Tag: health reform

Obamacare Complexity vs Free Market Simplicity

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

Free markets are characterized by voluntary exchange between buyers and sellers. Mapping that relationship is absurdly simply, as this image indicates.

Indeed, the only reason I even bothered to include that image was for purposes of comparison. Here is a new flowchart prepared for the Joint Economic Committee showing the healthcare system under Obamacare.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that the system already was a disaster even before Obamacare was enacted. In the health care sector, free markets are only allowed to operate in very rare cases, such as cosmetic surgery, laser eye surgery, and (for better or worse) abortion. The rest of the sector was heavily distorted by government intervention. Obamacare simply makes a bad situation worse.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care, Tax and Budget Policy

A Response to Gruber on RomneyCare & Health Care Costs

By
Michael F. Cannon

I just came across this letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal from MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.  I don’t know how to confine myself to just one of the letter’s many problems. So brace yourselves, here comes the fisk.

Joseph Rago’s article on Massachusetts health-care reform (“The Massachusetts Health-Care ‘Train Wreck’,” op-ed, July 7) is exactly the type of selectively misleading use of facts upon which opponents of health-care reform have been relying over the past year.

No comment, other than remember the phrase “selectively misleading use of facts.”

Health-care reform in Massachusetts has covered 60% of the state’s uninsured, has done so at roughly the cost projected before reform was enacted in 2006, and remains overwhelmingly popular with the residents of the state.

Regarding coverage gains, Massachusetts officials used to claim that RomneyCare reduced the share of uninsured residents from around 10 percent to 2.6 percent.  In a study released this year, Aaron Yelowitz (a former student and coauthor of Gruber’s) and I show why that figure is too low and why the actual figure is likely 5.1 percent or higher.  The study on which Gruber relies – like all other such studies – neither mentions nor attempts to measure the problem that Yelowitz and I identified: uninsured Massachusetts residents appear to be responding to the individual mandate by concealing their lack of insurance, which would inflate the coverage gains.  Since that study obtained results similar to our results for Massachusetts adults, that study’s estimate of a 60-percent reduction in the uninsured appears to be an upper-bound estimate, rather than a point estimate.

Regarding costs, I haven’t seen any updated numbers since the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation’s whitewash from May 2009.  I’d like to see an updated, non-whitewashed report on actual spending and how it compares to the original projections, especially considering that in 2006, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Massachusetts “anticipates that no additional funding will be needed beyond three years.“  Updated figures would also allow us to judge how much RomneyCare spent per newly insured resident.

The state has seen a decline in its nongroup premiums of more than 50% relative to national trends…It reduced the costs to individuals of purchasing insurance…[an] enormous reduction relative to pre-reform…

Here’s where Gruber engages in his own “selectively misleading use of facts.”  Yes, non-group premiums appear to have fallen for the 4 percent of residents in the non-group market – because RomneyCare shifted those costs to workers with job-based coverage.

It is true that reform has not slowed the growth of group health-insurance premiums, which have continued to rise at exactly the same rate as in the nation as a whole.

The first part of this sentence is an understatement; the second part is false.  This report from the left-wing Commonwealth Fund shows that premiums in Massachusetts are growing faster than anywhere else in the nation.  And the only study that has tried to isolate the effect of RomneyCare finds that it increased premiums for employment-based coverage by 6 percent (see cost-shifting, above).

Despite Gov. Mitt Romney’s claims, the Massachusetts reform was not designed to slow the growth of health-care cost growth.

It should be obvious by now that RomneyCare wasn’t designed that way.  But it sure was sold that way.  And so was ObamaCare.  Any bets on how long before we hear apologists for both claiming that ObamaCare wasn’t designed to slow cost growth?

The PPACA also includes a series of changes that represent the best thinking about how to control costs, such as an independent rate-setting board for Medicare, pilots of innovative medical reimbursement approaches, and an end to the open-ended tax subsidy to the highest cost health insurance plans in the U.S. None of these is guaranteed to slow the rate of cost growth. But each is better than doing nothing, which was the alternative.

