Summer Regulation: Does the Internet Need Saving?

Yesterday was the first day of Summer, and you know what that means? Sun, sand, the great outdoors…and a new issue of Regulation magazine. This issue contains a number of interesting articles that will be discussed in the coming months.

The cover articles provide perspective on the FCC decision to impose traditional public utility regulation on the internet. “What Hath the FCC Wrought”, by University of Pennsylvania professor and former FCC chief economist Gerald Faulhaber, argues that service quality will suffer to the extent that service providers can’t charge more for streams that require greater provider resources. Kansas State professor Dennis Weisman argues that internet regulation will likely protect competitors from competition rather than serve consumer interests just like the old telephone regulatory scheme.

A pair of articles discuss healthcare policy. West Texas A&M’s Neil Meredith and Heritage Foundation scholar Robert Moffit examine provisions of the Affordable Care Act encouraging the development of multi-state health plans (MSPs) intended to provide larger insurance pools while overcoming some of the regulatory burdens of state-regulated plans. They argue that eliminating questionable requirements would give consumers more opportunities to use MSP insurance.  University of Arizona professors Christopher Robertson and Keith Joiner propose two changes to health insurance to improve efficiency.  The first would set the stop-loss limit as a constant percent of wages rather than a fixed dollar amount.  The second would pay patients directly a portion of the cost of high-cost low-evidence-of-benefit procedures regardless of whether they obtained the procedure.  This would induce patients to think more carefully about the benefits of expensive uncertain-benefit procedures.

This issue continues Regulation’s long history of examining housing policy. Some Federal housing programs subsidize developers through tax credits to build affordable rental housing while other programs provide assistance directly to tenants in the form of vouchers. Edgar Olsen of the University of Virginia makes the case for moving to an all-voucher housing assistance program.

The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) fund will run out of money in 2016. Consultants A. Bentley Hankins and Jeffrey Joy propose five reforms that would update the program to reflect increased life expectancy and the changing skill requirements of jobs.

For many decades, articles in Regulation have referenced work of the late Gordon Tullock to explain the political economy of regulatory policy. Zachary Gochenour examines Tullock’s legacy, and speculates about future trends in the field of public choice economics that he helped build.

For these articles and many more, read the full issue of Regulation here.