Medicare for All

Simon Johnson, of the MIT Sloan School of Management and an “informal” advisor to Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D, MA) presidential campaign, thinks her Medicare for All scheme is the cat’s meow.  It would, he claims

cut costs by reducing inefficiency, eliminating predatory pricing (for example, for prescription drugs) and using the purchasing power of a single-payer system. Her plan would also constrain the growth rate of underlying medical costs.

This, of course, is utter nonsense.  While Johnson correctly notes that our present health care burden hangs around the neck of every company in America, and this dead weight gets heavier each year, government intervention only makes things worse, as each of the points he makes, ostensibly in support of his contention, illustrate clearly. Medicare for All schemes—not only Warrens, but all of them—only and severely exacerbate that government intervention and increase the costs heavily.

First, there is the onerous contribution most companies are required to make through employer-sponsored insurance. Every business owner wants employees and their families to have health insurance, but the cost rises inexorably.

Labor market competition and labor unions are the source of this “requirement,” and the government-mandated restrictions on businesses’ ability to band together—unless they’re in a narrowly defined “similar” business—denies them the market power to negotiate effectively.

Second, companies cannot by themselves easily constrain health-insurance premiums. They need healthy workers who are not ruined financially when a family member is rushed to the emergency room. In most competitive markets across the US, if an employer cuts back on health benefits (or raises deductibles, copays or out-of-pocket expenses), it raises the burden on employees and increases the risk that the best will leave.

See above regarding labor market competition, union power, and government-mandated limits on businesses’ negotiating power.

Third, the unpredictable nature of health-care costs makes it significantly harder to start and run a company. Every year, entrepreneurs and managers hold their breath while insurance companies decide what to charge them.

Again, see above regarding businesses’ government-mandated limits on negotiating power, now in contrast with the unpredictability of realized health care needs.

Nor is Medicare for all damaging only fiscally: such schemes eliminate choice; in fact, their proponents say that we Americans are too stupid to make our own choices; each of the plans’ proponents would throw the millions of us who have private health coverage, coverage better tailored to our individually determined needs, from one source or another off those plans.

 

Further restricting our choice—our right to decide for ourselves on what we’ll spend our property, our money, is Medicare for All’s requirement that we buy that one-size-fits-all government insurance—even though we judge ourselves healthy enough to not need a coverage plan or to not need Government’s dictated plan, or we just choose to run the risk and spend our money on our own needs and wants.  After all, these Progressive-Democrats Know Better, so by their fiat, we are to be denied.

 

Then Johnson sneers at efforts to switch to competition, but as the political economist should know, the failures here are failures of Republicans and failures of Progressive-Democrat obstructionism. The failures have nothing to do with competition.

Finally, the health care coverage costs—which are apart from health care needs—exist and burgeon by government fiat at the State level as well as the Federal, and the costs inflicted have little to do with health care provision or cost of provision, nor are they related to the likelihood of any particular health care need. Businesses—and we consumers—are not allowed to trade across state lines, and State insurance commissions set the range of premiums health care coverage entities are allowed to charge.

Obamacare made that even more explicit at the Federal level: the coverage plans carried coverages for matters we consumers neither want nor need and at fixed prices that are by design independent of the likelihoods of those mandated coverages. Beyond that, Obamacare forced millions of consumers off our privately held plans that we preferred and forced us to buy from the Federal government’s “market.”

Medicare for All is just an extreme version of Obamacare. In every respect. At trillions of dollars of higher cost.

Score One for Facebook

Facebook had a post up, recently, that the government of Singapore didn’t like and of which that government disputed the truthfulness.

As a result, By Order Of the Singapore government, Facebook added a notice—a “label”—to the post:

Facebook is legally required to tell you that the Singapore government says this post has false information.

For a wonder, Facebook didn’t take the post down, nor did it make any effort to “correct” its content.  Instead, it posted the notice, letting readers decide for themselves…whether they should take seriously the post or the notice required by a mendacious government.

Of course, I am assuming a motive for Facebook’s action.

Smart Move

Although, had it been me, I would have ignored it, not dignifying the thing with a response.

“It” is House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler’s (D, NY) pro forma invitation to President Donald Trump to send along his lawyer to be present at the Nadler Impeachment Inquisition, so long as Trump responded by Nadler’s deadline with the lawyer’s name and impeachment areas of interest.

The smart move was Trump’s refusal to accede to Nadler’s demand.

Note, too, that Nadler is beginning his hearings even before the House Intelligence Committee has prepared its report on its just concluded hearings and sent it along to Nadler.  Nadler will be starting his inquisition before he and his committee even know (at least officially) what the Intel Committee’s findings are.

The refusal letter included this in part of its explanation of Trump’s decision:

As for the hearing scheduled for December 4, we cannot fairly be expected to participate in a hearing while the witnesses are yet to be named and while it remains unclear whether the Judiciary Committee will afford the president a fair process through additional hearings[.]

