Tag Archives: regulation

Individual Mandate and Risk Pools

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Louise Radnofsky and Stephanie Armour had a piece in The Wall Street Journal that looked at the small and shrinking impact of removing the Individual Mandate (or more accurately, removing the penalty Supreme Court-created tax imposed for not satisfying the IM) on the health coverage providing industry.  The piece is worth the read, but there was one remark quoted at the end that wants a particular look.

“Making the risk pool stable is a vital part” of keeping individual insurance premiums in line with the overall cost to cover a person insured through a larger group or employer, said Andy Slavitt, a top health official in the Obama administration.

You bet. However, in order to stabilize a risk pool, it’s necessary to understand risk pools. A healthy young man does not have the same risks as an elderly man or woman, and so he does not belong in either of their risk pools, either of them in his, and neither of those two in each other’s. A healthy woman of child-bearing age does not share the same risks as a post-menopausal woman, and neither share the same risks as a man of any age. None of those three groups belong in the same risk pool as any of the others.

Health-related risk pools, to be effective and accurate at estimating future health coverage costs and so arriving at reasonable fees for accepting the transfer of the risks involved, need to be reasonably homogeneous.  Belonging to the species homo sapiens is not sufficiently homogeneous.

Minimum Wage in San Francisco

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City Supervisor Jane Kim, in a recent Letter to the Wall Street Journal Editor sang huzzahs for the city’s $15/hr minimum wage and touted a tax on robots that were replacing those low-skilled workers priced out of the labor market by that minimum wage.

The minimum wage isn’t a pathway to the middle class; it is a safety net to prevent destitution.

And

[A] “robot tax” is a practical way to smooth the transitions caused by automation….

She’s wrong.

I’m sure the robots and kiosks that are replacing those low-skilled workers appreciate being saved from destitution.

However, a true safety net would be a vasty reduction in San Francisco’s runaway regulatory regime and usurious tax scheme.  Then one of the most expensive cities in the nation could become affordable for the low-skilled and other poor.

Instead, the Supervisor wants to tax those robots and reduce them to similar jobless poverty.

That’s the Point

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Six months after it went into force, China’s tough new cybersecurity law is still troubling US technology executives who fear that it will put the intellectual property of their companies and the data they collect in jeopardy.

And

…while the law went into effect June 1, the Chinese government is still drafting specific implementation rules.

And

Company and trade-group representatives are also concerned that the network-equipment security reviews could expose proprietary source code, jeopardizing their trade secrets[.]

The People’s Republic of China wants other nations’ intellectual and technology property, and it’s willing to steal it in any way it can.  Especially targeted are businesses the PRC considers “critical information infrastructure:” computer-network operations in telecommunications, energy, transportation, information services, and finance.

Notice that.  These technologies also are critical to the other nations’ security. But that’s why the PRC demands the accesses and is so…hazy…about its rules facilitating getting those accesses.

One more reason to restrict the amount and nature of any business dealings with the mainland.

Obeying the Law

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In a piece about President Donald Trump’s domestic business policies—specifically, his administration’s lawsuit to block the merger of AT&T with Time Warner Inc and his parallel move to facilitate other kinds of close relationships between companies like AT&T and Time Warner, The Wall Street Journal described a rationale for these apparently conflicting moves: follow existing law, rather than piling on regulation after regulation to govern (new) behaviors.

[T]he actions reveal one consistency, and what might be viewed as an emerging Trump administration regulatory philosophy: instead of new bright-line rules, such as those put in place under the Obama administration, it is stressing the enforcement of longstanding laws and regulations.

Indeed.  A properly free, capitalist market will do its own regulation just fine, with customers voting—and enforcing—with their dollars.

And

The moves are a shift in emphasis from the approach taken by the Obama administration, which in 2015 adopted highly specific rules governing [for instance] internet providers….

Which were simply insulting to adult Americans.  We don’t need to be told, down to the veriest jot or tiddle, how to perform in the market.  We can operate just fine without Government’s micromanagement.  Better, even.

And there’s the illogic of new regulations: if current law or regulations are being disregarded (hence the push for new regulations), how is it possible to expect any new regulations to be followed?

Baristas, Bikinis, and Harvey Weinstein

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Everett, WA, has passed two ordinances that presume to define “lewd” behavior and forces employees to stop wearing bikinis on the job or otherwise showing “too much” skin.  Everett, it seems, has too many coffee shops that employee bikini-clad baristas to suit the prim town fathers.

After all, they claim,

The skin-flaunting coffee servers could turn men into the next Harvey Weinstein.

This is just projection.  These Liberals, with their two ordinances, confess their weakness of character, their own lack of morality, their own inability to resist temptation, and they insultingly assume that all of us are as weak, amoral, and temptation-accepting as they are.