For those who are interested, I will be participating in a health care reform debate at Stony Brook University on Monday (12/8). Details here.

I’ll be debating Dr. David Brown, chief of cardiology at the Stony Brook Medical Center.

Fans of Cato adjunct scholar David Hyman — you know, the guy who claimed that Medicare is a tool of the devil — will be happy to know that he is now blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Hyman’s inaugural post — the first in a series on capping non-economic damages in medical-malpractice cases — can be found here.

And seriously, he was just kidding about that whole Medicare/​devil thing. Honestly.

President-elect Barack Obama has named former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to head his National Economic Council. Obama also wants to require employers to offer health insurance to their workers.

It is therefore instructive to recall what the head of Obama’s National Economic Council has written about employer mandates:

Economists have generally devoted little attention to mandated benefits- regarding them as simply disguised tax and expenditure measures. Uwe Reinhardt’s reaction is probably typical: “[Just because] the fiscal flows triggered by mandate would not flow directly through the public budgets does not detract from the measure’s status of a bona fide tax.”

Suppose, for example, that there is a binding minimum wage. In this case, wages cannot fall to offset employers’ cost of providing a mandated benefit, so it is likely to create unemployment.…

Mandated benefit programs can work against the interests of those who most require the benefit being offered…

If policymakers fail to recognize the costs of mandated benefits because they do not appear in the government budget, then mandated benefit programs could lead to excessive spending on social programs. There is no sense in which benefits become ‘free’ just because the government mandates that employers offer them to workers…

It can plausibly be argued that mandated benefits fuel the growth of government.

The recent privacy dust-up about Google’s Flu Trends service is interesting — and confounding.

Flu Trends is one of many cool things that can be done with data. By tracking searches that suggest the existence of flu symptoms, Google can identify influenza outbreaks about two weeks faster than the Centers for Disease Control, as illustrated by this video graph.

Searches reveal our interests, and this service highlights that fact. So the good folks at Patient Privacy Rights and the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote a letter to Google asking for more information about the privacy consequences of Google Flu Trends. This kind of inquiry and exposure is important to the successful operation of markets because it helps educate both the public and businesses about the privacy consequences of services like Google.

The letter is a little confounding, though. It asks, “Would you agree to publish the technique that Google has adopted to protect the privacy of search queries for Google Flu Trends?”

It’s an inartfully drawn question. Search queries don’t have privacy — they’re inanimate character strings. What the letter intends, I think, is to ask how the privacy of Google users is protected in developing the data for Google Flu Trends. Still, the request is a bit incoherent.

Google said in response to the letter:

Flu Trends uses aggregated data from hundreds of millions of searches over time. Flu Trends uses aggregations of search query data which contain no information that can identify users personally. We also never reveal how many users are searching for particular queries. The only information released publicly or to the CDC is what is seen on the Flu Trends website now: estimates of the percentages of people with influenza-like illnesses.

It’s essentially a given that drawing aggregated data from hundreds of millions of searches produces data that is not identifiable. The data relevant for display by Google Flu Trends is not identifiable. Google Flu Trends doesn’t affect the privacy of Google users. It’s using Google at all that affects their privacy.

There’s value in exploring these issues though, and here’s where I think there is pay dirt in the PPR/EPIC letter:

[T]he question is how to ensure that Google Flu Trends and similar techniques will only produce aggregate data and will not open the door to user-specific investigations, which could be compelled, even over Google’s objection, by court order or Presidential authority.

The rule of law has fallen this far: Advocates must cite the privacy threat from unconstrained, unilateral “Presidential authority.” The letter is also right to point out that courts can strip away Google’s control of the information it collects about its users.

This is a problem with use of all Google services, and a problem with the use of all Internet services. The heart of the problem lies not with the current leader in search, or any other Internet innovator. The problem lies with our unconstrained government.

