[Researchers] monitored brain activity among some volunteers to see what parts of the brain were most excited when people talked about themselves as opposed to other people…
In several tests, they offered the volunteers money if they chose to answer questions about other people, such as President Obama, rather than about themselves, paying out on a sliding scale of up to four cents…
Despite the financial incentive, people often preferred to talk about themselves and willingly gave up between 17% and 25% of their potential earnings so they could reveal personal information.
The health reform law gave HHS the power to scrutinize “unreasonable” rate hikes in states that didn’t have robust review programs. But “scrutiny” doesn’t give the department power to actually block the rates from going into effect. HHS can use its bully pulpit to publicly shame insurers whose rates don’t pass its sniff test – and HHS has done just that, holding four media calls since November to scold insurers each time it’s made a new “unreasonable” determination.
The title of this article is “Jawboning by HHS Doesn’t Scare Insurers,” but maybe they should be scared.
When you go to the hospital these days, chances are good that it will be affiliated with a religious organization. And…there may…be rules about the kind of care allowed.
A survey of more than 1,000 OB-GYNs who work in religious hospitals finds that more than one-third report they’ve had a conflict regarding religion-based policy and patient care. At Catholic hospitals, the figure was 52 percent.
I’m interviewing a job applicant and she tells me that she doesn’t need the NCPA’s health insurance because she has better coverage at her husband’s place of work. Since she won’t need that fringe benefit, she asks if I will add the money we would have spent on it to her salary and pay extra wages instead.
Can I do that? I would like to be able to. But the IRS won’t let me.
In another case a part-time worker has the opposite problem. She offers to take a cut in pay if we will allow her to join the NCPA health plan. I would like to be able to do that too. Ah, but the IRS won’t let me do that either.
When I say the IRS won’t let me, that’s not technically correct. It won’t stop me from doing these things; it will just impose draconian penalties if I do. Allowing even one employee to choose between taxable wages and non-taxed fringe benefits could enable the IRS to constructively treat our entire health plan as a taxable benefit and it could then tax every employee’s health insurance the same way it taxes wages. (For most of our employees, that would be a 25% tax; for some it would be a 45% tax.)
These problems affect men just as much as they affect women, of course. But the problems mainly arise because the most important economic and sociological change of the past half century (the entry of women into the labor market) is completely at odds with a tax law written years ago by men who thought that full-time male workers with stay-at-home wives is the way life would be lived.
This proposal was in effect Roosevelt’s first introduction to supply-side economics. To arm the nation for war, Roosevelt not only had to agree to set aside his own ideological misgivings but almost a decade of his own failed economic policies…The results…were staggering. Barely a year later—by the time Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941—the scale of American war production was fast approaching that of Nazi Germany.
America truly became the “arsenal of democracy” (the phrase Knudsen invented). By the end of 1942 we were producing more tanks, ships, planes and guns than the entire Axis; by the end of 1943 more than Germany, the Soviet Union and Britain combined.
Children with public insurance (Medicaid or CHIP) or who had no coverage are at least 22 percent less likely than those with private insurance to receive testing or to undergo procedures when they visit the hospital emergency departments, researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston found. In addition, children with no insurance are less likely to receive any medication than children with public or private insurance.
That disparity did not hold true for kids diagnosed with a significant illness, who had the same odds of being admitted to the hospital regardless of insurance status.
Three separate provisions in the statute, and regulations implementing the law, will reduce access to HSA plans:
ObamaCare’s essential health benefits package contains new restrictions on deductibles and cost-sharing, which will prevent at least some current HSA plans from being offered.
ObamaCare’s medical loss ratio regulations also impose new restrictions that studies show will hit HSA plans particularly hard, and could force individuals to change their current form of coverage.
The ObamaCare statute does not specify that cash contributions made to an HSA will be counted towards the new federal actuarial value standards. And a February bulletin released by HHS in advance of upcoming rulemaking indicates that under the Administration’s approach, not all contributions into an HSA will count towards the new minimum federal standards – meaning some HSA policies will not be considered “government-approved.”
More from Chris Jacobs on ObamaCare’s negative effect on health coverage.
AHIP today released the first in a series of four state case studies examining states’ experiences with implementing market reforms without getting everyone covered. The first case study examines Washington State’s experience and shows that consumers experienced higher premiums and loss of choice following the enactment of guarantee issue without an individual mandate in the 1990′s. The full study can be viewed here and an accompanying press release can be found here. We will be releasing the next three state case studies over the course of the next several weeks.
This is Gary Becker, writing at the Becker-Posner blog.
I have argued several times previously that all “marriages” should be basically contractual arrangements between couples, whether heterosexual or homosexual. These couple-specific contracts would specify the duties of each member, including the conditions needed to terminate their arrangement, so that couples rather than laws and judges would determine the conditions under which they stay together or breakup. These contracts would be tailored to the special needs of each couple, and could even be made compulsory in order to take away any information revealed when a person asks his or her mate for a contract…
If such contracted civil unions became the norm, homosexual unions would not be any different than heterosexual unions. If civil unions obtained all the rights of marriage unions, then the issue of gay “marriage” would turn only on language, although it is emotionally charged language on both sides of the debate.
Posner’s view on homosexual marriage at the Becker-Posner blog.
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