Tag Archives: political economy

Obamacare and Insurance Costs

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Here are some of those costs.

No less a light than The New York Times reports that

…health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.  Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.  In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22%, Anthem Blue Cross 26%, and Blue Shield of California 20% for some of those policy holders.

OpenMarket notes that

Obamacare resulted in hikes of 41%-47% in health insurance premiums for some policyholders in Connecticut.  …in other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20% for some policy holders.

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, writing in Huff Post Business, says

Your medical plan is facing an unexpected expense, so you probably are, too.  It’s a new, $63-per-head fee to cushion the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.  The charge, buried in a recent regulation, works out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies….

On top of this, The Washington Post reminds us that President Barack Obama slid into his Obamacare a 3.5% surtax on those insurers that participate in Obamacare’s Federal health insurance exchanges.  Of course, this fee will be passed through to their customers in the form of higher health insurance premiums.

There are causes for these sharp increases, as we might expect.  Merrill Matthews and Mark Litow, in The Wall Street Journal, have some ideas on this.  They point out, for instance, some costs that Obamacare imposes, willy-nilly, on insurers—transforming them from companies that accept risk for a fee into Federally mandated, privately funded welfare programs:

Central to ObamaCare are requirements that health insurers (1) accept everyone who applies (guaranteed issue), (2) cannot charge more based on serious medical conditions (modified community rating), and (3) include numerous coverage mandates that force insurance to pay for many often uncovered medical conditions.

There is no risk-based fee allowed here.  Just take all comers, and don’t “overcharge” them—HHS’ definition of “overcharge.”  Folks won’t need to buy insurance until they’re actually sick—the risk has been realized—but the insurers won’t be able to charge a premium commensurate with the empirical fact of illness; they can only charge the premium in effect for a low risk, healthy population that hasn’t gotten sick yet.

Matthews and Litow also note that this outcome was well-known long before Obamacare was dreamed up post-2008:

Eight states—New Jersey, New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Washington, Kentucky, Vermont and Massachusetts—enacted guaranteed issue and community rating in the mid-1990s and wrecked their individual (i.e., non-group) health-insurance markets.  Premiums increased so much that Kentucky largely repealed its law in 2000 and some of the other states eventually modified their community-rating provisions.

They also note that, based on empirical evidence—i.e., facts already known to the authors of Obamacare—states with currently low insurance rates will be the most punished by Obamacare:

We compared the average premiums in states that already have ObamaCare-like provisions in their laws and found that consumers in New Jersey, New York, and Vermont already pay well over twice what citizens in many other states pay.  Consumers in Maine and Massachusetts aren’t far behind.  Those states will likely see a small increase.

By contrast, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Wyoming, and Virginia will likely see the largest increases—somewhere between 65% and 100% [a different estimate than the lower one of OpenMarket].  Another 18 states, including Texas and Michigan, could see their rates rise between 35% and 65%.

Finally,

Although President Obama repeatedly claimed that health-insurance premiums for a family would be $2,500 lower by the end of his first term, they are actually about $3,000 higher—a spread of about $5,500 per family.

It’s the Progressive New Math, from the Orwell School of High Finance: cost increases are premium cuts.

Digital Democracy and Intellectual Property Rights

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Aaron Swartz was a freedom of the Internet activist and an alleged hacker who was being prosecuted under an accusation of having hacked into an MIT JSTOR repository and downloading millions of copyrighted documents and making them freely available.  During pre-trial plea bargain negotiations, he committed suicide.  His suicide has put a spotlight on a serious debate, this one between intellectual property and digital democracy.

This debate flows from a false dichotomy.  Digital democracy demands the existence of intellectual property (rights), for without intellectual property rights, there can be no (digital) democracy—there can be only the rule of the stronger over the weaker, or the richer over the poorer.

Our own social compact recognizes the importance of this.  Article I, Section 8 says

The Congress shall have Power…To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries[.]

Without such protections, there can be little incentive to invent at all, physically or intellectually, since the work can be taken by anyone with the physical or financial means to do so and made freely available—or for a fee of the taker’s choosing and payable only to the taker—thereby denying the inventor the ability to recoup even his development costs, much less to earn a living from his work.  Moreover, those inventions that can have significant financial value in a market and so will be developed anyway will, without such protections, be developed only in secret, at the attendant slow pace, and then only made available at high cost to well-off buyers—since once made available at all, the secret will be public and the mechanism of the invention freely available.  In short, the wherewithal to innovate will not exist for the common man, being only available to the strongest or the richest, and so innovation will occur only glacially and secretively, or not at all.

