Courtesy of my good friend and colleague Elizabeth Krum:

Interesting new audio of Paul Krugman is up at Breitbart’s Big Government:

Background (excerpted):

In this audio, Krugman is speaking on health care reform at Hunter College on July 16, 2008. It’s a 5:00 clip (unedited).  If you want to know why liberals are continuing to fight tooth and nail for the public option, here it is in astonishing detail.

Most striking was Krugman’s admission that even without a public option the system would largely look like a single payer system – based on the subsidies for lower wage earners and the fact that everyone else is paying for these with taxes on top of their insurance premiums.

The “Rube Goldberg device”, which Krugman used as a metaphor, is a term for an over-engineered solution to a simple problem. In this case, designed to obscure the solution they are actually looking for, i.e. single payer.

The critical point in all of this is the sheer scope of this deception on the part of the Administration – with help from the media. Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein have been two of the most prominent media advocates for health care reform…with numerous appearances on television and their blogs at the New York Times and the Washington Post, respectively.

(Klein has recently added a whole new layer of deceit.)

Link up and Tweet at will.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:38 — 22.7MB)

Sorry it took me so long to post, but this is yet another great interview from The Notes proprietor D.R. Tucker.

Notwithstanding the fact that historically, Democrats in America have been and are THE party of dependence, Republicans are nonetheless complicit in the politics of emasculation. At least some Republicans (more on this later). In the wake of Senator Ted Kennedy’s recent passing, the complicity spotlight shines not only on Kennedy but on his partner in “dependency crime”, Orrin Hatch, who together expanded government control over health care decisions, (for the children of course), via the SCHIP program. Former Kansas Republican Nancy Kassebaum is similarly complicit vis-a-vis HIPPA regulations. One could go on (McCain-Feingold, Kennedy-McCain, etc.). Holman Jenkins sardonically crystalizes Republican guilt in the following Wall Street Journal paragraphs:

I want to give a shout-out to our Republican friends, who have been with us every step of the way, who have been an important part of our salami progress so far—by pushing various “patient’s bills of rights,” defending the tax giveaways that encourage spending regardless of cost or benefit; by expanding Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans benefits and subsidized health care for middle-class children.

I say tonight, without Republican help, we could never have brought the system to its current dysfunction and I thank you.

Sarah Palin’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece suggests the outlook for choice, competition, and the GOP may be brighter than they currently appear to be:

Common sense tells us that the government’s attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy. And common sense tells us to be skeptical when President Obama promises that the Democrats’ proposals “will provide more stability and security to every American.”

With all due respect, Americans are used to this kind of sweeping promise from Washington. And we know from long experience that it’s a promise Washington can’t keep.

We often hear such overblown promises from Washington. With first principles in mind and with the facts in hand, tell them that this time we’re not buying it.

Dear Governor, please continue to advocate for those first principles. If you do, they will take you and the country a long way in the right direction.

The Boston Globe reports on some apparent chicanery at President Obama’s recent town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Boston Herald also has more on this bizarre occurrence. Can you say, “embarrassing,” boys and girls? I knew you could!

In an unusual (to say the least) ruling, a Clinton-appointed US District Court Judge rules against a former employee of The Scotts Co. who sued the company after they fired him for being a smoker. This may be a minor miscarriage of justice, but it’s a miscarriage of justice nonetheless. According to the Boston Globe, the plaintiff in this case has accused the judge of pro-corporate bias. It may not be that the judge has a pro-corporate bias, or even a liberal bias; it may be that the judge just made a bad call. Hopefully the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals will set things right.

Summarizing tonight’s radio program, here are its highlights. In politics, the issue is never the issue. For example, “global warming” is not about saving the climate, it’s an income redistribution scheme, with some one-world government, centralized bureaucracy thrown in for good measure. Likewise, “stealth care” is not about universal health care but it is rather a devious way to permanently explode the growth of the welfare state, control the lives of nearly 300 million people, and enshrine health care as a right, thereby superseding The Bill of Rights provided by the Founders. Listen to then Illinois state senator Obama’s infamous “redistributive justice” interview and see for yourself. The following links reference the rhetoric characterizing the debate, tactics, bloated bureaucracies, and ultimately, the illusion of yoking universal care to cost containment.

United Senators John Barrasso and Tom Coburn are also practicing MD’s. Listen to their observations via YouTube!!! Here is the link to the Patients’ Choice Act of 2009 as well. Please let your representatives know you insist on choice and competition as the basis for making health car choices. Government has no role to play in this choice whatsoever.

The verdict is increasingly negative concerning Masssachusetts’ ill-fated attempt to force feed health “reform” to the public. The effort was doomed to fail from the outset because it was and is devoid of genuine market-based incentives.  Conceived in the heat of political expediency, Massachusetts “health reform” is a fiscal black hole operated by a bloated, top heavy bureaucracy.

