Viewpoints: For starters, Justice Scalia, broccoli isn't health insurance

The Sacramento Bee ^ | March 31, 2012 | by Paul Krugman

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Nobody knows what the Supreme Court will decide with regard to the Affordable Care Act. But, after this week's hearings, it seems quite possible that the court will strike down the "mandate" – the requirement that individuals purchase health insurance – and maybe the whole law.

Let's start with the already famous exchange in which Justice Antonin Scalia compared the purchase of health insurance to the purchase of broccoli, with the implication that if the government can compel you to do the former, it can also compel you to do the latter. That comparison horrified health care experts all across America because health insurance is nothing like broccoli.

Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don't make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don't buy health insurance until they get sick – which is what happens in the absence of a mandate – the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn't work, and never has.

As I said, we don't know how this will go. But it's hard not to feel a sense of foreboding – and to worry that the nation's already badly damaged faith in the Supreme Court's ability to stand above politics is about to take another severe hit.

[Hot Tabasco]

It sounds like Krugman is trying to out think Scalia in print.....and that ain't gonna happen.

Scalia used broccoli as an example so that even the stupidist people in this country could grasp the idea. Evidently he was wrong in that regard.....

[aruanan]

So to keep health costs low, the "progressive" mindset presumably holds that the federal government has a rational basis to require that everybody engage in the specific type of interstate commerce which deals with green vegetables. In other words, the controversy keeps boiling down to the question, Does the federal government have the power to force people to engage in a specific kind of interstate commerce (buying green vegetables) in order to "regulate" another kind of interstate commerce (health services and/or health insurance).

Some health professionals seem to believe that the government should sponsor their efforts to counter the self-interested efforts of others (nutrition and diet quacks for example) because they are right and the others are wrong, because they are altruistic and the others are not. It may be true that they are factually correct and genuinely altruistic, and that what they wish to do will have a beneficial effect on many people, but it doesn’t follow necessarily that the government should fund them.

This is a manifestation of a widespread phenomenon brought about by the advent of the secularized state. Instead of viewing the state as a limited means to a limited end, the tendency has been to imbue it, a temporal entity, with the attributes of a transcendent final judgment in which all injustices and inequalities are finally rectified. In this way, the secular state has been categorically, though not personally, deified and expected to act accordingly (something of a diffuse divine right of kings).

This is seen in those who believe the necessary response to a social ill is the passage of a law, especially a federal law, and the enactment of a program, especially one that they can devise and administrate (and that not necessarily for cynical reasons). Those who feel they are on the side of right, certain they aren’t acting against society’s interest, often appeal to the State to aid them in their struggle against evil. Since the spirit of the secular state is money and power, they ask to be endowed accordingly. It’s pathetically naive and dangerous.

Power accumulates power. Government grows until it meets a limit, either a systemic one (Constitutional limits), or a fiscal one (limits imposed by the amount of money it is able to generate or extort from its own citizens or those outside), or a social one (limits provided by massive societal non-compliance or armed insurrection or by other countries’ response to aggression or perceived weakness). Even then it still has great power to drain resources and people from productive enterprise and turn them to its own ends. In this way it is functioning as a parasite living off the body politic.

[aruanan]

Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don't make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don't buy health insurance until they get sick – which is what happens in the absence of a mandate – the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn't work, and never has.

Paul, you friggin moron, there is no unregulated health insurance anywhere in the United States. And Obamacare has already resulted in making insurance more expensive and unaffordable. So what you fear, doesn't exist and what you prescribe has resulted in what you fear. We need Nobel prize winners like you like we need Nobel prize winners like Algore, Arafat, and Barack Hussein Obama.

[WashingtonSource]

I thought Krugman was an economist. So, now he’s a constitutional scholar, too. So much idiocy crammed into one tiny brain.

[musicman]

"Krugman's America extends from....."

[musicman]

"..broccoli isn't health insurance.."

[eyedigress]

I noticed you didn’t sign in at the YMCA yesterday. Are you OK?

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

“The purchase of a broccoli spear...”

Aha, see? That’s the problem right there. Broccoli comes in florets, asparagus in spears. I suggest a two-week stay in Camp Analogy where they will help you rectify this confusion. Don’t worry...analogy rehab will be covered under 0bamacare.

[DrC]

“So to keep health costs low, the “progressive” mindset presumably holds that the federal government has a rational basis to require that everybody engage in the specific type of interstate commerce which deals with green vegetables.”

Failure to exercise imposes a larger cost on society than failure to obtain health insurance. According to the logic of Obamacare, government has the power to force us to exercise to avert that adverse consequence. http://www.aei.org/article/health/healthcare-reform/scalias-correct-the-slippery-slope-towards-compulsory-exercisescalias-correct-the-slippery-slope-towards-compulsory-exercise/

[Grizzled Bear]

People with no income, such as homeless people: We should try to come up with a special program where they can get basic care until they can get back on their feet and pay for some of the coverage.

