Freedom Line Blog

House Republican conservatives are considering an alternative to using the upcoming budget fight as an attempt to defund ObamaCare. In its place, the GOP would vote to delay all of ObamaCare for a year and use the money saved to restore budget cuts caused by the sequester, reports the Washington Examiner.

To entice Democrats, the proposal would also raise the government’s debt ceiling, which is estimated to be reached sometime in late October.

On the plus side, the one-year delay puts President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats on the defensive. After delaying the employer mandate and income eligibility requirements, it would be difficult to justify opposing the whole scale delay of a law that is turning into a “train wreck” to implement.

Shifting the money saved on ObamaCare implementation also lets Republicans take credit for restoring budget cuts, but here the plan starts to look less favorable. Conservatives want to restore funding to the military, but liberals are likely to demand restoration across the board – including budget items that Republicans would otherwise like to see shrink or eliminated.

Besides, if at the end of the year the sequester gets “paid for,” what was the point of going through all the downsizing? Angling for praise for restoring spending in a budget that doesn’t balance seems like an odd goal for fiscal conservatives.

Finally, there’s the debt ceiling issue. Between the White House, Senate Democrats and House Republican leadership there appears to be agreement that the debt ceiling should be raised. While that’s certainly the politically correct thing to do, it too seems contrary to the fiscal instincts of conservatives.

And yet, this trial balloon proposal might be attractive to House conservatives, also known as the best hope for imposing any kind of spending discipline in Washington. If this is the best they think they can do, then it means momentum inside Congress for defunding ObamaCare is dead.

If that’s true, let’s hope they can get a full and complete delay. Otherwise, capitulating on those terms will lead to more spending, more debt and more regulations. Not exactly a win for conservativsm.

If you think President Barack Obama has a difficult job delivering an on-the-fly speech about the situation in Syria, consider what his former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano is about to step into.

In language that’s better suited for an updated version of the movie PCU, a gaggle of liberal student groups in the University of California system sent a letter to Napolitano, who became UC’s first female president upon leaving the Obama administration.

After introducing themselves as “student leaders in the statewide multicultural progressive coalition that represents students who are underrepresented and marginalized within the UC System,” the petitioners “demand that you [Napolitano] implement the following across the UC system.”

These include “making the system a ‘sanctuary’ for illegal immigrants, barring the use of system funds or resources going to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which Napolitano oversaw in her previous job), impose mandatory sensitivity training on campus police and prohibit police from interfering with student demonstrations,” according to Fox News.

The letter, posted on Sunday, demands a meeting with Napolitano on Wednesday. For her trouble, the students promise to “do our best to cooperate with you in setting this up so all parties can have a productive conversation.”

Funny as it is to see a liberal like Napolitano have to take such people and demands seriously, it is still ridiculous that a highly compensated public official like her has to spend precious time and resources stoking the entitlement mentality of perennially aggrieved people.

Then again, that’s part of the job description when leading many modern higher education bureaucracies.

How bad has President Barack Obama mishandled his possible Syria bombing campaign?

“…President Obama finds himself in the biggest and ugliest public mess of his career, with a total policy meltdown playing out on the front pages and cable TV studios of the world,” writes Walter Russell Mead.

“It is like a slow motion Bay of Pigs, unrolling at an agonizing, prestige wrecking pace from day to day and week to week. It is almost impossible to defend whatever policy he actually has in mind at this point, yet the consequences of a congressional vote that opposes him are grave.”

Mead’s allusion to JFK’s Bay of Pigs fiasco is instructive. In 1961, the Kennedy administration armed and sent 1,400 Cuban exiles to topple Fidel Castro. However, they didn’t have air support or reinforcements from the U.S. military, and were quickly defeated.

Like Obama, Kennedy wanted to ‘send a message’ on the cheap, and got what he paid for.

The consequences to America were nearly disastrous. Not only did Castro and his Soviet Union patrons humiliate the United States in front of the world, they interpreted the defeat – and the resulting timidity – as a free pass to put ICBMs 90 miles from Florida. Without the Bay of Pigs fiasco as a precursor, it is almost impossible to imagine the following year’s Cuban Missile Crisis.

