Category Archives: regulation

Now’s the Chance

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President Barack Obama has admitted what Senator Max Baucus said a month ago: that his Obamacare is a train wreck coming down the tracks.  Obama has delayed until 2015—i.e., until after the midterm elections—the implementation of the employer mandate.  With this mandate, large employers would have been required to provide health “insurance” for all of their full-time-equivalent employees or face a fine of $2,000 per employee.  (Note that the existence of that fine puts a floor under the per-employee cost of insurance of some $2,000 per covered employee.)

No one was ready for employer mandate part of the train wreck.  Not the employers, although they have been variously cutting back on employees, employee hours, and/or hiring in order to hold their numbers to a bearable cost.  Not the IRS, which quite apart from the criminal aspects of its operation is wholly unprepared—employees or software—to manage its tracking and enforcement task.  Not HHS, which hasn’t even been able to write draft rules good enough for comment, much less for publication.

This represents a golden opportunity for the Republican Party.  They were handed a gift by the Supreme Court in the summer of 2012 when that body upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare.  Had it been struck, the Republicans would have been caught flat-footed with no viable alternative, and the Democrats would have had a field day beating them about the head and shoulders for being whiners without a solution.

Now’s the chance for the Republicans to recover from that unpreparedness.  In addition to voting to repeal Obamacare one more time, the House has from now through late summer 2014 to pass an actual alternative to Obamacare.  Such an alternative might be three bills: one to take down barriers and allow health insurance to be sold interstate, with no mandates for minimum coverage.  Let the doctors, patients, and market decide what policies (and there will be a lot of them) should be available, and a policy available for sale in New York ought to be saleable in California, also; only the market should make that determination, not any Know Better Government.  Moreover, these policies should be saleable for risk-based premiums, not community premiums.  One group of Americans should not be forced to subsidize another.

Another bill could be a sort of Truth in Advertising bill.  The House should pass a standard, plain English language policy format that mandates that each item to be covered or excluded is to be described in these terms, so that a potential insuree (and his doctor if desired) can compare policies from different insurers and be able to understand the tradeoffs he’s getting when he selects one policy over another.  All without having to talk to an insurance agent for the explanation (or even to view the policy at all), unless the insuree wants to.  This bill might also give the health insurance industry two years (say) to come up with their own standard language, or the House-passed format will go into effect.

A third bill could involve the health provision industry.  This one might center on the publication of performance statistics by hospitals and doctors: admission lengths vs readmission rates vs regional averages, surgery types vs success rates vs regional averages, treatment types vs re-treatment rates vs regional averages, and the like.

Senate Republicans should take up the matter, too, and either work to force a Senate (roll call) vote on their version or work to force a Senate (roll call) vote on the House version when it comes up.  Of course either version will fail in the Senate, and we can anticipate Obama veto threats, too.  But the Republicans will have the Democrats, in the runup to the 2014 midterms, on the record, ideally by name on the failed votes, as opposing serious, material health care reform.  Those Democrats can be called to account for their demonstrated preference for a train wreck that their constituencies—we Americans—have broadly and volubly disliked since before Obamacare was enacted.  We’ll also know who the RINOs were that contributed to blocking these reform bills; they can be dealt with in the primaries.

Government and Privacy

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) signed a bill last week penalizing those who publish the names of individuals who own or have applied for a concealed handgun permit with potential jail sentences of six months and fines of $10,000.

An identity may only be released if a concealed handgun carrier is charged with a felony offense involving the use of a firearm.

The Advocate Editor Peter Kovacs doesn’t get it.   He insists there’s no place for such legislation; his protest is typical of the NLMSM.  Indeed, the NLMSM’s general condoning of The Journal News‘ publication of the names and addresses of New York area gun owners—mostly plainly demonstrated by NLMSM silence on the matter—demonstrates that the press generally cannot be trusted to respect individual privacy.

Jindal was clear in his defense of the law:

In the face of an administration in Washington that wants to take away the rights of law-abiding gun owners, we are standing up for the Second Amendment and the Constitution of the United States here in Louisiana.

We are building on the work we’ve done to protect the rights of Louisianians while also implementing common-sense gun safety measures[.]

The principle is plain and simple: nor government nor the press get to invade citizens’ privacy just because they’re curious or want to sell newspapers.  Only the self-serving and self-important have a problem here.

