Obamacare premiums are going up again. The problem is the insurance market regulations, write Doug Badger and Edmund Haislmaier:
In 2019, Obamacare premiums are poised to become even more expensive. New York, Washington state, and Maryland are requesting to raise their rates for the individual market by an average of 24 percent, 19 percent, and 30 percent respectively. Nationwide, the Congressional Budget Office predicts premiums will increase an average of 15 percent for the Obamacare benchmark plan.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
Earlier this year, we co-authored a study examining how Obamacare regulations raised premiums. We reviewed dozens of prospective and retrospective actuarial analyses of Obamacare's premium effects on both the state and national levels.
We found that premium increases for Obamacare policies were attributable to a maze of new federal insurance mandates, combined with a flawed subsidy design. That unhappy concoction produced disproportionately older and less healthy insurance pools, requiring insurers to price policies beyond the reach of many families and small businesses.
Our review of dozens of actuarial analyses found that a cluster of popular Obamacare insurance access requirements – specifically those that required insurers to issue policies to all comers, prohibited medical underwriting (i.e., basing premiums on health status), and required coverage of pre-existing medical conditions – accounted for the largest share of premium increases.
But our study made additional findings, including this: As much as half the increases associated with this complex of regulations could be rolled back if Congress removed certain Obamacare mandates, such as the single risk pool requirement.
We also found that other Obamacare requirements adversely affected premiums. The essential health benefits mandate and the requirement that individual policies provide a minimum actuarial value of 60 percent exerted direct, measurable and substantial effects on premiums.
We further found that regulations requiring insurers to overcharge younger adults had a secondary effect on premiums by producing insurance pools that skew older and sicker.
[Doug Badger and Edmund Haislmaier, "How Congress Can Reduce Obamacare Premiums," The Daily Signal, July 5]
The U.S. shipping industry is being ruined. And the fault lies with the Jones Act, a law requiring cargo moved between U.S. ports to be carried only on U.S.-owned, U.S.-crewed, U.S.-registered, and U.S.-built ships. Colin Grabow, Inu Manak, and Daniel J. Ikenson write:
The U.S. shipping industry is the first casualty of the Jones Act. Of course, the primary objective of the law was to ensure a vibrant shipping industry as a pillar of U.S. national security. If vibrancy and fleet size were synonymous, Americans might sleep well knowing that the U.S. fleet consists of more than 40,000 vessels. However, we might choose to sleep with one eye open after learning that barges operating primarily on the Mississippi River alone account for 55 percent of that number.
In fact, nearly 9 of every 10 commercial vessels produced in U.S. shipyards since 2010 have been barges or tugboats. Among oceangoing ships of at least 1,000 gross tons that transport cargo and meet Jones Act requirements, their numbers have declined from 193 to 99 since 2000, and only 78 of those 99 can be deemed militarily useful. Even in their expressions of support for the Jones Act, government officials concede that the U.S. shipping industry and its associated ecosystem have been depleted. Appearing before Congress earlier this year, Maritime Administrator and retired rear admiral Mark H. Buzby testified that "over the last few decades, the U.S. maritime industry has suffered losses as companies, ships, and jobs moved overseas."
One of the main causes of that decline is the onerous domestic-build requirement of the Jones Act, which prohibits U.S. shippers from operating vessels constructed abroad. American-built coastal and feeder ships cost between $190 and $250 million, whereas the cost to build a similar vessel in a foreign shipyard is about $30 million. Accordingly, U.S. shippers buy fewer ships, U.S. shipyards build fewer ships, and merchant mariners have fewer employment opportunities to serve as crew on those nonexistent ships. [Internal citations omitted.]
[Colin Grabow, Inu Manak, and Daniel J. Ikenson, "The Jones Act: A Burden America Can No Longer Bear," Cato Institute, June 28]
There is good news about black men in America. W. Bradford Wilcox, Wendy Wang, and Ronald Mincy write:
Despite a portrait of race relations that often highlights the negative, especially regarding black men (many Americans, according to a 2006 study by the Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University, believed that crime, unemployment, and poverty are endemic among African-American men), the truth is that most black men will not be incarcerated, are not unemployed, and are not poor — even if black men are more likely than other men to experience these outcomes.
In fact, millions of black men are flourishing in America today.