With this in mind, Members of Congress should be extremely skeptical about the Obama administration’s claim that those we attack won’t be “arrogant and foolish enough to retaliate.”

History indicates otherwise, and in ways we can’t easily predict.

A highly regarded separation of powers expert says the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s oddly worded resolution to authorize military force in Syria might be more expansive than its drafters intend, according to the Washington Times.

At issue is the resolution’s use of the words “limited and tailored” in the phrase giving President Barack Obama power “to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in a limited and tailored manner against legitimate military targets in Syria…”

Louis Fisher, a former long-time expert at the Congressional Research Service and author of a leading treatise on presidential war powers, says the word choice is unprecedented and could be so vague that it creates space for an escalation.

“What could possibly be the meaning of ‘limited and tailored’? I doubt if I’ve ever seen the word ‘tailored’ in a bill,” Fisher told the paper. “Even if the ‘intent’ of Congress is a limited war, war has its own momentum.”

In other words, use of the word ‘tailored’ in the resolution can mean anything to the clever lawyers who will twist it however they please, so in reality that word, and any limiting effect it is designed to have, is meaningless.

It is impossible for me to imagine that the people drafting this resolution don’t know this. Therefore, it seems almost certain that the underlying intent here is to sound like they are limiting the President’s options while in fact not doing so at all.

If we’re going to bomb Syria then we are going to war with Syria. If that’s in America’s national security interest, Congress should declare it in unambiguous language.

To my mind it’s better to do nothing than to say something that means nothing.

Otherwise, Congress is just lying to itself so that it can act outraged when the President uses the resolution to wage a war the Senate and House impliedly authorized.

McClatchy news ran a piece yesterday describing how President Barack Obama’s seeming indecision on striking Syria is being interpreted by Middle Easterners.

“Obama’s abrupt decision on Saturday to delay the strikes that seemed just hours away is being seen in the region as the latest confirmation of an incoherent U.S. approach of mixed messages and unfulfilled threats that have driven America’s standing to a new low,” the paper said, citing numerous interviews with Syrian rebels and others.

The confusion wasn’t helped during Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There, the Vietnam veteran and anti-war hero did an about-face. Without a hint of irony he argued that in asking for congressional approval to fire missiles at Syria “President Obama is not asking America to go to war.”

Instead, the President was “asking only for the power to make clear, to make certain, that the United States means what we say,” when the Commander-in-Chief threatens military force.

But the fact remains that firing missiles into another country is an act of war, a fact that didn’t escape Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) before heading into the hearing.

“This is the most serious policy decision any senator will make,” reports the Daily Caller. “Authorizing the use of military force is, let’s face it, is a declaration of war against another country, no matter how limited it is, that’s what it is.”

Kudos to Senator Corker for saying the truth out loud. He understands the real world consequences of this decision, as do the Syrian rebels, Syrian President Bashar Assad and every other sentient being paying attention.

So far, the Obama administration is doing itself no favors by pushing forward an ad hoc, incoherent rationale for bombing a government whose actions – while immoral and deplorable – don’t necessarily threaten America’s national security interests.

No, I don’t mean news of yet another delay in the controversial health law’s implementation – this time a Reuters report that the Health and Human Services department is pushing back by two weeks its timetable for finalizing deals with health insurance companies.

I mean today’s announcement that former President Bill Clinton is being tasked with explaining what’s so great about ObamaCare to the country. Clinton’s speech next week is being billed as the first of several high-profile speeches designed to sell the law to the 54 percent of Americans who don’t like it.

To be sure, if anybody in politics can make this train wreck look good, it’s Bill Clinton. But why would President Obama wait till now, after three-and-a-half years of public relations futility, to bring in his party’s best spokesman?

Simple: With just over a month to go before ObamaCare’s enrollment begins the president and his administration are in full-blown panic mode. Nothing is on schedule. Their multi-million dollar ad campaign may not attract enough people to enroll. And, oh yeah, we’re about to intervene in Syria’s civil war.

