Freedom Line Blog

Last week, I posted here about the fact that the growing crisis in the supply of American doctors is driven partially by structural deficiencies in Medicare. A new piece out today in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) illuminates another key part of the puzzle: the growing tendency of doctors to refuse new patients under Medicaid — the vehicle that the Obama Administration intends to use to insure millions more Americans under Obamacare:

Some 31% of physicians in a sample of 4,326 said they wouldn’t accept Medicaid beneficiaries, economist Sandra Decker of the National Center for Health Statistics reported in an article in the journal Health Affairs published Monday. Most of the doctors cited the low reimbursement from Medicaid.

…

The health law passed by Democrats in March 2010 was supposed to expand coverage to around 16 million low-income people by signing them up for Medicaid. The Supreme Court decision in June effectively gave states the chance to opt out of the expansion. It isn’t yet clear how many will do so, although it’s likely to be a hot political issue. Either way, the coverage gained by low-income Americans could be less useful if they are unable to find a doctor to see them.

There are problems at the macro level too. Consider what Democratic(!) governors have been saying about the Medicaid expansion. Kentucky’s Steve Beshear has said “I have no idea how we’re going to pay for it.” California’s Jerry Brown has called it “devastating.” And Montana’s Brian Schweitzer — a man often touted by Democrats as a potential presidential candidate — has warned, ” I’m going to have to double my patient load and run the risk of bankrupting Montana.”

As Thomas Sowell is fond of saying, one of the hallmarks of liberalism is judging intent rather than outcomes when it comes to public policy. Thus do we get decades-long wars on poverty that do next to nothing for the impoverished, and stimulus programs of which it is always claimed that they would have worked if they only been a little bit bigger.

I’m not sure the abject failures of Obamacare will get a free pass based on good intent though. Theses sorts of consequences — patients unable to find doctors, states teetering on the verge of bankruptcy — are nearly impossible to ignore … no matter how desperately the White House will try.

Yesterday, the Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) launched a State Sovereignty Project devoted to persuading all 50 states to aggressively exercise their authority to serve as a check on the ever-growing and often extra-constitutional power of the federal government.

The project, which builds on CFIF’s existing work over the last several years in this area, focuses a grassroots-driven approach to encourage governmental authorities closest to the people – governors, state and local legislatures, state attorneys general and other state constitutional officers – to reclaim and exercise the structural powers granted to them by the U.S. Constitution as a bulwark against federal encroachments on state sovereignty and erosion of the individual liberties of the people they serve.  Specifically, CFIF will employ and enhance its numerous forms of paid advertising, earned media, social media and editorial materials, among other methods, as part of an ongoing broad education effort to promote localized grassroots activism.

Read the press release here.

Below is a sampling of CFIF’s recent work in support of the project’s goals:

• Supreme Court: Diminished Standing
• Podcast: Florida Secretary of State Defends Effort to Crack Down on Voter Fraud
• Conservative Governors Are Right to Resist Medicaid Expansion
• Governors Leading Nationwide Charge on Education Reform
• Obama Team Hijacks Schools’ Core Standards
• Podcast: Reining In Regulatory Power Grabs
• For Voting Rights, Don’t Keep Section 5 Alive
• Podcast: SCOTUS and Arizona’s Illegal Immigration Law
• Podcast: The Administration’s Education Power Grab

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

There’s no exercise of government power quite as nauseating when seen up close as a relatively small industry’s attempts to team up with government and either (A) shake down or (B) close down a rival who has built a better mousetrap. In his book “Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working” (one of the best political reads of the past few decades, by the way) — a volume dedicated to this trend — Jonathan Rauch describes how Washington D.C. bike messengers, for instance, lobbied heavily against the use of fax machines in the nation’s capital, for no other reason than that they were bad for business (a stand reminiscent of Frederic Bastiat’s famous satirical letter to the French Parliament in which it was claimed that candlemakers were suffering unfair competition from the sun).

This trend is rearing its ugly head again in Washington D.C., where city government is trying to crack down on Uber, one of the great innovations of the smart phone era. Uber is a private car service operating in a handful of major cities that allows you to instantly request a sedan from your smart phone, have it arrive in minutes, and then have all of the billing (including the tip) taken care of straight from your credit card. Uber eliminates all of the inconveniences of the taxi experience (your humble correspondent, for instance, recently waited 45 minutes for a cab in Silicon Valley after being told by dispatchers that it was five minutes away) and usually does so at a cheaper price. And of course, D.C. can’t have that! From the Daily Caller:

Members of the Washington, D.C. City Council haven’t given up on their efforts to bring the efficient and reliable luxury sedan-on-call service, Uber, under the authority of the company’s competitors in the taxicab industry.

