Democrats sold ObamaCare as a panacea for the ills of private insurance, but the law hasn’t made healthcare more affordable or accessible. The left’s response has been to vilify private insurers and push for Medicare for all.
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But government health care is a recipe for more care delays and denials. Witness the fiasco in the United Kingdom, where the Labour government reports that more than 120,000 people died in 2022 while on the National Health Service’s wait list for treatment. To adapt a famous Winston Churchill phrase, private insurance is the worst form of health care, except for all others.
Controlling health-care costs requires difficult trade-offs, the essential one being between access and cost. Insurers, whose profits are capped by federal law, must contend with consumer demand for ready access to high-priced specialists and prescription drugs — and, at the same time, premiums low enough that people can afford coverage. Many dislike the way the nation’s private-sector-led insurance system manages the trade-offs. But even the most generous state-run health systems in other countries also have to face them. Certain forms of care are delayed, or not even offered, to conserve finite resources for the treatments that are believed to deliver the most value for money.
Thomas Savidge explains that “capping credit card interest rates is a bipartisan blunder.” A slice:
Interest is a natural result of human interaction. The late George Mason University economist Walter Williams explained this to myself and others who took his microeconomics class: Imagine you were to visit a country that has effectively outlawed all lending and borrowing. Despite the prohibition on lending and borrowing, you could still get a rough estimate of the market rate of interest by comparing the present price of present goods to the present price of future goods. One can get a sense of the interest rate by looking at the difference between the price of milk and the price of cheese. If we have to use milk to make cheese, then milk is a present good and cheese is a future good. Further, if the price of milk rises relative to cheese, then we know that the interest rate must have fallen. If the price of cheese rises relative to milk, then we know that the interest rate must have risen.
Jeffrey Miron and Jonah Karafiol explain the libertarian position on labor unions. Two slices:
Libertarians hold that government policies should neither favor nor oppose unions. Employees should be free under the law to organize, request collective bargaining, or go on strike; and employers should be free under the law to fire employees who join a union or strike, or to hire replacement workers, or to move their operations to other states or countries. Thus, the libertarian perspective is not about unions per se but about government policy toward unions.
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Thus the libertarian position on monopsony power and union policy parallels the libertarian position on market power and antitrust policy. In neither case do libertarians insist that private arrangements are perfect, but that is not the right question. It is instead whether government intervention improves efficiency, and the libertarian assessment is that it does not.
Bob Graboyes celebrates the reopening of Notre Dame cathedral.
And here’s Pierre Lemieux on the the financing of Notre Dame’s repair and refurbishing.
Last year at X, Mark Perry updated his “Chart of the Century.”
A few months ago, GMU Econ alum Eric Crampton summarized an interesting new paper by Ryan Oprea on human behavior and behavioral economics. (HT Tyler Cowen)
The Editors of The Economist denounce the abuse in the U.S. of the power to pardon. A slice:
More damaging, Mr Biden’s pardon also blurs a crucial distinction Democrats make between themselves and their MAGA opponents. Several cited Mr Biden’s refusal to interfere in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) investigation into his son as evidence that, unlike Donald Trump, whose respect for the rule of law and norms like DOJ independence was selective, their party acted on principle. That argument now seems hollow.