If Clinton gets any traction with his speeches it will be of limited value because so much of the public’s mind has been made up in the years since the law was passed. Prior to that, who knows? As a matter of Politics 101, failing to use such a successful political spokesman strikes me as a huge wasted opportunity. Of all the delays with ObamaCare, putting off Clinton’s rhetorical talents may be the most fatal to the law because – perhaps – they could have done so much to keep it alive.

How’s this for a snapshot of ObamaCare’s priorities?

Since the controversial health law passed in March 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has hired 1,684 new employees.

Of those, 86 are criminal investigators while only two are consumer safety officers.

The numbers come from HHS data extracted by a Freedom of Information Request by The Daily Mail, a British newspaper.

Bear in mind, HHS’s health cops are in addition to the estimated 16,500 new agents the Internal Revenue Service is seeking to fulfill its ObamaCare policing mandate.

There are, of course, better, much less intrusive ways to do health reform.

“People would voluntarily purchase the health insurance of their choice with basic subsidies. Additional special assistance could be targeted to help those with low incomes and/or high risk-based premium costs in purchasing health insurance,” according to Thomas Miller of the American Enterprise Institute.

Instead of the demanding detailed financial and health information from millions of Americans, Miller proposes treating ObamaCare health insurance subsidies like other income tax issues, so that only “a tiny fraction of taxpayers would be subject to mostly random audits to ensure that their tax subsidies for insurance are being spent appropriately.”

Miller’s solution would nix the need for all the new ObamaCare investigators. Eliminating the 86 new HHS hires would save taxpayers approximately $138.8 million annually.

But that would mean less oversight and control for the federal government, which, as we are seeing with the rise in police-related hiring at HHS and IRS, is not a priority under ObamaCare.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is using an interesting tactic to get House Republicans to pass his immigration reform bill – Scare them with threats of a lawless presidency.

“I believe this president will be tempted, if nothing happens in Congress, he will be tempted to issue an executive order as he did for the DREAM Act kids a year ago, where he basically legalizes 11 million people by the sign of a pen,” the presumptive 2016 presidential candidate told a Florida radio station last week.

In effect, Rubio is telling House Republicans – opponents of his pathway to citizenship plan for illegal immigrants – that unless they pass the Senate Gang of Eight’s bad bill President Barack Obama will enlarge his controversial Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Brought to life last year via executive order, Obama directed immigration agents to put illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children at the bottom of the deportation list. The policy also makes available temporary work visas to those covered.

But Rubio, a University of Miami law school graduate and former Speaker of the Florida House, has his eyes on the wrong target.

For one thing, not even the liberal academics that provided cover for the president’s unilateral and unprecedented action think Obama has the power to defer action on every illegal immigrant.

“The justifications for DACA made clear that this is not a situation where the president can reduce overall enforcement of immigration laws. He can just redirect it in certain ways,” former principal deputy attorney general and current University of Virginia law professor David A. Martin told the Washington Post.

And even if President Obama did decide not to enforce any immigration laws, why is his lawlessness an argument against Republicans? Wouldn’t the proper response to an expanded abuse of presidential power be to oppose the president?

Yet it seems like Rubio is giving Obama a pass while preemptively blaming House Republicans for future bad acts the president may commit.

Only in a place like Washington does that kind of logic make sense. If Rubio really believes that the President of the United States won’t be constrained by the separation of powers and the rule of law, then the object of his anger should be directed at the White House, not Republicans in the House of Representatives.

News broke today that the United Parcel Service (UPS) is dropping an estimated 15,000 spouses of its non-union employees from the company’s health insurance plan – largely because of ObamaCare.

Doing so will save UPS around $60 million a year.

Under the health law, working spouses who have access to medical insurance from another employer don’t have to be covered.

The UPS memo explaining the decision cites ObamaCare’s stepped-up coverage requirements as playing a big role, reports Kaiser Health News.

Costly benefits such as the law’s “ban on annual and lifetime coverage limits and its requirement to cover dependent children up to age 26” will raise the cost of premiums for employers.

Eliminating coverage for working spouses is one of the few ways companies can rein in costs while still complying with the law.

But along with losing access to their current doctor networks and benefits, UPS’s soon-to-be-severed working spouses will also likely pay more for health insurance.

