Weekend Links
- How cap-and-trade is like ritual self-flagellation.
- The Senate Finance Committee’s version of health care reform is definitely a step up from all of the other versions of the bill. But that’s still a pretty low bar.
- Change? The president cuts another deal for special interest lobbyists at the expense of American families.
- Why free trade is a boon to the environment.
“Keep Your Subsidies off My Ovaries”
In my recent Cato paper, “All the President’s Mandates: Compulsory Health Insurance Is a Government Takeover,” I explain that if Congress compels Americans to purchase health insurance, it would “inevitably and unnecessarily open a new front in the abortion debate, one where either side—and possibly both sides—could lose.”
Slate‘s William Saletan explains how the pro-choice side could lose:
This week, the Senate finance committee is considering amendments that would bar coverage of abortions under federally subsidized health insurance. Pro-choice groups are up in arms. After all, says NARAL Pro-Choice America, “In the current insurance marketplace, private plans can choose whether to cover abortion care—and most do.” If Congress enacts subsidies that exclude abortion, “women could lose coverage for abortion care, even if their private health-insurance plan already covers it!“…
The argument these groups make is perfectly logical: If you standardize health insurance through federal subsidies and coverage requirements, people might lose benefits they used to enjoy in the private sector. But that’s more than an argument against excluding abortion. It’s an argument against health care reform altogether.
Saletan also explains why pro-life and pro-choice positions on Obama’s health plan are irreconcilable:
To get what they consider neutrality, pro-choicers have to make pro-lifers pay indirectly for abortions. And to keep what they consider clean hands, pro-lifers have to make abortion coverage federally unsupportable and therefore, in a subsidy-dependent system, commercially nonviable.
Rather than an argument against all health care reform, I’d say this is an argument against reforms that expand government subsidies or otherwise give government the power to choose what kind of insurance you purchase. Fortunately, there are better ways to reform health care.
Tuesday Links
- Twenty inaccurate claims in Obama’s speech to Congress on health care. “If [members of Congress] yelled out every time President Obama said something untrue about health care, they would quickly find themselves growing hoarse.”
- Political tensions decreasing between Taiwan and China.
- How Americans misunderstand war: “America’s biggest mistake in Afghanistan and Iraq was to think its modern military would make winning easy.”
- Always read the fine print: There is a dangerous provision in the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill that could deny crucial health treatments for Medicare patients.
- Will the FDIC start borrowing from healthy banks to continue to provide relief to banks teetering on the edge?
- Podcast: Justin Logan explains why even the best policy toward Iran’s nuclear ambitions may not yield a positive outcome.
Transparent Health Care Legislating?
Will Americans get “quality time” with proposed health care legislation before it passes?
Some say no: The Senate Finance Committee recently turned back an effort to put Chairman Max Baucus’ bill online for 72 hours before the committee’s vote. The Committee is on the wrong side of history.
Transparency shifts power away from the center, so it’s favored by those out of power. It’s no wonder that Republican representative John Culberson, a member of the minority party, is putting H.R. 3400 (a significant health care bill) online for comment, using a tool called SharedBook.
Transparency won’t be a gift from government. It is something we have to take. That’s why I think the action lies in private efforts like OpenCongress, GovTrack, and (my own) WashingtonWatch.com. (Links are to sites’ H.R. 3400 pages.)
The public has a way of conforming their expectations to what’s possible, and transparent law-making is entirely possible today. Closed processes like the Senate Finance Committee’s consideration of health care legislation will not satisfy the public, and it will emerge from the committee with one strike against it irrespective of the merits.
The President’s Health Care Tax
As Michael Cannon discussed in an earlier post, the White House is trying to claim that health care “reform” does not mean higher taxes. This is a two-pronged issue. First, there is a mandate to purchase health insurance. Second, there is a tax (the White House calls it a fee) on people who fail to purchase a policy.
The White House claims this mandate is akin to state-level requirements for the purchase of health insurance, and that the newly-insured people will be getting some value (a health insurance policy) in exchange for their money. These assertions are defensible, but that does not change the fact that a tax is being imposed.
It might be plausible to argue that the mandate is not a tax if the value of the insurance policy to the individual was equal to the cost. But since these are people who are not buying policies, their behavior reveals that this obviously cannot be true. So this means that they will be worse off under Obama’s plan and that at least some of the cost should be considered a tax.
Thursday Links
- A new T-shirt for Senator Baucus: I worked for six months with half a dozen members of the Senate Finance Committee, and all I got was this lousy 223-page summary of what I hope the new health care bill will look like.
- Why should evidence even matter in education policy? I mean, we’re doing this for the children.
- Videos reveal tax-funded organization being used to help those who want to open a brothel and illegally bring underage girls into the United States as “sex workers.” Meet the two 20-somethings who exposed it.
- It’s time to narrowly define the mission in Afghanistan. “The United States does not have the patience, cultural knowledge or legitimacy to transform what is a deeply divided, poverty stricken, tribal-based society into a self-sufficient, non-corrupt, and stable electoral democracy.”
- Podcast: The future of health insurance: You buy it, or else.
Remember When $1 Trillion Was Real Money?
Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) has announced that he has reached agreement on scoring a series of options that will reduce the cost of his health care reform bill to just $1 trillion over the next 10 years. Whew. Now we can all rest easy.
Still, no agreement on the tax increases needed to pay that $1 trillion though.
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