The seeds of the current mess were originally sown in the form of state-imposed (is there any other kind?) mandates:

Insurance in Massachusetts is among the most expensive in the nation because of multiple mandates, such as premium price controls and rules dictating that coverage be offered to all comers regardless of health. (February 1, 2008 Wall Street Journal)

The Bay State has long served up coverage-specific insurance mandates, such as for fertility treatments, which raise costs. Yet in a just-deserts twist, Massachusetts health planners are now reviewing ways to trim mandates because the state is footing more of the bill, even if they didn’t care when imposing them on individuals and small business. A state-sponsored study shows that total spending on mandates was $1.32 billion in 2005, or 12% of premiums. The study is devastating despite its pro-mandate slant. (July 29, 2008 Wall Street Journal).

For 15 years Massachusetts has also imposed mandates known as guaranteed issue and community rating — meaning that insurers must cover anyone who applies, regardless of health or pre-existing conditions, and also charge everyone the same premium (or close to it). Yet these mandates allow people to wait until they’re sick, or just before they’re about to incur major medical expenses, to buy insurance. This drives up costs for everyone else, which helps explain why small-group coverage in Massachusetts is so much more expensive than in most of the country. (July 11, 2009 Wall Street Journal)

Adding to the mandate mess is the fact that consumers and individuals always behave according to their perceived self interests. In insurance markets, this self interest manifests itself as “adverse selection“, which means that sick/dying individuals have a greater incentive to buy insurance than do healthy individuals. The invariable result is a market imploding under the weight of runaway costs. The following are excerpts from the blog of Charlie Baker, CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and newly declared candidate for Governor of Massachusetts.

Under health care reform, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts merged the individual market with the small group market – creating what is commonly referred to as the “merged market.”

The outcome of a merged market would be different in different states, depending on the rules for individual policies and small group policies prior to and after reform.  ‘Nuff said about that.

(Editor’s note: Rules are tantamount to mandates.)

Now here’s the costly wrinkle.  When the merger occurred, the state told the health plans in Massachusetts that we could no longer apply a pre-ex exclusion or waiting period to individual purchasers unless we applied it to all purchasers in the merged market (including all small businesses).  No one was willing to impose such a condition across the entire merged market - primarily because it would be unfair to small businesses to impose such a requirement.  In the end, we all hoped that the new state requirement on individuals to have health insurance – or pay a tax penalty - would encourage healthy individuals to purchase insurance every year, and offset this now wide open front door for individual coverage.

Long story short, I don’t think it’s working.

Between April of 2008 and March of 2009, about 40% of the people who purchased individual insurance from Harvard Pilgrim stayed covered by us for less than 5 months.  Even more amazing, they incurred, on average, about $2,400 per person in monthly medical expenses – roughly 600% higher than what we would have expected.  It wouldn’t surprise me if other health plans have the same problem.This is a problem.  It is raising the prices paid by individuals and small businesses who are doing the right thing by purchasing twelve months of health insurance, and it’s turning the whole notion of shared responsibility on its ear.  It’s also created a new way for people who don’t want to play by the rules to avoid them.  The state needs to reconsider its policy to eliminate waiting periods and/or pre-ex exemptions for individuals purchasing health insurance in the merged market.  That would be the simplest and easiest way to protect individuals and small businesses who are playing by the rules – and limit the very costly impact of this wrinkle in health care reform.

(Editor’s note:  mandates plus adverse selection equals dysfunctional market.  Consumers outwit bureaucrats, yet again. Not a difficult task by the way.)

The July 11, 2009 Wall Street Journal editorial omits mention of the religious exemption built into Commonwealth Choice. Its text follows:

Massachusetts residents who can afford health insurance but do not buy it must pay a tax penalty unless they qualify for a religious or hardship exemption, or a waiver.

• You can claim a religious exemption if you have sincerely held religious beliefs that prevent you from buying or having health insurance.

The bottom line: Massachusetts health care “reform” is a textbook example of what not to do. It is devoid of genuine market incentives, and relies instead on a series of ill-conceived mandates that incentivize adverse selection. Productive reform eliminates the guaranteed issue/community rating mandates. Paradoxically, this will encourage consumers to purchase and retain health insurance when they don’t need it so that they will have it when they do. Additionally, productive reform must also eliminate the “minimum coverage” mandates that drive policy costs skyward. Lastly, bureaucrats and politicians, their good intentions notwithstanding,  must be humble enough to realize that they have neither the right nor the wisdom to legislate the happiness and well being of others. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” Albert Einstein. Amen.

Nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Read here for more.