So the, ahem, best thinking on how to contain health care costs is (1) price and exchange controls set by (2) an unelected and unaccountable rationing board, plus (3) taxing health insurance.  Bra-vo. Sure, Obama’s National Economic Council chairman Larry Summers says, “Price and exchange controls inevitably create harmful economic distortions. Both the distortions and the economic damage get worse with time.” But when the alternative is nothing – nothing! – that means the bar for “best thinking” isn’t very high.

In the end, it is impossible to control health-care costs without first bringing as many citizens as possible into our health-insurance system.

As I blogged earlier today, it does not speak well of the Left’s approach to health care that in order to reduce wasteful government spending – or at least pretend to – they must first create more wasteful government spending.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, General, Government and Politics, Health Care

Abortion, Third-Party Payer, and the Cost of Health Care

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

A major problem with America’s health care system, both before and after Obamacare, is the fact that consumers very rarely spend their own money when obtaining health care. Known as third-party payer, this problem exists in part because government directly finances almost 50 percent of health care expenditures. But even a majority of supposedly private health care spending is financed by employer-provided policies that are heavily distorted by a preference in the tax code that encourages insurance payments even for routine expenses. According to government data, only 12 percent of health care costs are financed directly by consumers. And since consumers almost always are buying health care with somebody else’s money, it should come as no surprise that this system results in rising costs and inefficiency. This is why repealing Obamacare is just the first step that is needed if policymakers genuinely want to restore a free market health care system (all of which is explained in this 4-minute video).

Unfortunately, many people think that market forces don’t work in the health care system and that costs will always rise faster than prices for other goods and services. There are a few examples showing that this is not true, and proponents of liberalization usually cite cosmetic surgery and laser-eye surgery as examples of treatments that generally are financed by out-of-pocket payments. Not surprisingly, prices for these treatments have been quite stable – particularly when increases in quality are added to the equation.

I just ran across another example, and this one could be important since it may resonate with those who normally are very suspicious of free markets. As the chart from the Alan Guttmacher Institute shows, the price of an abortion has been remarkably stable over the past 20-plus years. Let’s connect the dots to make everything clear. Abortions generally are financed by out-of-pocket payments. People therefore have an incentive to shop carefully and get good value since they are spending their own money. And because market forces are allowed, the cost of abortions is stable. The logical conclusion to draw from this, of course, is that allowing market forces for other medical services will generate the same positive results in terms of cost and efficiency.

None of this analysis, by the way, implies that abortion is good or bad, or that it should be legal or illegal. The only lesson to be learned is that market forces control costs and promote efficiency and that more government spending and intervention exacerbate the third-party payer crisis.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care, Tax and Budget Policy

Restore Free Markets to Health Care

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

Eline van den Broek probably is not happy today since she was in South Africa watching her team lose a high-scoring (by soccer standards) battle with Spain, but she should be very proud of the new video she narrated that urges the repeal of Obamacare – and also points out some of the other reforms that are needed to restore a free market to the US health care system.

Her comments on how the American health care system was a mess even before Obamacare are particularly important and echo many of the points made by Mike Tanner and Michael Cannon.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care, Tax and Budget Policy

ObamaCare Regs’ Effect on Uncompensated Care Overblown

By
Michael F. Cannon

An Obama administration “fact sheet,” released alongside the interim final rules for several of ObamaCare’s cost-increasing mandates, claims those mandates will reduce the “hidden tax” imposed by uncompensated care:

By making sure insurance covers people who are most at risk, there will be less uncompensated care and the amount of cost shifting among those who have coverage today will be reduced by up to $1 billion in 2013.

According to research by the Urban Institute, that “hidden tax” isn’t very large:

Private insurance premiums are at most 1.7 percent higher because of the shifting of the costs of the uninsured to private insurers in the form of higher charges.

As the Congressional Budget Office repeatedly lectures Congress, “Uncompensated care is less significant than many people assume.”

