Freedom Line Blog

Ashton is right on target on the Independent Payment Advisory Board, and the Goldwater Institute deserves a lot of credit for challenging it. I think the challenge has a great deal of merit. I wrote on it here.

Ashton’s column today on direct-pay medicine is superb. Combine it with an expansion of the health savings accounts that Rick Santorum fought for during a 12-year span and helped authorize in 2003, and with allowing sales of health insurance across state lines, and with competition throughout Medicare rather than just in Part D, and with block grants to states for Medicaid so the states themselves will have freedom and incentive to promote market competition and efficiencies…. and, pretty soon, we would be well on our way to a thriving, multi-layered, market-based health-care financing system in which people would have all sorts of viable options. (Other ideas for free-market approaches for health care as a whole also abound.) It’s a shame President GW Bush never made such things a priority while he had House and Senate majorities. If somehow the American people (or the Supreme Court, in effect) can force the repeal of Obamacare, we’ll finally have the chance to put such ideas into play. As Ashton wrote, “there is a need for reform that opens up the healthcare industry to a lower-cost, transparent pricing system.”

Hear, hear!

I agree wholeheartedly with both Ashton and Troy that Romney does a poor job defending/advocating democratic capitalism and that Troy’s approach to what Romney should say is a good one. I also agree with Ashton that Romney, alas, is always going to have a tough time making that sort of case, because experientially and temperamentally (and maybe philosophically) he isn’t prone to that sort of approach. He really is easy to demonize (from the left)as a corporate raider, which makes him much more vulnerable to such charges in a general election campaign where the opponent has $800 million and is playing for a different set of voters than he is vulnerable to the charge in a GOP contest where the attack is rightly seen as perhaps scurrilous, and at least rhetorical overkill. Gingrich and Perry right now are doing Obama’s work for him — and it will make Romney all the more vulnerable in the fall.

Yes, if Romney tried language like Troy’s, it would help. But only so much. The sad reality is that he’s the perfect foil for Obama, both as plutocrat and as yet another Republican dynastic legatee. If he gets the nomination, he will be a weak general-election candidate because of it.

I join Ashton in saying that Eric Holder must go. I just think that he needs to take the whole Obama team down with him, for massive corruption. Holder and his ilk are race hustlers.  They violate the law with impunity, on more fronts than one might have possibly imagined.

The GOP presidential candidate who first makes an effective issue of all this will gain some real momentum in the race.  The rotten underbelly of the Obama/Holder Justice Department is just now being uncovered. There is a lot more rot still to come to light.