“The $500 in-network family deductible for UPS’s basic plan, for example, is less than the nationwide average of $733,” says Kaiser.

Remember that oft-repeated line from President Barack Obama in 2009 that if you like your current doctor and insurance plan you will be able to keep them after ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014?

Fast forward to today, and reality is singing a very different tune.

In the run-up to ObamaCare’s launch on October 1st we’ve seen plenty of waste and abuse.

Now comes the fraud.

“In Massachusetts, scammers have deceptively marketed fake health insurance policies and created fake web sites that claimed to sell ObamaCare, targeting seniors to gain their personal information,” reports Fox News.

There’s more.

“In Kansas and Alabama, con artists posing as government employees talked people into giving up their account numbers in order to sign up for fake health care plans.” (Emphasis added)

At first blush, it may seem crazy that people would hand over such sensitive information as their Social Security number, medical records, pay stubs and the like to complete strangers.

Yet that’s exactly how ObamaCare envisions millions of Americans getting health insurance on an ObamaCare exchange – by sharing some of their most sensitive financial and health information with an online-certified ‘navigator.’

Yes, we should believe the best about people and hope they don’t succumb to the temptation to sell private information.

But it’s first-order foolishness to expect millions of sensitive transactions involving most of a person’s critical data to be fraud-free.

Fraud, like most crimes, is a crime of opportunity. Shame on the Obama administration for creating so many.

Want to defund ObamaCare, but think DC’s politics make it impossible? Don’t worry. A new study confirms that convincing young healthy people to opt out is the best and fastest way to starve the beast.

“This study finds that in 2014 many single people aged 18-34 who do not have children will have a substantial financial incentive to forego insurance on the exchanges and instead pay the individual mandate penalty of $95 or one percent of income,” says the study’s author, David Hogberg, Ph.D.

Both the savings and the numbers of people affected are potentially huge. “About 3.7 million of those ages 18-34 will be at least $500 better off if they forgo insurance and pay the penalty,” Hogberg writes. “More than 3 million will be $1,000 better off if they go the same route. This raises the likelihood that an insufficient number of young people and healthy people will participate in the exchanges, thereby leading to a death spiral.”

The reason for the massive savings is that young and healthy people won’t use health insurance as much as older and sicker people on the same plan. Thus, the young and healthy will “cross-subsidize” the old and sick by paying in more than they take out in services.

The Obama administration knows this and is gearing up a multi-million ad campaign to convince at least 2.7 million 18-34 year olds (the amount estimated necessary to make the risk pools solvent) to buy a product ObamaCare’s architects don’t want them to use.

But if that sounds like too much of a conspiracy for some (albeit one that’s true), the young and healthy should be reminded of this: Cash-strapped cities like Chicago, Detroit and others are planning to dump thousands of retired public employees into ObamaCare’s risk pools to reduce the legacy costs associated with unsustainable union benefits. Filling the pool with even more older and sicker consumers than anticipated will make enrolling in ObamaCare even more financially absurd for the young and healthy.

Despite all the spin, paying for insurance through an ObamaCare exchange is little more than a voluntary tax on the young and healthy. If conservatives want to stop the health law in its tracks, hammering this point seems like a great way to do it.

Democratic strongholds like California, Vermont and New York have been quick to use ObamaCare’s state-based insurance exchanges as an excuse to register voters.

State officials are claiming that 1993 National Voter Registration Act (aka the “Motor Voter Act”) requires combining election prospects with health insurance, but the reality is much murkier.

To start, ObamaCare is silent on voter registration. “The health care law spans 974 pages and regulates nearly one-fifth of our economy,” Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) wrote in a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, “yet nowhere in the law is voter registration mentioned.”

Then there’s the Motor Voter Act itself.

As written, the law “requires states to offer voter registration at government offices, most commonly departments of motor vehicles,” explains the Detroit Free Press. “With the exchanges, which are in some ways a new kind of government office, some are questioning whether the law applies to them.”

But unlike a state’s motor vehicles department, not all ObamaCare exchanges are standard government agencies. The paper continues, “In some states, the exchange will be a nonprofit; in others it will be part of the state’s health or human services agency. And in many Republican-controlled states, the federal government will operate the exchanges.”

