The Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy promotes the principles of individual freedom and personal responsibility. The Institute believes these principles are best encouraged through policies that emphasize a free economy, private initiative, and limited government.
Today’s New York Times has a compelling op-ed by Ronen Avraham, a law professor at the University of Texas. It proposes a way to fix the out-of-control medical-malpractice laws that hold sway over much of the country. Pointing out that both Republicans and Democrats in D.C. regret that Obamacare didn’t do enough on med-mal, Professor Avraham proposes a reform based on the sound principle that physicians who follow accepted medical guidelines should suffer reduced liability. I can’t imagine that any reasonable person would disagree with this principle. However, there are two problems with his proposal.
I've often wondered at how little Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services, knows about state and federal health legislation pre-Obamacare. Career politicians do not get rewarded for telling the truth, but her ignorance is shocking.
From the department of "I was going to do this myself but these folks did it better," I'd like to share an analysis of who received Obamacare waivers, published by the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group. It looks like a pretty mixed bag of outfits. I can't really see much rhyme nor reason to who gets one and who doesn't.
Louisiana governor Jindal has told POLITICO Pulse that he will not establish an Obamacare Health Benefits Exchange in his state. According to POLITICO, this is the governor's first definitive statement on the question.
Very good news from Atlanta, where governor Nathan Deal has reconsidered his previous decision to collaborate with Obamacare by establishing a Health Benefits Exchange in Georgia. Although a bill was moving through the legislature, governor Deal reconsidered and decided to stall an exchange, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This follows my column opposing exchanges in that same newspaper a few days ago.
Michael Cannon and Grace-Marie Turner (aided and abetted by Robert Goldberg) have started a real dispute on the effectiveness of Indiana governor Mitch Daniels’s Medicaid reform. I think that this is really a proxy war over Obamacare. Like me, Cannon encourages absolute non-collaboration with Obamacare, so that its roots cannot grow into the soil before it can credibly be overturned.
The range of current libertarian-conservative expert opinion on ObamaCare’s Health Benefits Exchanges has well-defined boundaries. On the one hand, there are those who believe that states are obliged to establish some sort of barebones exchange along the lines of the Utah Health Exchange in order to prevent the federal government from coming into a state and imposing a bloated contraption like Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Connector.
Others (especially myself) believe that the Utah Health Exchange is unimpressive, that no “exchange” can overcome certain bureaucratic necessities, and that states should therefore refuse to collaborate with ObamaCare, while waiting for it to be overturned by the Supreme Court or a future Congress and President. None of us has anything positive to say about Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Connector — until now! In one respect, the Commonwealth Connector is an extremely well-run government program, while the Utah Health Exchange is not. The issue is transparency.
Ralph Nader’s disciples are upset that pharmaceutical companies are using new media to reach out to potentional consumers of their medicines. In a recent submission to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Naderites encourage the FTC to add its weight to the Food and Drug Administration’s intrusive control over drugmakers’ free-speech rights.
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