Category Archives: morality

The Romney-Ryan Medicare Plan

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What is it, exactly, and how does it work?  The plan is a means of restoring responsibility for health insurance spending to the individuals seeking the coverage—which also removes that (usurped) responsibility from the Federal government.  The Wall Street Journal provided a summary earlier this week of how this gets accomplished.

  • Private insurers, and Traditional Medicare, would bid for the business of each individual senior citizen (oh, the ignominy: Big Government having to mingle with—to compete with—the hoi polloi) in a region for the year.
  • Each senior citizen would receive from the government a payment equal to the second-lowest bid in that region.
  • Each senior citizen then would spend that payment on the health coverage of that person’s choice.
    • If the senior citizen chose the cheapest policy, he would pocket the difference.
    • If the senior citizen chose the second cheapest, he would break even.
    • If the senior citizen chose a more expensive policy, he would pay the increment out of his own resources.

Hmm….  Choice—what’s up with that?  Can we trust our senior citizens to behave responsibly?  Even push actual competition among the vendors?  Some plainly say, “No!  We do not trust these people.”  It’s why they oppose the plan.

As the WSJ also points out, there’s real world, empirical evidence that base competition works: it has…in Medicare Advantage.  This program already requires vendors to bid against Traditional Medicare.  As recently as 2009, the year for which data are readily available, the lowest and second lowest bids—for the same coverage—were, respectively, 87% and 91% of the government’s Medicare charge.

Where, then, are the extra $6,400 that our seniors are supposed to be socked with paying under the Romney-Ryan plan about which Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is on about so much?  He and his are using an obsolete CBO report about an obsolete Ryan proposal that doesn’t exist today and that has nothing to do with the Romney-Ryan plan.  Moreover, CBO conceded at the time that its analysis was suspect because it did not consider the effects of competition: their results

depend on the evolution of the health care and health insurance systems over time, which is hard to predict.

More damning—to the CBO analysis here and to its analyses generally—CBO has admitted its inability to score the Romney-Ryan Medicare plan because it

does not have the capability at this time to estimate such effects[.]

There goes Obama, again—stuck in a past that never existed.  And trying to change the subject again.

Retirement Security—For Whom?

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The Obama Campaign now seems to be coming out in favor of the status quo regarding the financial security of our American senior citizens.  They continue to state their adamant opposition to reforming Social Security (and Medicare, which is part of the Social Security system) at all.  Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Joe Biden made that refusal explicit a few days ago during a Virginia campaign stop:

I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security.  I flat guarantee you.

The opposition summarized by Biden has been so long-lasting and, of late, so shrill, that it seems the Progressives are afraid of freeing up the programs, of freeing up us American citizens to take care of ourselves away from the watchful eye and controlling hand of government.

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D, FL) expresses Progressive fear this way:

The very last thing we ought to be doing is putting at risk the retirement security of millions of America’s seniors.

And yet, she chooses not to address the plain and simple fact that, with our retirement security in the hands of government, with government making funding and disbursement decisions for millions of us, we have no retirement security: Social Security will be bankrupt in just a few short years (it’s already paying out far more than it’s taking in, and the Social Security trustees say the funds will be exhausted by 2033), and Medicare is in worse shape.

Wasserman’s plaint is especially cynical in light of the fact that, for the last three-plus years, Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama—and his fellow Progressives in Congress—have chosen to offer no solution to this at all, save taking $700 billion dollars from America’s seniors’ Medicare in order to give it to his precious Obamacare, and otherwise, as Biden has assured us all, to refuse any change.

Wasserman, et al., also are objecting to a reform that would put more freedom and responsibility in the hands of us citizens: the specific proposal to which Wasserman was objecting (and which, sadly, has been absent from the last two (Republican) House-passed Federal budgets) would have allowed us to take a significant portion of our Social Security taxes and invest those funds in our own retirement accounts, managed by us without government interference.

