Obamacare’s Failed Rollout and Public-Choice Economics

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Veronique de Rugy:

The last few weeks have been interesting. As it became clear that the rollout of Obamacare’s Healthcare.gov wasn’t going according to plan, we have seen liberal commentators go from enthusiasm to dismay. To their credit, many of them are actually condemning the failure in not uncertain terms. Ezra Klein of Wonkblog called it a “disaster”; in fact, he and his co-authors at Wonkblog have spent the last ten days explaining in detail all the different ways it turned into such a mess.

The Republicans, as expected, have seized this opportunity to hammer the law, using this very visible and very embarrasing failure to make the case that the glitches and the failed rollout are more evidence that the law should be repealed.

Yet the overall reaction from the supporters of the law remains that, while the website isn’t working properly and the rollout has been a disaster, that doesn’t mean the whole law is bad. They are obviously forgetting that this is not the first failure encountered by the law. In fact, many aspects of the law have had to be repealed and changed. It was written in such a hurry or passed with so little care that no one seems to have considered that the Medicaid expansion (one of the core features of the law) could be challenged the way it was, making it much less likely states will opt in, and that the statute technically doesn’t authorize subsidies to be distributed through the federal exchanges.

As Yuval Levin wrote last week in a very thoughtful piece about the problems faced by the exchanges, we shouldn’t forget that these glitches are not our main beef with the law:

For me, and for other critics of Obamacare, the problem with the law was never about these technical matters. I didn’t think the system wouldn’t work because the government couldn’t build a website, but because the basic health economics involved is deeply misguided and would take the (badly inadequate) American health-financing system in the wrong direction. But Obamacare was also always going to be a test of the sheer capacity of the administrative state to actually do what it claims the authority and ability to do. At this point, it looks as though we may be witnessing a failure of the administrative state on a level unimagined even by its staunchest critics. We may be. But we’ll have to see.

I agree. I also believe that, contrary to what liberals are saying, these technical problems are actually a sign of deep problems with the law itself. And I would go further: I think it is the sign of a deeper problem with government intervention in general. This is yet another piece of evidence that no matter how good lawmakers’ intentions are, no matter how much money government spends, government solutions are very likely to fall short of solving most of our problems, and often turn into massive disasters. Government fails to address most problems it tackles because the incentives are arranged in such a way that it favors interest groups and doesn’t reward success or punish failures in the same way as the market does.

Let me explain: It seems liberals truly believed that as long as they had the right people, the more compassionate people, and the people who truly care about the poor in office, they could pull off this massive government program to address our health-care woes. To be fair, conservatives and Republicans in general suffer from something similar, except that they believe that if Republicans were in power, they could successfully shrink the size of the government, reform entitlements, and spread democracy around the world.

Unfortunately, this comes from a serious failure to understand public-choice economics, the great work of Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan and many others. Let me sum it up for you: The problem isn’t that we have the wrong people in office; rather, it’s that the institutions of government themselves that are inherently incapable of performing certain tasks, prone to catering to interest groups, and inherently conducive to bad decision-making. This doesn’t mean that who holds power doesn’t have some influence on the outcome, just that it isn’t the most important factor.

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That is one of the reasons the US Constitution is such a magnificent document. It was designed to RESTRICT the government from acting like a black hole trapping everything within it’s gravitational grasp. Leftists cannot stand individualism, because it prevents them from grabbing more political power through enslavement of the masses.

Obamacare cannot work. Whether the left designed it that way on purpose to fail as a means of demanding full national socialist takeover of healthcare in the US, or if they really are just that economically insane, I don’t really know. But at least even some in the MSM are starting to talk about this cosmic leftist failure.

http://www.cbsnews.com/

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57609224/arrival-of-obamacare-forcing-insurers-to-drop-customers-with-low-coverage/

The Affordable Care Act was signed by President Obama in 2010 and since then he has repeated one reassuring phrase: “If you like your insurance plan you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.” But it is happening. The president’s health care law raises the standards for insurance policies, which many consider to be a good thing. But hundreds of thousands of Americans whose policies don’t meet the new standards are being told that their health plans are being cancelled. Natalie Willes is a sleep consultant who helps parents in Los Angeles train their newborns to sleep. She buys her own health insurance.

“I was completely happy with the insurance I had before,” Willes said. So she was surprised when she tried to renew her policy. What did she find out? “That my insurance was going to be completely different, and they are going to be replaced with 10 new plans that were going to fall under the regulations of the Affordable Care Act,” she said. Her insurer, Kaiser Permanente, is terminating policies for 160,000 people in California and presenting them with new plans that comply with the healthcare law.

“Before I had a plan that I had a $1,500 deductible,” she said. “I paid $199 dollars a month. The most similar plan that I would have available to me would be $278 a month. My deductible would be $6,500 dollars, and all of my care after that point would only be covered 70 percent.”

Her final statement is why I hope enough Americans will finally wake up to the insanity of obamacare. When enough people realize that what we who have opposed this national socialist monster have been saying all along would happen IS happening – and that the leftists as they always do – are lying to fool you into putting the shackles of your own enslavement to them.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/census-bureau-means-tested-govt-benefit-recipients-outnumber-full#sthash.ibawQtwX.dpuf

It is a national shame that there are more people on government “means tested” handouts than people who are working. From the site directly above:

The 108,592,000 people who were beneficiaries of means-tested government programs in the United States in 2011 not only outnumbered full-time year-round workers, they also outnumbered the total population of the Philippines, which is 105,720,644, according to the CIA World Factbook. They are also approaching the number of people living in Mexico, which is 116,220,947, according to the CIA.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/millions-americans-are-losing-their-health-plans-because-obamacare_764602.html

So again, for those still drowing in socialist kool-aid and supporting this horrible law – how do you square Obama’s repeated lies that we would be able to keep our insurance plans and doctors if we liked them with the purposely designed obamacare mandate for unwanted and unneeded “coverage” that does nothing but raise the cost of insurance coverage and require BY LAW that people lose the coverage they had that they already liked? Are you so blinded by bogus leftist pseudo-compassion that you cannot see the false foundation upon which socialism is inherently built?

Obamacare delenda est.

Pete
WOW YOU GAVE US A MUST READ,
THANK YOU, FOR ENLIGHTING THE MIND OF SO MANY ,

You’re welcome, Bee.

Have a great weekend.

Pete
and you deserve one for yourself,