Category Archives: regulation

Questions for Susan Collins

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Susan Collins is the Republican Senator from Maine whose refusal to vote for the health care reform bill on offer (and any of the prior efforts) is centered on her insistence that the bill’s cuts to reductions to growth in Medicaid payments to the States—Maine in particular—are too great.  Collins needs to be asked, and required to give straight, substantive answers to, a number of questions.

What is Maine’s government doing to reduce the costs to its citizens of health care and of health coverage?

What is Maine’s government doing to make health care available to its citizens in the absence of health coverage?

On what is Maine’s government spending its citizens’ tax money on instead of Medicaid?  What does the Maine government consider to be more important than the health of its citizens?

On what basis does she insist that the citizens of New York, Illinois, California, Texas—any of the other 49 States—must be required to pay into Maine’s Medicaid program?

The Cruz Amendment

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Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) has a provision in the latest Senate health bill that’s on offer, one that would allow sellers of actual health insurance to sell non-Obamacare compliant policies on the condition that they also sold Obamacare compliant plans on the ObamaMart.  The idea, and it’s a sound one, is that those plans, better tailored their customers’ needs, would soon have commensurately lower premiums, deductibles, and copays and thereby be more affordable.

Health plan sellers don’t like it, though.

While this setup could offer healthy people less expensive policies, insurers and actuaries say it would likely prove dysfunctional over time, pushing up rates and reducing offerings for people buying the compliant plans.

That’s a market decision, though; nothing in the provision or in the overall bill would require the plan sellers offer fewer compliant plans or at higher premiums.

Aside from that, those non-compliant plans would be better tailored—market forces would require it—have fewer items covered that a plan purchaser doesn’t want or need—market forces would push plan sellers to stop forcing contraceptive coverage on men and geriatrics or prostate cancer coverage onto women—and they would, as advertised, have much lower premiums, smaller deductibles, and lower copays.

They would also attract customers, low income and others, from those ObamaMart plans into the non-compliant market because those better tailored and cheaper plans would better suit their needs, too.

Maybe the health care coverage welfare plan providers—sorry, the health insurance companies—don’t want the noise of competition; maybe they prefer the steady, safe income of government subsidies in the form of customers trapped in their protected monopoly in the health “insurance” industry.  Maybe that’s why so many of these companies are leaving ObamaMarts, leaving folks with few plan choices or no plans to buy at all—because the industry as Obamacare has changed it is so sound.

On the other hand, the Progressive-Democrats in Congress should jump on this provision with both feet.  Obamacare plans are terrific, they insist.  Surely, in their wonderfulness, these plans would win resoundingly in the competition of the market place.  Especially with so many of those plans still subsidized through other provisions in the bill.  Wouldn’t they?

On Whose Side Is He?

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Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) has said he will not vote for the latest Senate effort at beginning the repeal and replace process of Obamacare.  He claims he can’t tell the difference between this offer and the Obamacare that exists because, in part, it leaves some of the Obamacare taxes in place.

Never mind that a critical difference between the offer and Obamacare is that the offer does repeal some of the Obamacare taxes.

The offer isn’t a perfect bill, but it represents progress, and it’s not a final answer—and I know of no one, other than a few Senators, perhaps, who are arguing that it is; that there will be, can be, no possibility of coming back next year to make more progress and coming back in the next Congress to make yet more in each of those two years.

Furthermore, there aren’t enough votes to get all of the Obamacare taxes passed in this bill.  And, at least some Obamacare taxes must be repealed in order to be able to effect significant tax code reform.

Finally, the only politically possible alternative to passing a bill that repeals only some of the Obamacare taxes is to preserve the status quo and all of the Obamacare taxes.

Paul knows all of this, of course; he’s just virtue signaling.

I have to ask, then: on whose side is he?

The Health Care Choice

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The Wall Street Journal has the right of it, and it’s a stark one for the Republican Party and for us Americans.  The House and the Senate bills for getting rid of Obamacare and replacing it with something better are far from perfect, but they are significant improvements over the Obamacare assault on Americans’ access to health care, and on individual liberty and responsibility.  Further, the House plan has always been billed as the first part of a three-part effort at complete repeal and replacement; it’s never been claimed to be a final answer.  And the Senate bill on offer is not one, either.  Senate Republicans are well aware of this.

However, posturing Republican Senators from both the Conservative (or so they claim) and the middle regions of the party, no better than the openly kickback-demanding Progressive-Democrats of 2009 Congress infamy, are standing in the way of any progress at all.

Here’s the choice, then, with which these persons are faced: doing the deal and passing an improvement over the disaster that is Obamacare, with its growing loss of access even to health coverage plans, much less actual health care, and coming back next year for further improvement, or inflicting the continued failure of Obamacare on Americans foolish enough to have trusted these guys.

Here’s the collateral damage from failure that would be inevitable from making the wrong choice and the avoidance of which was a major motivation for electing Donald Trump: loss of control of the Senate to the Progressive-Democratic Party, and with that, loss of the Supreme Court for generations, if not permanently.  Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer all are likely to retire in the next three years.  Justice Clarence Thomas may well, also.  The Progressive-Democrats will block conservative, textualist Justice nominations, for whom the Constitution actually matters as the supreme Law of the Land, and will get confirmed—one way or another—three (or four) Justices in the Ginsburg (“the Constitution is a living document that lives through judicial rulings rather than Art V”) or Thurgood Marshall (“I rule and let the law catch up”) mold.  This would be an even worse disaster to our Republic and to our liberty than continuance of Obamacare, which only threatens our fiscal weal.

General Reform

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25% of us don’t see doctors because that costs too much.

32% of older millennials (is there such a thing?  Gad) skip the doctor.  13% of Americans don’t have any health coverage plan at all—paying the penalty is more valuable to them.  Half of us don’t think we’ll have affordable health insurance much less Obamacare’s health coverage welfare.

This, together with today’s other post, just illustrates the fact that no single part of our economy—or of our Federal government—can effectively be treated in isolation: not Obamacare alone, not Federal spending alone (especially not by “cutting” through reducing the rate of growth in spending), not taxing alone, not debt handling alone.

They’re a system, and the system as a whole must be reformed, not convenient parts of it.  That’s Systems Management 101.