Cato Daily Dispatch for November 22, 2002
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For U.S. Troops in Gulf, A Perilous Waiting GameMore High-Income Americans Go Without Health Insurance
North Korea Says 1994 Peace Framework Is Dead
For U.S. Troops in Gulf, A Perilous Waiting Game
According to the Wall Street Journal, a long-term military buildup in the Persian Gulf region in preparation for a possible war with Iraq could expose American troops to more danger. The continued threat of al Qaeda attacks, widespread fury at American support for Israel, and the specter of a far less popular war with Iraq this time already has made waiting for the fight an occupational hazard for U.S. troops in the region. And the Pentagon is worried that danger will only grow in coming weeks if President Bush decides to go to war.
The current dangers were crystalized Thursday when two U.S. soldiers in Kuwait for military exercises were shot and seriously injured by a Kuwaiti policeman. It was the third attack on U.S. soldiers there in slightly more than a month, including an early October shooting by al Qaeda operatives that left one American soldier dead and another wounded.
The CIA's newly declassified judgments on the likelihood of Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction severely undercut the Bush administration's case for attacking Iraq, according to Ivan Eland, the Cato Institute's director of defense policy. In his commentary, "Declassified CIA Report Undercuts Bush's Desire to Invade Iraq", Eland says that "the CIA noted that Iraq now appears to be deterred from initiating terrorist attacks against the United States with conventional, biological or chemical weapons. But if the United States invades Iraq and attempts to depose Hussein, the CIA concluded that he would be more likely to conduct such attacks."
In "War Against Terror Expands Excessively", Eland has warned that "a seemingly unprovoked war against another Muslim nation... could act as a recruiting poster for terrorists for years to come in the fundamentalist Islamic community." Unfortunately, "in Washington, the invasion train has already left the station and is steaming down the track. Some of the more alert passengers are telling the engineer that a truck is blocking the tracks up ahead, but the engineer insists on opening the throttle wider. Unless the unlikely occurs and the train is stopped, a bloody mess could ensue."
More High-Income Americans Go Without Health Insurance
USA Today reports that more high-income Americans are going without health insurance, as premiums rise at their fastest rate in 10 years. While the working poor make up the biggest chunk of the 41.2 million Americans who lack insurance, 811,000 people with household incomes above $75,000 joined the ranks of the uninsured last year, bringing that group's total to 6.6 million, according to the Census Bureau.
Because higher income groups have more political power, their mounting numbers among the uninsured could renew stalled debate about what to do. "There is a category of people who are uninsured who can afford to buy the insurance, but they don't," says Tom Miller, Director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. "As insurance gets more expensive, they don't see the return on that insurance, so they drop out."
Miller says one answer would be to loosen restrictions on the benefits that insurance policies must offer, so that lower-cost, less-comprehensive policies are available for catastrophic coverage.
In "No Health Insurance? So What?", Cato Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds has suggested that the phenomenon of fewer insured Americans should not be a cause for worry. He writes that "economists Craig Perry and Harvey Rosen, in a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that 'the lack of health insurance among the self-employed does not affect their health. For virtually every subjective and objective measure of their health status, the self-employed and wage-earners are statistically indistinguishable for each other.' There is likewise no reason to assume that those who choose not to participate in employer-provided plans suffer any adverse effects on health care, much less on health."
Cato has long promoted the Medical Savings Account (MSA) as a solution to rising health care costs. In "More Than a Theory: Medical Savings Accounts at Work", Peter Ferrara examines the experience of private companies currently using MSA-type approaches to reducing health care costs. In the study, he proves that MSAs can control rapidly rising health costs, while preserving both quality and patient choice.
North Korea Says 1994 Peace Framework Is Dead
The New York Times reports that North Korea, invoking a decision last week by countries including the United States to cut off fuel supplies, said Thursday that a 1994 agreement intended to prevent it from producing nuclear weapons had collapsed, and accused Washington of destroying it.
The statement comes just weeks after the Bush administration confronted the impoverished communist country with evidence showing that it had already secretly violated the so-called framework by importing equipment needed to produce highly enriched uranium.
In Thursday's statement, the North Korean government said the supply of fuel was the only one of four articles of the framework that Washington had respected.
Citing U.S. hostility, North Korea said a "proposal for concluding a nonaggression treaty is, in essence, the only realistic solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula."
According to Cato Institute Senior Fellow Doug Bandow, the Bush administration "should treat North Korea with studied indifference, noting that its behavior is of far greater interest to its neighbors and that America intends to follow their lead. Without fanfare, Washington should suspend all aid, humanitarian and other," he said.
In "Confronting the Korean Bomb", Bandow lays out a strategy for the U.S. to follow for North Korea, advising that "it should tell North Korea that when it begins to behave in a more positive fashion, agreeing to dismantle its nuclear operation and allow in outside inspectors, for instance, that official recognition, trade, membership in international organizations and the like will follow. Should the North continue to behave belligerently, however, there will be nothing to negotiate." In "Cato's Handbook for the 105th Congress", Bandow advises the U.S. government to "return to its noninterventionist roots, and to do so on the basis of American interests. Seoul and its neighbors throughout East Asia will probably always want the United States to be prepared to fight to the last American for them. But Washington should risk the lives and wealth of its citizens only when something fundamental is at stake for their own political community. The lives of U.S. soldiers are not gambit pawns to be sacrificed in some global or regional chess game. It is time to bring American troops home from Korea."
Christopher Kilmer, editor, ckilmer@cato.org
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