The recent judicial decision affirming Virginia’s meritorious lawsuit against Obamacare has highlighted one of the profound flaws of the administration’s health care plan. But a recent news story regarding Louisiana Senator David Vitter has been relatively under-reported, which is a shame, because it also illustrates the hazards of an overreaching bureaucracy. Senator Vitter has been campaigning against an FDA advisory panel’s recent recommendation to take Avastin off-label as a breast cancer-treatment drug.
Health Care
One of the best editorials of the year appeared in the New York Times recently courtesy of Ross Douthat. Douthat refers to the array of crises which have beset the United States in recent years – the automotive industry, health care, big bank failure, etc.- and astutely points out that, despite glaring evidence of a systemic failure, our response has not been to disassemble the system, but to consolidate it and grant it even more power.
Douthat correctly diagnoses these assorted meltdowns not as failings of capitalism or democracy, but as the implications of an unprecedented collusion of government and private industry. “The panic of 2008 happened, in part, because the public interest had become too intertwined with private interests for the latter to be allowed to fail.” In the wake of the financial meltdown, many were quick to point out the supposed failure of free market and/or unregulated capitalism. This, however, is a poor interpretation of what has actually been transpiring.
Despite the constant growth of government mechanisms to prevent disasters of all kinds – economic, ecological, national defense – these apparatuses have not succeeded in their duties, even with the untold trillions of dollars which prop them up and the innumerable laws and policies which are created to empower them. In spite of these failures, we continue to trust the system. So much actually, that we vest it with even more responsibilities, allowing the government to keep expanding in scope and further collude with our private sectors.
In his brilliant assessment of the state of American health care, David Goldhill makes the analogy to a dilapidated house. If before the passage of comprehensive “health care reform,” American health care was a rotting house, the recent legislation merely made cosmetic changes. The rotting foundation remains, and the government just added a few more stories to the decrepit structure.
His analogy does not just hold water in regards to health care, but illuminates other sectors of our economy which are currently being bailed out and subsidized to no end. As long as we continue to think so finitely, we are sentencing ourselves to another economic catastrophe. What we need, as both Douthat and Goldhill implore, is a paradigm shift altogether. For instance, Goldhill is adamant that “the most important step that we can take toward truly reforming our system is to move away from comprehensive health insurance as a single model for financing care.”
Likewise, Douthat criticizes the rapid consolidation and centralization of government:
“From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the stimulus bill, from the auto bailout to health care reform, we’ve created a vast new array of public-private partnerships – empowering insiders at the expense of outsiders, large institutions at the expense of small ones, and Washington at the expense of state and loval governments.”
Instead, we need to reduce the size of government and its reach into private businesses and industries, disassemble and reconfigure those government departments which don’t work, rather than adding on to them, and stop treating public workers and labor unions as a client class of its own. Slight modifications to the current system are only delaying the inevitable- we need to think beyond the status quo and create a sustainable system independent of the welfare state which we reside in now.
Would you like to read an excessively optimistic view on health care reform? Sen. Mary Landrieu’s op-ed highlights what she believes to be the greatest ObamaCare achievements, praising the full coverage of Louisiana’s children, young adults, and seniors.
Claiming that “congress has finally delivered meaningful health care coverage to all Americans,” Sen. Landrieu argues that the new reform will “save businesses thousands of dollars each year which will allow businesses to potentially increase wages or hire more employees.”
But Sen. Landrieu is overly confident – and even deceptive – because she is neglecting important facts behind the new health care reform: its costs. As Michael Cannon from the Cato Institute points out:
“Obama’s plan [aka: ObamaCare] would vastly increase the size and scope of the federal government, and increase our already record federal deficit”
The Congressional Budget Office estimated costs to be around $940 billion, but this projection takes into account only the costs to expand current health insurance coverage. Considering other unavoidable spending provisions, the costs would amount to around $1.2 trillion. And that is a conservative estimate. Further, the new health care reform will force nearly all Americans to purchase health insurance, set price controls on the private health insurance industry, and increase the federal deficit by providing more than $1 trillion in subsidies.
Sure, Landrieu is right to claim that these reforms will extend coverage to more children, seniors, and sick individuals. Unfortunately she fails to acknowledge that this will not be sustainable in the long run.
Louisiana State Senator A.G. Crowe has authored legislation that seeks to “Prohibit state or local governmental coercion of any Louisiana employer, health care provider, or individual to compel participation in any health care system or health insurance plan.”
The legislation spells out a number of findings that include:
- The U.S. Supreme Court in Printz v. United States, 117 S.Ct. 2365, 521 U.S. 898, 138 L.Ed.2d 914 (1997), has declared that states cannot be required by the federal government to provide services which are not compensated for by the federal government.
- Proposed federal mandates would require Louisiana taxpayers to pay for or subsidize all elective abortions and would be in conflict with state law.
- To coerce individuals to enter into contracts with private companies, particularly health insurers, would go beyond the authority of the Commerce Clause in Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution and, therefore, be unconstitutional.
- To require the citizens of Louisiana to pay for certain federally mandated services while exempting the taxpayers of certain other states is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
- The Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Issues regarding health care and health insurance were never delegated.
Louisiana is not the first state to propose such an action. According to the American Legislative Exchange Council, twenty-nine states have either proposed, or announced an intention, to propose similar legislation.
Ultimately, as has been proposed in other states, a constitutional amendment might have to be passed to facilitate implementation of such as law. In Louisiana, two-thirds of the members of both houses of the Louisiana State Legislature must either vote to put the issue on a statewide ballot, or call a constitutional convention.
The legal arguments that stem from this legislation will be lively. Clint Bolick, litigation director at the Goldwater Institute, argues that the case is “winnable”, and others, such as Mark A. Hall, a law professor at Wake Forest University, claim that there is “no way this challenge will succeed in court.”
Time will tell whether states have the ability to resist the continuing encroachments of the federal government into health care.
On January 11, 2010, Senator Mary Landrieu was confronted by protestors outside the Vermilion Parish Library as she spoke about coastal protection. The protestors were there to discuss the Senator’s vote on health care reform. As she responded to criticism, she noted:
“The idea is to require personal responsibility. People have to have insurance but we’ll help you pay for it.”
This is a strange kind of personal responsibility. Real personal responsibility requires individual people to take ownership of their actions. If the government mandates behavior, it can hardly be thought of as people taking the responsibility to accomplish something on their own.
To make matters worse, Landrieu follows up with a promise that the government will help pay for this required behavior. It seems that she views personal responsibility as something that ought be legislated and subsidized rather than left to the individual where it belongs.
If legislators focused on addressing the unnecessary rules and regulations that drive up the cost of insurance and health care, more individuals could afford to act responsibly. That would be better for the individual and less expensive for the government.
