October — 2009 — VOICES for REASON

President Obama has been bemoaning rising health insurance premiums ever since he started pushing ObamaCare. Yet newly released studies show that ObamaCare will likely drive up premiums—sometimes as high as double or triple their present rate. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the insurance company Wellpoint, Inc. just published detailed studies of the potential impact of ObamaCare on insurance premiums in the fourteen states where it offers plans. Their conclusion? Premiums for most customers, especially the young and healthy, would skyrocket: Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic reflects on news that Iraq’s politicians are still wrangling over details of the country’s election law — and even now, after the much touted U.S. surge, cannot settle their differences. He writes:

The surge was supposed to create the space necessary for the sectarian factions to come together. That was its critical definition of success. So far: surge fail. And if the parties cannot hammer out an agreement now, with 120,000 US troops still in country, what chance once the US leaves?

The situation is actually far worse than Sullivan’s rhetorical question implies. Hype about the so-called success of the surge has enabled people to cast out of mind the fact that Washington’s mission in Iraq was a fiasco. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the ugliest spectacles in the push for ObamaCare has been the demonization of the health insurance industry. Nancy Pelosi went so far as to call them “villains”. Obama has been a bit more circumspect, suggesting only that they are not honest.

There are plenty of real problems with health insurance today. Many are frustrated by the ever-increasing cost of health insurance, the seemingly impossible task of figuring out what their insurance covers, the fear of losing their job and with it their insurance. But as my colleague Jeff Scialabba has been pointing out, these sorts of problems are the result of government interference in the health insurance market. The less-regulated life insurance market, for example, does not have spiraling costs, miles of bureaucratic red tape, or a pervasive employer-sponsored system tying people to their jobs.

But there is another category of charges leveled at health insurance companies that is not legitimate. These complaints brand insurance companies as evil because they engage in an array of discriminatory behaviors, which ObamaCare promises to end. The Baucus bill (PDF here), for instance, contains guaranteed issue and modified community rating provisions. This means that insurance companies will be forced to insure everyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions, and must charge everyone in the same age range identical premiums. The idea is that treating different consumers differently is unfair.

But in actual fact, it is eliminating health insurance discrimination that is unfair. Read the rest of this entry »

A reader of this blog was kind enough to send me a photocopy of a New York Times article on health care reform . . . published on May 10, 1962. It was reporting on a controversy surrounding the precursor to Medicare, the King-Anderson bill, then being debated in Congress.

The proposed law had sparked what the Times called a “revolt” among more than two hundred New Jersey doctors who signed a resolution opposing the bill. Observers noted a “movement that is spreading among New Jersey doctors in threatening to refuse to treat medical patients under the provisions of the King-Anderson bill.” The movement’s leader, Dr. J. Bruce Henriksen, was quoted as saying: “As far as I’m concerned as an individual, of course, I won’t practice under socialized medicine. I’ll quit. I’ll refuse to see all patients. Maybe they’ll put me in jail.”

Someone then asked former President Harry Truman what he thought about the New Jersey doctors’ revolt. Replied Truman: “I think they ought to be hit over the head with a club.”

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The Goldstone Report on the 2008/09 Gaza war brings to light genuine horrors — not pertaining to Israel’s conduct in the war, but horrors indicative of the U.N.’s basic character.

What events led up to the Gaza war? Perhaps it had something to do with the 10,000+ rockets and mortars fired into Israeli towns from Gaza during an eight-year period. But that salient fact is given no weight in the report. The report actually seems to be calculated to absolve Hamas of guilt for its aggression, while smearing Israel for “war crimes” for defending itself. E.g. the report cites an admission by a Hamas official that the Islamist group “created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the mujahideen, against the Zionist bombing machines” — but dismisses that admission in concluding that Hamas did not exploit human beings as shields. Facts in the report appear to have been bent into submission to advance a pro-Hamas agenda.