[U]nclear whether the Judiciary Committee will afford the president a fair process.  Pat Cipollone, White House Counsel and author of the letter, is being generous.  It’s actually crystalline that there is no fair process to be had in the Judiciary Committee proceeding.  This is what House Resolution 660, passed on strictly partisan lines by the House Progressive-Democrats, says:

SEC. 4. IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY PROCEDURES IN THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY.
(c)(1) The ranking minority member of the Committee on the Judiciary is authorized, with the concurrence of the chair of the Committee on the Judiciary, to require, as deemed necessary to the investigation—
(A) by subpoena or otherwise—
(i) the attendance and testimony of any person (including at a taking of a deposition); and
(ii) the production of books, records, correspondence, memoranda, papers, and documents; and
(B) by interrogatory, the furnishing of information.

Only with the permission of the Committee chairman can any Republican member of the Committee do anything. Of course, the Rules go on to say that the Chairman’s decision can be appealed to the committee as a whole—to the Progressive-Democrat majority membership. There’s nothing in this Progressive-Democrat-passed set of rules that even pretend to be a fair process.

There’s nothing going on in the House that warrants White House participation. There is a great deal going on in the House that warrants strong voter participation in the upcoming elections. We are, indeed, in a battle for the soul—and the safety—of our nation. The Progressive-Democratic Party is just too desperate to undo our choice in 2016 and to prevent us from exercising our choice in 2020.

Head in the Sand?

Volkswagen is building cars in Xinjiang, People’s Republic of China.  You know Xinjiang, the “semi-autonomous” region of the PRC that’s home to tens millions of Muslims and to President Xi Jinping’s “reeducation” camps, Mao-ist internment camps for millions of those Muslims, a people of whom Xi disapproves.

VW thinks all of that is jake.

Speaking with DW on Tuesday, the company said its 2012 decision to open the Urumqi facility was “based purely on economics.” VW says it expects “further economic growth in the region over the coming years.”

Sure. Because economics isn’t just important (such considerations are), it’s all that matters (because principles, apparently, are for academics and parlor small talk).  And: economic growth in the region for whom?  The camp inmates?  Volkswagen?

Never mind the likelihood that Volkswagen’s facility uses forced labor.

We do not assume any of our employees are forced laborers.

Well, alrighty, then. A forced labor force is assumed away, so it doesn’t exist.  It’s all good.

A NATO Disconnect

French President Emmanuel Macron extended his “NATO is braindead” criticism.

The French leader has been critical of the United States after it abruptly pulled troops out of northeastern Syria, allowing NATO member Turkey to launch an incursion against the Kurdish YPG militia fighting against the “Islamic State” group. The US and Turkey did not coordinate their moves with NATO members.

Nor were either required to, regardless of what anyone thinks of the moves themselves or the rudeness of the lack of advisement.  Syria has nothing to do with NATO, for all that it’s on the rear porch of Europe’s nations.  Coordination with NATO was, and is, not required.

And

Macron said that Turkey cannot expect solidarity from NATO allies while also launching an offensive in Syria as a “fait accompli.”

Nor should it, since NATO solidarity is an “attack on one is…” and not “an attack by one means all must attack” alliance.  Turkey is out of line to hold up a NATO realignment of forces into the Baltics and Poland until NATO also openly supports Turkey’s independently done invasion.

As an aside on that last, there’s nothing keeping the member nations from deploying national forces consistent with what the alliance would realign were Turkey not in the way.

Still, Macron is not far wrong in his overall assessment.  Most of the European NATO nations don’t take their collective security seriously, insisting on freeloading off the US instead, even as President Donald Trump pushes the nations to increase their support of the alliance (which is theirs, too), at least to the point of honoring their own financial commitments to reach a spending level of 2% of national GDPs on NATO equipage and manpower by 2024.

Even as German Chancellor makes her cynical, disingenuous “promise” to reach 2% by sometime in the 2030s.  If the then-German government still feels like it.

Even as Western Europe member nations whine about the US’ redeployment of several American units out of Germany and into Eastern Europe member nations, nations that do take their security seriously.

Further still, though, Macron is badly mistaken to want talks with Russia aimed at

a new pact limiting mid-range nuclear missiles held by the US and Russia, after the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty collapsed in August.

On what planet does Macron reside that he thinks Russia would honor a new treaty after it spent so many years violating the original?  An accord [with Russia] that would replace the INF would be the height of naivety and complacency.

In contrast with NATO’s disinclination to support Turkey in Syria, Macron wants NATO to support French forces in the Sahel.  Again, though, there’s this business about NATO being an “attack on one is…” alliance, and even though France entered the Sahel for legitimate reasons, France was not attacked there or from there.  The terrorist attacks on France were, for the most part, by Daesh operating out of the Middle East—where France generally declines to operate (even though it has a longer and more legitimate history there than Russia)—or whose terrorists were only passing through northern Africa en route to their targets in France (and Belgium).  On top of that, Africa is outside NATO’s area of operation and would require a (unanimously done) change to the NATO charter to include it.  NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan can at least be justified (however tenuously at this late date) by the United States having been attacked from there and/or by entities now operating from there.