Category Archives: regulation

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.

Losing Health Coverage

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The CBO and Progressive-Democrats in Congress loudly claim that millions will lose their health coverage plans under Republican plans to repeal and replace Obamacare.

What the Progressive-Democrats are carefully ignoring (the CBO not so much; they weren’t tasked with comparing the Republican plans and Obamacare) are the real millions that already are losing or are about to lose their health coverage plans because Obamacare is collapsing now.

The nation’s second largest health insurance company, Anthem, will extract itself from the majority of the ObamaCare market in the state of Ohio by 2018, the company announced Tuesday, raising questions about the future of its exchange participation.

And

The decision could leave 20 counties within the state without access to coverage under the Affordable Care Act[.]

Anthem is considering leaving Obamacare altogether in the not-too-distant future.

Anthem handles over a million customers in the health coverage market, now considerably fewer under Obamacare, and perhaps shortly none at all.  Nor is Anthem alone in being unable to continue under Obamacare.  Aetna and Humana will be leaving next year, and those customers will be losing their coverage.

Those people actually, not speculatively, are losing their coverage.

Expanding their Empire?

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The SEC—the Securities and Exchange Commission—doesn’t have enough power; it wants to convince more private companies, over which it has no jurisdiction, to go public so it can regulate them, too?

To spur more companies to go public, the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission has turned to a veteran Silicon Valley lawyer whose career has involved some of the biggest deals in history.

SEC Commissioner Jay Clayton seems to be sincere in this effort, but he won’t be around forever, and his predecessor had different regulatory ideas, and so likely will his successors.

Then there’s this:

“The real question is do small-growth companies have access to capital, and they do,” said Robin Graham, Managing Director and Head of Technology, Media and Communications at Oppenheimer & Co Inc. “It’s just in the private markets.”

There’s a hint there.

Going Soft

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Senate pseudo-Republicans are balking at one good item that was contained the House-passed American Health Care Act: repeal of Obamacare’s trillion dollars’ worth of taxes.  These guys actually don’t see the value of that repeal.  Senator Susan Collins (R, ME) is typical:

I don’t see how you can repeal all of the pay-fors…and still meet the goal of providing health-insurance coverage for people who truly need assistance[.]

Aside from the false premise of needing Federal government “pay-fors” as a default position, rather than a last result, the Lady from Maine and her fellows plainly either don’t understand free market principles, or they have no confidence in free markets.

One path for the Senate could be a repeal of the taxes but a delay in the effective dates.

This is the only legitimate point of discussion on the repeal of these taxes.  The AHCA makes the repeal retroactive to 1 Jan 2017.  It’s the repeal that’s important, not its date of effectivity.  Effective 1 Jan 2018 is fine, so is a date (certain) in 2019, to the extent health coverage providers, businesses, and individual citizens need time to plan and prepare.  The repeal itself, however, must be inarguable.

I’ve decried the House’s Freedom Caucus of No, but the Caucus of Squish in the Senate is going too far in the other direction.  These folks need to do the job they were sent to the Senate to do vis-à-vis Obamacare and our nation’s health provision and health coverage industries.  Failing to repeal the Obamacare taxes in addition to the reductions in other business and personal taxes that have been proposed is unacceptable.  If the Caucus of Squish fails to do this, its members need to be replaced at the next available elections for each of them.

If that costs the Republican Party control of the Senate, well—how will we tell the difference?  The Caucus of Squish is, with its timidity, worse even than the Progressive-Democratic Party.