Category Archives: markets

Medicare for All

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Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I [sic], VT) has the canonical version of Medicare for All; the other Progressive-Democrat candidates have only slightly varied versions of it.  Here’s Sanders on his Next Big Idea for health care provision and health care coverage:

You will have a card which has Medicare on it, you’ll go to any doctor that you want, you’ll go to any hospital that you want.

Right.  Been there, done that.  Both claims were straight up lies then, too.  There is a major difference, though, between Sanders’ two lies and ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) two lies: Sanders would make private insurance illegal—both the selling and the possessing.  That, though, only potentiates the power of Sanders’ lies.

As The Wall Street Journal mentioned on the other side of the link,

The point of Medicare for All is to cut reimbursement rates to Medicare levels, which government can now set so low only because private commercial reimbursement rates are so much higher. Cutting reimbursement rates would “probably reduce the amount of care supplied and could also reduce the quality of care,” CBO says.

Not could—would.  Reducing availability cannot help but reduce quality, if only from denying it altogether to many who need it or would merely benefit from it.  But that’s not the only pathway: that reduction in availability will flow, at least in large part, from that reduction in reimbursement rates.  As a result of that, those doctors and hospitals whose talents and skills warrant higher pay will limit their practices to the bare minimum.

That’s not out of personal greed, either: costs of care delivery go up markedly as the number of patients go up.  Absent meeting costs with fees charged, these providers would have no choice but to limit their costs by limiting their services and the numbers of potential patients served.

There’s another cost path, too: the more complex or difficult, or even merely rare, a medical problem, the more expensive it is to provide services for dealing with it.  Capped reimbursements will limit the availability of that care. And—lower reimbursement rates again—lower the quality of those providers willing to provide the care.

The EU Blows Things out of Proportion

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…again.  This time it’s over the US’ decision to implement all of the Helms-Burton Act, to stop waiving Title III of the Act.  Helms-Burton, you’ll recall, is a law passed in 1996 that pressured Cuba and its trading partners to not traffic in Cuban government-appropriated -stolen private property, property that was seized by that government over the course its power-grabbing in the days following Fidel Castro’s successful rebellion.

Title III created a private cause of action, allowing private citizens whose property had been confiscated by the Cuban government to sue those trafficking in that property for monetary compensation for the loss, plus court and attorney costs associated with the suit.  The Title also contained within it authority for the President to waive the Title for six-month periods.

The EU is up in arms over this.

The EU considers the US move to be “contrary to international law” and “will draw on all appropriate measures to address the effects of the Helms-Burton Act, including in relation to its WTO rights,” according to a statement from the EU’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini.

Because it’s contrary to international law and a violation of WTO rights for persons whose property has been stolen to go into court in order to be compensated for the loss ensuing from the theft.  No, the EU and a few member nations simply are worried about the inconvenience of protecting justice:

[A]ctivation of the Title III provision could bring about dozens, if not hundreds, of lawsuits and also generate trade conflicts between the US and European countries such as Spain, France and Britain. It is also likely to negatively affect the already lagging levels of foreign investment in Cuba.

That last is especially risible.  The point of Helms-Burton is to pressure the Cuban government to cut it out and make its victims whole.  Negatively pressuring Cuba’s reception of foreign investment is a valuable tool in gaining the compensation.  Beyond that, if European companies lose money as a result of the suits, that’s on them for trafficking in stolen goods in the first place, and their beef is between them and the Cuban government, not between them and the victims of the crimes.

And there’s the matter of perspective.

The US State Department has certified some 6,000 claims worth some $8 billion (€7.14 billion) in current values. Another 200,000 claims have yet to be certified, but could have a value amounting to tens of billions of dollars.

Tens of billions.  The level of trade between the US and the EU (because Spain and France, and Great Britain so far, cannot conclude trade agreements apart from the EU), even in the present parlous trade environment, is $1.1 trillion (€1.23 trillion).  The Europeans are raising their misguided tempest deep inside a teacup.

The Helms-Burton Act is summarized here, and the Act itself can be read by following the first link in that cite.

Drug Pricing

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Amazingly, there’s an actual debate going on over whether consumers should be allowed to see drug prices in drug advertising.

Stacie Dusetzina, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s Associate Professor of Health Policy and the Ingram Associate Professor of Cancer Research, argued—in all seriousness—in a recent Wall Street Journal example of the debate (see the link) in favor of the following points:

  • disclosure of list prices may deter some people from seeking treatment
  • disclosing prices could backfire by creating an artificial sense of “value” due to a high price tag
  • the idea behind the proposal is to shame manufacturers into lowering list prices or limiting price increases by requiring them to disclose just how high their prices are

Wow.  In reverse order….

