Single payer doesn't cut administrative costs. Boosters of single-payer health care claim that we can get rid of a lot of administrative overhead by getting rid of private health insurance. Meridian Paulton and Robert Moffit show why that claim is wrong:
Per capita administrative costs may be higher in Medicare. For instance, in 2009 they were $509 in Medicare and $453 in private insurance. Medicare costs are lower as a percentage of the total only because total claims costs tend to be much higher in Medicare than in private insurance. This is because Medicare's older and less healthy population file the claims costs.
Medicare shifts administrative costs to doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies, and other medical professionals who must comply with Medicare's huge and complex regulatory requirements. Compliance with tens of thousands of pages of Medicare rules, regulations, guidelines, billing, and other paperwork requirements consumes vast amounts of time, energy, and effort on the part of the private-sector professionals who participate in the Medicare program.
Medicare fails to effectively control waste, fraud, and abuse in the program. This failure of administration results in the staggering loss of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each and every year. Private-sector health plans, policing their billing, have no comparable record in accumulating such enormous losses.
[Meridian Paulton and Robert Moffit, "Why Single-Payer Would Make Health Care Worse for Americans," The Daily Signal, September 25]
Yet more evidence that the more economically free a country is, the more prosperous it will be. The latest edition of The Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Report has been published. It demonstrates, as James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Joshua Hall write, that "[n]ations that are economically free out-perform non-free nations in indicators of well-being":
Nations in the top quartile of economic freedom had an average per-capita GDP of $40,376 in 2016, compared to $5,649 for bottom quartile nations (PPP con-stant 2011 US$).
In the top quartile, the average income of the poorest 10% was $10.660, compared to $1,345 in the bottom quartile in 2016 (PPP constant 2011 US$). Interestingly, the average income of the Poorest 10% in the most economically free nations is almost twice the average per-capita income in the least free nations.
Life expectancy is 79.5 years in the top quartile compared to 60.4 years in the bottom quartile.
[James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Joshua Hall, "Economic Freedom of the World: 2018 Annual Report," Fraser Institute, September 25]
Will character assassination be the new normal? As Kimberly Strassel points out, that's what's at stake in the Kavanaugh nomination:
The stakes go beyond Judge Kavanaugh. A "no" vote now equals public approval of every underhanded tactic deployed by the left in recent weeks. It's a green light to send coat hangers and rape threats to Sen. Susan Collins and her staff. It is a sanction to the mob that drove Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife out of a restaurant. It is an endorsement of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who kept the charge secret for weeks until she could use it to ambush the nominee with last-minute, unverified claims. It's approval of the release of confidential committee material (hello, Spartacus), the overthrow of regular Senate order, and Twitter rule. It's authorization for a now thoroughly unprofessional press corps to continue crafting stories that rest on anonymous accusers and that twist innuendo into gang rapes. A vote against Brett Kavanaugh is a vote for Michael Avenatti. No senator can hide from this reality. There is no muddy middle.
[Kimberly A. Strassel, "The Kavanaugh Stakes," Wall Street Journal, September 27]
"If you build it they will come" is not a good way to allocate transportation dollars. Christian Britschgi reports:
Despite spending millions of dollars on hundreds of miles of bikeways, American cities are seeing a big drop in the number of people who pedal their way to work. That's according to the latest American Community Survey (a smaller, more detailed version of the U.S. Census), which found declining bike ridership across most American cities last year.
The drop was most pronounced in bike-friendly Seattle, home of the $12-million-a-mile bike lane. In 2015, 4 percent of Seattleites (16,300 people) biked to work. That rate fell to 3.5 percent (14,600 people) in 2016 and 2.8 percent (12,000 people) last year. [...]
[B]iking was down in many cities, even those spared harsh winter rains. Take Los Angeles, where biking has been falling for years, even as the city has added bike lanes at a frenzied pace. The city's 2010 Bicycle Plan called for quintupling the number of bike lane miles at a projected cost of $234 million to $437 million. The state and federal governments have chipped in with grants for bike infrastructure. The city has been adding from 30 to 60 lane miles (the number of lanes multiplied by miles of path) of bikeways a year, reaching some 1,200 lane miles—including fully separated lanes, recreational trails, and marked or "sharrowed" lanes—by 2017.
Despite this investment, biking numbers are down. In 2013, some 21,000 Angelenos (1.2 percent of commuters) biked to work. After a spike in 2014, the number of bikers has been falling continuously. Last year, only 17,930 commuters (about 0.9 percent of all commuters) biked to work, according to the new survey data.
[Christian Britschgi, "After Millions of Dollars Spent and Hundreds of New Lane Miles Built, Bike Ridership Is Down Across America," Reason, September 27]
Calling all artists. If you have any artistic talent and can use it to promote liberty, then consider participating in the Cato Institute's inaugural "Freedom: Art as the Messenger" exhibition. All media are accepted. There will be cash prizes. The deadline for entry is January 11, 2019, and the exhibition will be held April 11 – June 14, 2019.
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