Tag Archives: regulation

An Unintended Consequence

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The health coverage plan providers, companies like Humana, Aetna, Anthem, et al., are gaming the Medicare system to keep their Medicare bonuses coming in.  Surprise.

It seems that when Obamacare was passed, it included a system of paying bonuses from Medicare to those plan providers that got sufficiently high ratings on the quality of their plans.

But wait….

Medicare ranks privately managed plans…on a five-star quality scale and provides financial bonuses to providers of top-ranked plans. [A plan-holder’s] plan was set to be downgraded, which would have cost Humana its bonus. So the company merged plans covering [the plan-holder] and more than a million others into different contracts with higher scores. That preserved the bonuses.

That’s called cross-walking, and it’s entirely legal, if maybe a tad shady.

This is the sort of thing that happens, though, when Government intrudes itself too far into a marketplace.  Private enterprise is more agile than government bureaucracies can ever hope to be, and they can move much faster than any government bureaucracy can hope to do.

It’s also why black markets flourish in centrally planned economies.

The existence of this ability to cross-walk is a function of our Federal government’s intervention in what should be a free, competitive market.  The question wouldn’t even exist if we had an actual health insurance industry that operated free of Government fetters in an actual freely competitive market.

Biofuel Mandates

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The Wall Street Journal had a piece titled Biofuel Mandates Are a Bad Idea Whose Time May Be Up that centered on the possibility that these might get watered down, or even eliminated, sometime “soon.”

The Renewable Fuel Standard, which forces oil refiners to mix corn-based fuel into gasoline, is one of history’s great policy boondoggles.

Well, NSS.  The only things it’s done of practical consequence have been to serve as a backdoor subsidy for farmers and to drive up the cost of corn, corn substitutes, and food that eats corn.  And to drive up the cost of gasoline and to create ethanol fuel-related automobile engine maintenance costs.

But that’s the problem with Government mandates in general when they’re intended to create a market for a particular product.

As a mandate, the time for this one on biofuels never was.

Arms Keeping and Bearing “Reform”

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The House passed a bill last December that greatly expands background checks and that mandates concealed-carry reciprocity among the several States.

The Senate should take up that bill without further delay and pass it as well.  With the much broader background checks, there’s no longer any rational argument for opposing concealed-carry reciprocity.

It’s a pipedream, though; there aren’t enough Progressive-Democrat Senators willing to vote for cloture.  The lack of progress is too important to them as a campaign issue.

Big Government and Responsibility

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The Progressive-Democratic Party-run States and the Republican-run States are demonstrating what they think of the intelligence and capability of ordinary American citizens.

The roughly half of states controlled by Republicans are therefore moving aggressively to roll back the law widely known as Obamacare, while the smaller number of Democratic states are working to bolster it.

One party does not believe that Americans in a free market, here for health care and for health care coverage plans, are capable of making sound decisions.  They need Big Government to think and act for them.  The other party believes the opposite: the ordinary man is fully capable of thinking for himself and doesn’t need Big Government to tell him what to do.

Oh, and that other party also believes in free markets and the associated competition that brings down overall prices and increases the range of options available.  That other party also believes that the greater range of options facilitates the decision-making of the ordinary man.  The one party believes the range of options only confuses the ordinary man and so—single payer for limited choices.

Agency Fees

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These are fees unions in a raft of jurisdictions are allowed to charge non-union members as a condition of those workers’ right to work at all.  Ostensibly, the fees are for the unions’ labor efforts in negotiating wages, benefits, and working conditions for everyone in the workplace.  The Supreme Court is considering a case, Janus v AFSCME, concerning whether such fees are constitutional.

It’s already the case that

Agency fees already are forbidden from paying for advocacy and other political activity.

Money is fungible, though, and even though agency fees might be barred from the purpose, the existence of the fees allows unions to reallocate equivalent money from other sources to the purpose—making it impossible actually to say that agency fees aren’t being used for the illegal purpose.  After all, if a union has $100, it can’t afford to engage in political activity.  If the union also collects a $10 agency fee from a non-union member, it now has $110, and it can afford to spend $10 on political activity, even if it’s forbidden by dollar bill serial tracking from using the non-union member’s $10 for the purpose.  Those ten bucks went illegally, however indirectly, to the political activity.

Moreover,

…plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case argue that negotiating with public agencies requires taking positions on government’s size and scope, which is a political question, so forcing employees to pay for the negotiations violates the First Amendment.

There’s the crux of the matter.  Agency fees are eminently unconstitutional, but I’m not sanguine that the Court will see it that way.  Both CJ Roberts and J Kennedy have shown themselves unreliable defenders of the Constitution, and the four Liberal Justices are a rock-solid bloc.