Council members previously tried to establish a price floor for the company. More recently, at a July 10 meeting, a number of City Council members voted to bring the sedan service under the authority of the D.C. Taxicab Commission, a regulatory body strongly influenced by the taxi industry.

…

“I was opposed to them not being regulated, period,” councilman and former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry told The Daily Caller. “This was a compromise. I think if it’s not a regulated service, it really has an impact on the D.C. taxi industry.”

Of course it has an impact! That’s generally what happens when someone decides to build a company that can deliver a better product at a lower price.

Let’s hope Uber can resist the legislative strong-arming. At least they have this going for them: there are few inadvertent blessings as sweet as having Marion Barry be your chief antagonist.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 (CDT)/5:00 pm (EDT):  Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment: Obama’s Anti-Business Remarks;

4:30 (CDT)/5:30 pm (EDT): Congresswoman Nan Hayworth, M.D. (R-NY): Tax Reform;

5:00 (CDT)/6:00 pm (EDT): Matt Patterson, Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute: Jobs, Food Stamps and Global Warming; and

5:30 (CDT)/6:30 pm (EDT):  Bryan Goettel, US Chamber of Commerce, Hiring our Heroes: Veterans Employment Programs.

Listen live on the Internet here.  Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

By the way, many congratulations to NASA for the successful landing of Curiosity.

Yuval Levin has an incredibly important piece at today’s NRO about how the Obamites are working to destroy the mediating institutions of civil society.

When pressed to defend its constriction of the rights of religious institutions, the administration recast the basic definition and purpose of such institutions. The final HHS rule defined a religious employer exceedingly narrowly, as an institution that primarily serves and employs people of its own faith and has as its basic purpose the inculcation of the beliefs of that faith. This leaves no room for most religiously based institutions of civil society — no room for hospitals, for schools and universities, for soup kitchens and homeless shelters, for adoption agencies and legal-aid clinics. Religious institutions may preach to the choir, but otherwise they may not play any role in society. Especially when they disagree with those in power, they must be cleared out of the space between the individual and the state. Indeed, the president and his administration don’t seem to have much use for that space at all. Even the family, which naturally stands between the individual and the community, is not essential. … Edmund Burke, Paine’s great nemesis, argued that such mediating structures also express in their very forms the actual shape of our society — evolved over time out of affectionate sentiments, practical needs, and common aspirations. “We begin our public affections in our families,” Burke wrote. “We pass on to our neighborhoods, and our habitual provincial connections. These are inns and resting-places. Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill.” To sweep them away and leave only the citizen and the state would rob society of its sources of warmth, loyalty, and affinity, and of the most effective means of enacting significant social improvements….

The Left’s disdain for civil society is thus driven above all not by a desire to empower the state without limit, but by a deeply held concern that the mediating institutions in society — emphatically including the family, the church, and private enterprise — are instruments of prejudice, selfishness, backwardness, and resistance to change, and that in order to establish our national life on more rational grounds, the government needs to weaken and counteract them.

The Right’s high regard for civil society, meanwhile, is driven above all not by a disdain for government but by a deeply held belief in the importance of our diverse and evolved societal forms, without which we could not hope to secure our liberty. Conservatives seek mechanisms and institutions to bring implicit social knowledge to bear on our troubles, while progressives seek the authority and power to bring explicit technical knowledge to bear on them.

This president and those of his ilk who are acting in increasingly authoritarian ways are, in short, deliberately trying to destroy the very institutions, and the space for voluntary individual action both within and apart from those institutions, that most Americans have always believed were the very heart of the American idea. The president’s mission, whether he knows it or not, is a species of evil. It must not be allowed to succeed.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

In an interview with the Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”), Competitive Enterprise Institute (“CEI”) Transportation Analyst Marc Scribner discusses the legal challenge to compel the Transportation Security Administration (“TSA”) to comply with a year-old court order to give the public an opportunity to comment on the agency’s use of full-body scanners on airports.

CFIF joined CEI’s amici brief.

Listen to the interview with Mr. Scribner here.

In an interview with CFIF, Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner defends his state’s efforts to purge the rolls of ineligible voters and discusses the recent decision by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to grant the state access to the SAVE database.

Listen to the interview here.

Jindal continues to creep up. The only other major change I could see happening is a big spike for Christie. I wouldn’t choose him, but I’ve said all along that he makes a lot of political sense from the standpoint of the sort of campaign Romney appears to be running. While I have officially withdrawn my prediction that he will be chosen, I just can’t keep my mind off the possibility that the Romneyites will envision the ways Christie could give the left and the media fits and shake up their suppositions — and make the Obama camp worry whether they need to spend more resources defending New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and maybe even Rhode Island.

Still, I think the pick will be Jindal.

