Category Archives: markets

Birth Control “Mandate”

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In the Twitter to-do surrounding the Supreme Court’s hearing two cases related to this, Planned Parenthood linked to one of their favorite posters, reproduced just below.  The poster is so mendacious, it cries out for a post in point-by-point response.

1. 99% still can—and 99% already were, long before Obamacare came up.  Neither case before the Court has anything to do with women’s access, only whether employers, or insurers, must cover birth control in every plan offered.  And it’s always been cheap, too, including for guys (why aren’t condoms mandated, by the way?  Whatever happened to equality of the sexes?).  WalMart, for instance sells birth control pills for as little as $4/mo.  The doctor’s appointment to get the prescription still is extra.  WalMart sells condoms for as little as $15 for three dozen.  No doctor’s appointment required.

2. Birth control for health reasons isn’t birth control; it’s medicinal use for treating an illness or other condition unrelated to pregnancy.  As a medicine, it’s already covered in other aspects of a health plan.  If it isn’t, that would be a legitimate gripe, but it would be legitimate only between customers and plan purveyors.  It would remain no business of government.

3. 27 million women still can; this is wholly unrelated to any question of the legitimacy of a contraceptive coverage mandate.  See #1 above.

4. 70%?  That depends on who’s polling.  Of course there’s a bias involved: who doesn’t like free stuff?  Especially when they’re not the ones paying to make it “free.”

5. Who, indeed, are the plaintiffs?  Two families with deeply held religious beliefs who live their religion in their business operations, too—like charity toward all, family nurturing practices vis-à-vis their employees, and so on.  What products they offer to sell matters to this debate how, exactly?

6. Slippery Slope?  This is a cynically offered straw man.  No one is regulating women’s access to birth control here except the government.  No one is looking to regulate access to vaccines, transfusion, etc—except, perhaps government as it attempts to start down this slope.  The only thing the plaintiffs in these two cases want to do is to not be regulated in this arena.  As to access itself, see #1 and #3 above.

7. First time for whom, actually?  Businesses always before have had the choice to offer health coverage plans (back when they actually resembled insurance policies and not Obamacare’s mandated health welfare plans).  Now it’s government that wants, for the first time, to eliminate that right to choose.  And, of course, with this point, Planned Parenthood ignores the fact that in opposing the plaintiffs, they’re seeking nakedly to impose their own personal beliefs on others.  This whole argument also cynically elides the fact that it’s a market choice, not business’ or government’s, that determines what gets included in a health coverage plan.  At least in a free country.

As to the Twitter hashtag #Notmybossbusiness, indeed it’s not.  The employer has no business providing birth control to his employees, “free,” or otherwise.  The use of birth control is a personal choice, not an employer’s.

How Can We Trust This Program?

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ObamaMart’s back end has yet another “glitch,” this time one that impacts whether a potential Obamacare health welfare plan buyer gets the subsidy the Obama administration says is due him.

The Philadelphia Inquirer found this one in its own explorations for a story on the various income scenarios that would draw a Federal subsidy.

Incorrect poverty-level guidelines are automatically telling what could be tens of thousands of eligible people they do not qualify for subsidized insurance.

The error in the federal marketplace primarily affects households with incomes just above the poverty line in states like Pennsylvania that have not expanded Medicaid.  The mistake raises the price of their insurance by thousands of dollars, making insurance so unaffordable many may just give up and go without.

It appears, for now, to be a mistake limited to ObamaMart’s window shopping tool and not the part of the back end that calculates whether there will be a subsidy at all, and if so the subsidy actually to be paid a buyer who actually buys and pays the premium.  The error seems to be centered on the tool’s use of the 2014 Federal Poverty Guideline, rather than the Obamacare-mandated 2013 levels.

This particular error is easy to correct, but it shouldn’t have occurred at all—apparently nobody at CMS cared enough even to check the simple things, like this one, before they decided it would be a good idea to foist this Web site off onto the public.  And apparently nobody at CMS has cared enough to go look in the months since it’s become so embarrassingly well-known what a failure ObamaMart is (quite apart from the disaster that is the underlying Obamacare).

That it was discovered not by ObamaMart’s CMS developers or testers but by someone in the private sector is illustrative of the level of seriousness with which Obama, his HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, or anyone else in HHS or Treasury or the IRS has (not) taken this program.

In the end, though, this “glitch” demonstrates a larger problem: no matter the good intentions, no matter the strength of the consensus that a program is a good idea, Government is simply no good at doing this sort of thing.  The tasks must be left to private enterprise operating in a free market economy.

Indeed, that’s where the needs will be best identified, and producers, sellers, and buyers will coalesce to provide the most efficient implementation.  Or not, if the market—us private citizens—don’t agree that the need exists at plausible prices.

