Ben_Domenech's blog

Super-sized GOP Debate Reax

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Benjamin Domenech moderates a super-sized panel with Guy Benson, Matt Lewis, and Pejman Yousefzadeh on their reactions to last night’s debate.

We’re brought to you as always by Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Mitt Romney’s Health Care Problem

The big news yesterday on the health care policy front is that the 11th Circuit case against the individual mandate is headed to the Supreme Court before the 2012 election, not after. This means a decision about the constitutionality of the individual mandate is likely to come in mid-2012, after the Republicans have chosen a nominee but well before the election ramp up. This is good political news for nearly everyone in the race on the Republican side, with one obvious exception: Mitt Romney.

Let’s back up a moment to explain why. There’s one line that Romney used in Florida during the most recent debate which is still sticking in my craw today, and I’m having a hard time shaking it. Excerpt – in response to a question from Chris Wallace about Perry referring to Romney’s Massachusetts’ reforms as “socialized medicine”:

“I don’t think [Perry] knows what he was talking about in that — in that regard. Let me tell you this about our system in Massachusetts: 92 percent of our people were insured before we put our plan in place. Nothing’s changed for them. The system is the same. They have private market-based insurance. We had 8 percent of our people that weren’t insured. And so what we did is we said let’s find a way to get them insurance, again, market-based private insurance. We didn’t come up with some new government insurance plan.”

Now, there’s a factual criticism here regarding the latter part of his comments, and the way people get that insurance under Romney’s plan – namely, the overwhelming number of those newly covered are subsidized by other taxpayers, and are on Medicaid, not private market-based insurance. This is directly the opposite of Romney’s case for his plan in 2007 and 2008, where he explicitly framed the matter not as a Massachusetts-specific solution, but as he said on the day he signed the bill into law, the “Republican way of solving a problem which we face as a nation.” He’s continued to maintain his approach is a “Republican way to reform the marketplace” which ensured personal responsibility, as opposed to “expecting someone else to pay” for your own care.

This is ironic, given that the effect of his plan has been to shift health care costs for the newly covered (reducing the number of uninsured from a little over 9% to 4.4%) to the taxpayers. Of the 412,000 people added to the insurance rolls in Massachusetts since 2006, 47% are on Medicaid, and only 7,000 of them have coverage not subsidized by other taxpayers.

Obama vs. AT&T on T-Mobile, and Bachmann vs. Perry on HPV

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Bruce Walker talks about the government’s attempt to stop the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, and Elizabeth Blackney and Benjamin Domenech walk through the HPV vaccine issue in response to Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Obama’s Terrible, Horrible Poll Numbers

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Elizabeth Blackney and Benjamin Domenech walk through the latest poll numbers for Barack Obama. Hint: They’re really, really bad.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Crisis in Europe and Why PC Makers Are Shifting to Other Business

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Francis Cianfrocca and Ben Domenech talk about the Eurozone in crisis and why computer makers want to get out of the computer making business and into the software/services business.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Cianfrocca on the Fed and Adam Hasner on Florida

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Francis Cianfrocca and Ben Domenech talk about Rick Perry’s comments on the Fed, and Florida’s Adam Hasner talks about his run for the Senate.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Burt Folsom on How FDR’s Economic Legacy Damaged America

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Hillsdale professor and author Burt Folsom joins Pejman Yousefzadeh and Kevin Holtsberry to discuss his book, New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Andrew Sullivan’s Reality Based Economic Analysis

Dan Mitchell writes this morning about Andrew Sullivan’s reality-based economic analysis:

I was rather amused last night when I read one of his posts, in which he was discussing whether government spending helps or hurts economic performance. He took the view that a bigger public sector stimulated growth, and criticized those who wanted to reduce the burden of government spending, snarkily observing that, “The notion that Herbert Hoover was right has become quite a dogged meme on the reality-challenged right.”

Since I’m one of those “reality-challenged” people who prefer smaller government, I obviously disagreed with his analysis. But his reference to Hoover set off alarm bells. As I have noted before, Hoover increased the burden of government during his time in office.

It turns out that Hoover actually increased government spending by 47 percent (50 if you adjust for falling prices). Mitchell has the audacity to back this claim up with numbers and everything. There’s even a convenient chart!

