Tag Archives: spending

Drugs

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Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has turned to bashing drug companies, and in doing so, she’s exposing her ignorance of economics. Last Tuesday, she proposed in all seriousness

a $250 monthly cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs and other measures to stop what she called “price gouging” by pharmaceutical companies.
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Under Clinton’s plan, the monthly cap would limit what insurance companies could ask patients to pay for drugs that treat patients with chronic or serious medical conditions.

Then she added this gem:

“We need to protect hard-working Americans here at home from excessive costs. Too often these drugs cost a fortune,” adding drug companies keep the profits for themselves while “shifting the cost to families.”

Well, yeah, they do keep the profits. Contra her BFF, President Barack Obama, they did build that.

Here’s a thought, Madam, for holding down costs for us “hard-working Americans here at home” about whom you claim to care so much: reduce the costs to the manufacturers by getting your Big Government’s regulations out of their way. Increase the incentives for manufacturers to reduce costs by getting your Big Government out of the way of competition.

And think about this: if your monthly cap, pulled straight out of rectal storage, plays out, what will be the cost of those drugs to us hard-working Americans here at home when the drug companies, unable to recoup their costs, stop manufacturing the drugs altogether?

Free College

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Hillary wants to rein in the rising cost of a college education.

States would have to increase their own spending on higher education, and universities would be required to control spending[.]

With those strings, Clinton would send an additional $350 billion of your tax money (including your higher taxes she’s proposing to pay for some of this) over the next 10 years to the states for their public universities and community colleges.

And

…new rules would ensure a certain portion of total spending is directed to instruction….

How like a Progressive to think the answer to stopping a rise in the cost of a thing is to spend more money on the thing. And then to add to the cost of the thing with compliance cost imposition.

Can our nation really afford another four or eight years of this lack of understanding about how a free economy works?

Medicare Funding

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The fund Medicare uses to pay hospitals will run out in the next 15 years, and experts say there are no easy answers to solve it.

Certainly not politically easy answers, and that does matter. However, the practical answer is quite simple, if expensive in the transition.

Keep everyone 55 and older in the current Medicare system, with the individual option to leave that system in favor of the one I’ve proposed many times and summarize here. It’s important to note also that the “experts” are referring only to Medicare Part A, the hospitalization part. My reform is broader and applies to Medicare Parts B, payments to physicians, and D, drug coverage.

Rescind the payroll taxes from both the employer and younger-than-55 employee, while requiring the employee to put his payroll tax equivalent into what would be essentially a Health Savings Account. This New Model HSA would contain investment vehicles of the account owner’s choosing—including stocks, bonds, mutual funds for the same, bank savings accounts, etc—and be held for the benefit of the account holder. Unlike the Old Model HSA, with its shameful limits, the NMHSA would have no income limits on contributions, no annual limits on contributions, no requirement to have a High Deductible Health Coverage Policy, none of those government-mandated limits.

Of course, this can’t happen in a vacuum. In conjunction with this, the bankrupt* Social Security system needs to be similarly privatized, also, and the overly expensive Medicare system blocked granted, on a declining-to-zero schedule, to the States. These need to be done, too, with significant tax rate reductions and Federal spending cuts (and not just one-time gimmicks or reductions in spending growth).

Most, if not all of the cost of the transition can be covered by that spending and taxing reform.

 

*Bankrupt: not strictly so because in a few short years, while the Social Security Trust Fund will be emptied of money, current payroll taxes still will be available to make the payouts, requiring the payouts to drop to 75% of their presently scheduled values.

Update: Corrected an empty reference to Part C to the correct reference to Part D.

Democrats and Unions

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Illinois’ Democrat-controlled legislature—both houses—passed a budget earlier this year that spent $4 billion more than it intended to collect in revenue: a $36 billion spending bill against a $32 billion revenue bill. Never mind the rank dishonesty of this—bankrupt Illinois has no hope of raising those $4 billion except by borrowing, and these Democrat legislaturists know that. They have no intention, then, of repaying the borrowing, and that’s the dishonesty.

But leave that aside for a moment, and consider the following.

Governor Bruce Rauner (R) vetoed the bill because of that deficit, so the State is operating without a budget. Nevertheless, Rauner said the State would keep paying its government employees; as AFSCME said in support of Rauner’s decision,

public service workers in state government are on the job despite the lack of a state budget…and they should be paid for their work on time and in full.

Well, not so fast. Illinois’ Democrat Attorney General Lisa Madigan (just by happenstance, she’s also the daughter of the State’s Democrat Speaker of the House, Michael Madigan, whose own father was a New Deal pusher), with the full backing of her Democrat legislaturists, went into Illinois’ courts to block payment for those same “public service workers.”

Strictly to make a political point for their own benefit, these legislaturist Democrats are trying to prevent their employees from being paid, and they’re using their (erstwhile?) union allies as speed cushions for their bus. The Democratic Party of Illinois is typical of the national Democratic Party.