Jindal  35%  (+2)

Pawlenty  22  (=)

Ryan  17  (=)

Portman 12  (-.5)

Ayotte  9  (-1)

Santorum 1.5  (=)

Kyl  1  (=)

Christie 1  (+.5)

Thune 1  (=)

Rubio .5 (-.5)

Rice  0  (-.5)

With a new Gallup poll showing Obama’s unpopularity higher among business owners than any other occupational group, this week we dismantle his desperate “You didn’t build that – somebody else made that happen!” alibis.  Peggy Noonan, in this weekend’s column, believes they’re now his most famous words:

President Obama’s comment – ‘You didn’t build that’ – is the political gift that keeps on giving.  They are now the most famous words he has said in his presidency. And oh, how he wishes they weren’t.”

Now, with this morning’s sour unemployment report, prepare to hear, “I didn’t cause that – somebody else made that happen!” from the White House.  The nation’s unemployment rate rose yet again, to 8.3% from last month’s 8.2%.  That means we’ve now suffered a record 42 consecutive months of unemployment in excess of 8%, a level Obama promised we’d never reach in the first place under his economic plan.  The White House will also attempt to emphasize the 163,000 new jobs created, but keep three things in mind.  First, our economy must add 200,000 jobs each month just to keep up with population growth and substantively reduce the unemployment rate.  Second, nearly as many Americans – 155,000 – dropped out of the labor market altogether, according to this morning’s report.  Third, according to the Labor Department, employment growth has averaged just 151,000 per month in 2012, which is below 2011’s average of 153,000 per month.  Some “recovery.”

Fortunately, there is an alternative.  The early-1980s recession witnessed even worse numbers – higher unemployment, higher inflation and higher interest rates.  But President Reagan’s policy of lower taxes and less regulation slashed unemployment from 10.4% to 6.7% in the three years following the effective date of his tax cuts in January 1983.  In contrast, Obama’s policies of higher spending, higher deficits, higher taxes and more regulation have caused the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

Obama just hopes that enough people fail to notice that he really is making that happen.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Talk to most people who write about politics for a living long enough and you’ll find that there are certain topics that aggravate them far out of proportion to their ultimate significance. Some issues just get up your nose, even if they’ll never command a news cycle.

For me, one of those issues is the U.S. Postal Service. I’m one of those irritating, libertarian-leaning types that can’t resist the contrarian instinct to object when someone says that the federal government shouldn’t do anything beyond “Protecting our shores, defending the borders, and delivering the mail.” (For the record, I’m fine with the first two).

Perhaps it started when I read about the federal government’s epic battle with the anarcho-libertarian activist Lysander Spooner in the 19th century, when he tried to upend their postal monopoly. But regardless, I’ve felt vindicated in recent years as the the lack of the USPS’s financial sustainability has come to light.

Thus, you can only imagine the joy I felt when Matthew Yglesias, Slate’s liberal economics writer, recently declared himself in favor of privatizing the Postal Service. This was music to my ears:

The model is pretty simple, albeit a little old-fashioned as a way of providing public services. Rather than having taxpayers directly finance mail delivery, Congress has chartered a freestanding entity, the USPS, charged with the legal obligation to provide low-cost daily mail service six days a week to all Americans at a flat rate—regardless of whether it’s cost-effective to do so. In exchange, that entity has a monopoly on ordinary mail delivery. The idea is that the lucrative monopoly over delivery to metropolitan areas will generate enough revenue to cover money-losing rural services without the need for direct taxpayer subsidies. The problem is that the monopoly isn’t nearly as lucrative as it used to be—and barring some wild technological shift, it’s going to keep getting less and less lucrative.

That means that administrative fixes related to Saturday delivery or various schemes to more aggressively lay off workers or cut their pay will only kick the can down the road. Sooner or later the basic model will need a more thorough rethink.

Quite right. But here’s where he stumbles:

But absent open-ended taxpayer subsidies, postal workers are going to suffer. A monopoly on daily mail delivery is an intrinsically much less valuable thing to have in 2012 than it was in 1992, and nothing can change that. A humane approach to privatization would note that the USPS currently owns a lot of valuable assets—not only a good brand, but a massive portfolio of real estate—and that the federal government has no real need for the one-time infusion of cash that would come from selling it. That means the privatized company could be turned over to its workforce as an employee-owned firm. Workers could have a say in how to manage the transition and the ability to benefit as owners from more efficient business even as they lost as workers from the same dynamic.

Those first two sentences are indisputably accurate. The rest of it? Barmy. Outright barmy.

The federal government has “no need” for a “one-time infusion of cash”? The federal government is one slight downturn away from rooting through the cushions of congressional office furniture to pick up spare change! And the preferred method of privatizing the postal service is to turn it into a workers’ collective? That’ll definitely staunch the bleeding from excess union influence.