Mandates and Freedom

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Recall that HHS’ original rule regarding contraceptive coverage by “insurance” companies

exempted churches and other houses of worship, but required faith-affiliated charities, universities and other nonprofits to provide the coverage for their employees.

HHS’ finalized rule, which they claim is an outstanding compromise,

simplified the definition of religious organizations that are fully exempt from the requirement.  The change means a church that also ran a soup kitchen would not have to comply.

But “faith-affiliated charities, universities and other nonprofits” still are required to provide the contraceptive coverage.  Moreover,

religious nonprofits must notify their insurance company that they object to birth control coverage.  The insurer or administrator of the plan will then notify affected employees separately that coverage will be provided at no cost.  The insurers would be reimbursed by a credit against fees owed the government.

Of course, HHS omits to say to whom there is no cost.  It’s also unclear what happens in the event there are more credits than fees.  Who pays the difference?  In either event, it seems clear to me, it’s the taxpayers—and the “insurers’ ” customers—who pay.

Eric Rassbach, of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, has pointed out

As we said when the proposed rule was issued, this doesn’t solve the religious conscience problem because it still makes our non-profit clients the gatekeepers to abortion and provides no protection to religious businesses[.]

Michael Hash, Director of the HHS Office of Health Reform, demurs from that description.  Faith-based groups, says he, were given another reprieve, until 1 Jan, to comply.

But they still have to comply—screw ’em.

Here is an impact of capricious Federal regulation (apologies for the redundancy) on individual liberty.

Regulation(s) and our Economy

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The American Enterprise Institute‘s AEIdeas has looked at the economic cost of Federal regulation and growth in regulation; this study and one by The Heritage Foundation make…interesting…reading in conjunction with each other.

Here’s the money headline on the AEI report:

Federal regulations have lowered real GDP growth by 2% per year since 1949 and made America 72% poorer

And the money graph:

And now some highlights [emphasis in the original]:

Macroeconomists typically divide government economic activity into four broad classes: spending, taxation, deficits, and monetary policy.  There is, however, a fifth class of activity that may well have important effects on economic activity but that nevertheless has received little attention in the macroeconomic literature: regulation.  Although microeconomists have analyzed both the causes and effects of regulation for decades, macroeconomists have joined the discussion only much more recently, with a number of empirical studies suggesting that regulation has significant macroeconomic effects.

They conclude, in the main:

Regulation’s overall effect on output’s growth rate is negative and substantial.  Federal regulations added over the past fifty years have reduced real output growth by about two percentage points on average over the period 1949-2005.  That reduction in the growth rate has led to an accumulated reduction in GDP of about $38.8 trillion as of the end of 2011.  That is, GDP at the end of 2011 would have been $53.9 trillion instead of $15.1 trillion if regulation had remained at its 1949 level.  One channel through which regulation has reduced output is TFP*.  We find that federal regulation can explain much of the famous and famously puzzling productivity slowdown of the 1970s.

Hmm…

 

* Total-Factor Productivity (TFP) is a variable which accounts for effects in total output not caused by inputs (inputs here are the classic factors of production: raw materials and labor, for instance).  Technology Growth and Efficiency are regarded as two of the biggest sub-sections of Total Factor Productivity, and now, Federal regulation is shown to be a major sub-section, also.

Arrogance

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Fox News‘ headline says it all:

Obama planning to sidestep Congress for next phase in climate change agenda

He came through on that in his Tuesday speech: he intends to implement his climate change claptrap by diktat through his EPA, wholly ignoring the will of the people and our representatives.  In the realization of his speech, his

national plan to combat climate change…include[s] the first-ever federal regulations on carbon dioxide emitted by existing power plants….

In a speech at Georgetown University Tuesday Obama…announce[d] he’s issuing a presidential memorandum to implement the regulations….

And

…he is directing his administration to allow enough renewables on public lands to power 6 million homes by 2020, effectively doubling the capacity from solar, wind and geothermal projects on federal property.

But he won’t allow oil and gas drilling—or the associated jobs and cheap energy.  Expensive energy that the unemployed can’t get is better, you see.  Additionally, there’ll be

…$8 billion in federal loan guarantees to spur investment in technologies that can keep carbon dioxide produced by power plants from being released into the atmosphere.

Never minding that actual science, rather than the pseudo-science of his followers, has shown that CO2 is a trailing indicator of increasing health of the planet.

Congress?  I don’ need no stinkin’ Congress.