States are innovating to lower health care costs. Getting a waiver from Obamacare's insurance market regulations is the first step. Robert Moffit writes:
Alaska secured a 1332 waiver that enabled officials to redeploy federal subsidies and re-channel those funds into a risk pool for high-cost enrollees and thus stabilize its market. The result: Alaska reduced individual market premiums by a stunning 25 percent.
Likewise, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin signed legislation to apply for a waiver to create a reinsurance program that would cover 80 percent of high-cost claims. Under the waiver, the state would use federal dollars to cover 75 percent of the cost and state taxpayers would fund the remainder. Wisconsin officials project a 13 percent premium reduction in 2019 and 12 percent in 2020.
Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland also recently signed bipartisan legislation authorizing a waiver and creating a reinsurance program. While Maryland would impose a small premium tax to finance its reinsurance program to finance high-cost claims, Maryland officials are hoping to cut individual market premiums "in half."
State officials using these waivers from current law can stabilize their markets, reduce premiums, and provide relief to individuals and families currently entrapped in severely damaged individual and small group health insurance markets.
Moffit adds:
Federal waivers and reinsurance initiatives are, however, only a partial answer to the multi-faceted crises in the various state health insurance markets. Under Obamacare, the elected representatives of the people of the states are still largely hamstrung in their efforts to secure market innovations, inasmuch as they still are little more than supplicants for federal regulatory relief. […]
This wide variety of circumstances is no prescription for centralized, standardized federal regulation and control. Congress should heed the consensus advice of a wide range of conservative health policy analysts and restore the primacy of state authority over health insurance markets.
[Robert Moffit, "States Are Offering Relief from Rising Health Care Costs. Here's How Congress Can Help," The Daily Signal, May 23]
Armed citizens can be part of the solution to mass shootings. David French writes:
After reading the FBI's latest report on active-shooter incidents in the United States, two things are increasingly clear. First, the United States has a growing problem with actual or attempted spree killers. And second, armed and alert citizens can be part of the solution. […]
How do shootings end? The most common ways are exactly what you'd expect: The shooters kill themselves or flee, or the police exchange gunfire with the shooter and/or apprehend him. But a surprising amount of the time, citizens stop the killer, and an increasing percentage of those citizens are armed.
From 2000 to 2013, only five times did an armed citizen (who was not a police officer) exchange fire with the shooter. Three times the citizen killed the shooter, once the shooter committed suicide, and once the shooter was wounded. Fast forward to 2016–2017. In that time period, six armed citizens confronted active shooters. They stopped the shooting four times (in one case, the shooter fled to a different site and continued shooting, and in the other the armed citizen was wounded before he could stop the shooting).
The lesson? Armed citizens can make a difference, and as more Americans obtain carry permits, more Americans will be on-scene and able to react. Moreover, what's missing from the data is any indication that armed citizens make the crisis worse. The stereotype of carry-permit holders spraying panicked gunfire is simply wrong.
[David French, "New FBI Data on Active Shooters Shows the Importance of Armed Citizens," National Review, May 25]
Ride-sharing helps lower health care costs. Leon S. Moskatel and David J. G. Slusky write:
Unnecessary ambulance use (when the patient could have taken a less expensive means of transportation without a reduction in health outcome) is partially due to lack of alternatives. Recently, though, alternatives have become available. Many individuals have started to seek cheaper transport from ride-sharing services such as Lyft and Uber. In addition, while ambulances prioritize patient safety and typically insist on transporting a person to the nearest hospital, ride-sharing cars allow the patient to pick which hospital to go to. This is important because farther facilities can have differing results for the same condition. Also, the closest hospital may not be in network for the patient, and therefore directing a ride-sharing vehicle to a farther hospital would lower the hospital bill itself as well. […]
There is at least a 7 percent decrease in the ambulance rate from the time of UberX entry into a city. Given that this decrease happened so soon after the UberX introduction, ambulance companies likely did not adjust the size of their fleets, so UberX entry likely also led to a reduction in the time spent waiting for an ambulance for the remaining volume. Because a reduction of a few minutes can drastically improve the odds of survival for many serious conditions, that decrease could have caused a substantial reduction in loss of life.
[Leon S. Moskatel and David J. G. Slusky, "Does Ride-Sharing Substitute for Ambulances?" Cato Institute, May 23]
States could cut taxes significantly if they eliminated corporate welfare. Matthew Mitchell and Tamara Winter have calculated the cost of corporate welfare in terms of tax cuts forgone for each state. Here are the highlights:
Several states, including Missouri and New York, could reduce their corporate tax rates by more than 90 percent if policymakers eliminated corporate incentives. Michigan, Nebraska, and Oklahoma could completely eliminate corporate taxation and still have room for cuts in other taxes if they eliminated all corporate incentives.
Lawmakers in Louisiana, Michigan, and Nebraska could reduce their states' personal income tax rates by 14.2, 10.8, and 16.2 percent, respectively, if they eliminated corporate incentives. […]
Taxpayers in Nebraska could enjoy a 23.2 percent reduction in their sales tax rate if state lawmakers eliminated corporate incentives. Similarly, if lawmakers in New York eliminated corporate incentives, they could reduce the state sales tax rate by 34.1 percent. More dramatically, Michigan state lawmakers could reduce their state sales tax rate by 49.3 percent in the absence of corporate incentives.
If Nebraska state policymakers eliminated corporate incentives, they could reduce total taxation by 8.43 percent. Similarly, Michigan and New York could reduce total taxation by 7.67 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively.
[Matthew D. Mitchell and Tamara Winter, "The Opportunity Cost of Corporate Welfare," Mercatus Center, May 22]
Less free, more lies. Charles Hughes writes:
A recent working paper from Luis R. Martinez of the University of Chicago uses a novel data set of satellite imagery and finds that yearly GDP growth rates in the most authoritarian regimes are inflated by between 15 and 30 percent. This finding should be incorporated into our understanding of the economic performance of authoritarian countries relative to "freer" countries. With better data, countries that have a higher degree of economic and human freedom likely perform even better than previous comparisons would suggest.
In a previous study in the American Economic Review, the authors developed a statistical framework to use satellite images to estimate growth. To answer the question of whether authoritarian countries were manipulating official GDP statistics, Martinez compared reported GDP figures to satellite images of night time lights. While governments might be able to influence or change reported figures, it would be difficult or impossible for them to similarly affect satellite imagery. […]
A topline comparison of average growth rates in night lights and GDP reveals that the same amount of growth in night lights translates to a significantly higher amount of GDP growth in more authoritarian countries. […]
Using raw GDP, only 4 of the 20 countries that had the highest aggregate growth from 1992 to 2008 were classified as "free" by Freedom House, compared to 5 being "partially free" and 11 that were "not free." After correcting for the data manipulation in authoritarian regimes, 9 of the countries in the top 20 were "free."
[Charles Hughes, "Satellites to Authoritarian Regimes: Your GDP Is Inflated," e21, May 22]
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