Our new report, "Black Men Making It In America," spotlights two pieces of particular good news about the economic well-being of black men.
First, the share of black men in poverty has fallen from 41% in 1960 to 18% today. Second, and more importantly, the share of black men in the middle or upper class — as measured by their family income — has risen from 38% in 1960 to 57% today. In other words, about one-in-two black men in America have reached the middle class or higher.
This good news is important and should be widely disseminated because it might help reduce prejudicial views of black men in the society at large, and negative portrayals of black men in the media. It should also engender hope among all African-Americans — particularly young black males. [...]
So, what routes are black men taking to make it in America?
Tracking black men from young adulthood through their 50s using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we identified three factors that are associated with their success: education, work, and marriage.
[W. Bradford Wilcox, Wendy Wang, and Ronald Mincy, "The Good News About Black Men in America," American Enterprise Institute, July 3]
Imposing one answer on everybody is the opposite of pluralism and tolerance. Thoughts on the gay-wedding-cake case and social change from Ronald Dworkin:
After marriage equality passed nationally, some gay rights organizations shrewdly disbanded, having achieved their goal. There would be no "permanent revolution," as some theoreticians call for. For many gays and lesbians it was time to go from being a new and exciting bud on society's tree to blending in with all the other boring branches that give the tree its vital structure. In other words, it was time to assimilate, as Jews and other minorities had prudently done in their day after achieving their goals.
But the gay wedding cake issue in Masterpiece has thrown a monkey wrench into the plan. It signifies the ascent of theory over prudence.
Richard Thompson Ford, in a recent [The American Interest] essay titled, "Anti-Discrimination Eats Itself," captures one aspect of that change. He notes that the theory behind anti-discrimination law has greatly expanded over the years, on behalf of both religious people and oppressed minorities, such that what was once a workable idea—for example, don't discriminate against someone because of their race, religion, or sexual orientation—has expanded to include the illegality of discriminating against anyone for any kind of behavior. This is what led to the impasse in Masterpiece, notes Ford, as we now face an unresolvable conflict of absolutes: the freedom to behave in accordance with one's religious belief and the right to have one's culture accommodated in all situations. He suggests cutting back on the applicability of anti-discrimination law to religious people, and muses on the spinelessness of a liberal culture that hesitates to "outlaw discrimination against the discriminators." This moves Ford closer to the LGBT position in the wedding cake debate. Yet even he admits that the culture itself must work these issues out, and that theories of rights get us nowhere.
This is precisely Burke's point. Theory is an insufficient guide. Societies differ, their cultures differ, because the conditions in each society differ, growing out as they do from different histories. This is why universal theory can only take reformers so far. The question then becomes what to do. In the case of the French Revolution, rather than seek a workable solution unique to France, the idealists dealt with the inevitable pushback by imposing their theory of justice on everyone, violently and bloodily, inspired by Rousseau's dictum that sometimes people must be "forced to be free." In the name of freedom the idealists abolished freedom. The alternative approach to social reform, Burke observed, is prudence.
[Ronald Dworkin, "Slow and Steady," Hudson Institute, July 4]
Against racial discrimination. The Trump administration has rescinded guidance that the Obama administration had given to colleges on using race and ethnicity in student admissions. That's the right moves, says Roger Clegg:
As a legal matter, while the courts have, alas, left the door ajar for this sort of discrimination, they have also placed significant restraints on it. The federal government should not be encouraging schools to do as much of this as they can get away with, which is what the Obama administration's guidance did. [...]
First, it is not just white students who are frequently discriminated against, but Asian-American students as well. Indeed, as America becomes increasingly multiracial and multiethnic — and as individual Americans are themselves more and more likely to be multiracial and multiethnic — it becomes more and more untenable for our institutions to sort people according to what color skin they have and where their ancestors came from.Second, the evidence is now overwhelming that, because of the "mismatch" phenomenon, it is not only the students who are discriminated against who are hurt by these policies, but also those who are supposedly receiving racial preferences. That is, if a student is admitted to and attends a school where his or her academic qualifications are significantly below the rest of the student body's, that student is less likely to graduate and more likely to flunk out or switch majors, and will receive lower grades — all to the student's detriment.
[Roger Clegg, "Good News: Trump Rescinds Obama's 'Affirmative Action' Guidance," National Review, July 3]
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