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I have found learning the history of oil to be invaluable when looking at today’s controversies. For example, when watching Congress haul oil executives to Washington over gasoline prices that are “too high,” and calling for “investigations”—it is instructive to know that this practice has been going on since the 1920s. Or, when reading references to the oil embargo of the 1970s, along with the idea that it proves the necessity of “energy independence,” it is crucial to know what really happened and what America’s real mistake was.

As long as any of us have been alive, oil issues have dominated both domestic policy and foreign policy. Yet Americans have surprisingly little background knowledge about this coveted commodity. In an effort to educate people more about the oil industry and oil policy, ARC has just released my 3-lecture course, “The Triumph and Tragedy of the Oil Industry,” available online for free in MP3 format. The purpose of the course is to explain how today’s state of affairs in oil came to be—both the benefits and the problems associated with oil.

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In its endorsement of the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war, the U.N.’s Human Rights Council described Israel’s retaliation as a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population….” The idea that only a “proportionate” response would be appropriate has its roots in Just War Theory, the mainstream view of morality in war. So does the related injunction to avoid injuring civilians — even to the point of risking a mission to do so. It is a measure of the deep entrenchment of Just War Theory, that not only do the accusers accept it unquestioningly, but so does the accused.

Observe that Israel refused to participate in the Goldstone investigation and has vehemently criticized the report, yet its ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, told PBS’s NewsHour:

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Every time Alan Greenspan opens his mouth to blame some aspect of the financial crisis on free markets, rather than government intervention, many commentators gleefully proclaim it another nail in the coffin for laissez-faire capitalism. Even Alan Greenspan, the refrain goes, acolyte of Ayn Rand, lover of laissez-faire, admits that the current crisis was a failure of his free-market philosophy.

But Greenspan has no free-market philosophy. As Yaron Brook and I explained in “The Maestro vs. the Market,”

Greenspan, while once associated with laissez-faire philosopher Ayn Rand, hasn’t advocated genuinely free markets for decades. Remember, this is a man who for two decades reveled in being, as the New York Times put it, “the infallible maestro of the financial system.”…. Early in Greenspan’s tenure, some expected the onetime opponent of the Fed and supporter of a gold standard to minimize the Fed’s distortion of markets. Instead, Greenspan became our Manipulator-in-Chief, repeatedly inflating the money supply and artificially lowering interest rates to allegedly magnify prosperity…. Thus, when Greenspan speaks, he does so not as the voice of a (non-existent) free market in finance and housing, but as the voice of government central-planning–a voice with every incentive to blame the market rather than the Fed’s market-distorting policies.

Which brings us to Greenspan’s latest salvo against the free market — a call for government to break up institutions classified as “too big to fail.” According to a Bloomberg news story:
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I discussed in Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this post how many of the problems in our health care system are the result of the dominance of third-party comprehensive insurance—a dominance which has arisen from decades of government interventions favoring this kind of insurance. But as these interventions are not new, neither are the problems we are presently facing. On the contrary, our government has been attempting to solve our health care problems for as long as it has been creating them—and time and again these “solutions” have left our health care system worse off.

In recent decades, for instance, state governments have increasingly looked at insurance mandates as a means of expanding coverage to groups that have difficulty obtaining it. Broadly, mandates are requirements—backed by government force—that insurers cover specific medical expenses (e.g., chiropractors, treatment for lyme disease) or patient populations (e.g., continuing coverage for laid-off employees). Mandates are an extremely myopic political tool: they force insurers into a money-losing endeavor, who respond by increasing insurance premiums or decreasing coverage in another area—creating another problem for politicians to solve by passing more mandates.

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President Obama is weighing how to deal with the seemingly unwinnable war in Afghanistan, but have the right questions been asked about how we got to this point? In a post that I contributed to the blog of Rowman & Littlefield (the publisher of my book), I suggest that our policymakers (and all Americans) should re-think their assumptions about what went wrong in Afghanistan.