No, the idea behind the proposal is not to shame or to limit price increases by requiring manufacturers to disclose just how high their prices are. The idea is competition.  The idea is to limit price increases or to lower prices by forcing manufacturers to compete in an open, free market environment.  This, just incidentally, also will force intermediaries and pharmacies as end-sellers to compete on pricing in a similarly open, free market environment.

No, disclosing prices won’t create an artificial sense of “value” from a high price.  Dusetzina must really think Americans are stupid to pay artificially inflated prices simply because the prices are high.  That may be the case for luxury cars or fancy purses or other objects of ego-driven conspicuous consumption, but it’s most assuredly not the case for the working man or woman—which is to say the vast majority of us—buying necessities or even the merely nice-to-haves.  If we were stupid enough to buy the higher priced good or service just because it was more expensive, grocery store prices would be much higher than they are now.

No, disclosure of list prices won’t deter many of us from seeking treatment at all.  What it will do is let us see the lowering prices make getting treatment more affordable.  Besides, even for those few of us who do defer or avoid treatment because of those prices; that’s our choice, not Government’s to make for us, not even indirectly by manipulating our accesses.

Price information—especially price information available before any decision to buy or not to buy—is critical to competition.  And it’s that competition that will drive drug prices to their natural levels—the cost of producing and marketing them—and not a penny more.  Even the profit margin that competitive companies legitimately can collect will be eaten into by that competition.  Look at those grocery stores, again.

Hiding price information is absolutely antithetical to free markets and low prices.

Fueling the Housing “Crisis”

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California’s Progressive-Democrats are at it again; although, this time they’re not active only in California.  Now they’re looking to

expand subsidies to middle-class families—some with six-figure incomes

under the pretense of “helping” folks afford housing in this manufactured crisis of housing.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed funding housing for families whose income normally wouldn’t qualify them for assistance programs. Last month, his administration set aside $200 million for middle-class families in a $750 million package meant to combat the state’s housing crisis.
DC Mayor Muriel E Bowser has proposed a $20 million workforce fund to help families earning up to $141,000.

Boston and Philadelphia city governments are pushing the same sort of nonsense for the same sort of reason.

Aside from money spent on this pandering is money not spent on serious problems, these moves will only make the problem worse. The moves only increase demand for a not very flexible or easily expanded supply—and so supports, and increases, price, and so exacerbating the problem.

The way to address housing costs for the residents of a city—and the citizens of States like California—is to get the governments out of the way.  That means reduce duplicative regulations associated with housing and housing construction and eliminating regulations that exist solely for the benefit of unions and other special interests.  It means reducing zoning limits that drive up the cost of building and of living in a neighborhood.

“A Battle for the Soul of this Nation”

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That’s what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Hamlet’s poor relation Joe Biden, said we’re in as he opened his campaign.

We are in the battle for the soul of this nation[.] If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter….

Indeed, we are in a battle for our nation’s soul. It’s a battle between one party that actively tries to improve the situations of our nation’s citizens—whether we agree with those policies or not—and a party that has no aim for our people’s benefit, but is focused solely on anti-Trumpism.

It’s a battle between a party on the one hand that wants to get Government out of our way, to unleash our individuality and individual entrepreneurial spirit, to restore to us our individual responsibilities and freedoms, and a Party on the other hand that wants to take things away from us: our money in the form of higher taxes; our weapons, under the guise of carefully undefined “common sense”…restrictions; our freedom of speech under the cynically offered guise of suppressing “hate” speech or “terrorism fomenting;” our freedom of religion under the just as cynically offered guise of “protecting” others from discrimination (but not the ones asserting their religious tenets); our morality by growing Government to arrogate that morality to it, thereby destroying it in both places; our individualism by mandating what all of us collectively must do because Party says it benefits some of us—even where it plainly does not—and on and on.

It’s a battle between a party that wants to shrink government and Party, which wants to grow a Government run by Party members who Know Better than the rest of us.

It’s a battle between a party that wants government to work for all of us and Party, which has open contempt for millions of us and insists that us ignoramuses must simply be quiet and obey.

What will be altered—an outcome devoutly to be wished—is what this nation has become under the last 80 years of pressures and outright rule of the Democratic Party and of late the Progressive-Democratic Party: a rapidly growing regulatory state with weakened national security, and a nation damaged domestically by Party’s explosively growing national debt, its racist and sexist affirmative action programs, its gilded welfare cage, and lately its revived segregationist policy of identity politics.

There have been excursions from that trend, to be sure, but they have been only occasional and brief: one party’s successful effort to defeat the Soviet Union via its rapid defense buildup and its current, nascent restart toward rebuilding our nation’s defense establishment, together with the beginnings of a rollback of Party’s imposed regulations governing what Party would permit or require each of us to do.

This is a battle we cannot afford to lose.