Category Archives: regulation

Health Plan Coverage and Contraception

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The Wall Street Journal has noted that the Trump administration has taken regulatory action to reduce, if not eliminate (the Supreme Court still has to do its job vis-à-vis a Little Sisters of the Poor case, as does Congress legislatively, contra a short handful of Republicans who prefer Obamacare intact over any step toward getting rid of it), the requirement that health plan providers provide contraception to women at no cost to those women coverees and do so regardless of any question of conscience or religious tenet.

Naturally, Progressive-Democrats and the Left generally have their collective panties in a wedgie over that.  However, they carefully ignore certain inconvenient facts.

One inconvenience is the actual cost of contraception—to the user, not the rest of us who must pay for these “free” items.  Contraceptive pills can be had at places like Walmart for $9/mo, vaginal contraceptives are cheaper, condoms (don’t men have a role here, too?) are $6.50 the dozen.  These are not prices that will shatter anyone’s piggy bank.

Contraceptives are used to treat medical conditions, and they can be terribly expensive?  That’s the other inconvenience.  No they aren’t; those aren’t contraceptives.  They’re medications used for treating a medical condition; they happen to have a (if not the) major side effect of being anti-conceiving.  Insurance plans already covered such meds, and Obamacare could have, too, but the Progressive-Democratic Party eschewed that when they rammed through Obamacare.

In the end, there’s no reason anyone should pay for contraceptives other than the users.  Full stop.

Two Health Insurance Markets?

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The Wall Street Journal has misunderstood the situation and the proposal [emphasis added].

President Donald Trump’s executive order on health insurance, the most significant step so far to put his stamp on health policy, is designed to give more options to healthy consumers. It also could divide the insurance market in two.

What Trump is purportedly going to do with his Executive Order is

  • instruct[] federal agencies to loosen rules on health plans that the administration says have driven up premiums and reduced insurance offerings
  • direct the Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury Departments to lay the groundwork for the growth of association health plans, coverage that would have fewer mandated benefits than many current plans available to small employers and individuals [and] that wouldn’t be subject to the full range of ACA requirements, such as the mandated package of benefits.
  • departments, in addition, will be told to take steps to expand the availability of short-term medical plans …  allow people to once again buy plans in that category that could last for almost a year.

However, rather than create two health insurance markets, these actions would do no more than begin to create one health insurance market.  There is no extant health insurance market; there is nothing present to become part of “two markets.”  What we have presently is neither insurance nor a market for it.  What we have is a health coverage welfare program that has some (very poor) options from which we’re required to select one for ourselves.

The beginnings of a health insurance market, in addition to being an actual market for health insurance, would, though, lessen the importance of the mandated welfare program—to the benefit of all of us, including those trapped in that welfare program.

YGTBSM

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This is from a Food and Drug Administration warning letter to the owners of Nashoba Brook Bakery, via The Wall Street Journal:

Your…products are misbranded…because…the labels fail to bear a complete list of all the ingredients by common or usual name….

Your Nashoba Granola label lists ingredient “Love.” Ingredients required to be declared on the label or labeling of food must be listed by their common or usual name…. “Love” is not a common or usual name of an ingredient, and is considered to be intervening material because it is not part of the common or usual name of the ingredient.

The utter idiocy of this bureaucratic foolishness wants no further comment beyond a simple question: why are the letter writer and his supervisor still on the taxpayer’s payroll?  There are other complaints identified in the letter that would appear to be serious, but they’re deprecated, and the letter cannot be taken seriously with this kind of nonsense included.

Another Example

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…of government regulatory failure.  The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which regulates, among other financial institutions, brokerage houses, has its own investment portfolio.  FINRA charges fees from those it regulates for their privilege of being regulated.  And

In years when FINRA’s fee revenue exceeds forecasts and investment gains are strong, the regulator can rebate fees paid by firms it regulates.

Investment gains are strong.  However, FINRA turns out to be a crappy investor, getting just two-thirds of the return since 2004, when the regulatory body’s investment portfolio was created, that a simple-minded standard portfolio mix of 50% each of bonds and stocks would have gotten in the same period.  Its return shortfall, 3.4% vs that standard portfolio’s 6%, is a real money shortfall: $440 million for a portfolio of $1.6 billion.

And that has real impact on the regulatees that are so privileged: not only have there been no fee rebates since 2014, FINRA is raising fees on its regulatees to make up for its failure as an investor.

Go figure.

What’s Their Limiting Principle?

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Progressives, as The Wall Street Journal puts it,

believe that every human problem can be solved with a policy tweak. A ban here, a background check there, and, voila, no more mass shootings.

But what’s their limiting principle?  What level of gun control would satisfy them?  What fundamental concept would make them believe they’ve gone far enough with their tweaks, checks, bans on an American citizen’s access to the means of defending himself and his family?  Besides their empty rhetoric of “I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t take all your guns away…,” I mean.

Some statistics would seem to give the lie to the Progressive-Democrats’ claims both about the ubiquitousness of gun violence and the purpose of these persons’ desired “controls.”

[A] 2015 Congressional Research Service report found that from 1999 to 2013 assault rifles were used in 27% of public mass shootings. The Virginia Tech shooter in 2007 killed 32 people with two handguns. FBI statistics show that of 15,070 homicides in 2016, 374 people or 3% were killed with rifles. Some 656 homicides were committed with “personal weapons” (hands, fists, feet) and 1,604 with knives.

Guns just aren’t that important to the violence humans commit against each other.  This, in turn, gives that lie to Progressive-Democrats’ claimed goals of merely wanting to “control” our firearms; our use of them is not out of control.

The Left, the Progressive-Democrats, don’t have a limiting principle.  Their tweaks, checks, bans are only first steps.  Their purpose throughout this “debate” is to disarm us completely, so that Government—one of the entities the 2nd Amendment seeks to enable us to defend ourselves against—will have the only guns.

Now, why might that be, exactly?

And this from a different angle on the Left’s desire to disarm us, from Larry O’Connor at Mediaite:

The US government is systemically racist and, through its inaction, seems willing to allow innocent, black citizens to be murdered by its police force. Furthermore, the judicial system is often rigged to protect the evil, racist officers by never punishing them for those murders. Additionally, the very same government is now in the hands of a fascist, incompetent criminal who, not only hates blacks and Latinos so much that he is willing to let the latter die of starvation and thirst [in Puerto Rico] rather than deliver humanitarian aid to them, but also calls the former [NFL player kneelers] “Sons of bitches” for protesting the racist country he oversees….

…if I really thought this country was so evil and so racist…I certainly wouldn’t want that evil, fascist, incompetent, and racist government to determine who could and could not arm themselves.

Why would a thinking American want a Government so evil to have the only guns?

The position on gun control of the Left generally and of the Progressive-Democratic Party in particular not only has no limiting principle, it makes no sense within itself.

 

h/t Grim’s Hall for the Mediaite link.