All Posts Tagged With: "health insurance"
The Mandated Health Insurance Outrage
With the introduction of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s 2,074-page health insurance nationalization bill, we can be thankful for one thing at least. It will most likely be the last bill of its kind introduced this year. Who’d have time to wade through another?
This doesn’t mean there is anything in the bill to be thankful [...]
Monsieur Bastiat, Call Your Office
In September I lectured at the Liberty Weekend Dedicated to the Life and Legacy of Frédéric Bastiat, sponsored by the Polish-American Foundation for Economic Research and Education (PAFERE) in Warsaw. Preparing for my visit, I reread Bastiat’s great book The Law. Oh do we need Bastiat today! The Law is the kind of book you [...]
18Nov2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedBig Business Goes Big for Health Care Reform
“What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand,” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times a few months ago.
That manipulation should disturb us. But contrary to Rich, it is not the work of “corporatists” who have sprung [...]
Not with a Bang But a Whimper
Social change can be revolutionary, sudden, and swift. More commonly it moves at a glacier pace. Yet glaciers work great change, and great damage, given enough time.
3Nov2009 | Ross Levatter | 2 comments | ContinuedCompetition
Give Me a Break!
Competition
by John Stossel
John Stossel is the hosts of Stossel on Fox Business and the author of Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel—Why Everything You Know is Wrong. Copyright 2009 by JFS Productions, Inc. Distributed by Creators Syndicate, Inc.
“Choice, competition, reducing costs—those
are the things that I want to see accomplished [...]
Health Care’s Muddled Incentives
On the topic of health care, what empirical observations are reliable? Unfortunately, many “facts” come freighted with a great deal of ideological baggage. Those skeptical of markets, who favor a large role for government in health care, tend to emphasize statistics that disparage the American healthcare system. For supporters of markets, it is tempting to try to [...]
23Oct2009 | Arnold Kling | 4 comments | ContinuedHealth Care: A Future Free-Market Alternative
I visit a new doctor because of complaints I’ve been having. The primary-care doctor begins his first visit with me by explaining his payment system. I need to put down a retainer based on his assessment of the time it will take him to deal with my problem, which he’ll inform me of at the [...]
23Sep2009 | Ross Levatter | 5 comments | ContinuedArrogance
It’s crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It’s even crazier to do it in a few months.
Yet that is what some members of Congress presumed to do. They intended, as the New York Times put it, “to reinvent the nation’s health care system.”
Let that [...]
Competition Would Save Medicine, Too
Competition so regularly brings us better stuff—cars, phones, shoes, medicine—that we’ve come to expect it. We complain on the rare occasion the supermarket doesn’t carry a particular ice-cream flavor. We just assume the store will have 30,000 items, that it will be open 24/7, and that the food will be fresh and cheap.
I take it [...]
Health-Care Cons
Economist Joan Robinson (1903–1983) wrote, “The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of readymade answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”
A better reason to study economics is to avoid being deceived by politicians; they are the far greater threat to life, liberty, and the [...]
Book Reviews – January 2008
- The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care
by David Gratzer Reviewed by Jane M. Orient
- Self-Determination: The Other Path for Native Americans
Edited by Terry L. Anderson, Bruce L. Benson, and Thomas F. Flanagan Reviewed by William L. Anderson, Jr.
- The Wal-Mart Revolution
by Richard Vedder and Wendell Cox Reviewed by George Leef - On the Wealth of Nations
by P.J. O’Rourke Reviewed by Raymond J. Keating
Medical Competition Works for Patients
Health-care costs overall have been rising faster than inflation, but not all medical costs are skyrocketing. In a few pockets of medicine, costs are down while quality is up.
Dr. Brian Bonanni has an unusual medical practice. His office is open Saturdays. He e-mails his patients and gives them his cell-phone number.
“I need to be available [...]
Bad Policy Drives Out Good
All public policies are related. Okay, that may be a slight overstatement, but there’s a point here. A politician’s credibility on one public issue—and even the disposition of that issue—will often be determined by his or her position on other issues. People will look at a politician’s full program as a way of judging good [...]
1Dec2007 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedRanking the U.S. Health-Care System
It is curious that the United States ranked below Europe in the World Health Organization’s 2000 World Health Report, which rated 191 countries’ medical systems. In his documentary Sicko, socialist Michael Moore makes hay out of the fact that the United States placed 37th, behind even Morocco, Cyprus, and Costa Rica. This ranking is used [...]
1Nov2007 | Jim Peron | 34 comments | ContinuedCleaning Up After the Elephants
I detect a pattern in the challenges hurled at liberals on nearly every issue. The opponent of liberalism describes a problem, invariably with roots in a government infringement of freedom. In response, he prescribes more government interference with freedom, at which point the liberal interjects that the best and only just solution is the repeal [...]
1Aug2006 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedSeparate the Professions and the State
Lewis Andrews (lew@yankeeinstitute.org) is executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy in Hartford, Connecticut.
Since the early 1990s, and even through the collapse of the stock-market bubble, the American economy has continued to experience remarkable increases in worker productivity, both in manufacturing, which now accounts for 14 percent of the nation’s output, and in [...]
Freedom of Conscience and the Welfare State
Who says the welfare state respects freedom of conscience? Consider: In March the California Supreme Court ruled that employer-provided prescription-drug plans must cover birth-control products, even if contraception violates an employer’s religious convictions.
The conscientious objector in the case is Catholic Charities of Sacramento. The nonprofit organization, which is part of the Roman Catholic Church, argued [...]
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
