Category Archives: regulation

Obamacare Replacement

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One aspect of the plan on offer in the House is this:

…whether it includes enough reform to arrest the current death spiral in the individual insurance market.

Notably, the bill includes a new 10-year $100 billion “stability fund” that allows states to start to repair their individual insurance markets. Before ObamaCare, it wasn’t inevitable that costs would increase by 25% on average this year, or that nearly a third of US counties would become single-insurer monopolies. With better policy choices, states can make coverage cheaper and more attractive for consumers and coax insurers back into the market, and the stability fund is a powerful tool.

Right idea, but it needs a tweak.  As with all Federal transfers to the States (even though nearly all of them do not have this), this transfer needs a sunset (ideally, but not as a deal breaker, on a declining balance to the sunset date) by which the transfer will cease to exist.  States need time to adjust their budgets as their addiction to Federal money is broken, but in the end the costs a State inflicts on itself must be the sole responsibility of that State.

Then there’s this:

The larger goal is to start to restore the traditional state regulatory authority over health insurance that ObamaCare supplanted for federal control. Local governments understand local needs best. With more flexibility, autonomy and accountability, the GOP hope is that reform Governors can pry open markets and help promote a larger and more dynamic business.

The larger goal still, and an even better one, should be to reduce regulation altogether to a great degree, and let the markets regulate health insurance products and costs.

In the end, too, local governments do understand local needs better than remote Federal, and State, governments.  But the greatest understanding is even more local: the patient and his doctor.  These are the participants in a free market for health insurance products—nation-wide and freely crossing State borders—whose “regulatory” activities should prevail.

Republican Gadflies

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Karl Rove talked about health care coverage prospects in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, and that triggered a thought in my pea brain.

Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) has announced that the House plan on offer, a plan designed to be passable through reconciliation, with later phases of repeal and replace for completing the task, is dead on arrival, and the House shoe start over and produce a more comprehensive plan in this first phase.  But Cotton has chosen to not offer a plan of his own, or outline what a plan acceptable to him would look like other than to address taxes and to more fully repeal right damn now Obamacare, or even to offer the tactics he’d use to get the new plan—which could not be done through reconciliation—past a Progressive-Democrat filibuster.

Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) similarly demands a broader bill right damn now, but he, too, has chosen to offer no tactics for getting his bill past a Senate Progressive-Democrat filibuster.  He’s just using the copout excuse that that’s the Senate’s problem.  Oh, and Jordan also declines to identify the value of a bill that can’t be passed.

Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) at least has offered an actual plan, but he, too, has declined to identify how he expects to get his plan past a Progressive-Democrat filibuster.

These gadflies keep demanding that everyone else put up (these three’s demands) or shut up.  It’s time these three put up; otherwise, they’re just porch dogs, yapping from the safety of their stoops.

Dismembering Government?

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If the advance word leaks about President Donald Trump’s upcoming budget proposal can be believed, it would appear that his swamp-draining and Government downsizing are about to get start.  And “news” outlets like CNN are getting their panties bunched over the prospect.  This is from this outlet’s piece, tellingly headlined Trump’s plan to dismember government:

It would codify an assault on regulatory regimes over the environment, business and education bequeathed by former President Barack Obama, and attempt to halt decades of steadily growing government reach.

And this:

Slicing up government power is part of a deeper antipathy towards institutions and the political establishment that runs deep in the Trump White House.

Yewbetcha. And among us poor, dumb, gun-toting, Bible-clinging, irredeemably deplorable denizens of flyover country, too.

And this from The Washington Post, albeit a bit less strident than CNN:

President Trump’s budget proposal this week would shake the federal government to its core if enacted, culling back numerous programs and expediting a historic contraction of the federal workforce.

And this from the Post‘s cite of Robert Reischauer, of an earlier time’s CBO:

These are not the kind of cuts that you can accommodate by tightening the belt one notch, by shaving a little bit off of a program, or by downsizing a few staff here or there.  These are cuts that would require a wholesale triage of a vast array of federal activities.

Dismember government: ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished.

Privacy

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Cross-posted from my comment on the matter at Grim’s Hall and based on a CNN article.

From Comey’s quote as provided by CNN:

There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America….

That’s his (cynically offered, because I don’t agree he’s either as stupid or as ignorant as he’d have to be otherwise) straw man; he’ll have to play with his dolly without me.

He also has distorted (deliberately, if not from his lack of understanding, coming from Government’s perspective as he does) what the Founders wrought:

Our founders struck a bargain that is at the center of this amazing country of ours and has been for over two centuries.

No. Not even close. Our Founders allocated to the Federal government a strictly limited set of authorities and powers to execute them. There was, and is, no bargain other than the one that exists between any employer and employee: do your job, or I’ll fire you. And as one of our social compact documents puts it on two occasions, at gunpoint if needs be.

Full stop.

Perhaps this distorted view of things is near the core of his failures to perform–three times–vis-à-vis Hillary Clinton during the campaign, and again since the inauguration.

Misguided

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In light of whose DoJ it’s been doing this most recently, it’s easy to say it was nefarious.  But the whole thing could be eliminated with either of a couple of steps and a change in underlying procedure.

What is “it?”  It’s a secret (or merely secretive) slush fund fed by settlement proceeds from DoJ civil suits against large banks.

When big banks are sued by the government for discrimination or mortgage abuse, they can settle the cases by donating to third-party non-victims. The settlements do not specify how these third-party groups could use the windfall.

So far, investigators have accounted for $3 billion paid to “non-victim entities.”

Those third-party non-victims, under the Obama administration, were grassroots activist organizations favored by the Obama crowd.  These organizations consisted of the National Council of La Raza, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the National Urban League, and the like.

That arouses suspicion.  As Ted Frank, Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Director of the Center for Class Action Fairness, put it,

The underlying problem with the slush funds is we don’t know exactly where the money is going. Using enforcement authority to go after corporate defendants, DoJ bureaucrats are taking billions away from taxpayers to fund their pet projects overriding congressional preferences.

It’s bad enough that the money is going to those favored groups—directly to them and not going through DoJ or Treasury enroute—but as Frank noted, it’s taxpayer monies once the banks have paid the settlements, whether these were legitimate settlements or coerced ones.

It also turns out that much of the funding of the slush funds are “voluntary” extra payments, “encouraged” by DoJ.  Except that when DoJ is holding a lawsuit over the banks’ heads, there’s very little voluntary about acceding to “encouragement.”

The better solution is one of two: pay the money exclusively to the Treasury Department for the use of the Federal government.  That, though, leaves in place incentives for DoJ to browbeat the banks rather than seek justice for those the banks have been alleged to be cheating.  The better alternative, then, is for the banks to pay the money directly to the alleged victims.

The change in underlying procedure—the best solution—is for DoJ to stop being spring-loaded to settling.  If they have a case, bring it to court, and push the pace on it (the banks should do this, too; neither side should be allowed to stall the other).  If DoJ isn’t ready to bring the case, it should drop it altogether.  The settlements, even well-intended ones, just look like lawfare extortion.