Yes, Google is playing a dangerous game with the data it collects from us. It has nonchalantly beaten the CDC at its own game, and one can’t predict how the agency will respond. CDC may seek to deputize Google as its public health agent. As the PPR/EPIC letter points out, it may drive Google to reveal more precise — and identifiable — information about health-related searches.

Any agency could do this to any Internet service provider while our law about privacy/​search and seizure is in such a shambles.

Again, I think advocacy of this type is a valuable part of market processes because of its educational value, but if I had written the letter, I would have written it to the head of the Centers for Disease Control asking for a pledge that the agency will not use any informal or extra-judicial means to collect personally identifiable health information.

Paul Starr is an ardent advocate of (dare I say it?) socialized medicine. He co-founded the left-wing magazine The American Prospect. And he wrote the definitive history of the medical profession in the United States — seriously, you should read this book. Which is why Republicans should take heed when he writes:

Political leaders since Bismarck seeking to strengthen the state or to advance their own or their party’s interests have used insurance against the costs of sickness as a means of turning benevolence to power.

As noted earlier, the political survival of the Republican party probably depends on its defeating whatever health-care plan emerges from the scrum created by Messrs. Obama, Baucus, Kennedy, and Wyden.

If the GOP fails, the beating it took in 2008 will pale in comparison to the decades-long drubbing that will follow.

Two trends in job-based health benefits demonstrate why markets are a better bet than government for containing health-care costs and preserving choice.

Today’s New York Times reports:

even if they are fortunate enough to have a job at a company that still offers health benefits, many workers are finding that the buffet of options has been trimmed to a very short menu…

this year, at more than 100 large companies and hundreds of smaller ones … high-deductible plans are the employee’s single take-it-or-leave-it option. One of those companies is the automaker Nissan, which is offering only high-deductible plans to its 15,000 United States employees for the coming year. Another is Delta Airlines.

Expect to hear the usual nonsense about how employers are cost-shifting to workers (they aren’t) and how high-deductible coverage will harm workers’ health (it won’t).

The real lessons to be taken from this news are:

1. Markets are better than government at cost-control. The cost of both public and private health insurance is rising. Despite being badly hampered by government intervention, the private sector is responding by cutting back on overly generous health coverage, a move that will reduce use and cost growth. How is the government responding? By expanding public subsidies, which contribute to cost growth.
2. Forced pooling reduces choice. In unregulated markets, the healthy quite happily subsidize the sick. But when government forces the healthy to do so, healthy people bolt from comprehensive health plans, which then causes those plans to collapse. One of the ways that government badly hampers private health-insurance markets is by herding us all into job-based insurance pools, in an attempt to force the healthy to subsidize the sick. And wouldn’t you know, employers are now having to drop comprehensive plans.

There must be a lesson in here for Obauckennewyden.

More from our Marxist friend Norman Markowitz, contributing editor of Polit​i​calAf​fairs​.net (motto: “Marxist Thought Online”):

Obama certainly has a mandate, and it is a mandate for change. Obama’s slogan, “Change We Can Believe In,” was reminiscent of slogans like the “New Deal” of Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign and the “Great Society” banner under which Johnson won in 1964. In the latter cases, those slogans translated into the major policy domestic agendas of those administrations.

For the people who elected Obama and the increased Democratic majority, “change we can believe in”… is about creating a national public health care program more than 50 years after it was established in other major industrial nations … [a] “single payer” national health system – known as “socialized medicine” in the rest of the developed world …

The right-wing propaganda machine will scream socialism, and that is also a good thing. Because the more socialism comes to be identified with real policies that raise the standard of living and improve the quality of life for the working class and the whole people, the more socialism will be looked at seriously. A stronger left that follows the tradition of the Communist Party in its unbreakable commitment to a socialist future and to educating people about the value and necessity of socialist policies in the present could follow.

It would be a stretch to say that this guy speaks for president-elect Barack Obama, or anyone who voted for Obama.

But it is interesting how excited the Marxists are about Obama’s presidency. In particular, his health-care plan.