It is, further, the protection of property rights, intellectual or any other, that gives a man the wherewithal to improve his own lot in life, to increase his own prospects and prosperity, to satisfy his duty to family, friends, and neighbors.  It is the (temporary) monopoly control over his invention that enables the inventor to recoup his costs and subsequently to earn his living from that work.

On a practical level, it’s expensive to feed, digitize, and organize, for instance, JSTOR’s millions of files; accordingly, JSTOR charges subscription fees to recoup those costs.  Were Swartz and his fellows allowed to proceed with such hacks, innovations like JSTOR might not even exist to be attacked.

Reasonable men can argue about how long a man’s monopoly protection of his invention should last, but that he should enjoy that sole control over his invention and its issue for some period should be beyond dispute.

Americans, Deadbeats, and Bills

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President Barack Obama, the other day, announced that we’re a not a nation of deadbeats; we pay our bills.  What are the facts?

Brett Arends, in a recent Wall Street Journal Market Watch article offers some.

Far from paying our bills, the current generation of Americans—or some of them—have set records for default which probably have no parallel in the history of the human race.  During the last five years, US individuals have walked away from a staggering $585 billion in mortgages, credit card debts and other personal loans.  That works out at about $6,000 per household.

And if the numbers are to be believed, there is probably a lot more to come.

For instance,

According to the Federal Reserve, US household debts peaked five years ago at a gigantic $13.8 trillion.  Since then it has declined to $12.9 trillion—a decline of about 7%.  To put that in context, household debts today still exceed those seen at the end of 2006, near the peak of the bubble.  They are three times what they were in 1998.

The outcome includes

The total debt reduction from the peak, says the Fed, is $954 billion.  Loan write-offs [from those “walk aways”], at $585 billion, account for 60% of that.  In other words…in the last five years Americans have walked away from $3 in debt for every $2 they’ve paid off.

Does all of this make us a nation of deadbeats, though?  Let’s look at some more facts.  Arends notes

[T]his has occurred even while the federal government has bailed out bankrupt financial institutions, and flooded the economy with massive deficits, low interest rates and free money to make it all easier.

The policies have altered the incentives to make it easier to walk away from our debts.  But that’s not all there is to it.

Richard Vetter, in a same-day WSJ op-ed, offers some more facts.

From the mid-17th century to the late 20th century, the American economy grew roughly 3.5% a year.  That growth rate has since declined significantly.  When the final figures are in for 2012, the annual rate of real output growth for the first dozen years of this century is likely to be about 1.81%.

What accounts for the slowdown?  An important part of the answer is simple: Americans aren’t working as much today.  And this trend reflects more than the recession and sluggish economy of the past few years.

This chart, covering the last 65 years, illustrates the matter starkly.

Before continuing, a digression is in order.  Recall a couple of the dates Arends mentioned above.  Today’s household debt is greater than it was during the housing bubble peak in 2006.  At that time, we were already well on the way down in workforce participation, yet the Panic was still two years off.  Today’s household debt is three times what it was in 1998.  1998 is the 65-year peak in Americans’ workforce participation.  Fewer people are working today, relatively, than then, and that has nothing to do with our present economic malaise.

Back to the main program.  Vetter asked why fewer Americans are working today (after all, we have to earn an income in order to pay our debts.  Don’t we?).  After all,

[i]f today the country had the same proportion of persons of working age employed as it did in 2000 [the end of the peak in work force participation], the US would have almost 14 million more people contributing to the economy.  [Aside: so much for those 3-5 million jobs Obama’s policies have so proudly saved.]

