"If you lose your job or you change your job, you'll be able to get coverage. If you strike out on your own and start a small business, you'll be able to get coverage. We'll do this by creating a new insurance exchange -- a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices."
Try typing "personal health insurance" in Google. The first two sites are companies that compare quotes for personal health insurance (e Health Insurance and Health Insurance Finders) both of which provide quotes and application links for individual/family, group/business, short-term, and even medicare. Sorry Dems, this marketplace already exists, created by the free market, something that doesn't seem to have been valued in the past 16 years.
"For those individuals and small businesses who still can't afford the lower-priced insurance available in the exchange, we'll provide tax credits, the size of which will be based on your need. For those Americans who can't get insurance today because they have preexisting medical conditions, we will immediately offer low-cost coverage that will protect you against financial ruin if you become seriously ill."
The first part sounds dangerously like "from each according to his ability to each according to his need," providing disincentives for people to raise their income. We will provide you tax credits if you are poor and if you become more productive, we will take them away. And economically speaking, people with preexisting conditions cost a lot of money to insure, meaning that low-cost coverage is not an economically viable option. What if a rich person has a preexisting condition? Do middle class Americans pay for this person to have "low-cost coverage" or is there a double standard providing this coverage to only some people who meet certain conditions? Who determines these conditions? This last paragraph is scares me quite a bit.
In this post, I'll be commenting on this video found at www.whitehouse.gov:
"Here are the details that every American needs to know about this plan. First if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or doctor you have."
This is true, you won't have to change your plan, just like you don't have to accept other government funding. Unfortunately the government will provide incentives that not only make the public option more appealing to each individual marginally, it will provide negative financial incentives to have private insurance because:
"Under this plan it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition... As soon as I sign this bill, it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it most."
This will increase the cost for everyone who buys private insurance because forcing them to provide coverage to those individuals with preexisting conditions ultimately raises premiums for everyone, a negative incentive for buying private insurance. And insurance companies cannot just drop your coverage when you are sick (see John Stossel's six part "Sick in America"), they usually do this when you lie about preexisting conditions (Stossel's example is of a man who went to see a doctor about a lump in his leg a few days before he bought insurance), so providing insurance for people who cheat the system again raises the premiums for the contract abiding citizens.
"They will no longer to be able to place a cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime. We will place a limit on the amount you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they get sick. And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventative care -- like mammograms and colonoscopies -- because there's no reason we shouldn't be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse."
Again these are regulations that will increase the cost ofindividual premiums or at the very least make the minimum coverage plan a lot more expensive for those who can afford it least. This will drive more people to the public option by increasing the amount of people that cannot afford a minimum health insurance premium. The forced coverage of preventative healthcare will increase the cost of everyone's premiums yet again. Also, see the uproar over mammograms and "expert opinion and consensus" in the LA Times, my particular favorite is their observation that "even the most careful scientific evaluations cannot always provide definitive answers on what works best for all patients."
I had a nice little break and a fantastic Turkey Day dinner. I also watched the movie Great Debaters, a Denzel Washington film about a black university's debate team. The final debate in the movie reminded me of this post on civil disobedience, a great read.
The tobacco (not smoking, tobacco) ban went into "effect" yesterday. Richard Becker has a good piece in the Kentucky Kernel about his thoughts. Not only is this unenforceable, the university is making a judgment that only individual students themselves can make. Also, this ban applies to smokeless tobacco as well, which does no harm to anyone around! UK claims they are doing tobacco users a favor and helping them quit.
Where was this "altruism" when it came to naming a new facility that will house basketball players the Wildcat Coal Lodge?
Patrick Lonneman also makes an effective argument, advocating that if UK is trying to provide a healthy campus, they should remove all the soda machines, Chic-Fil-A's, and Sbarros on campus and provide only healthy food.
In an obvious move to quash resistance to LFUGC's student housing plan, five students have been evicted from 171 Woodland Avenue for fire code violations. Now I don't have too much of a problem (just a small one) with enforcing code violations (as long as the city keeps its own building up to code -> check here for more on that one or below for the video), but I have a major problem with "Mayor Jim Newberry’s recent aim to address safety fire codes and zoning violations in neighborhoods surrounding UK." If code violations are going to be enforced, they should be enforced in all areas, not just ones containing students that the mayor dissapproves of.
Bluegrass Policy Blog (a blog I complained about in my last entry) has an update on "an initiative to conduct numerous open records requests to obtain check registers, financial data, and budgets for Kentucky school districts, cities, and state agencies." We need more of this to happen, well done guys!
Bluegrass Policy Blog reports that Owensboro schools are scheduling activities to honor veterans on veterans day. Don't get me wrong, I am a supporter of veterans as much as anyone, and their service to the nation and fight for freedom should be honored. But coming from the Austrian school, I have a couple of problems with doing this in public school, and I'm quite surprised that a "free-market" or "libertarian" think-tank would support such activities.
First, schools should not be forcing students to celebrate any holiday. If they would like to give the students the day off to do what they (or their parents) please, that would be fine, they are not. If students or their parents wished to attend local Veterans Day celebrations, they could. Having schools put on events and likely forcing students to attend or even participate in presentations is not acceptable.
We can't force anyone to love this country or appreciate veterans. In addition, such activities usually (and I am not too far removed from being forced to participate in such "festivities" myself) involve the glorification of imperialist aspirations of politicians, not the sacrifice many have made for freedom. Most celebrations take on a joyous mood and lack the sobering reminder that war is something that should never be excitedly entered into and should be avoided at all costs. Forcing students to do this is not in line with libertarian or Austrian beliefs.
