Daily Archives: March 1, 2011

Libertarians Admit “Market Based Health Care” Won’t Work

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Yesterday the President spoke to a group of governors and explained to them that if they really didn’t want their states to be included in the federal Affordable Care Act, there is a way to opt out —

“Beginning in 2017, if you can come up with a better system for your state to provide coverage of the same quality and affordability as the Affordable Care Act, you can take that route instead,” Obama told the governors.

And Obama said he supported moving that date up to 2014, as proposed by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Scott Brown, R-Mass., to “give [governors] flexibility more quickly, while still guaranteeing the American people reform.”

In other words, they can opt out “if your state can create a plan that covers as many people as affordably and comprehensively as the Affordable Care Act does, without increasing the deficit,” the President said.

We’ve talked about this before. Basically, the deal is that if a state can come up with a way — any way — to insure the same percentage of citizens, with comparable coverage, at no additional cost, they are free to do that, and they can opt out of the ACA, mandate and all.

So far, the reaction from the “free market” libertarian right is a big howl of “that’s not fair!”

Peter Suderman of Reason‘s Hit & Run explains:

But the supposed flexibility the opt-out provision gives the states to innovate is fairly limited. Theoretically, they can get out of the mandate. But to do so, they have to submit a proposal that is judged to cover the same number of people, for the same cost (or less), with the same benefit and coverage levels as mandated in the law. That will make it easier for states—like Sen. Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont—to experiment with, say, single payer at the state level. But the high bar for coverage set by ObamaCare means that proposals that would rely on higher levels of cost-sharing, on increased use of catastrophic insurance, on allowing consumers to choose what benefits they actually want to pay for are less likely to pass muster.

I’m not even entirely sure how states will get out of the mandate. If, as is my preliminary understanding, they are required to keep some form of guaranteed issue and community rating—insurance regulations requiring insurers to sell to all comers and prohibiting discrimination based on preexisting conditions—then patients will have even less incentive to purchase insurance.

In other words, if you actually want to set up a system in which most citizens can obtain comprehensive insurance coverage, your options are single payer or something like the Affordable Care Act, mandate and all. Even the libertarians admit that. Of course, in their minds, it’s better to have some gawdawful Rube Goldberg mess of a system that is eating our economy and doesn’t cover a large part of the population, so long as markets are free.

The View of Wisconsin From Neverland

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Our buddy DD posted a video, made yesterday, of the Wisconsin protest that he seems to think makes the protesters look bad. The little bit of narrative at the beginning reveals that the person making the video is hostile to the protest (he refers to the protesters as “sheep” at one point).

But I watched the whole thing, and it was inspiring. These are patriotic citizens peacefully assembling to express their grievances of government. This is what America and the Bill of Rights are all about. You watch it and see what you think; maybe I missed something.

Now, my question is — on what planet does this video make the protesters seem bad or corrupt? Or, put another way, how twisted do you have to be to watch this video and interpret it as being anti-protest?

This illustrates brilliantly why it is Right and Left talk past each other. Even when we look at the same thing, what we see is radically different.

At the very beginning of the video, the narrator is baffled by a sign that says “Ethics Trumps ‘Values’ in a Civil Society.” Next to the word “Values,” someone has written in “whose?” Eerily, the video itself makes the same point. The filmmaker’s “values” are that he hates the people he is filming and cannot see them as anything but wrongdoers who don’t deserve to be allowed into the state capitol. And for this reason, he thinks the state is justified in treating the assembled protesters as second-class citizens whose right to be inside the capitol building can be denied. In other words, his subjective “values” trump ethics.

But a democracy, never mind a civil society, cannot operate that way. When people in power can demand their so-called “values” can override ethics and even the law, that’s totalitarianism.

Note that these same righties march around in their pro-liberty T-shirts claiming that they are for “freedom,” but when push comes to shove they run into the waiting arms of the dictator, every time.

Update: Althouse has the same video, and the, um, quadrupedal, ruminant mammals (Ovis aries) that flock to her site are dutifully sneering at the “libtards.”