War on ‘Chooming’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Tony Blankley, former press secretary to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, exults in the Washington Times that Americans are waking up “to our heritage of freedom” and to the abuse of the Constitution:

All the following acts have suddenly awakened Americans to their Constitution: (1) The nationalization of car companies and banks; (2) the subordination of the car companies’ legal bondholders to union bosses; (3) the creation of trillion-dollar slush funds (the stimulus package) used for, among other purposes, the corrupt purchase of congressional votes; (4) the mandating of individual health insurance purchase against the will of Americans; (5) the attempt to have Obamacare “deemed” to have been enacted, rather than actually publicly voted on by Congress.

Amazingly, spontaneously, Americans are educating themselves about the details of our Constitution.

He’s absolutely right. All those actions do raise serious questions about whether there are still any constitutional limitations on government, which is to say, whether the Constitution is still in effect, questions that Roger Pilon also raised this week in the Christian Science Monitor. But it would be even better if Americans had noticed the threats to constitutional government a bit earlier, if not during the New Deal or the Great Society, then perhaps during the past decade when, as Gene Healy and Tim Lynch wrote in 2006:

Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes

• a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech—and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;
• a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;
• a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as “enemy combatants,” strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror— in other words, perhaps forever; and
• a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.

President Bush’s constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.

But better late than never, and we join Tony Blankley in hoping that the Constitution’s limits on the powers of the federal government will once again be an issue in American politics and governance.

Waking Up at Last is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Having fisked Newt Gingrich’s and John Goodman’s “best” health care reform ideas, I probably should do the same for Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s similar oped in the Washington Post.  Pawlenty makes five recommendations:

1. “Incentivize patients to be smart consumers.” Setting aside his use of the grating word incentivize (down with suffix creep!), Pawlenty is on the right track.  But he’s so vague as to leave (himself?) room for mischief.  “Make quality and costs more transparent”?  “Incentivize smarter health-care decisions”?  A pol could claim to be doing those things while falling far short of what he should be doing: letting Americans — rather than employers or government — control their health care dollars and choose their own health plan.  If that’s what Pawlenty means, heck, say it.
2. “Congress should pass reforms that allow people to stop paying for procedures and start paying for results.” Pawlenty appears to think government should find the “right” payment system, rather than allow for competition between different ways of paying health care providers — between fee-for-service, capitation, and everything in between.  Such competition promotes all dimensions of quality.  Government isn’t equipped to define and pay for performance, and bad things happen when it tries.
3. “Liability reform.” To recap: federal limits on med mal liability unconstitutional; Republicans unprincipled.
4. “Interstate health-care insurance.” Pawlenty doesn’t seem to get that the point of letting individuals and employers purchase health insurance across state lines is to force regulators to compete.  His “interstate purchasing pool with strict standards” idea makes it sound like he doesn’t get it.
5. “Modernize health insurance.” Again, with the vagueness.  If Pawlenty means he wants to let individuals control their health care dollars and choose their own health insurance — see here for how — then terrific.  But when he recommends that we should “make health insurance transferable so employees can keep their coverage if they switch jobs” and “prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against individuals whose preexisting conditions were covered under insurance they lost through no fault of their own,” it sounds like he thinks regulation is the solution.

Fisking Pawlenty is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Could it be the Washington Post? Bannered across the top of the Post‘s op-ed page today is a piece titled “Copenhagen’s political science,” titularly authored by Sarah Palin. I’m delighted to see the Post publishing an op-ed critical of the questionable science behind the Copenhagen conference and the demands for massive regulations to deal with “climate change.”

But Sarah Palin? Of all the experts and political leaders a great newspaper might call on for a critical look at the science behind global warming, Sarah Palin?

What’s even more interesting is that the Post also ran an op-ed by Palin in July. But during this entire year, the Post has not run any op-eds by such credible and accomplished Republicans as Gov. Mitch Daniels; former governors Mitt Romney or Gary Johnson; Sen. John Thune; or indeed former governor Mike Huckabee, who might be Palin’s chief rival for the social-conservative vote. You might almost think the Post wanted Palin to be seen as a leader of Republicans.

I should note that during the past year the Post has run one op-ed each from John McCain, Bobby Jindal, Newt Gingrich, and Tim Pawlenty. (And for people who don’t read well, I should note that when I call the people above “credible and accomplished,” that’s not an endorsement for any political office.) Still, it’s the rare political leader who gets two Post op-eds in six months, and rarer still the Post op-eds by ex-governors who can’t name a newspaper that they read.

Who Wants to Make Sarah Palin the Leader of the Republican Party? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

When you get to the top of a mountain, what do you find? Other than maybe a mountain goat, or the frozen remains of an ill-fated previous climber, snow, that’s what. That’s why it’s almost appropriate that the Obama administration’s Race to the The Top Fund, as I have written before and write again in this new op-ed, is essentially a snow job.  And it seems to be a particularly blinding one.

To qualify for Fund dollars, states have to make hardly any meaningful changes to their education systems. For the most part they just have to submit plans for how they could conceivably do good stuff. Moreover, the same “stimulus” that furnished the $4.35 billion for Race to The Top supplied roughly 20 times that amount to protect the abysmal, obese education status quo from recessionary pressures. Nonetheless, many conservatives, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, are going out of their way to lionize Obama & co. for their reform efforts.

Why the cross-spectrum adulation? One problem is certainly that some conservatives have given up on real reform — universal school choice and getting the feds out of education — in favor of being seen as “doing something” from Washington. Probably more important, though, is that Race to the Top is constantly being festooned in brash, combative rhetoric about pushing what are actually relatively minor — but still disliked by teacher union — improvements such as linking educator pay to student performance and increasing charter schools. (For a taste of the hyperbole, check out Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s opening commentary from Sunday’s Meet the Press.) That Race to the Top falls far short of actually doing even these very limited things seems not to matter.

That leads to a very familiar, but nonetheless dispiriting, conclusion: in education, a blizzard of rhetoric is all it takes to blind people to reality.

Fed Ed Snow Job is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

So why would he talk like one?

On Fox News Sunday this week, Obama Senior Advisor David Axelrod spoke with Chris Wallace about nuclear non-proliferation, saying, among other things:

[President Obama] wants in the next four years to lock up the loose nuclear weapons that are scattered around Eastern Europe, that could fall into the hands of terrorists. And, of course, that is the big threat. That’s why we have to step up the pace. This represents an existential threat and we need to meet it.

Controlling any loose nukes is important, but the chance of them being used by terrorists is exceedingly small, and it is not an existential threat.

For too long, U.S. national leaders have perpetrated the error of speaking about terrorist threats as “existential” when they are not. Talking this way needlessly riles the U.S. public and thrills would-be or wannabe terrorists the world over. When U.S. leaders donate awesomeness to terrorism, the disenfranchised simply have to join a terror group or make empty threats to impact our discourse, policy, and quality of life.

David Axelrod didn’t need the makeweight argument of terrorist access to justify controlling loose nukes.

(Axelrod’s error was made on the road, from a different time zone. To damn him with faint praise, he comes up looking pretty good compared to Newt Gingrich, who issued spectacularly inconsistent positions from the comfort of the Fox News studio: Gingrich first criticized the Obama Administration for avoiding “war on terror” rhetoric, then sought small-government credibility by criticizing Obama’s budget as the largest non-wartime increase in history. There is no such thing as a limited-government war-monger, and Gingrich should not modulate between treating the country as “at war” or “not at war” within a single television appearance.)

David Axelrod Isn’t a Parrot is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog