Obamacare's coverage growth was 89 percent Medicaid. | CBO's bias needs fixing. | D.C. keeps losing guns rights cases. | Finally, some discipline for campus disruptions.


July 29, 2017
The Senate voted to preserve Obamacare this week. In other words, it voted to preserve a failing health insurance market that is pushing more people into Medicaid. Health care reformers should work on fixing the CBO's bias. The District of Columbia keeps losing gun rights cases. Finally, a college has handed out real discipline for disrupting campus speakers. The United States has been missing the worldwide wave of corporate tax cutting.
Obamacare has mostly been an expansion of Medicaid, not a reform of the health insurance market. As of this week, Obamacare is still the law. From Edmund Haislmaier and Drew Gonshorowski, here is a look at what the enrollment data are telling us: “[Two thousand fourteen] and 2015 saw significant increase in enrollment in individual-market policies. However, those gains have tapered off and may even be in the process of reversing as a result of the law significantly driving up premiums in that market. Lower-income individuals who qualify for premium subsidies for coverage purchased through the exchanges are largely insulated from those costs. However, middle-income, self-employed persons—the more typical pre-Obamacare individual-market customers—do not qualify for subsidies and are finding coverage to be increasingly unaffordable or even unavailable. “Thus, the present danger is that, if Obamacare’s most costly insurance regulations remain in place, the law will effectively force more of those middle-income individuals to drop their coverage, with some of them becoming uninsured. “The evidence of the past three years also indicates that the vast majority of enrollment gains under Obamacare have come through the law’s expansion of Medicaid coverage to include able-bodied adults without dependent children. While health insurance enrollment increased by 15.7 million individuals over the three-year period, 89 percent of that increase (14 million) was attributable to additional Medicaid enrollment and 73.5 percent of the total (11.7 million) came from higher Medicaid enrollment in the 31 states and the District of Columbia that adopted the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.” [The Heritage Foundation] The Congressional Budget Office needs reform. CBO opacity is one of the reasons moderates and conservatives could not find common ground on a bill to repeal Obamacare, writes Avik Roy: “The CBO refused to break out the proportion of GOP Medicaid savings that were driven by long-term entitlement reform (per capita caps) vs. the repeal of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. The CBO’s deliberate opacity allowed journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and every Democrat to dishonestly claim that per capita caps would ‘cut $800 billion from Medicaid,’ even though nearly all of the Medicaid savings were from repealing and replacing the Obamacare expansion. “Similarly, the CBO refused to break out — until the very end, after it had leaked — the fact that nearly three-fourths of the ‘coverage losses’ under the GOP bill would come from people voluntarily choosing to forgo coverage due to the repeal of the individual mandate. […] “So long as the individual mandate is on the books, and the CBO has the point of view it has, no Republican bill will be scored by the CBO as competitive with Obamacare on coverage. Repealing the mandate would reset the CBO’s baseline such that the broader GOP repeal-and-replace effort could fare much better.” [National Review] The District of Columbia keeps losing gun rights cases. On Tuesday, the D.C. Court of Appeals struck down the District’s requirement that individuals provided a ‘good reason’ before being issued a permit to own a gun. The District, as Adam Bates writes, seems to be having difficulty accepting that gun ownership is protected by the Constitution: “[T]he District banned all handgun possession, including in the home, in 1976. That policy was ruled unconstitutional in the Heller I decision in 2008, which held that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual right to have a handgun in the home for self-defense. The District responded to Heller I by banning the public carrying of handguns. That ban was ruled unconstitutional in Palmer v. District of Columbia in 2014 (Cato’s own Tom Palmer was the named plaintiff in that case). The District was undeterred, and responded to the Palmer ruling by requiring permit applicants to provide a ‘good reason’ why they should be allowed to carry. “The ‘good reason,’ as defined by the D.C. government, is incredibly narrow. Simply being concerned about crime, or living/working in a crime-ridden area of the city does not suffice. Effectively the only people capable of meeting the D.C. test are those working in extraordinarily high-risk occupations or people who have received substantive, specific threats against them.” And here is the key passage from Judge Griffith’s opinion: “At the Second Amendment’s core lies the right of responsible citizens to carry firearms for personal self-defense beyond the home, subject to longstanding restrictions. These traditional limits include, for instance, licensing requirements, but not bans on carrying in urban areas like D.C. or bans on carrying absent a special need for self-defense. In fact, the Amendment’s core at a minimum shields the typically situated citizen’s ability to carry common arms generally. The District’s good-reason law is necessarily a total ban on exercises of that constitutional right for most D.C. residents. That’s enough to sink this law under Heller I.” [Cato Institute] Finally, a college has decided that disrupting campus speakers merits real discipline. Claremont McKenna has handed out some punishments for the disruption of Heather Mac Donald’s April 6 talk on her book, The War on Cops. Rachelle Peterson writes: “Claremont announced it has identified twelve students as protest participants, of which it formally charged ten and punished seven. The college will suspend three students for one year, suspend two for one semester and place another two on ‘conduct probation.’ A three-member panel determined the severity of discipline ‘based on the nature and degree of leadership in the blockade, the acknowledgment and acceptance of responsibility, and other factors.’ […] “Few of the recent campus outrages have resulted in accountability for the perpetrators. In February, at the University of California-Berkeley, a 1,500-person mob prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking. Masked Molotov-cocktail throwing rioters assaulted bystanders, lit fireworks and smashed windows. Berkeley officials announced they ‘condemn in the strongest possible terms the violence and unlawful behavior,’ and Chancellor Nicholas Dirks vowed, ‘We will not stand idly by while laws or university policies are violated, no matter who the perpetrators are.’ But campus police arrested only one agitator that night. There have been no reports of students punished. (In April, when a Berkeley event featuring Ann Coulter was scheduled, then canceled, then reinstated, police did arrest five protesters and confiscate multiple weapons.) “Middlebury College recently made a stunt of handing out wrist slaps after students shut down a speech by Charles Murray, injured his interlocutor Middlebury professor Alison Stanger, and rocked Murray’s car as he attempted to leave. The college disciplined 67 students. The strongest punishment? A mark on students’ records. Some received even milder sentences, such as a disciplinary letter that would be removed from their records at semester’s end. All this President Laurie Patton hailed in the Wall Street Journal as ‘The Right Way to Protect Free Speech on Campus.’ […] “Restraining rule-breaking students ought not to require special courage. The turmoil at Claremont and elsewhere was entirely avoidable. Colleges have been neglecting their basic responsibilities for a long time, trading intellectual diversity for political conformity. Is it any wonder that students now feel entitled to erupt in self-righteous anger at the first sign of real intellectual disagreement?” [RealClearEducation] Missing the wave of tax cutting: The United States still has the highest top corporate income tax rate in the world, as the graph from Veronique de Rugy shows: [Mercatus Center]
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