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Posted at 9:19 pm on March 23, 2010, by Justin M. Stoddard
I wrote earlier this evening about some possible unintended consequences of the newly signed health care legislation. While attending my daughter’s orchestral debut, I thought of a few more. -An increase in the Nanny State. I first heard this argument put forth in my Junior year at high school: “Seat belts should be mandatory because we pay for the uninsured drivers who would get hurt without wearing them.” Since then, this argument has taken on more manifestations than I care to acknowledge. We need to regulate trans-fats, salt, cigarettes, cigars, MSG, butter, alcohol, fast cars, ad infinitum…for the same reason. It’s about to get a whole lot worse. ‘We’ not only pay for the uninsured, now, ‘we’ pay for everybody. Since ‘we’ pay for everybody, ‘we’re’ now responsible for everybody’s health. This is in no way hyperbolic. It’s happening right now: Brooklyn Dem Felix Ortiz wants to ban use of salt in New York restaurants. As absurd as this sounds (and we’ve all had our laugh), his reasoning is ominous:
On second thought, perhaps this consequence won’t be so unintended, after all. -People are going to get sicker and more obese There is good reason to believe that the fault of our country’s current “obesity crisis” can be placed directly at the feet of well-intentioned governmental interference based on incorrect science. If we can expect the government to have an ever increasing role in what we can and cannot put into our bodies (see above), it follows that people will be lead to the conclusion that the way to maintain a healthy diet is to decrease fatty foods (red meats, butter, natural fats, etc…) and increase the intake of complex carbohydrates in the form of grains (whole wheat breads, cereals, rice, oats). This is most certainly the exact wrong thing to do. There is enough on that subject for a whole different post (one that I believe Eric will be undertaking, soon). For the purposes of this post, it will have to suffice to say that the current model (the government backed food pyramid) is based on wildly outdated and faulty science. But, even if you don’t believe that a low-carb, higher fat diet is the road to health, at least you had a choice in the matter. Doctors have slowly been coming around to the notion that low-carb lifestyles have terrific benefits. Can anyone doubt that obesity patients (and patients with Diabetes, blood sugar problems) will soon be robbed of those choices? If the government backed model is X, you can bet that when the government pays doctors who treat obese/diabetic patients that X will be the prescription. The result will be an inescapable negative feed-back loop. -When everyone is forced to have health care insurance, only criminals won’t have health care insurance. As snarky as that may sound, this legislation will make criminals out of a whole new class of people. It’s really rather simple. There are no provisions for those who want to opt out. If you’re a woman and you don’t want maternity coverage…tough. If you don’t want mental health coverage…tough. If you don’t want coverage at all, for reasons that, quite frankly, are none of anyone’s business…tough. Oh, we’re assured (wink, wink) that nobody will actually end up in jail for not buying coverage, but don’t you believe them. The end result is always the same. It’s always force. -We will see a sharp increase in mental health cases in this country. Everyone must now be covered for mental health. This can be as innocuous as a couple of trips a year to your therapist or as serious as treatment for Schizophrenia or OCD or ADD. Psychotropic drugs (Prozac, etc…) will also be covered. When something is universally offered at a price below market value, people are going to naturally take advantage of that something. I imagine we are going to see a rather steep incline in the number of people seen by mental health professionals. This, of course, leads to a whole separate Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences. How much more money will be funneled into mental health, thus creating another negative feed-back loop? More people see more mental health professionals, triggering more federal money pouring into the field of mental heath, triggering more people seeing mental health professionals, etc… Also, will more people be forced to take psychotropic drugs either based on bad advice or against their will? That, too, may be a subject for a future post. Unintended consequences are a powerful thing. I wish more people were able to think deeply about them before jumping on bandwagons, however well intentioned they may be. [Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.] Filed under: Health Care, Unintended Consequences Comments: 4 Comments
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Posted at 5:14 pm on March 23, 2010, by Justin M. Stoddard
It seems appropriate to start my first entry on this blog with a quote from Henry Hazlitt, author of Economics in One Lesson, which is the inspiration for the name of this new adventure.
“The most frequent fallacy by far today, the fallacy that emerges again and again in nearly every conversation that touches on economic affairs, the error of a thousand political speeches, the central sophism of the new economics, is to concentrate on the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole.” By far, the aspects of economics I pay attention to the most are those of Unintended Consequences and opportunity costs. When Hazlitt talks of “the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole”, Unintended Consequences and Opportunity Costs come into play Several such consequences/costs come immediately to mind when thinking of the current Health Care bill recently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. -We can probably expect new innovations in medical science to stagnate. We can never know what amazing technology will never be invented simply because the money or the incentive no longer exists to invent that technology. This points to Bastiat’s Broken Window Theory Fallacy, which simply states that though a broken window may unexpectedly enrich the window maker, it impoverishes the person who must now replace the window. His money could have been spent on something else, entirely. -We can probably expect a new wave of crackdowns on immigration. Though I have some problems with Milton Friedman, he had it exactly right when he said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” I understand that ‘illegal immigrants’ are not explicitly covered under this new legislation, and there is a good deal of economic proof that immigration is a net boon to the economy, but we must face some inconvenient truths. There is a strong movement in this country to give millions of immigrants ‘amnesty’, meaning they will not only be in the country legally, they will be on the first step to obtaining citizenship. Do not misunderstand me, I applaud the efforts to make this happen as I agree with open borders/immigration. However, as the majority of elected Republicans are against this, if it is passed, it will be because of the Democrats. I do not mean to be cynical here, but the legalization and naturalization of millions of immigrants as a political movement coming from the Left has to be repaid somehow. Namely, there will be millions more in the Democratic party 10 years hence. This will cause a huge, irrational backlash against immigration. An ‘unintended consequence”. Instead of attacking the welfare state, Republicans and others from the right will score points by fear-mongering and know-nothingness. We can assuredly expect the passage of a National ID bill sometime in the near future, and that’s not even mentioning the hundreds of millions of more dollars that will go towards “protecting the borders”. It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out. [Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.] Filed under: Health Care, Unintended Consequences Comments: 3 Comments
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"[T]he whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."