insurance

With a reported bump in public support for some variation on Obamacare after the President’s speech last week, there is no time to rest. Rather, it’s time to drive stakes into the heart of the “public option” vampire. And stakes we shall provide. The following are solid reasons why no version of the public option must be resurrected:

1. A government “competitor” can’t go out of business when it fails. Failing government entities only drains resources from more productive places—not to mention from taxpayers. (Witness the Postal Service.) The left has been particularly disingenuous with this constant doublespeak about the public options offering “competition and choice.” This is another example of the left trying cleverly to co-opt the language of the right. Call the b.s.  
2. Sooner or later any public option will be subsidized by the government. This will put private companies at a competitive disadvantage, which is not only unfair, but threatens the private market so many Americans currently enjoy (despite all the cost-drivers created by government).
3. A public option will create a new set of special interests and dependents. These supplicants will be beholden to the Democrats and Barack Obama. This is why government programs never go away. People who don’t think this is really about buying their power with our tax dollars are kidding themselves.
4. Co-ops are a ruse. We already have non-profit health insurance companies with their own special place in the tax code. They’re called Blue Cross Blue Shield. Talk of co-ops is but a ruse to reawaken the vampire. Co-ops too must be killed.
5. A public option will have different rules to play by.That’s not fair.  Believe it or not, the regulations and mandates that make premiums unaffordable in places like MA, NJ and NY are not as bad at the federal level. So the regulatory framework for the public option would be more favorable than for insurance companies in most states. Another reason private insurers would die off—preparing the way for a complete government takeover of healthcare.

There are fundamental asymmetries between government and private companies. Those asymmetries make government provision of most goods and services unfair and illiberal. Let’s take these stakes and kill the public option. (Lest cries of “you have no proposal” go up from the Left, this should keep you busy. And this.)

(Note: Baucuscare – i.e. Obamacare Plan B – has most of the elements of the failed Massachusetts plan. The MA plan jockeys for most expensive in the country with NJ and NY. All are more expensive due to regs Baucus is proposing for the whole country.) 

Let's change FEMA’s (and similar disaster response agencies’) regulations as follows:

For example: if a person lives in a hurricane prone area and their house is destroyed by a hurricane (or related disaster such as a tornado or flooding caused by a hurricane), they can receive help to restore their lives to some semblance of order. However, they may not receive any more hurricane-related bailouts for the next 10 years.

Because right now we are subsidizing people who think it is a good idea to build their house in areas which are prone to natural disasters on a regular basis and everyone who does not live in such areas is paying for them to do so.

By removing the incentive which allows them to spread their risk among everyone else, we will begin the process of forcing people make truer assessments of the amount of risk they are willing to take on than they are currently doing.

The positive results? 

1. People will move away from areas prone to certain natural disasters or
2. Have to buy proper insurance to ameliorate the risk they are voluntarily taking.
3. Also cost to everyone else will go down as the government stops forcing them to pay for someone else’s willful disregard of reality.
4. "Worst-disaster ever" will be used less frequently as fewer people are at risk to harm.

1. Areas like South Florida would see a drop in population or
2. Their inhabitants would see a rise in the cost of living commensurate with the true risk they are taking to indulge their preference to live in the area.
   

I am not sorry that the employees of the Big Three believed everything their unions sold them on.  The reality that their income, insurance and retirement security is going down the toilet with the rest of their union crap should be an eye opener to them about the kind of sewage system they invested in.  Would anyone know how much income, insurance and retirement security each Union Boss and their helpers received, and was any of it flushed down the toilet?

If the Big Three gets their money then we need a Web Site where we should support buying anything to drive as long as it is not made by one of the Big Three?

Darn, I do love my truck.  Ouch, it is a Ford.  Don’t get excited, my car is a Nissan, and my other truck is a Toyota.
 

Promoted by Matt Moon: Bob Carroll of the Tax Foundation explains McCain's health credit better than McCain does in today's WSJ. Health care is one of those issues that the next conservative movement must provide new ideas for.

As the election hoopla crescendos, Hawaii is giving the rest of us a little preview of what health care mandates could do in the next presidency.

Barack Obama's only mandate is that all children have health insurance. Hawaii tried to accomplish this through its government, and sadly, revealed the problems.

Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, writes in the New York Post:

"Hawaii just had a vivid lesson in health-care economics, learning that if you offer people insurance for free - surprise, surprise - they'll quickly drop other coverage to enroll.

"As a result, Hawaii is ending the only state universal child health-care program in the country after just seven months.

"The program, called the Keiki (Child) Care Plan, was designed to provide coverage to children whose parents can't afford private insurance but who make too much to qualify for other public programs (such as Medicaid and Hawaii's State Children's Health Insurance Program). Keiki Care was free for these gap kids, except for a $7 office-visit fee.

"But then state officials found that families were dropping private coverage to enroll their children in the plan. 'People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free,' said Dr. Kenny Fink of Hawaii's Department of Human Services."

A lesson in human nature and government we can't soon forget.