Yuval Levin

The Anti-Jobs Bill

My colleague Yuval Levin and I have coauthored a piece in the latest Weekly Standard that examines the consequences of the Democrats' health care plan for the broader economy, and especially for the jobs outlook:

Beyond taxes and spending, Obamacare would also wreak havoc on the labor market. Because employers would get penalized if any of their low- and moderate-wage workers ended up in the new subsidized insurance pool, they would avoid hiring such workers. Democrats claim they want to jam through health care reform so they can turn their attention to jobs, but the bill provides a strong disincentive for businesses to hire those who need jobs the most.

The plan would, moreover, trigger an inefficient and costly re-sorting of American labor. Under the bill, despite the enormous cost of subsidizing coverage in the new government-run “exchanges,” only 18 million people would be getting such subsidized coverage in 2016—even though there are 127 million Americans today with incomes in the targeted range of between one and four times the poverty rate. The vast majority of workers would still be in job-based plans and get no additional help. Gene Steuerle of the Urban Institute estimates that a worker making about $60,000 per year in 2016 would get $4,500 more in federal aid if he were able to get his insurance through an exchange rather than through his employer. That’s a powerful incentive for workers and firms to rearrange their operations to take advantage of the federal money. In time, the American economy would be divided into companies with low-wage workers getting government-subsidized health care and others with higher-wage workers who continue to get employer-based plans. This would make the labor market far less efficient (harming productivity), and it would mean that the subsidies themselves would cost far more than the CBO now estimates.

And for those workers who do end up getting federal subsidies for their insurance, the program is a trap. If they get a pay raise, they will lose some of their insurance subsidy. Indeed, the schedule of subsidy withdrawal is so severe that it will push many low-wage families into effective tax brackets of 60 percent to 80 percent, according to a CATO Institute analysis. Obamacare would thus provide a strong disincentive to work and so undermine the most successful policy initiative in generations: welfare reform.

You can read the entire article online here.

posted by James C. Capretta | 11:52 am
Tags: Obamacare, Yuval Levin, Eugene Steuerle, CBO
File As: Health Care

Facing in Opposite Directions

My EPPC colleague Yuval Levin has written a post that nicely sums up why a bipartisan health-care solution will not be easy to come by. It's not that conservatives and liberals don't both see the shortcomings of today's arrangements. They do. It's that they simply have very different conceptions of what must be done to fix the problems. Liberals believe that more empowered and enlightened government management of the health sector can deliver better results. Conservatives quite rightly are highly suspicious of this contention. The government has been running Medicare and Medicaid for more than four decades, and the result has been bureaucratic regulation and price controls that make the entire health sector less efficient and productive. The conservative solution is to empower cost-conscious consumers in a reformed marketplace that rewards efficiency and value. Given the intensity of the debate over the last year, the odds are long indeed that the two sides will suddenly find an acceptable compromise anytime soon.

posted by James C. Capretta | 5:01 pm
Tags: Yuval Levin, conservatives, liberals
File As: Health Care

After Obamacare

With my colleague Yuval Levin, I have cowritten a piece in the latest Weekly Standard examining the political landscape for health care reform in the wake of the election of Scott Brown to the United States Senate. After discussing how the Democrats’ ambitious plans have screeched to a halt, we suggest some ideas for health reform that conservatives should take up:

First, they should seek to address the problem of insuring Americans with preexisting conditions through state-based high-risk pools, not cumbersome insurance regulations that try to outlaw basic economics. Risk pools, backed with federal money but nowhere near the scale of Obamacare’s costs, would give those with preexisting conditions more options in the individual market and make a significant dent in the number of uninsured, but without overturning our health care system.

Second, they should propose to help doctors and patients limit some of the burden of rising costs with medical malpractice reform. Sensible caps on punitive damages would not only save money but also help address shortages of medical providers in key specialties, and allow more Americans to afford and access care.