It’s so hard to be reality based when the facts get in the way.

Saving Medicare, Visualized

Paul Ryan‘s latest infographic video walks interested citizens through the truth about Medicare’s unsustainable path. Watch it here: “Saving Medicare, Visualized”

Ryan makes the case for empowering consumers and Medicare patients versus Obama’s bureaucracy and rationing based solution. It’s one we’ve heard before, but we’ve never seen it encapsulated in such an easily shareable form.

Side note: For more than three years, I’ve been arguing that conservative groups needed to take this video approach in creating graphically appealing walkthroughs which explain complex problems in straightforward ways. Groups haven’t responded to the need to do this, for the most part. It’s great to see Ryan pushing forward along these lines.

Read more about the facts on Medicare at the House Budget website: “The Facts on Medicare and How to Save It”.

The Center for Public Integrity Smears George W. Bush

Add the Center for Public Integrity to the small list of leftist organizations still bent on smearing George W. Bush. They blasted this to my inbox this morning a piece from former Ramparts editor Peter Stone implying that the reason Bush didn’t attend Obama’s Ground Zero ceremony was because Obama didn’t offer to pay him a speaker’s fee:

When George W. Bush declined President Barack Obama’s invitation to a ceremony at New York City’s Ground Zero after Osama bin Laden was killed, the former president cited his desire to keep a low public profile.

But Bush has been high profile on the private, paid speaking circuit: he has raked in millions of dollars since he left office by making scores of speeches that typically earn him six figures a pop.

Are the folks at CPI really suggesting that Bush not wanting to give a prominent public appearance in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden – a choice that has been roundly applauded in the national media as a classy move – is a hypocritical act? They really can’t make the distinction to saying no to this appearance because of the politics of the moment, while giving speaking tours like all former presidents (who we all know give speeches for flowers and fruit baskets, not dirty dirty money)?

This is just the latest ridiculous attack from CPI’s new poorly-named “iWatchNews” portal, which recently launched a vile slander of Gov. Mitch Daniels’ time at Eli Lilly – which established no connection between Daniels and the marketing-focused lawsuits against Lilly during the 1990s, falsely depicted Daniels’ role within the company as having any responsibility for the matters they were sued over (Daniels was in charge of Lilly’s number crunching, not their ad campaigns), and prominently quoted employees of Ralph Nader without sharing that fact.

In reaction to my piece detailing CPI’s failure to build a rational or balanced case on their Daniels assault, their communications director commented – calling the Nader employee an “industry analyst” – that the piece had merit because:

“Daniels is running for president.”

While this is certainly possible, one Indiana emailer responded: “Really? Wow, they’re all about breaking news at the Center for Public Integrity!”

At least they’re consistent in their ridiculousness.

Saving Medicare: Free Market Reforms or Bureaucratic Rationing

Dan Mitchell’s latest video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity walks through the choices facing political leaders on reforming the Medicare system.

This is a timely and well-done walk-through on the real choices we face for this system. “Would you be a cost-effective shopper if you were told I’d pay 80% of the cost the next time you buy a new car?” Watch and learn!

Are There Any Solutions for High Gas Prices?

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, we’ll discuss what’s driving gas prices and other environmental issues with James Taylor of the Heartland Institute.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Unemployment, Commodities, and Debt Ceilings

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, we’re talking commodities, the debt ceiling, and the unemployment rate with Francis Cianfrocca.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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The Pakistan Problem

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, we’re joined by D.B. Grady, a correspondent for The Atlantic, author, paratrooper, and veteran of Afghanistan, to discuss the regional fallout from the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Paul Krugman’s Romantic View of Health Care

Dear Mr. Krugman,

In regards to your recent blog post maintaining that “patients are not consumers,” and what’s more that such a depiction of a relationship is “sickening” — your romantic image of health care, apparently garnered from too many viewings of ER, House M.D., or perhaps General Hospital, apparently consists of handsome wisecracking surgeons facing a barrage of patients bleeding out or dealing with obscure, life-threatening conditions.

Medical care is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made; yet making those decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge; and often those decisions must also be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping… There’s a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don’t have TV series about heroic middle managers or heroic economists.

