Scapegoating ObamaCare

By
Michael F. Cannon

Here’s how Ezra Klein spins Sen. Max Baucus’ (D-MT) preditions of an ObamaCare “train wreck”:

The GOP can try and keep the implementation from being done effectively, in part by refusing to authorize the needed funds. Then they can capitalize on the problems they create to weaken the law, or at least weaken Democrats up for reelection in 2014.

In other words, step one: Create problems for Obamacare. Step two: Blame Obamacare for the problems. Step 3: Political profit!

It never ceases to amaze me how people who want government to plan our lives are horrified when government then interferes with their plans. Here’s one way to summarize Klein’s attempt to blame ObamaCare’s opponents for ObamaCare’s failures:

Step one: Pass a law the public opposes.

Step two: Act surprised when the public continues to oppose it.

Step three: Blame the public for the law’s failures. 

Or:

Step one: Enact an immense law requiring lots of implementation funding.

Step two: Don’t include any implementation funding.

Step three: Blame opponents for not funding the implementation. 

Ooh, this is fun:

Step one: Give government new powers.

Step two: Express frustration when those powers fall into the hands of your political opponents.

Step three: Put your political opponents in camps.

I wonder if Mike Pompeo will pen a letter to Klein, too.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

Press Release from Union Seeking Repeal of ObamaCare

By
Michael F. Cannon

From the Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON, April 16, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers International President Kinsey M. Robinson issued the following statement today calling for a repeal or complete reform of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA):

“Our Union and its members have supported President Obama and his Administration for both of his terms in office.

But regrettably, our concerns over certain provisions in the ACA have not been addressed, or in some instances, totally ignored. In the rush to achieve its passage, many of the Act’s provisions were not fully conceived, resulting in unintended consequences that are inconsistent with the promise that those who were satisfied with their employer sponsored coverage could keep it.

These provisions jeopardize our multi-employer health plans, have the potential to cause a loss of work for our members, create an unfair bidding advantage for those contractors who do not provide health coverage to their workers, and in the worst case, may cause our members and their families to lose the benefits they currently enjoy as participants in multi-employer health plans.

For decades, our multi-employer health and welfare plans have provided the necessary medical coverage for our members and their families to protect them in times of illness and medical needs. This collaboration between labor and management has been a model of success that should be emulated rather than ignored. I refuse to remain silent, or idly watch as the ACA destroys those protections.

I am therefore calling for repeal or complete reform of the Affordable Care Act to protect our employers, our industry, and our most important asset: our members and their families.”

The United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers, based in Washington, D.C., has 22,000 members participating in 9 regional district councils across the United States

www.unionroofers.com 

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

Pompeo to Baucus: You Wrote this ‘Train Wreck’

By
Michael F. Cannon

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) is having none of Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) trying to dodge responsibility for the coming ObamaCare “train wreck.” Here’s a letter Pompeo sent to Baucus yesterday:

Dear Senator Baucus,

     I was stunned, and also saddened, to read of your complaint that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is doing an insufficient job informing the public about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), otherwise known as Obamacare.  My shock wasn’t because I disagreed: You’re right to say this legislation has led to great uncertainty for hard-working Americans, small business owners, and families.  No, I was shocked because you wrote this bill.  I was saddened because your acknowledgement of the harm caused by PPACA has come so late.

     Unlike you, the American people have opposed this law from the moment it was first introduced in Congress.  How hard was it to see that even the smartest government bureaucrats can’t competently plan something as complicated as America’s health-care sector?

     President Obama’s proposal to rescind the Medicaid disproportionate share hospital payments for 2014 is an admission that this law will not work as written.  The IRS is violating the clear language of this law by planning to spend more than half a trillion dollars and tax millions of employers and individuals without congressional authorization.

     No one in the country bears more responsibility for the complexity of this law than you.  When your supermajority couldn’t pass the bill using normal procedures, you and your Senate colleagues rammed through the final legislation by using parliamentary gimmickry.  Then, in the House, Speaker Pelosi cheerfully urged members to pass the legislation “in order to find out what’s in it.”

     This was not good policy-making, and now we’re seeing the consequences.

