Tag Archives: regulation

Another Reason

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…to get Government—at the Federal and at the State level—out of the way of a free market for health care and for health care coverage, which must include price transparency if there’s to be true price and quality of product/service competition. This illustration is in Boston.

An Emergency Room visit to Massachusetts General Hospital for a particular problem covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts would cost the patient and his employer together nearly $950. In fairness to BCBSoM, some other providers of health coverage for the same problem at MassGen charge substantially the same total price. At Carney Hospital, just three miles away, though, the same problem with the same provider would be only a bit under $550—$400 less.

It gets more variable. An ER trip to MassGen for a patient with substantially the same problem and whose coverage was through an Aetna PPO would cost $2,170. At Carney the cost would be in the range of $550.

But never mind, Government Knows Better:

The Massachusetts Health Policy Commission…called for capping the prices of the state’s costliest hospitals.

No. Price caps provide no incentive to innovate, to improve quality, to lower prices. Secretive negotiations between health coverage providers and health providers provide no such incentives, either. Secretive pricing by health providers provides no incentives.

Competition among health coverage providers and among health providers provides those incentives because superior quality of care and lower prices are what attract customers, and open competition is what produces those outcomes. The lack is especially insidious with hospital ERs, since those “customers” are in dire straights and in no position to shop around.

Those folks (all partakers of health provision and health coverage provision, but especially prospective ER users) need to prior plan before the trip becomes necessary. That requires an ability to compare among health coverage providers and among health providers. That, in turn, requires price transparency among health coverage providers—not just for premiums charged the customer and his employer (which already are pretty visible), but the prices paid each of the hospitals in the area.

Transparency also requires hospitals to make their prices publicly available. An example of this is with Surgery Center of Oklahoma. This facility doesn’t have emergency room facilities, but their model is easily extensible to all hospital and all prompt care facilities.

Free Enterprise

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The politicians populating Vermont’s State government don’t like it; they’re taking an overt step to bring the State’s economy under centralized control. These politicians are using the State’s insurance industry—already an industry with limited freedom to operate in all States, not just in Vermont—as their tool to do this.

Vermont is now one of the first states to require health insurers to pay for the costs associated with at-home COVID-19 tests, Governor Phil Scott (R) announced.

Yes, this is a Republican governor. A weak Republican governor, with a Progressive-Democrat State House of Representatives and State Senate.

Never mind that, if consumers in a free market environment wanted the tests covered by their insurers, competition would lead the insurers to cover them. Never mind, either, that that same competition would drive the cost of that coverage to its lowest level.

Instead, with this Government-driven requirement, coverage costs will be elevated, propped up by the artificial, Government-created demand. And, notwithstanding the disingenuous claim of the State’s Department of Financial Regulation Commissioner, Michael Pieciak, that the tests will be free, they will not only cost all Vermonters in the form of elevated premiums and/or limited quality of coverage elsewhere in the policies, all Vermonters will be paying for the tests of the few.

Socialism in action. Vermont businesses—insurers are just the camel’s nose—are free to produce whatever goods and services they choose, so long as Government politicians approve.

Big Progressive-Democrat Government

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A Rasmussen poll suggests that a majority of Americans oppose the socialism in the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.

That’s encouraging, but I have some concerns about the policies anyway, given that they’re being jammed through without regard for the views of the government’s employers.

The socialism aspect of the Biden-Harris and Progressive-Democratic Party policies is less a matter of the raw spending and usurious taxes in them much more a matter of the strings attached to the spending and of who gets (punitively) taxed.

The strings attached would give the Federal government more control over the States and over what businesses are allowed to produce and the prices they charge. The proposed tax structure would give the Federal government more indirect control by “encouraging” businesses to comport themselves IAW Government wishes.

That control is the essence of socialism, whether the control is through outright ownership or through controlling production permissions.

The spendthriftiness should be enough by itself to keep the bill from being passed.

The tax distortions should be enough by itself to keep the bill from being passed.

The increased Government control should be enough by itself to keep the bill from being passed.

Unfortunately, dangerously, each of the three individually (as well as together) are tightly aligned with Progressive-Democratic Party goals of spending to buy votes, taxing the Evil Rich to virtue-signal for votes, and to outright accrete power to Party.

A Progressive-Democrat Threatens

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California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has issued a threat to try to destroy one of our most fundamental rights as Americans: our right to keep and bear Arms. He’s doing it, too, while drawing a disingenuous parallel between Arms possession and abortion—and in the process, threatening an even more fundamental right, one imbued in all humans not just in Americans.

If states can shield their laws from review by federal courts, then CA will use that authority to help protect lives.
We will work to create the ability for private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in CA[.]

In the process, Newsom ignored a critical distinction here. Gun rights are in our Constitution.

The right to abortion exists only in a Supreme Court ruling and has only the force of statutory law—which is explicitly subordinate to our Constitution.

Regarding Newsom’s disingenuous claim about using legal authority to protect people’s lives, he’s also ignoring that our gun rights exist in critical (but not exclusive) part to defend lives and to defend against overreaching government. That the tools occasionally are misused to illegally kill only emphasizes the need to better catch and punish the killers, not to punish the vast majority of us for the crimes of those few. And to not keep letting the accused killers back out on the street with little to no bail.

Abortion laws, on the other hand, kill babies and tend toward blocking legal voices from speaking for them in court. That’s not very protective of our very youngest people’s lives.

Court Deference

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The Supreme Court has before it American Hospital Association v Becerra, which The Wall Street Journal suggests makes a sufficient vehicle for revisiting judicial deference to an Executive Branch agency’s claims about the legitimacy of this or that regulation promulgated by the agency. The specific item is HHS’ Medicare reimbursement rates for outpatient drugs.

The question is far broader than that, however.

Chevron deference and its still extant forebear, Skidmore, need to be overruled, rescinded, and done away with altogether, along with all other moves, even predispositions, to defer. A regulation (or a mandated drug reimbursement rate) is valid or it is not on its merit, not because a government expert says it is.

It’s wholly unacceptable for a coequal branch of our government to subordinate itself to another coequal branch, much less to an unaccountable subordinate formation of that other branch.

Eliminating deference—subordination—and striking rules that exceed the governing statute’s scope, especially on the grounds that the statute was so vague (as Congress has taken to doing) that an Executive Branch agency must, or has the “flexibility” to, write regulations so originating as to be the agency doing its own legislating, would go a long way toward forcing Congress to do its own job rather than wishing it off onto others.

Our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, should be dispositive here.