Knowledge of Obamacare

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Seventy percent of uninsured Americans said they do not know about Obamacare tax credits, and 45% are unaware of the enrollment deadline.  So says a poll taken by Bankrate.com.

What might this mean, really, especially in the face of a Democratic Party that’s already demonstrated an impressive skill at getting its message out to all Americans?  Some thoughts come to mind.

  • We aren’t as plugged in to the Internet as we like to think we are.  While that might be true for rural America, the number of rural Americans cannot account for these numbers.
  • Nobody reads the newspapers or watches network news on television anymore.  Declining circulation and Nielson ratings do tend to support this.
  • It might also be strongly influenced by what we actually do when we’re online or reading the papers or watching TV.  Folks no longer read the “news” or watch it on TV—they’re reading the funny pages and sports sections, and they’re watching entertainment programming on TV.  And they’re doing largely the same thing as they surf the Internet.  The “news” items, no longer being unbiased reporting of the day’s events, are being increasingly disregarded altogether.
  • And it might be a simple case of whatever the Democratic, or Republican, Party says is becoming increasingly disregarded: from the fatigue induced by the constant bombardment by both parties (but by the Democrats especially) with political pronouncement, and duns for money which add to the general fatigue, as well as an irritation aspect.  And from a growing disdain for the routine and blatant mendacity of each party.

Fannie and Freddie “Restructuring”

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Federal National Mortgage Association—Fannie Mae—and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation—Freddie Mac—are at the heart of the US housing industry, since they play a central role in guaranteeing a major fraction of the mortgage loans through which we Americans buy our homes.  They also lie at the heart of the housing bust that was a major cause (albeit not the only one) of the Panic of 2008.  Their role in the bust stems from their decision functionally to waive credit standards and to encourage anyone with two nickels to rub together to borrow to buy a house, whether those borrowers could afford to make the loan payments or not.  And too often Fannie and Freddie waived the two-nickel standard, too.

The mortgage industry cries out for major reform, and now some of that reform might be in the offing.  A plan worked out by Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Chairman Tim Johnson (D, SD) and Committee Ranking Member Mike Crapo (R, ID) and preliminarily agreed by President Barack Obama looks do away entirely with Fannie and Freddie and to replace them with a system of Federally insured “mortgage securities” whose private insurers would be required to take initial losses before any government guarantee would be triggered.

Of course, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won’t like the bill because it has Republican fingerprints on it.  House Republicans won’t like the bill, either, since they’re opposed to any government backstop in the private economy.  This isn’t a done deal.

This is, though, a valuable and needed step in the right direction.

There’s no arguing with a tired old man who insists on clinging bitterly to his hatred of all things Republican; Senate Democrats need to lose their fear of him and bypass him on this matter.

On the other hand, the chuckleheads in the House do have a chance to get smarter all on their own.  They’re right to insist that there be no Federal backstop in the housing market, much less in private economy, generally.  However, they also need to understand that this deal isn’t the final step, and that if they hold out for everything all in one fell swoop, they won’t get anything at all.

They should pass this deal, if it gets to them in substantially this form, and then they should begin working on a follow-on bill that withdraws that Federal backstop.  After all, if the free market wants such a thing—in the insurance industry, it’s called reinsurance—a market for mortgage reinsurers will develop.  If such a market doesn’t develop, it’ll be because the free market doesn’t need one.  If the governments of the individual States think such a thing is a good idea for their citizens, they can face their citizens and propose such a thing.  If the citizens of those States demure, then a State government backstop isn’t useful.

Step by step.  Slowly, and so surely.

EU Trade Protectionism

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Now the EU is looking to claim that cheeses originally made in Europe cannot be made anywhere else and marketed under those European generic names: feta and parmesan cannot be made in the US, but only in Greece and Italy, for instance.  Never mind that it’s the same cheese made here, the manufacturers have to use different terminology to market their cheeses, the EU is demanding.  The EU even is (mendaciously, say I) claiming that feta, for instance,

is so closely connected to Greece as to be identified as an inherently Greek product.

As if that original connection matters at all in a global market.  And, never mind that feta produced elsewhere is plainly competitive, if not superior, or there’d be no market for that produced-elsewhere feta.

The AP says that this sort of thing is

important for the EU as Europe has tried to protect its share of agricultural exports and pull itself out of recession.  The ability to exclusively sell some of the continent’s most famous and traditional products would prevent others from cutting into those markets.

Never mind that Europe does not own any share of any market; the market is possessed (not owned) by the aggregation of individual buyers and sellers that choose to operate in it.  Europe—as with any participant—earns a share of a market by competing effectively in it.

No, this is an issue that needs to be dragged out until after the 2016 elections, and we get a President that has the moral courage to stand up for American, if not free market, interests.