Third, they should argue that the states be given the lead role in developing more detailed reforms of how and where people get their insurance—to cover more people and slow the rise of costs. The overall goal should be to build well-functioning marketplaces in which insurers and providers compete to deliver the best value to cost-conscious consumers. The federal government should remove bureaucratic obstacles to state experimentation on this front, and offer support where possible, but not design one mammoth new program. The regulation of both the practice of medicine and of insurance is done in the states, and their improvement should be too....

Meanwhile, for the longer term, conservatives should make a case for changes in the tax law that level the playing field between employer-provided and individually purchased health insurance, with a gradual transformation of the tax exclusion for employer-based coverage into a credit available to all. A consumer-controlled tax credit would also enhance the benefits of risk-pools, tort reform, and state-based reform efforts.

And they should press the case for real Medicare reform, not to use the program as a pot of cash, as the Democrats tried to do over the past year, but to put it on a sound footing by empowering enrollees rather than bureaucrats to make decisions....

These ideas would not yield a sudden transformation of American health care, but a gradual improvement in the areas that matter most—cost-control, greater access for the uninsured, and greater fairness for those with preexisting conditions—while sustaining the quality and innovation that characterize American health care.

The piece is available in its entirety here.

posted by James C. Capretta | 9:28 pm
Tags: Obamacare, Yuval Levin, tort reform, risk pools, Medicare
File As: Health Care

Why the Senate Bill Makes No Sense

In the new Weekly Standard, my colleague Yuval Levin and I discuss the bill that has emerged from the Senate. An excerpt:

The [Democrats' original] goal was to get a large swath of the public insured by the government, and so gradually create a socialized insurance system. Conservatives opposed this scheme because they believe a public insurer would not be able to introduce efficiencies that would lower prices. Liberals supported it because they think a public insurer would be more fair and more effective.

But in order to gain 60 votes in the Senate, the Democrats have now had to give up, for all practical purposes, on any version of that public insurer, while leaving the other components of their scheme in place. The result makes no sense whatsoever — not to conservatives, not to liberals, not to anyone. Rather than reform a system that everyone agrees is a failure, it will subsidize that system and compel participation in it — requiring all Americans to pay ever-growing premiums to private insurance companies, most of which are for-profit, while doing essentially nothing about the underlying causes of those rising costs. The thought that, after all of this, a Democratic Congress is going to force Americans to send their premiums to the despised insurance industry and then subsidize that industry to boot has sent the left into such a state of frenzied recriminations it could sink the whole enterprise yet.

And that is by no means the only problem for the left in this bill. The mad rush to pass something obscures a crucial component of the bill's design that could prove very problematic for Democrats. For all of President Obama's insistence that we must have action now, and all the talk by congressional Democrats about the terrible costs of delay, the key components of the Senate bill would actually not go into effect for four years. Essentially all of the spending provisions and insurance reforms — including the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, the employer mandate to provide it, the state insurance exchanges, the federal subsidies for coverage, and the Medicaid expansion — would only go into operation in 2014....

This timeline of tax and spending implementation corresponds rather awkwardly to the political calendar confronting the Democrats.

The entire article is available here.

posted by James C. Capretta | 8:16 pm
Tags: Yuval Levin, Harry Reid, Senate bill
File As: Health Care

Ben Nelson caves on taxpayer funding of abortion

From a new piece my colleague Yuval Levin and I have over on the Weekly Standard website:

Now that Senator Nelson has announced his intention to vote to end debate on the Reid bill, it's worth looking at whether his actions match his words....