It comes back to incentives.  The Obama administration’s Progressive policies encourage Americans to not work.  Some of those destructive policies are these:

Food stamps. Above all else, people work to eat.  If the government provides food, then the imperative to work is severely reduced.  [Food stamp program use] has grown considerably, but especially so in the 21st century: There are over 30 million more Americans receiving food stamps today than in 2000.
The sharp rise in food-stamp beneficiaries predated the financial crisis of 2008: From 2000 to 2007, the number of beneficiaries rose from 17.1 million to 26.3 million, according to the Department of Agriculture. That number has leaped to 47.5 million in October 2012.  The average benefit per person jumped in 2009 from $102 to $125 per month.
… But more is going on here.
Compare 2010 with October 2012, the last month for which food-stamp data have been reported. The unemployment rate fell to 7.8% from 9.6%, and real GDP was rising steadily if not vigorously.  Food-stamp usage should have peaked and probably even begun to decline.  Yet the number of recipients rose by 7,223,000.  In a period of falling unemployment and rising output, the number of food-stamp recipients grew nearly 10,000 a day.

Social Security disability payments. The health of Americans has improved, and the decline in the number of relatively dangerous industrial production and mining jobs should have led to a smaller proportion of Americans unable to work because of disability.  Yet the opposite is the case.
Barely three million Americans received work-related disability checks from Social Security in 1990, a number that had changed only modestly in the preceding decade or two.  Since then, the number of people drawing disability checks has soared, passing…6.5 million by 2005, and rising to nearly 8.6 million today.  In a series of papers, David Autor of MIT has shown that the disability program is ineffective, inefficient, and growing at an unsustainable rate.

Pell grants. Paying people to go to college instead of to work is traditionally justified on the grounds that higher education builds “human capital” that is vital for the country’s economic future.  But a study Christopher Denhart, Jonathan Robe and I did for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (that will be released soon) shows that nearly half of four-year college graduates today work in jobs that the Labor Department has determined do not require a college degree.  For example, over one million “retail sales persons” and 115,000 “janitors and cleaners” are college graduates.
In 2000, fewer than 3.9 million young men and women received Pell Grant awards to attend college.  The number rose one-third, to 5.2 million by 2005, and increased a million more [one-fifth] by 2008.  In the next three years, however, the number grew over 50%, to an estimated 9.7 million.  … The result is fewer people in the work force.  Meanwhile the mismatch grows between the number of college graduates and the jobs that require a college education.

Extended unemployment benefits. Since the 1930s, the unemployment-insurance system has been designed to lend a short-term, temporary helping hand to folks losing their jobs, allowing them some breathing room to look for new positions.  Yet the traditional 26-week benefit has been continuously extended over the past four years—many persons out of work a year or more are still receiving benefits.

We don’t pay our bills.  But we’re not deadbeats, either; Progressive policies have simply altered the incentives.  It’s the rational (if not moral) choice to go the cheaper route—the route that welfare programs and Progressive excusals incentivize—the route of not working, and “walking away” from our debts.  Even bankruptcy itself has lost its moral stigma.  (That failure is on us, though, not our government.)  Obama is right—we’re not a nation of deadbeats.  But he’d like us to become a nation of government dependents for whom the rational, if not moral, choice is continued dependency.  And that makes it tough for us to pay our bills—individually or as a nation.

Debt Ceiling Negotiations

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President Barack Obama had some thoughts on this in a press conference the other day.  Surprise—I have some thoughts on his thoughts.

Obama said this in response to a question from CBS News‘ Major Garrett on how Obama reconciles his refusal to vote to raise the debt ceiling while a Senator (the raise would be a “leadership failure”) with his current refusal, as President, to negotiate his demanded raise of the debt ceiling:

And, you know, the fact of the matter is, is that we have never seen the debt ceiling used in this fashion, where the notion was, you know what, we might default unless we get 100 percent of what we want. That hasn’t happened.

Actually, we’ve seen this repeatedly in the recent past.  Under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, for instance, spending cuts (or what passed for them—reductions in the rate of growth of spending) were explicit parts of the deal to raise the ceiling.

Obama then added this:

Now, as I indicated before, I’m happy to have a conversation about how we reduce our deficits further….

There are a couple of things about this one.  One is that bit about being “happy to have a conversation.”  A conversation is an “exchange of thoughts and feelings.”  It’s not a negotiation.  Obama is willing only to engage in idle chit-chat on this subject; he’s not willing to enter into serious negotiation.

The other thing is that nonsense, “reduce our deficits further.”  As a man of Obama’s learned education knows—as his economic advisors in the White House and in his Cabinet know—a reduced deficit is still a deficit, and so it still grows our nation’s debt.  Once again, Obama is unwilling to take our debt seriously.