     Implementation is still going full steam ahead despite numerous problems—with your support.  Contrary to the legislation and the administration’s myriad promises, the SHOP exchanges have been delayed by a year.  Officials have admitted that they’ve gone from worrying over the color of fonts on a website to just making sure that the exchanges aren’t a “third world experience.”  Little to no information has been provided about how the exchanges will function.

     Each one of these problems results from legislation you authored and your colleagues supported.  And yet many Republicans, at every step of the process, issued warnings and condemnations based on exactly these inevitable problems. We warned that businesses would drop coverage. We warned that Americans would not be able to keep a doctor or plan that they liked. We warned that insurance premiums would increase.  

     Secretary Sebelius’s implementation of the law is certainly flawed, but the policy process produced a law that could not possibly be implemented successfully.  As legislators, it is our responsibility to write bills that clearly explain our meaning and have achievable goals.  By your own admission, this law is a disaster.

     Make no mistake.  Unless you act before it’s too late, the American people are going to hold you personally responsible for the failings of this law that negatively impact their jobs, their health, and their families.  You drafted it, you twisted arms to get it passed, and, until now, you have lauded it as a model for all the world.  Your attempts to pass the buck to President Obama’s team will not work, nor will they absolve you of responsibility for the harm that you have brought via this law.

     Republicans have repeatedly offered legislation to repeal PPACA and replace it with more sustainable reforms that would have bipartisan support.  Perhaps we can work together to fix this mess before it’s too late.  We stand ready to repeal the law and put forward legislation that will truly benefit patients and their doctors.

     I look forward to hearing from you.

     Sincerely,

     Mike Pompeo

     Member of Congress

     Kansas 4th District

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care

Immigration: Government Can Only Regulate Legal Markets

By
Alex Nowrasteh

Details about the Boston bombers are surfacing by the minute, but many opponents of immigration reform are already using it as an excuse to oppose reform. There is no reason to assume that continuing the status quo immigration policy will prevent future terrorist attacks.

Legalizing the peaceful and otherwise law-abiding unauthorized immigrants here will allow law enforcement to focus on legitimate national security and crime threats. It is more costly for the government to weed out criminals and national security threats when there is such a large and relatively peaceful unauthorized immigrant population. Shrinking the size of that immigrant black market quickly and cheaply through responsible legalization, and allowing more immigration of workers in the future, will channel scarce government resources toward legitimate security and criminal screenings and away from enforcing economic protectionism. Every minute that a government official currently spends raiding workplaces and checking whether immigrants will affect the wages of technology workers or Washington lawyers is a waste.

Removing peaceful people from the immigration black market and channeling future immigrants into a legal system—after security, criminal, and health checks—is likely to increase safety, not diminish it. The number of permitted immigrants should be determined based on the demands of the market, not the whims of politcs. The government should shed its economic protectionist role in immigration enforcement and instead devote its resources to weeding out the terrorist and criminal needles in an otherwise peaceful and productive haystack.

Topics: 
Trade and Immigration

Food Stamp Fraud and Twinkies

By
Chris Edwards

The federal food stamp program—now called SNAP—is attracting a lot of media coverage. One reason for this is that the program’s costs have exploded—spending more than quadrupled during the Bush-Obama years to $82 billion in 2013 (see here and here p. 16). The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations all took steps to loosen the purse strings on food stamp eligibility, and those changes have led to the ballooning costs of recent years during the stagnant economy.

Aside from the rising costs, two other aspects of SNAP have garnered interest. One is food stamp fraud. The other is the program’s “Twinkie problem”: taxpayers are paying for billions of dollars of junk food, which seems like a huge waste of money to most people.

These two issues have come together in a high-profile effort by a group of media organizations that is demanding greater transparency in SNAP operations. The organizations—led by the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ)—have sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (whose agency oversees SNAP) asking for full disclosure about where food stamps are being spent and what they are being spent on. The Daily Caller reports on the issue here.

Let’s look at the fraud issue. The government claims that the food stamp trafficking rate is just 1 percent and the general overpayment rate is just 4 percent. I suspect that the real rates are much higher, for three reasons: First, the overall costs of SNAP and the number of beneficiaries have skyrocketed. Second, SNAP is ideally suited for abuse: the USDA has few investigators to police the roughly 200,000 SNAP retailers, any of whom could be scamming the system. Third, overpayment rates on other federal subsidy programs are often around 10 percent. Medicare and Medicaid overpayments are in that range, for example, and overpayments have long been around 20 percent in the EITC program.