The lack of uniformity is already leading to differing interpretations about whether the Motor Voter Act applies, which in turn is spawning lawsuits.

With this much uncertainty leading to costly court battles, states and their taxpayers would be much better served leaving the question whether Motor Voter applies to ObamaCare for academics to debate.

The alternative is an expensive and unnecessary distraction.

Today, the Obama administration announced $67 million in grants to 105 groups nationwide who will assist people trying to find health insurance on an ObamaCare exchange, according to Politico.

The groups are non-insurance organizations that will in turn employ so-called “navigators” to help insurance seekers fill out an ObamaCare application, obtain insurance, and yes, even register to vote.

Some of the groups receiving grants include Planned Parenthood affiliates and various community organizers and activists. Care to speculate which political party they’ll steer registrants to?

The likely pay isn’t bad either.

In a proposed regulation issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid two weeks ago, it is suggested that the groups employing navigators pay between $20 and $48 an hour. (Navigators are prohibited by law from being paid by insurance companies, so compensation is expected to come from grant recipients.)

You’ve got to hand it to liberals. Not only do they manage to find a way to pay themselves to grow an entitlement, they get to grow their political support too.

What’s that line about democracy lasting only until the people discover they can vote themselves the treasury…?

How often do the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Elections Commission share information about non-profit political groups?

If the question seems highly unusual that’s because it is. Ordinarily, there is no reason for the two federal agencies to communicate about a private entity, yet evidence is mounting that IRS and FEC officials had several conversations about politically conservative non-profit groups.

To recall, the IRS has the power to grant or strip a group’s non-profit status, and the FEC is the main arbiter of political speech. If there is evidence of coordination between these two agencies to discriminate against associations because of their viewpoint, a whole new level of government corruption will emerge.

To find out the truth, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is requesting “All documents and communications between or among any FEC official or employee and any IRS official or employee for the period January 1, 2008, to the present.”

If past experience with the Obama administration is any guide, House committee staff could be in for a lot of reading.

Today, I’m up with a column that identifies what ObamaCare’s employer mandate really means for small businesses.

Note to Members of Congress and HR consultants – it’s not what you think.

Most of the attention on this particular mandate has focused on the idea that employers can avoid the twin threats of costly insurance or hefty fines if they pare back full-time employees to part-time status.

By not employing 50 full-time employees a small business can avoid triggering the mandate, or so the thinking goes.

But the reality is that ObamaCare adds up the total amount of part-time hours worked to create “full-time equivalent” (FTE) employees that count toward the 50 employee total. Meet or exceed the threshold, and say hello to huge compliance costs.

This is why a proposed legislative fix won’t actually solve the underlying problem, which is capping the amount of hours a small business can pay out to 50 FTEs – whether they are full-time, part-time or some combination of both.

It’s time for Congress to take a closer look at how ObamaCare’s employer mandate works and repeal it.

With just eight weeks to go until ObamaCare’s October 1 enrollment, the Health and Human Services department is scrambling to meet the deadline.

Its first order of business: A log-in portal where users can create a personal account.

In a few clicks you can get a sense of the kind of information you’ll be sharing via your account: family size, personal income, health history, age, gender and employment status.

Yes, some level of government likely has access to most if not all of this information, but it is ObamaCare’s user account that will, for the first time, house all of it in one place.

It will then be the Federal Data Hub’s job to share this information with the applicable state-based insurance exchange, and check your entries against another federal database to ensure accuracy.

As I’ve written before, the two federal databases will attract attention from hackers and identity thieves.

The ObamaCare user account creates a third inviting target.

Enjoy your privacy, while it lasts.

In a last ditch effort to shield Members of Congress and their staff members from having to pay the same outrageous premiums set to hit everyday Americans under ObamaCare, President Obama personally intervened to ensure that the government would instead pay the bill.

The deal preserves a 75 percent contribution by the federal government for Congress and its staff toward the price of the new, costlier health insurance premiums available under ObamaCare, according to Politico.

