Re: [OT] USA Elections
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Nov 05, 2012
- 2873 views
If you think reduced choice in health care, increased cost, lowered supply are going to help all of that
I don't see how any of this is currently true.
Recent changes in law have increased mandates about what health insurance must cover, which increases cost
I thought that cost would go down in spite of this, thanks to the universal mandate (so the insurance companies have to spend more to cover more, but they get a larger pool of applicants (and thus more income) to make up for it).
and reduces our ability to choose how we want to finance future health care. Downward pressures on payments to physicians (especially in Medicare) are already causing more doctors to not take Medicare. Many are considering early retirement. Fewer doctors means lowered supply.
Considering how much of the money that doctors had to charge was to cover their rising insurance premiums (in case of malpractice suits and the like), I don't see this as necessarily happening.
I admit what we have isn't quite the Australian system, but it's closer. The Australians seem to be doing just fine with what they have.
Yes, but appearances can be deceiving. Laws that are nominally aimed at a particular purpose always have unintended consequences. Often those consequences work to opposite purposes of the intention of the law.
No, I think poorly argued articles like that were completely expected. 
How I long for the days of deficits measured by the hundreds of billions.
My argument is simple: As an example of what you are saying, the Bush tax cuts resulted in a concentration of wealth - instead of a trickle down effect that was expected to benefit the middle class.
I would firstly agree that sometimes they do work against their self proclaimed principles. This is largely the Tea Party critique of the Republican party. And in those cases, they tend to do things that are in agreement with the stated principles of the Democratic party (and Progressives in general).
This is about compromise. A case can be made that since the Tea Party is unwilling to compromise, they are undermining their own goals. (E.g. the no-tax pledge leading to the fiscal cliff.)
Perhaps. But compromises where the taxes start immediately and the cuts come in future years are comically dishonest.
Agreed, it'd be too easy to push back or even void the cuts later on once the extra in taxes has closed the deficit.
And it's decades of such compromises that have created the fiscal cliff.
Uh, really? I thought it was the direct result of a narrowly avoided government shutdown.
And I think Hayek nailed it with the knowledge problem in describing why central planning is inferior to a market guided by prices.
I agree with this. Keep in mind that this is important to the central premise of Keynesian economics - that the market works best most of the time, but something a carefully limited helping hand is needed to prevent and limit damage.
A key Austrian critique of Keynesian economics is that they consider all capital to be fungible (human or physical).
Matt
[/quote]
Agreed. Stimulus spending should be avoided. No company should be too big to fail. I'm not too familiar with Austrian economics, but I'm not aware that it critiques the welfare state.