Likewise, these mandates’ effect on uncompensated care will be less significant than the Obama administration would like you to think.  Using data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and a reasonable assumption of 6-percent annual growth, total private health insurance premiums in 2013 will be in the neighborhood of $1.1 trillion.  So the administration is boasting that these mandates will reduce the 1.7-percent “hidden tax” imposed by uncompensated care to 1.61 percent.

Indeed, the whole of ObamaCare may not do much to reduce the “hidden tax” of uncompensated care. After Massachusetts enacted a nearly identical law, the Urban Institute reports, “high levels of emergency department (ED) use have persisted in Massachusetts. Specifically, ED use was high in Massachusetts prior to health reform and has stayed high under health reform.”  A lot of uncompensated care comes in through the ED.

Finally, notice how a 1.7-percentage-point premium surcharge is a bad thing if President Obama is ostensibly rescuing you from it, but a good thing if he’s imposing it on you.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Health Care

Individual Mandate Is Constitutional - If You Rewrite the Constitution

By
Ilya Shapiro

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) was asked on Friday where in the Constitution Congress gets the power to force people to buy health insurance.  He said, “Under several clauses, the good and welfare clause and a couple others.”

As it happens, there is no “good and welfare clause” – which Conyers should know, as both judiciary chairman and a lawyer.  But even if you excuse his casual use of constitutional language, what he probably means – the General Welfare Clause of Article I, Section 8 – is not a better answer.  What that clause does is limit Congress’s use of the powers enumerated elsewhere in that section to legislation that promotes ”the general welfare.”  (So earmarks are arguably unconstitutional, though you can make a colorable argument that, when considering a pork bill as a whole, with all parts of the country getting something, that monstrosity is collectively in “the general welfare” – maybe.)  In any event, the General Welfare Clause doesn’t give Congress any additional powers – and I’d be curious to know what the other “several clauses” are.

Conyers  also noted that, “All the scholars, the constitutional scholars that I know … they all say that there’s nothing unconstitutional in this bill and if there were, I would have tried to correct it if I thought there were.”  Well, Mr. Conyers, to start let me introduce you to three constitutional scholars – not fringe right-wing kooks or anything like that, but respected people who publish widely – who think Obamacare is unconstitutional.  Now will you try to “correct” the bill?

Here’s video of Conyers’s full remarks on the subject (h/t Jon Blanks):

And for a survey of the various constitutional issues attending Obamacare, see Randy Barnett’s oped from Sunday’s Washington Post.

Topics: 
Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

Lies, Damned Lies, and CBO Estimates

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

Washington is buzzing with news that the Congressional Budget Office has a new cost estimate for the President’s proposal to further expand the federal government’s control over the health care system. The White House is doubtlessly pleased because the takeaway message, as blindly regurgitated by the Associated Press, is that a giant new entitlement program is going to “drive down red ink:”

The Congressional Budget Office estimated the legislation would reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over its first 10 years, and continue to drive down the red ink thereafter. Democratic leaders said the deficit would be cut $1.2 trillion in the second decade - and Obama called it the biggest reduction since the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton put the federal budget on a path to surplus.

Michael Cannon already has explained that the cost estimate is fraudulent because of what it leaves out, so let me explain why it is fraudulent because of what it includes. The CBO has a very dismal track record of getting the numbers wrong, in part because there is no attempt to measure how a bigger burden of government has negative macroeconomic effects, but also because the number crunchers do a poor job of measuring the degree to which people (recipients, health care providers, state and local politicians, etc.) will modify their behavior to become eligible for other people’s money. The problem is compounded by similar mistakes for revenue estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation, which (like CBO) makes no attempt to capture macroeconomic effects and has a less-than-stellar history of predicting behavioral responses.

If the legislation passes, we will get more spending, more taxes, and more debt. Equally troubling, we will get more dependency. That’s good for Washington and bad for the country.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care, Tax and Budget Policy

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