Christian Hospitals and organizations used to do this. In many areas, they still do. Unfortunately, the Progressive/Communist/Statist collective are working overtime to stop this.

If a private activity can collect donations and provide direct assistance, without government interference, they are able to do the work of Jesus, the King of kings and Lord of lords. The demonic butt sniffers in DC can't tolerate that.

[Grizzled Bear]

I’m still waiting for the commies to start pushing food as a ‘basic right’...

They already have. How do you think they justify school breakfast and lunch programs along with food stamps? Last year, I saw a push for Summer meal programs for students.

[William Tell]

I notice that the author never does address whether or not the government can force people to buy broccoli. Obviously, his answer would be "yes". The government has no bounds which prevent it from addressing any problem if it believes the problem is big enough.

Our Founders needed to add a specific injunction; "Congress shall have no powers beyond those enumerated despite how urgent, pressing, important, critical, or necessary the exercise of such other powers may seem".

Having included a process for amending the Constitution, I would guess that they didn't believe such an injunction would be necessary.

[mrsmel]

Great post.

[lentulusgracchus]

ObamaCare is not the answer, because its 2,000 plus pages are nothing but pages of confusion after confusion.

Obamacare isn't about insurance, or health, or care.

It's about enmeshing people in mechanisms of social and political control. It's Communism.

"Socialized medicine is the keystone of the arch of Soviet power" -- V. I. Lenin

[fortheDeclaration]

Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don't make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don't buy health insurance until they get sick – which is what happens in the absence of a mandate – the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn't work, and never has.

Those who don't have health insurance don't care about it and aren't going to buy it.

This forces those who do have health insurance to pay more for those individuals who are still going to use the emergency rooms.

[lentulusgracchus]

Christian Hospitals and organizations used to do this. In many areas, they still do. Unfortunately, the Progressive/Communist/Statist collective are working overtime to stop this.

By, for example, requiring Catholic and Baptist hospitals to provide gratis sterilization and abortion services.

Next they'll demand that Christus St. Joseph Hospital provide gerbils and butt-plugs for the fun-minded.

[combat_boots]

And health CARE isn’t health INSURANCE, Krugman.

[zeestephen]

This is a political issue NOT a legal issue.

“ObamaCare” is a backdoor political euphemism for government controlled health care.

ObamaCare IS a tax.

It's just not CALLED a tax.

The “free market choices” in ObamaCare are political rhetoric with no basis in reality.

If Democrats had called ObamaCare “A Tax With Personal Choices,” it would be exactly the same program.

If they had called ObamaCare a TAX, there would be no Supreme Court case.

But Democrats knew they could not pass a national health care TAX bill.

So, they have to pretend ObamaCare allows some kind of “choice.”

[Monorprise]

“
Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don’t make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don’t buy health insurance until they get sick – which is what happens in the absence of a mandate – the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn’t work, and never has.”

Health insurance in general has never worked but to drive up the cost of healthcare. Anytime you have a 3rd party picking up the bills that result from a 1st and 2nd parties choices, there is as little control over the size and growht of them bills as there is over the choices that result in the same bills.

Likewise even if you did FORCE everyone in to this failed socialist scheme and we somehow didn’t end up with the same tragity of the commons health insurance has always produced in terms of growing costs.

The cartel of available(government approved) insurance providers would invariably do 2 things:

1: Buy off politicians and government bureaucratic to see to it that no serous competition can enter the Government mandated market.

2: Like all monopolies become over time “less and less efferent and thus more and more expensive”. With no legal alternative the population will be forced to pay their rates whatever they make em. Just like any government run(”Public”) monopoly.

But once again that wont even be the primary driver of cost growth, the primary driver will be that old pesky tragity of the commons, and the Government to then manage costs growth will have to start making healthcare choices prioritization & rationing service coverage based upon the cookycutter set of Washington political Values.

Conservatives will cut services they feel are unnecessary like abortion, birth-control, various STD that result from immoral behavioral. Leftist will cut services they don’t approve of like care for the elderly who’s life they judge to be likely be too short to be worth while.

In either case Americans of every stripe will lose their basic freedom plan their own life and pick and choose what they are prepared for.

Invariably 2 independent systems will develop whether its legal or not, there will be one for the wealthy and one for poor.

[Monorprise]

“Standing above politics, in Krugman’s pea brain, means also standing above the Constitution.”

And upon the everyone rights.

Krugman seems to have it suck in his head that he has the right to force all the rest of us into participating in his hair-brained socialist scheme.

Well we don’t want to be subject to anther tragity of the commons scheme. Believe it or not Health insurance is NOT, and never was a viable way to manage the cost of healthcare!

It never was viable to put a 3rd party in charge of paying all the bills that result from the choices controlled only by the 1st and 2nd party!