Well, well. Progressives are at last acknowledging that ObamaCare is a failure. They aren’t doing so explicitly, of course, but their social-media screeds against insurers, triggered by last week’s murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, suggest as much. “We’ve gotten to a point where healthcare is so inaccessible and unaffordable, people are justified in their frustrations,” CBS News medical contributor Céline Gounder said during a Friday segment on the roasting of health insurers.
A Gallup survey released Friday affirms the sentiment, finding that only 44% of Americans rate U.S. healthcare good or excellent, down from 62% when Democrats passed ObamaCare in 2010. A mere 28% rate the country’s insurance coverage highly, an 11-point decline. ObamaCare may rank as the biggest political bait-and-switch in history.
Remember Barack Obama’s promise that if you like your health plan and doctor, you could keep them? Sorry. How about his claim that people with pre-existing conditions would be protected? Also not true. The biggest howler, however, was that healthcare would become more affordable.
Grant Democrats this: The law has advanced their political goal of expanding government control over insurers, in return for lavishing Americans with subsidies to buy overpriced, lousy products. (One might observe that Democrats are driving a similar Faustian bargain to induce automakers to produce more electric vehicles.)
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ObamaCare requires plans to cover myriad government-determined “essential benefits” regardless of whether people need them. It also prohibits insurers from charging higher premiums based on a patient’s health-risk factors and limits their ability to do so for older people. The young and healthy are thus required to subsidize their elders, while taxpayers are required to subsidize everyone on the exchanges.
If the goal were to help Americans with costly health conditions, it would have been far simpler and less expensive to boost subsidies for state high-risk pools. But that wouldn’t have accomplished Democrats’ actual goal, which is to turn insurers into de facto public utilities and jerry-rig a halfway house to single-payer healthcare. What a con.
The great Bruce Yandle ponders the return of Tariff Man. A slice:
Yes, the “Tariff Man,” as he likes to style himself, is back in town, and the pros and cons of his approach — continued mainly by President Biden — have been on display for years. Yet, anytime government sausage is made, there are ingredients we can’t easily see.
More than reinforcing an America First promise to protect U.S. industries and jobs, Trump presents his latest tariff foray as about bargaining. He indicates he will reduce the newly imposed tariffs when the affected countries eliminate shipments of drugs and illegal immigrants into the United States.
Anyone who has looked closely knows that border taxes do serious collateral damage to U.S. firms that rely on imported materials to manufacture American goods. They can also impose burdensome costs on firms of all sizes caught in a competitive struggle to survive, either against better-protected rivals or in a market made less free and friendly.
Also writing intelligently about trade is Kevin Corcoran.
Steve Chapman warns that Trump’s second reign of tariffs will be even worse than his first. A slice:
Trump habitually decries the U.S. trade deficit, particularly with China. But the trade deficit actually rose by 36% under him. Trump’s complaint, however, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how international commerce works. We consistently run a capital account surplus, because foreigners invest far more in U.S. assets, including Treasury bills, than Americans invest abroad. To do that, they need dollars. They get those by selling us more goods and services than they buy. It’s a simple accounting truism that the capital surplus and the trade deficit have to be the same amount. As the late conservative economist Herbert Stein explained, “A deficit in the current account is always accompanied by an equal surplus in the capital account, and vice versa.” No amount of protectionism will reduce the trade deficit as long as we continue to attract so much foreign investment—which, by the way, is a boon to the U.S. economy and American workers.
Russ Roberts and Scott Sumner talk industrial policy.
Charles Cooke agrees with Andrew McCarthy that the federal pardon power should be abolished.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown reports some unfortunate – if not unsurprising – news about Trump and antitrust. Two slices:
In announcing Gail Slater as his pick to lead the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Trump opined that “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech! I was proud to fight these abuses in my First Term, and our Department of Justice’s antitrust team will continue that work under Gail’s leadership.” Slater, he continued, “will help ensure that our competition laws are enforced, both vigorously and FAIRLY, with clear rules that facilitate, rather than stifle, the ingenuity of our greatest companies. Congratulations Gail – Together, we will Make America Competitive Again!”
That might sound OK. Who doesn’t like fair competition?
But under both Trump 1.0 and Biden, “competition” served as a euphemism for a marketplace in which the federal government decides which businesses win and lose.
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As of yet, it’s unclear who Trump will pick to head the FTC. Current FTC commissioner Andrew Ferguson is one of those angling for the job. His pitch to run the agency suggests what already seems the most likely scenario under Trump: a rollback of some of Khan and Biden’s most business-unfriendly policies but continued aggressive attempts to use antitrust law to proselytize against popular tech companies.
Arnold Kling offers what he calls his “amateur guesses” about what’s likely in store for Syria.