Why are the Progressives so afraid of letting American citizens make our own choices, be responsible for our own lives?  Do they think we’re just too stupid to manage our own futures, that we’re dumber than government?  Or are they simply afraid of losing the power that comes from the dependency of others on them, and so their own retirement security?

Foreign Law in US Courts

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog recently ran a piece about the legitimacy of using of foreign law in American courts.  The piece drew heavily from an article on the Volokh Conspiracy, but I want to talk about the concept, rather than the particular case (which Eugene Volokh also used for a concept discussion).

The particular case began with a man and woman who married in Pakistan.  Later, still in Pakistan, the man divorced the woman in a religious ceremony, but neither followed through with a secular divorce.  The woman then remarried while still in Pakistan, and after that, the new couple moved to the US, where they had another marriage ceremony.  This marriage, though, also failed, and the two separated.  The woman had never told her second husband about her first marriage, but in the course of his own divorce preparation investigation, he discovered that first marriage, the religious divorce, and the lack of a secular divorce.  He filed for annulment, rather than divorce, arguing that the woman from whom he was seeking an end to marriage had committed bigamy.  The woman filed for divorce, rather than annulment, insisting that the religious divorce was sufficient to have ended that first marriage.

A trial court, after consulting Pakistani law—which controlled both the secular and the religious marriage and divorce concerning that first marriage—granted the annulment, and a state appellate court affirmed.  Volokh and the Law Blog both say that this use of foreign law in a domestic court was legitimate.  I agree for the narrow kind of case this represents.

The acts in this case, which created the status of each person on which the other relied, were wholly completed within that foreign jurisdiction.  Whether each person could rely on that status, then, needs to consider the law under which that status originated.

But this is a narrow situation.  It cannot apply, for instance, where acts are completed in the US.  This must rule out, for instance, the use of Sharia law to determine whether allegations of spousal abuse in a household in the US are accurate.  This must rule out any legitimacy of any defense of the form “That’s the way we do it in the Old Country.”  Actors in the US are not in the Old Country.

It must also rule out some areas where the actors in the US are acknowledged by all relevant parties to have broken the Old Country’s laws and then come here.  This is what political asylum is for.  A divorce vs annulment question has nothing to do with asylum.  Breaking an Old Country law in defense of the inalienable rights—and associated individual freedoms—that we acknowledge as possessed by all human beings is an area where the foreign law must be held irrelevant.

Some Thoughts on Poverty and Obligation

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Anthony Davies and Kristina Antolin had these thoughts in a Saturday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Wealth and poverty are catalysts for bringing the rich and the poor together in community, and community is the hallmark of the church’s mission on Earth. Government is not community. Government is one of community’s tools, a coercive one we use when it is necessary to force people to behave in ways they would not otherwise behave voluntarily.

But that word—voluntarily—is key, and it’s where Mr. Ryan’s religious detractors go awry: Charity can only be charity when it is voluntary. Coerced acts, no matter how beneficial or well-intentioned, cannot be moral. If we force people to give to the poor, we have stripped away the moral component, reducing charity to mere income redistribution.

All people have the moral obligation to care for those who are less fortunate. But replacing morality with legality is the first step in replacing church, religion and conscience with government, politics and majority vote. Coercing people to feed the poor simply substitutes moral poverty for material poverty.

What they said.

Look! Shiny!

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Anything to distract attention and to change the subject from the topics at hand.  Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is so reluctant to talk about his performance with the economy these last three-plus years, to talk about his performance with job creation, to talk about foreign policy, or to propose concrete solutions to these problems that he’s back to dragging this red herring.

He’s had his campaign manager, Jim Messina, resurrect Reid-esque nonsense by sending a letter to Matt Rhoades, of the Romney campaign, asking pretty please for just five years’ worth of Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney’s tax returns, against a legal requirement of two years’ worth of such records.  And if Governor Romney will only do that much, Messina promises that Obama will make no more demands or comments on the matter.  Real decent of him to make such an offer.  And real evasive.