The decision flies in the face of an amendment attached to ObamaCare that requires Congress and staff to use the same health insurance exchanges as everyone else with the same rules. Until today, that meant that a person’s salary – from a Senator’s to an entry-level staff member’s – would determine whether a person qualifies for a federal subsidy and if so for how much.

But now we see that, once again, Congress and this President are choosing to operate by a different set of rules than the ones they enforce on everyone else.

Beware of financial bureaucrats posing as economists. That’s my main takeaway from some pre-analysis of Friday’s unemployment numbers by Gallup’s lead economist, Dennis Jacobe.

As is sometimes the case when using metrics to understand reality, it looks like the federal government isn’t counting the right economic event if it truly wants to understand the employment market.

According to Jacobe, “The current government job measures leave a lot to be desired in terms of face-validity. For example, [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke noted in his testimony to Congress that the Fed’s unemployment target may need to be adjusted, depending on the labor participation rate. A declining participation rate can artificially lower the unemployment rate as job seekers give up looking for work, while an increasing participation rate can do the reverse.”

The problem is particularly acute when one considers how the feds count part-time jobs.

“Similarly, the establishment survey can be distorted by a surge in part-time jobs – a factor that may need to be considered when one evaluates Friday’s report,” writes Jacobe. “Part-time jobs not only count as new jobs for this survey, but if an American having one part-time job adds an additional part-time job, it counts the same as the creation of a new full-time job.”

This kind of counting completely misrepresents the rise in multiple part-time jobs. By treating two-part time jobs as the equivalent of one full-time job, the metric leaves out the fact that unlike just about every full-time job, almost no part-time job provides health or retirement benefits. Thus, while the hours worked my be roughly the same, the overall compensation is not.

What makes this an especially pernicious way to describe today’s employment market is the well-documented impact ObamaCare is having on the decline of full-time employment. If the federal unemployment survey continues to equate workers with multiple part-time jobs and those with full-time employment, a huge net loss in millions of workers’ standard of living will be lost because the official formula simply doesn’t account for it.

That’s a point worth remembering if Friday’s unemployment numbers come back better than expected.

In a speech to a room full of government researchers, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker made some bold predictions: If Detroit had passed the same public union reforms as the Badger State did, it wouldn’t be bankrupt today. And if Chicago had done so, its public school system would be in much better shape.

Walker’s comments are sure to spark controversy from union-friendly Democrats who disdain his rollback of debt-creating privileges. But liberals should get used to the argument because the success of Walker’s program is quietly making him into a viable 2016 presidential contender.

Later this week Walker is hosting the National Governors Association in Milwaukee, and he plans to deliver a simple message: “Worry more about the next generation than the next election.”

Absent Walker’s track record, it would be an empty bromide. But with it, the phrase introduces a formula for success that Americans nationwide may be willing to try after eight years of economic futility under President Barack Obama.

Stay tuned…

IPAB – aka, the Independent Payment Advisory Board – is one of the chief cost-containing elements of ObamaCare. As designed, a presidentially appointed panel of medical experts will convene to decide how much the government will pay for certain kinds of care, and who gets which treatments.

That means that “The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body,” writes Howard Dean in the Wall Street Journal. “By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.”

Dean, who is a licensed medical doctor and spent 11 years as the Democratic Governor of Vermont before running for president in 2004, knows from experience that IPAB is doomed to fail.

“There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting – the essential mechanism of the IPAB – has a 40-year track record of failure,” says Dean. “What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients. Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic.”

Dean goes on to call for a bipartisan repeal of IPAB, which is great to read and should be acted on. But the logic of including IPAB with ObamaCare’s structure makes perfect sense. Government-controlled health care is centrally-controlled and -planned health care.

If Dr. Dean wants a more patient-centered health care system he should be calling for repeal of ObamaCare in its entirety and greater deregulation of the health care industry. Empowering a new generation of medical entrepreneurs that can leverage advances in technology into boutique health care outlets would drive down costs, increase business opportunities and improve the quality of individualized care.

Dean is right to shudder at the care-killing cost of bureaucracy. Maybe one day he’ll discover the possibilities of a freer health care market too.