I’m going to make an assertion that seems utterly absurd. The enactment of Obamacare may have been good news. Before sending a team of medical attendants to cart me off to a sanitarium, allow me to elaborate. I’m not saying Obamacare is good policy. After all, I’ve written over and over again that it is […]

When I travel, particularly overseas, I run into a lot of people who are totally confused about the American healthcare system. For all intents and purposes, they think the United States relies on the free market and that government (at least in the pre-Obamacare era) was largely absent. So they are baffled when I tell […]

I’ve often complained that government-created third-party payer is the main problem with America’s healthcare system, and I was making that point well before Obamacare was imposed upon the country. Simply stated, people won’t be smart consumers and providers won’t compete to keep costs low when the vast majority of expenses are paid for either by […]

One of my very first blog posts was about the link between big government and big corruption. For the rest of my life, I can now cite the Obamacare travesty as an example. Here’s some of what Tim Carney wrote for the Washington Examiner. Chief Justice John Roberts’ judicial sleight of hand, transforming Obamacare’s mandate […]

’m not a lawyer, or an expert on the Constitution, though I sometimes play one on TV. But I can read, and I’ll agree with my friends on the left that the federal government has a broad power to tax. I wish the 16th Amendment had never been ratified, but its language gives the federal […]

I think Obamacare is bad policy because it exacerbates the main problem with the current healthcare system, which is third-party payer. And as a public finance economist, I’m obviously not happy about the new taxes and additional spending in Obamacare. But those issues are temporarily on the back burner now that the Supreme Court is […]

I like to think people in the United States still believe in liberty, and I’ve cited some polling data in support of American Exceptionalism. And it seems like that philosophical belief in individualism and limited government sometimes has an impact in the polling booth. According to a recent study, Obamacare was poison for Democrats in […]

Washington is filled with people who exaggerate, prevaricate, dissemble, and obfuscate. And those are the people I like. The ones I don’t like are much worse. That’s why, during the Obamacare debate, I warned that the numbers were utterly dishonest. We were told, if you remember those grim days, that adopting a giant new entitlement […]

Paul Krugman has told us that awful stories about government-run healthcare in Britain “are false.” I guess this means that the media must be dominated by conservative liars, since we keep getting reports about substandard care and needless deaths (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). And the Boston Globe and Associated Press must be part of this vast […]

It’s obviously quite disappointing that Congressman Paul Ryan has teamed up with Senator Ron Wyden, a Democratic from Oregon, to put forth a significantly watered down version of his Medicare reform plan. Ben Domenech of the Heartland Institute and Peter Suderman of Reason have good summaries of why the new plan is a less-than-exciting development. […]