Tag Archives: political economy

Medicaid-Receiving Companies Object to the Senate Bill

Posted on by
Reply

The Senate is proposing an overhaul of Obamacare and an improvement to the health coverage providing industry, and one of those improvements is a rollback of the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid and an eventual capping of Federal funds transfers to the States’ Medicaid programs.  There are objections to this.

The primary objections are from insurers and hospitals, et al., who get a significant fraction of their income from the guarantees of Medicaid payments; they don’t want to have to compete in the open market.  They prefer the supposed safety of that guaranteed income, paltry though it is, especially compared to the income available from a free market, and they don’t care what that “safety” costs those who must pay for it.

The States themselves, for instance, in addition to financing their own Medicaid programs, are required to contribute to other States’ Medicaid programs through those Federal tax transfers, and by extension they’re forced to contribute to other States’ spending decisions generally.

Let Medicaid be the State-run program it was intended to be. Keeping the monies that would otherwise be transferred to other States would both leave more money for funding a State’s own program and force each State to become more fiscally responsible, instead of exercising a claim on other States’ money.  That fiscal responsibility also will contribute to the rising prosperity of freer market.

And let the health care providers and coverage providers compete for income from that much larger market.

Obstructionism

Posted on by
Reply

…for the sake of obstructionism.  And now the Progressive-Democrats in the Senate are getting blatant about it.  They don’t want to help reform the health care coverage disaster of the last eight years, so to block Republican and Conservative efforts at reform, these Progressive-Democrats have decided to block everything in the Senate.  Here’s Senator Chris Murphy (D, CT) o the overall attitude:

What more could we do—hold Republican Senators by the arms to stop them from getting to the chamber?  I think we’ll use every tool at our disposal.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) even arranged to force cancelation of all committee meetings last Monday, regardless of the subject or purpose of those meetings.  No business was allowed to be conducted—all to block health care coverage reform.

Meanwhile, these Progressive-Democrats are ignoring the millions of Americans who are about to lose all coverage as coverage provider after coverage provider leave the Obamacare markets and withdraw from the ObamaMarts in the States.  Iowa, for instance, is about to lose all providers of individual plans—every single one of them—and no Iowa citizen will have access to market coverage.

This blanket obstructionism while the health coverage industry burns stinks, it’s damaging to Americans who need or want health care insurance, and it’s destructive of our democracy.

More on Foolish

Posted on by
Reply

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Charles Evans said Tuesday that the U.S. central bank can wait until the end of the year before making the decision to raise rates again, while adding it could start reducing the size of its balance sheet before that.

Indeed.  We could wait a decade, too.  Both delays are about equally foolish.

Increasing interest rates on debt, whether market rates of Federal Reserve benchmark rates, are inherently inflationary.  Thus: the Fed needs to set its rates to levels consistent with target inflation, and then sit down, and be quiet.

Mr Evans also said in the interview that even if the Fed does hold off on rate rises until very late in the year, that needn’t stop the institution from pressing forward with its plans to allow its balance sheet to start shrinking at some point this year.

Indeed.  The Fed needs to take this separate step, regardless, and get rid of the massive amount of Treasury debt it bought as part of its failed stimulus policy.  The Fed isn’t a stimulus institution: its role is strictly the maintenance of stable market pricing and full employment (the latter which shouldn’t be a mandate as full employment will fall out of long-term price stability).

The Nub of the Thing

Posted on by
Reply

In a Deutsche Welle piece on the likelihood of Emmanuel Macron being able to reform French labor and pension law, is this statement by Julie Hamann, a political scientist with the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.

The French have high expectations of the state, for it to fulfill its protective function with regard to social welfare.  As soon as reforms are announced that may lead to cuts in social services or labor market insecurity, this very quickly gives rise to very great and very emotional fears.

It doesn’t get any clearer than that.  The French people—French society—expects government to play the major role in doing for them; individual personal responsibility for a Frenchman’s own future is secondary and operable only within a Government provided framework.

Macron and his La République en Marche! party may well fail as resoundingly as did Alain Juppe, who had the major French labor union on his side 22 years ago but couldn’t do the deed, and as resoundingly as did Dominique de Villepin, whose plan already had passed through Parliament 11 years ago when he folded and canceled reforms similar to Macron’s.

Macron is a younger man, and his party is populated by newcomers still fired by their idealism and disdain, if not disgust, for the establishment.  But he will need to go directly against the forces of the people—the popular establishment of a sort—if he’s to succeed.

Macron will change the foundation of French social thinking with his proposals.  He and a sufficiency of his party must have the courage to lead in order to enact his proposals—and to face the consequences if his policies, rammed through and held to, do not lift the French economy into prosperity-generating dynamism.

Another Example

Posted on by
Reply

…of the failure of government intervention in “green” energy.  And of the lack of understanding of the problem by the participants.  This four minute video via Deutsche Welle tells the tale.

A group of Spanish farmers, in order to “improve their pensions and to do something for the environment,” banded together to build a solar farm, Spain’s biggest cooperative solar park, an operation of solar cell collectors at roughly €90,000 per module.

The central takeaway:

[T]he modern facility is currently losing money because the conservative government has drastically cut the subsidies for solar power.

The solar farm is not economic viable, it cannot compete in the market place, without those subsidies, without OPM.  The thing simply is not market ready.

The lack of understanding is in the plaints that this is someone else’s fault; it can’t possibly be a poor business decision to rely on a technology that can’t compete and that isn’t ready for prime time.

I feel swindled by my own government, by the politicians we Spaniards voted into office.

And

The big energy companies regard us small investors as enemies because we threaten their monopoly on the market.

Except that these “small investors” don’t have anything with which to challenge them without all that OPM to prop you up.  Their enemy—and the small investors’—is that government subsidy.

One bit of slanting by DW: there is a vague reference to a tax on solar cell installations on private homes in that region of Spain.  However, DW chose to provide no context for that reference: what the tax is for, how much it is, what is actually being taxed, and so on.