{"id":8389,"date":"2011-01-21T12:52:52","date_gmt":"2011-01-21T17:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=8389"},"modified":"2011-01-21T12:54:03","modified_gmt":"2011-01-21T17:54:03","slug":"the-economics-of-federalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/8389\/the-economics-of-federalism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Economics of Federalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, 60 members of the House Republican majority endorsed a bill that would <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/health\/la-na-healthcare-repeal-20110121,0,7134212.story?utm_source=Newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Email&amp;utm_campaign=Heritage%2BHotsheet\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cderegulate\u201d health insurance purchases<\/a> by allowing consumers to buy plans across state lines.\u00a0 The idea is to let companies compete on a national scale, spreading the risk and lowering premiums.\u00a0 The bill is gaining support as a free market counterargument against ObamaCare\u2019s one-size-fits-all regulation of health insurance.<\/p>\n<p>There is a caveat.\u00a0 In order to liberalize the insurance market, the GOP-sponsored bill must take away the states\u2019 power to regulate insurance.\u00a0 The reason insurance plans cost different amounts in different states is because individual states have different regulatory schemes.\u00a0 Those schemes are the product of public policy decisions hammered out at the state level.\u00a0 Importantly for 10<sup>th<\/sup> Amendment limited government types, the plan to \u201cderegulate\u201d the health insurance market comes at the expense of state sovereignty.<\/p>\n<p>Ironically, the only way the House Republicans\u2019 answer to ObamaCare gets passed is through an expansive reading of Congress\u2019 ability to regulate interstate commerce \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/topics.law.cornell.edu\/wex\/Commerce_Clause\" target=\"_blank\">among the states<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Members of Congress will (or at least should) have to struggle with which conservative principle they value more in this instance: the free market or federalism.\u00a0 In a certain sense, federalism grants to states a public policy monopoly over all issues not expressly contained in the text of the U.S. Constitution.\u00a0 That monopoly drives up prices for consumers in states with costly regulations.\u00a0 Theoretically, if people want to pay less for health insurance, they could move to a state with less costly regulations.<\/p>\n<p>Ideas like federalism have consequences.\u00a0 As the Tea Party-flavored House GOP boards the ship of state, it will be interesting to see which crate of principles the revolutionaries toss over.<\/p>\n<p>H\/T: Los Angeles Times<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, 60 members of the House Republican majority endorsed a bill that would \u201cderegulate\u201d health insurance purchases by allowing consumers to buy plans across state lines.\u00a0 The idea is to let companies compete on a national scale, spreading the risk and lowering premiums.\u00a0 The bill is gaining support as a free market counterargument against ObamaCare\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[593,2003,582,102,2310,2154,742,35,28,839,995],"class_list":["post-8389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-commerce-clause","tag-deregulation","tag-federalism","tag-free-market","tag-health-insurance","tag-house-gop","tag-limited-government","tag-obamacare","tag-tea-party","tag-tenth-amendment","tag-u-s-constitution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8389"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8394,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8389\/revisions\/8394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}