The AHCJ-led effort is asking the USDA to release data on food stamp purchases by retail outlet. This would be a very useful resource for investigators across the nation to help the government reduce waste and fraud. Are food stamps being cashed in at liquor stores? Which corner stores have unusually high food stamp usage? Let’s get detailed SNAP data on the Internet and allow journalists and the public to help answer these questions. After all, scandal after scandal illustrate that the federal government is lousy at policing programs itself.

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy

Food Aid as Industrial Policy

By
Simon Lester

It’s understandable that Americans would see malnourished people in other countries and want to help. Despite our recent economic woes, we are still relatively wealthy, and our instinct is to make the world a better place if we can.

The role of the government in any such issue is debatable. But not surprisingly, once the government gets involved, the original purpose gets distorted. In practice, after becoming a government program, the idea of giving food to poor people has been turned into an industrial policy tool. Instead of simply giving money to people to buy food from the cheapest source, the U.S. government buys food from U.S. producers and requires that it be sent overseas on U.S. ships.

Thus, government turns aid for the foreign poor into a domestic jobs program. As a result, the percentage of food aid money actually spent on food for the hungry is significantly reduced, as some of that money is now diverted to subsidizing domestic agricultural and other interests. (That, of course, is the problem with all industrial policy: it reduces overall welfare in order to help a favored few.)

Hopefully, that may change soon.  From the Washington Post:

The Obama administration has proposed the first major change in three decades to the way the United States supplies food aid to impoverished nations, significantly scaling back the program that buys commodities from U.S. farmers and ships them to the needy overseas.

Under a proposal in the White House budget released Wednesday, nearly half of $1.4 billion in requested funds for the aid could instead be spent to purchase local bulk food in countries in need or to distribute individual vouchers for local purchases.

Reducing the government’s requirement to purchase U.S. food, most of which by law must be shipped on U.S.-flag vessels, will save enough money to feed an additional 4 million children, according to Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

…

Although the United States is the biggest provider of food assistance in the world, it is the only donor nation that continues to require national purchases and shipment. Government and academic studies in recent years have described the U.S. system as both wasteful and inefficient.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy, Trade and Immigration

School Choice Works

By
Jason Bedrick

The evidence is in: school choice works. Yesterday, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice released their third edition of their report “A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice.” The report provides a literature review of dozens of high-quality studies of school choice programs around the country, including studies from scholars at Harvard University, Stanford University, Cornell University, the University of Arkansas, the Brookings Institution, and the Federal Reserve Bank. The studies examine the impact of school choice programs on the academic performance of participants and public school students, the fiscal impact on taxpayers, racial segregation, and civic values.

The report’s key findings included the following:

  • Twelve empirical studies have examined academic outcomes for school choice participants using random assignment, the “gold standard” of social science. Of these, 11 find that choice improves student outcomes—six that all students benefit and five that some benefit and some are not affected. One study finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found a negative impact.
  • Twenty-three empirical studies (including all methods) have examined school choice’s impact on academic outcomes in public schools. Of these, 22 find that choice improves public schools and one finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found that choice harms public schools.
  • Six empirical studies have examined school choice’s fiscal impact on taxpayers. All six find that school choice saves money for taxpayers. No empirical study has found a negative fiscal impact.
  • Eight empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools. Of these, seven find that school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools. One finds no net effect on segregation from school choice. No empirical study has found that choice increases racial segregation.
  • Seven empirical studies have examined school choice’s impact on civic values and practices such as respect for the rights of others and civic knowledge. Of these, five find that school choice improves civic values and practices. Two find no visible impact from school choice. No empirical study has found that school choice has a negative impact on civic values and practices.

On the same day, a new study from researchers at Harvard University and the Brookings Institution found that a school choice program boosted college enrollment among African-American participants by 24 percent.

While many of the findings show only modest improvement, they consistently show that school choice programs produce the same or superior results across a gamut of measures. Moreover, not all the benefits of choice are easily measurable. Some families are looking for a school that better meets a student’s special needs, instills the parents’ values, inspires a lifelong love of learning, or where a student is safe from bullying. These outcomes are sometimes difficult if not impossible to measure in the aggregate, but parents are in the best position to tell the difference for their own children.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

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