In defense of the pundits ctd.
September 18, 2009 Comments Off
Chart of the Day
September 11, 2009 6 Comments
Obama’s inconsistencies on health care
September 10, 2009 8 Comments
Through the Looking Glass: The Health Care Debate from a Doctor’s Perspective
Luckily, it just so happens that one of the League’s Guest Authors and blogger in his own right (check out: Bleakonomy), Dan Summers, is an MD and was willing to engage in a back and forth with me over email about various facets of the debate. [Read more →]
August 20, 2009 10 Comments
Public Option? What Public Option?
But the broader context of the debate is something I’ve found pretty interesting to follow and in doing so I’ve noted how much the ontology of that context strikes me as largely contrived — and thereby leads to a fairly contrived debate.
Take for example the screaming dissidents of the proposed Obamacare reforms. [Read more →]
August 11, 2009 6 Comments
health care musings
Peter Suderman, from his new perch at Reason Magazine, dissects the looming breakdown of the public option in Obama’s push for health care reform. At the crux of the issue lies the cost, which the CBO estimates at $1.6 trillion dollars over the next 10 years. This is a hefty pricetag. I’ve been following all of this and reading a good deal on the subject of regulatory capture and public choice theory, and suffice to say, I’ve had some pretty eye-opening discussions especially with brother Mark on all of this, so I’d just like to revisit health care in light of what looks to be a reform bill that – when it’s done – will probably bring the worst of all worlds together into one epic reform failure.
Mark pointed out something to me that I think is too often left out of the health care debate, which is essentially that there is a pretty striking difference between subsidizing the supply side (i.e. insurance providers) vs. the demand side (consumers of health care insurance) in that the former is more likely to become a subsidy of fewer providers, whereas the latter at least theoretically would be better for competition and leave the door open to many different providers. Thus a health insurance voucher program would at least theoretically be less likely to unduly benefit a handful of insurance companies over the rest.
This makes sense to me, though I still worry that voucher programs would meet up with a few problems – namely pre-existing condition limits, but also the fact that we already have such an entrenched system that it seems unlikely that many new health insurance providers would be able to emerge. The system has been anti-competitive for so long, I’m not sure how we can turn it back to a more decentralized, competitive environment.
But I wonder if we should break this out a little more. So here’s some ideas: [Read more →]
June 29, 2009 78 Comments
(Not) Disproving Public Choice
First, a quick primer on the relevant portions of public choice theory for the uninitiated. Here, Publius is correct that Conor’s passing remarks provide a good summation:
I wish that progressives would realize that parties with a narrow vested interest in a legislative outcome are always going to enjoy an advantage over the diffuse interests of the populace, and especially that portion of the populace that is without power. Community organizing is never going to change this basic fact, nor is any campaign finance reform that passes constitutional muster, nor is a bigger Democratic majority in Congress.
Although not all public choice theorists are libertarians, all (or at least almost all) libertarians are public choice theorists. Indeed, some version of public choice theory, intentionally or unintentionally, lies at the heart of just about any of the myriad strains of modern libertarianism.* So whether public choice theory holds up to scrutiny is pretty important to both vindicating and undermining libertarianism.
Publius’ argument is that, although public choice theory should be taken seriously, the passage of net neutrality, a public health option, and/or energy reform would be inexplicable under public choice theory because the benefits of each would be spread out diffusely, while the costs would be concentrated on a handful of narrow interests.
Unfortunately, this completely misunderstands public choice theory and also assumes that no narrow interests benefit from the aforementioned agenda, regardless of whether one thinks that agenda is still good policy.
June 16, 2009 15 Comments
follow the money
June 15, 2009 8 Comments
