Healthcare and the Cost of Non-Price Rationing
Monday May 20, 2013 | John C. Goodman

The orthodox approach to health policy is obsessively focused on the burdens of price barriers to care, and at the same time inordinately oblivious to the burdens of non-price barriers. Yet non-price barriers to care can be very costly. This is an important point that dooms many healthcare proposals, as I explain in my...
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Stupid Regulations
Friday May 17, 2013 | Randall Holcombe

I received a postcard in yesterday’s mail. The first paragraph reads: “The City of Tallahassee’s Office of Cross-Connection Control monitors actual or potential backflow via cross connections with non-approved water sources. We are committed to the quality of water delivered to our customers, and your drinking water remains clean and free of contaminants [sic]....
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Healthcare and the Poor: Why Money Works Better than Waiting
Wednesday May 15, 2013 | John C. Goodman

What I call health policy orthodoxy is committed to two propositions: (1) The really important health issue for poor people is access to care, and (2) to ensure access, waiting for care is always better than paying for care. In other words, if you have to ration scarce medical resources somehow, rationing by waiting...
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Why Government Shouldn’t Build Things (Part 3)
Monday May 13, 2013 | Mary Theroux

I had earlier posted about the SNAFUed boondoggle also known as the Eastern span of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge (here and here), but the bad news just keeps rolling in. Yesterday it was revealed that the tower supporting the entire self-anchored suspension bridge rests on bolts that are likely to fail, causing the...
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No Longer Fruitcakes. . .
Monday May 13, 2013 | Alvaro Vargas Llosa

Barring legal maneuvers, a fringe party becomes part of a country’s mainstream politics for one of two reasons: because it sheds or conceals its extravagant views or because mainstream politics shifts in such a way as to make it relevant. The UK Independence Party, which won an average of 25 percent of the vote...
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Both the Right and Left Go Wrong on Healthcare Prices
Monday May 13, 2013 | John C. Goodman

Despite the fact that prices in healthcare do not play the same role as they do in other markets, there is a tendency on both the political right and the political left to ignore this fact. The right, for example, issues frequent calls to make prices transparent. A number of proposals would even require...
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What Medical Tourism Tells Us about Our Healthcare System
Wednesday May 8, 2013 | John C. Goodman

If you ask a hospital in your neighborhood to give you a package price on a standard surgical procedure, you will probably be turned down. After the suppression of normal market forces for the better part of a century, hospitals are rarely interested in competing on price for patients they are likely to get...
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“Customer Service” at the IRS?
Monday May 20, 2013 | K. Lloyd Billingsley

On May 17 outgoing IRS boss Steven Miller – president Obama fired him but he was going to resign anyway – testified to the House Ways and Means Committee about his agency’s campaign to target conservative groups seeking non-profit status. Mr. Miller contended that he did not mislead Congress or the American people. He...
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Hitting the Debt Ceiling
Sunday May 19, 2013 | Craig Eyermann

On this Sunday, May 19, 2013, the U.S. federal government will metaphorically max out its credit card. Jeffrey Sparshott of the Wall Street Journal‘s Real Time Economics blog reports: The U.S. government will bump up against the federal debt limit this weekend, though a series of emergency steps will allow it to continue paying...
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Feds Apply Full Court Press
Friday May 17, 2013 | K. Lloyd Billingsley

The federal government is obfuscating about Benghazi and deploying the IRS against groups less than worshipful of government. As if that were not enough, the Justice Department is seizing the phone records of Associated Press reporters, which the AP calls a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” on press freedom. Ben Wizner of the ACLU called...
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A Government Too Vast
Thursday May 16, 2013 | Craig Eyermann

Has the U.S. government become too vast for the President to be accountable for the misconduct of its bureaucrats? Believe it or not, that’s the argument being advanced by President Obama’s former campaign manager David Axelrod for the purpose of defending the President in the abuse of power scandals now engulfing his administration. Politico...
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Internal-Repression-Service.con
Wednesday May 15, 2013 | K. Lloyd Billingsley

The Internal Revenue Service has been targeting conservative groups but the powerful federal agency was not content with abuse of groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their names. As the Wall Street Journal noted, the IRS was acting in a highly inclusive manner, giving extra scrutiny to groups seeking to “make America a...
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CIA cash promotes waste, fraud and abuse in Afghanistan
Monday May 13, 2013 | K. Lloyd Billingsley

For ten years the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has been dropping off bags of money for Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who is grateful for the monthly cash deliveries. The revelation sparked a protest from Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who told the New York Times “I thought we were trying to clean up waste,...
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The IRS Admits Its Corruption
Friday May 10, 2013 | Craig Eyermann

There’s a long-standing joke among politicians, which kind of goes along the following line: “You had better not threaten my power, or else I’ll set the IRS on you!” Even President Obama has told a version of this joke: Unfortunately, the people and managers who staff the bureaucracy of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),...
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