The new Reid language that Senator Nelson now finds acceptable would allow federal subsidies to flow to plans that cover elective abortions in the insurance exchanges. Senate Democrats try to create the impression that only the enrollees' premiums will pay for the abortion coverage. But it's an artificial bookkeeping exercise. Taxpayer funding would support the same insurance policies that pay for abortions. Senator Nelson is touting the fact that states can enact laws which prohibit elective abortions in the exchanges (the so-called "opt out"), but that was already permissible under the previous Reid language. And in any event a state can't protect its taxpayers from financing abortions beyond its borders. Senator Nelson's "compromise" leaves Nebraska's voters entirely vulnerable to paying for California's and New York's abortions.

posted by James C. Capretta | 6:45 pm
Tags: Ben Nelson, Harry Reid, abortion, Yuval Levin
File As: Health Care

From Awful to Worse

In the new Weekly Standard, I have a piece co-written with my New Atlantis and EPPC colleague Yuval Levin. We discuss how Harry Reid's latest proposal is even worse than his original one. An excerpt:

Apparently, in exchange for dropping the "public option," moderate Senate Democrats have tentatively agreed to open up Medicare to people age 55 to 64 (retirees can currently sign up for it at age 65). In other words, rather than build on the failed cost-control model of Medicare, they now want to actually further burden Medicare itself. Why take a roundabout path to failure when a direct one is available? The irrationality of this solution is staggering. But, of course, it's a solution to Reid's political problem, not to the nation's health care financing crisis. Moderate Senate Democrats don't want to vote for anything called a "public option," but some of Reid's more liberal colleagues won't give up the dream of marching toward a single payer health care system. So he has offered up an even more direct path to such a system, but given it a different name and frame than the "public option."...

According to the Census Bureau, only 4.3 million people age 55 to 64 were uninsured in 2008. But the total population in this age range was 34.3 million--so the Medicare buy-in is not a means to help the uninsured but a means to socialize the health insurance of a vast swath of the public.

Initially, a voluntary Medicare program might attract only a small number of enrollees, especially because those who opt in would be required to pay the full premium. But over time, employers would likely find it convenient to put their early retirees into Medicare to shed some of their costs, providing only wraparound coverage as they do for retirees over 65. Once the opt-in is established, moreover, pressure would build for Congress to ensure "premiums" are affordable. Directly or indirectly, the government would find ways to subsidize enrollment. If established, a Medicare option for the 55- to 64-year-old population would quickly become the default option for the entire age group, and a case for further lowering the age of eligibility would emerge.

And when that happens, those who have fought all year against a new government-run insurance plan will have lost the battle, and those seeking means of actually cutting the growth of health care costs will pretty much have lost the war. The Reid bill already assumes a 15 million-person jump in enrollment in Medicaid, bringing the total enrollment to 60 million Americans. If 20 to 30 million new people end up on Medicare, on top of Medicare's current 45 million enrollees, then more than one-in-three Americans would be covered by government-funded health insurance. A single-payer health care system would be all but inevitable.

The entire piece is here.

Meanwhile, I recently discussed the unfolding Senate process in an interview with The New Ledger; you can hear the podcast here.

posted by James C. Capretta | 11:09 am
Tags: Medicare, Harry Reid, Senate, Yuval Levin
File As: Health Care

ObamaCare: Worse Than You Think

Tevi Troy and I co-authored a piece for the current edition of National Review on the emerging health care plans in Congress. Although much has already been written about the structural flaws of these plans — their immense costs and excessive reliance on governmental control — their details are just as worrisome. Indeed, the more the public learns about what these plans would actually do if passed, the less they will like them. That article is available here.

Also this week, Yuval Levin and I have a piece in the Weekly Standard. In it, we point out that the costs of the bills now being considered in Congress are much higher than advertised because tens of millions of low- and middle-income Americans would be forced to sign up for costly job-based insurance, with no additional financial support from the government. That will create tremendous pressure on Congress to extend premium subsidies to even more families, which will drive costs well above current projections. Moreover, the Obama administration's main cost-control idea — a new commission for setting Medicare payment policy — is not really a new idea at all. The current system for paying physicians under Medicare was designed by just such an expert panel twenty years ago and it has been a disaster. It was supposed to encourage and reward general practitioners, but it actually drove many new doctors to become specialists instead of primary care physicians. You can read the full article here.

posted by James C. Capretta | 4:50 pm
Tags: Tevi Troy, ObamaCare, Yuval Levin, cost control, Medicare
File As: Health Care