Want a better model? The answer — and it’s always a bad sign when you have to say this — is to follow Europe’s lead and embrace full-tilt privatization.

Kudos to Slate and Mr. Yglesias for at least leaning in the right direction. But the defect with this analysis — as with the Postal Service itself — is that the time for half-measures is well behind us.

Read all about it.

James Madison would strongly oppose the HHS abortifacient mandate. I explain why, here.

A few months ago, I authored a column here touting the extraordinary accomplishments of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in enacting perhaps the most sweeping piece of education reform in the country. Part of what made the reform possible, I noted at the time, was the relative weakness of teacher unions in the Pelican State:

The laws passed by the Louisiana legislature last week read like a conservative education reformer’s wish list. Teacher tenure, which previously required three years of employment, will now be contingent on educators receiving a “highly effective” rating in five out of six consecutive years. Back-to-back “ineffective” ratings will be a firing offense. Seniority will no longer be a dominant factor in layoff decisions. Decisions about teacher employment and pay will largely devolve to principals and superintendents (they had previously been dominated by local school boards), allowing them to act with the dispatch becoming of an executive.

The reforms go well beyond personnel matters, however. They open up opportunities for charter schools, allowing new providers to enter the market. They offer vouchers that will allow poor and middle-income children in Louisiana’s worst schools to attend private or parochial institutions. They even expand opportunities for online learning.

Had Jindal tried something nearly as audacious in a union-dominated state like California, Illinois or New York, the proposal surely would have been stillborn in committee. But in right-to-work Louisiana, where the unions aren’t subsidized by compulsory membership, the best that organized labor can do is flail in anger after the fact. And flail they have.

Well, the flailing is now reaching a crescendo. As is the tendency of unions that can’t win arguments at the ballot box, organized labor is now taking the fight to the courts. From the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

On Thursday, lawyers representing the unions faxed letters to about 100 of the 119 schools that are participating in the voucher program. “Our clients have directed us to take whatever means necessary,” the letter reads. Unless the school agrees to turn away voucher students, “we will have no alternative other than to institute litigation.” The letter demanded an answer in writing by the next day.

Louisiana’s voucher program is adjusted for family income and is intended above all to give a shot at a decent education to underprivileged minorities, who are more likely to be relegated to the worst public schools. Forty-four percent of Louisiana public schools received a D or F ranking under the state’s grading system, and some 84% of the kids in the program come from one of those low-performing schools.

Demand for vouchers has been overwhelming: There were 10,300 applications for 5,600 slots. Despite claims to the contrary by school-choice opponents, low-income parents can and do act rationally when it comes to the education of their children.

That last sentence, I think, says it all. Liberals — who reflexively bay about the plight of the underclass — are actively complicit in keeping them “under”; that is, in denying them both opportunity and aspiration. They are there for the poor only to the extent that it does not conflict with the interests of one of their client groups. In this instance, they have chosen the pecuniary interests of the unions over the future of Louisiana’s children. There is much shame in that. Citizens of Louisiana would do well to make them bear it.

Compared to my last guesstimate:

Jindal: 33% (+3)

Pawlenty 22  (+2)

Ryan  17  (-1)

Portman  12.5   (-3.5)

Ayotte  10  (=)

Santorum  1.5  (+.5)

Kyl  1  (-1)

Rubio  1 (=)

Thune  1  (+.5)

Rice .5  (=)

Christie  .5 (-.5)

Reasonable people agree that the U.S. tax code is too bloated and complex.  We also agree that our businesses and economy cannot withstand the January 1, 2013 tax cliff catastrophe that Barack Obama and his Congressional accomplices are willing to allow in the name of class warfare.

Fortunately, there’s something you can do about it.

The House will vote soon on H.R. 8 and H.R. 6169, the “Job Protection and Recession Prevention Act” and the “Pathway to Job Creation through a Simpler, Fairer Tax Code Act of 2012,” respectively.   In conjunction, stated simply, the two bills would:  block the scheduled January 1 tax increases by extending current income tax rates for one year;  maintain marriage penalty relief;  continue the $1,000 child credit;  continue the critical 15% top rate on dividends and capital gains;  maintain the estate tax at its 2011 and 2012 parameters (indexed for inflation);  provide for higher Section 179 small business expensing limits;  preserve education-related benefits;  provide a two-year AMT patch for 2012 and 2013;  and provide a clear pathway to comprehensive tax reform in 2013 by implementing expedited procedures to enable lawmakers in both the House and Senate to overcome technical hurdles that cause bills to languish during the legislative process.

For this to occur, however, members must hear from you.  Please call your representative immediately and demand their support for this critical legislation (members and contact information accessible via CFIF’s “Take Action” link here).