Obama then concluded his evasion of the original question (he never did address Garrett’s question of how Obama reconciles his Senatorial “No” with his Presidential “Raise it now” demand on the debt ceiling) with this:

But what you’ve never seen is the notion that has been presented so far at least by the Republicans that deficit reduction will only count spending cuts, that we will raise the deficit—or the debt ceiling dollar for dollar on spending cuts.  …what we’re not going to do is put ourselves in a position where in order to pay for spending that we’ve already incurred, that our two options are; we’re either going to profoundly hurt the economy, and hurt middle-class families, and hurt seniors, and hurt kids who are trying to go to college, or alternatively we’re going to blow up the economy.

The first part of that is true.  Having seen the failure of tying reduced spending growth rates to raising the debt limit, the House Republicans now are tying actual spending cuts to raising the debt ceiling.

The rest, though, is exactly what Obama is threatening.  He’s holding out for “100% of what [he] want[s],”  or he’ll blow up our economy.  He’s the one demanding a debt ceiling raise with no strings attached (he’s even called for ceding borrowing authority to him) and refusing to discuss any alternative.  He’s the one who’s said he won’t negotiate at all on the debt ceiling.

Yet, it’s his demand for continued borrowing, for continued expansion of our debt, that is profoundly hurting the economy, the middle class, seniors, the poor (who are notably absent in his “concern” for the welfare of others).   The opposition has already agreed to raise the borrowing limit.  They just want real spending cuts, also, so as to break the DC addiction to spending, and so as to reduce—or even eliminate—the need to borrow more.

Tax Failures

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The Foundry is offering a list of tax increases that went into effect with the start of the year, the fiscal cliff fiasco notwithstanding.  Here are some of them, and the Obama attack on jobs embodied in them is…interesting.

Payroll tax: increase in the Social Security portion of the payroll tax from 4.2% to 6.2% for workers.  This hits all Americans earning a paycheck—not just the “wealthy.”  For example, The Wall Street Journal calculated that the “typical U.S. family earning $50,000 a year” will lose “an annual income boost of $1,000.”

I have trouble with this.  Conservatives do themselves no good to tout this as a tax increase.  This is, in fact, merely the expiration of a payroll tax reduction that was purely temporary from the start, and advertised and passed as temporary.  Worse, this tax holiday was nothing but vote pandering while defunding an already failing Social Security System.

Tax rates on investment: increase in the rate on dividends and capital gains from 15 percent to 20 percent for taxable incomes over $450,000 ($400,000 for single filers).

Taxes on business investment: expiration of full expensing—the immediate deduction of capital purchases by businesses.

Another investment tax increase: 3.8 percent surtax on investment income for taxpayers with taxable income exceeding $250,000 ($200,000 for singles).

Medical device tax: 2.3 percent excise tax paid by medical device manufacturers and importers on all their sales.

These directly attack jobs and job creation.  With active disincentives on investments, these will, inevitably, fall.  With reduced investing, there is less capital available for business’ R&D, which represents new products in production, which represents new—and more—jobs in the producing.  With reduced investing, there is less capital available for business expansion, and such expansion translates directly into jobs.

Death tax: increase in the rate (on estates larger than $5 million) from 35 percent to 40 percent.

Another payroll tax hike: 0.9% increase in the Hospital Insurance portion of the payroll tax for incomes over $250,000 ($200,000 for single filers).

The increase in the death tax makes it harder for small business owners to pass on to their heirs their businesses.  This hits particularly hard businesses whose value is largely tied up in physical assets, like small manufacturers and small farmers.  These folks will be faced with an increasing likelihood of having to sell their businesses, or major components of them—things they’ve spent a lifetime building up—in order to pay the death vig.  These sales/downsizings represent existing jobs that will go away with the sale/downsize.

That last payroll tax increase also will hit the small business owner especially hard.  It just got more expensive to hire additional labor or to keep existing labor.  Moreover, there’s significant opportunity cost: that 0.9% tax represents money that now cannot be committed to R&D (already expensive for small businesses) in an effort to stay competitive; or committed to improved marketing in an effort to maintain/grow market share; or committed to payroll in the form of a new hire, pay raises, bonuses; or….

 

h/t The Spirit of Enterprise