Tag Archives: health care

It Isn’t Pro-Choice, Anymore

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Now it’s pro-infanticide.  That’s the position of the Progressive-Democratic Party after Party Senators voted—unanimously—to kill a bill that would have outlawed immediately post-birth infanticide.

Senator Ben Sasse’s (R, NE) bill, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, would have required doctors to work to save a baby’s life if an abortion attempt failed and the baby was born alive despite the attempt.  All Progressive-Democrat Senators, every single one of them, voted to kill the bill and thereby to let abortion doctors finish killing the baby.

As Sasse put the situation after those Progressive-Democrat Senators had had their way,

I want to ask each and every one of my colleagues whether or not we’re OK with infanticide[.]

Indeed.

On the other hand,

Opponents, noting the rarity of such births and citing laws already making it a crime to kill newborn babies, said the bill was unnecessary.

How cynical. Statistica reports that

There were a total of 17,284 reported murder and non-negligent manslaughter cases in the US in 2017.

Out of a population of some 325 million, that works out to about 0.005%.  That’s pretty rare, too.  Maybe we don’t need those other anti-murder laws, either.

Never mind that the bill would have been an easy way to reduce the post-failed abortion infanticide rate even further.  It still would have been too much like moral work.

Remember this in the fall of 2020.

A Judge’s Error

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The Trump administration had expanded rules allowing employers to opt out of being required to provide birth control coverage to their employees at no cost to the employees, so long as the opting out was convincingly based on religious or moral grounds.  Federal District Judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California has issued an injunction blocking enforcement of the expansion while an underlying lawsuit against the expansion is underway.

Ordinarily, blocking an enforcement while the underlying case proceeds is no big deal, but this one is just plain wrong.  Gilliam based his ruling in significant part on the premise that

the [expansion] would result in a “substantial number” of women losing birth control coverage, which would be a “massive policy shift.”

For one thing, given how cheap birth control drugs and devices are and how easily obtained prescriptions for them are, it’s not at all clear that a “substantial number” of women would be unable to obtain birth control drugs or devices.

But the larger, vastly more important matter is this.  As Gilliam himself noted, the expansion would be a policy shift (massive or not, that’s irrelevant here).  Policy matters are political matters, and so they clearly are outside the purview of the courts.  Policy—political—matters are the exclusive province of the political arms of our government and of We the People.  A judge who intrudes, from his bench, into political matters clearly violates his oath to uphold the law.  Making policy has no place in his oath.

A Health Care Coverage Step

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Alexander Acosta, Steven Mnuchin, and Alex Azar, respectively Secretaries of Labor, Treasury, and Health and Human Services, are in the process of offering one.  They’re putting together a rule that would expand HRAs, Health Reimbursement Arrangements.  These are plans that allow employers to reimburse employees for certain qualified health expenses.  Their expansion consists of two parts:

  • permit[ting] employers to offer HRAs to reimburse employees for health insurance purchased in the individual market—allowing employers to provide a contribution as significant as they would have made for the premiums of a traditional employer-sponsored plan.
  • allow[ing] employers that offer a traditional group plan to offer an HRA of up to $1,800 a year to reimburse an employee for certain qualified medical expenses such as stand-alone dental benefits.

Both of these parts would be done on an income tax-free basis for the employee.

Of course, this would compete against Obamacare, and that’s anathema for the Progressive-Democrats in the House and Senate.

Their ire notwithstanding, the rule would be that step toward competition, and competition is one of the ways of making health care and health care coverage less economically onerous to a family.

Free Markets for Health Care

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Here’s an illustration of why one is badly needed.  The Wall Street Journal‘s article is centered on health coverage plans, but the underlying problem is in health care provision and the monopolistic nature of both provision and coverage.

Last year, Cigna Corp and the New York hospital system Northwell Health discussed developing an insurance plan that would offer low-cost coverage by excluding some other health-care providers, according to people with knowledge of the matter. It never happened.
The problem was a separate contract between Cigna and NewYork-Presbyterian, the powerful hospital operator that is a Northwell rival. Cigna couldn’t find a way to work around restrictive language that blocked it from selling any plans that didn’t include NewYork-Presbyterian, according to the people.

And

Dominant hospital systems use an array of secret contract terms to protect their turf and block efforts to curb health-care costs. As part of these deals, hospitals can demand insurers include them in every plan and discourage use of less-expensive rivals. Other terms allow hospitals to mask prices from consumers, limit audits of claims, add extra fees and block efforts to exclude health-care providers based on quality or cost.

We’re on track to commit 20% of our GDP to health care costs, and the industries of health care provision and health care coverage operating outside a free market environment is the major driver of that expense.

The WSJ piece goes on at length in this vein.

If patients and our doctors were able to shop around and force hospitals, clinics, and coverage providers to compete for our business, we’d very quickly see better health care, better (actual) health insurance, and lower costs.  If our doctors had to compete for our business, we’d see just as quickly better care at lower cost.  And our doctors would need have no fear of costs—their fees—going too low: there’s a lot to be said for patient loyalty to a good doctor, both from a quality of care and continuity of that care perspective.

A Next Step

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A step has been taken to mitigate the destructiveness of Obamacare.  A new rule has been promulgated by the Trump administration that will

allow for the proliferation of cheaper, less-comprehensive health plans that have been restricted by the former Obama administration.

Under the rule, actual health insurance plans will be allowed that cover a range of health-related matters that more closely align with a customer’s interests.  These plans also will be good for a year and be renewable for a total of three years, a drastic improvement over Obamacare’s limit of 90 days.  A further improvement of this rule:

The plans don’t have to cover people with pre-existing conditions, and insurers can charge higher premiums based on a consumer’s health status.

This is a good interim step, but more is necessary.  One additional step should be the elimination of the time limit on the duration/renewability of these plans.  What should be available in the health insurance market place should be a market decision—a decision of the buyers and sellers.  Government has nothing legitimate to say in this arena.