This is both ludicrous and incorrect, painting a picture where visits with a medical professional are always preceded by a call to 911 and a trip on a blaring ambulance — which is the experience for approximately zero Americans, anywhere. I would be eager to learn of any of your research showing otherwise.

A simple glance at a cost breakdown of the American health care system eradicates your fanciful depiction. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, as much as 75% of health care costs in the United States are due to chronic conditions. Administrative costs alone take up nearly 10% of the national pie chart. As the U.S. population ages, the management of these long-term conditions takes up the overwhelming portion of responsibility for the rising costs of care — according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s research, the average American over the age of 64 spends vastly more on health care services than any other age group, roughly $9,000 per year — and despite the massive increase in taxpayer subsidies, private health insurance remains the largest source of health spending.

Your incorrect view of the nation’s health care reality is, in fact, one of the chief reasons for problems with the current system, which was originally designed in the 1930s to cover catastrophic events, not chronic conditions, predictable treatments, and long-term care. As a 2009 report in McKinsey Quarterly notes, “The fundamental nature of medical risk in the United States has changed over the past 20 to 30 years — shifting away from random, infrequent, and catastrophic events driven by accidents, genetic predisposition, or contagious disease, and toward behavior- and lifestyle-induced chronic conditions. Treating them, and the serious medical events they commonly induce, now costs more than treating the more random, catastrophic events that health insurance was originally designed to cover.”

Employer-based insurance, which made sense when people had one or two employers in a lifetime, now separates consumers from price signals and eliminates transparency in the marketplace, and results in a situation where people are overinsured for some risks and underinsured for others. America today is burdened with a nonsensical health care system where government-driven incentives warp the decision-making process of individuals, and doctors are expected to work essentially for free.

The small steps taken toward market approaches which allow for expanded individual choices have shown positive results, and progress toward cost-reduction without sacrificing coverage, as individuals make decisions based not on artificial systems constructed by agencies, but on their own priorities and needs. Yet these positive examples were completely ignored under President Obama’s new nationalized health care regime.

There is some irony in your mistake and in his, in that the government-managed coverage systems you favor are perhaps at their worst in providing responses to the life-threatening illnesses you apparently think all of us are faced with on a daily basis. In fact, in the absence of on-demand treatment of consumers, they turn serious yet treatable illnesses into death sentences. The United Kingdom, under CMS director Donald Berwick’s beloved National Health Service (he openly confesses “I am a romantic about the NHS”) in which consumer power is extremely limited by law, has created a cancer mortality rate more than 38 percent higher than America’s. For example, in the UK, women with breast cancer have a 46 percent mortality rate, compared with only 25 percent in the U.S., and while only 19 percent of men in the U.S. who get prostate cancer die of it, in the U.K. it kills 57 percent.

Of course, the U.K. was recently touted by the Economist Intelligence Unit for ranking at the top in one category, thanks in large part to the abundant provision of painkillers as opposed to extended treatment: quality of death. That’s what the beau ideal of government-run health care gets you, Mr. Krugman — a system in which patients have no ability to act as consumers, where providers do not have to compete for their business, where individuals are treated too late and all that the system will allow is to give them some painkillers to make them comfortable before they die.

Such approaches might make for good television scenes, but they make for terrible policy.

Best Regards,

Benjamin Domenech
Research Fellow, The Heartland Institute

P.S. A colleague suggests that you ought to try re-reading what you have written, replacing medical care with, say, aviation, and then repeat your conjecture.

How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by John J. Miller to discuss his new book, The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football. Then Nick Ayers stops by to discuss Tim Pawlenty’s 2012 presidential campaign.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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The Budget Has Been Compromised

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the Tim Pawlenty’s hiring of Nick Ayers and the budget compromise that was reached on Friday night.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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From the Sammies in Chicago: Washington’s Looming Government Shutdown

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets from the Sammies in Chicago, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the political and economic costs of a potential government shutdown.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Michael Barone Talks About Paul Ryan’s Budget and 2012

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Michael Barone to talk about Paul Ryan‘s budget, how Republicans can appeal to minorities and the 2012 election.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Can the GOP Snatch a Victory from Obama in 2012?

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Mark Hemingway to discuss the Obama’s launch of his 2012 campaign and who the GOP might nominate to face him, then Pej talks about the KSM trial.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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