Administrations Threatening Private Health Insurers

Health care premiums are likely to go up as a result of the recent health care and insurance overhaul enacted by the Obama Administration. The Heritage Foundations' Kathryn Nix explains:

Starting this year, Obamacare prohibits plans from placing lifetime limits on coverage, severely limits rescissions, and requires all plans to cover children up to age 26. Plans also have to fully cover preventive services and are prohibited from denying children due to pre-existing conditions. The list goes on. Since extra benefits cost more, it makes sense that insurance premiums would climb as a result of the new law. Insurers cited increases between 1 and 9 percent.

The administration's response? Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announces that "there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases."

What will "zero tolerance" means? Why is it "misinformation" on the part of private health insurers? Just what constitutes a "justified" price increase. And who decides that?

Well, Secretary Sebelius is clear on at least one of those issues. She decides what prices health insurers can set and if they don't fall in line, there'll be "zero tolerance" for them!

GOP "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Filibuster Makes Some Sense

I complained of Republicans blocking a vote on the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" yesterday -- something I'm strongly in favor of. But as it turns out, that's not the whole of the story.

Over at Redstate, Dan McLaughlin explains how Democrats tied a vote on immigration reform onto a vote on defense appropriations -- which included "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The so-called DREAM Act is somewhat related to defense in that it would allow illegal aliens to earn citizenship by serving in the military or enroll in college, but it's understandable that Republicans didn't appreciate having to say "yes" to both at once.

I'm all in favor of freer immigration as well and the DREAM Act sounds like a smart idea but this unnecessary trick on part of the Democrats makes no sense. If they want to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", why attach it to a vote on immigration reform which they could perfectly expect Republicans to filibuster?

But now, they have a chance to portray Republicans as both anti-gay and anti-immigration, all that just a few weeks before the midterm elections which are likely to turn out disastrous for them anyway.

Senate Republicans Block "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Repeal

Politico reports today that the effort to repeal the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy went down to defeat this afternoon, with Senate Democrats and Republicans squaring off in a procedural vote.

In the face of a promised filibuster by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Democrats could not convince a single GOP senator to cross over and provide the 60th vote needed to begin debate on a defense spending bill containing the repeal measure.

This is extremely unfortunate. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is arbitrary government discrimination, pure and simple. There isn't a shred of evidence to support the preposterous assertion forwarded by some Republicans that allowing gay men and women to serve openly would somehow diminish "moral" or even the military's effectiveness. To the contrary, in practically all developed countries, gay men and women can serve openly and do so with success.

Tom Ricks of Foreign Policy offered a piece of sensible advice a couple of days ago, citing the unfortunate dismissal of three combat veterans under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Collectively, they represent almost a decade of combat experience, a big handful of Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars, service as aide-de-camps to general officers and as platoon leaders and company commanders in combat, and the investment of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds. They have offered blood, sweat, and tears in defense of a nation that discriminates against them for no good reason.

This policy must end.

OMB Director Candidate Says Deregulation Didn't Cause Crisis

The Huffington Post reports that former Citigroup executive Jacob Lew, the administration's nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, told Senate Budget Committee this Thursday that deregulation was not exclusively to blame for the financial meltdown and recession.

Lew was asked by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont whether he believed that the "deregulation of Wall Street, pushed by people like Alan Greenspan [and] Robert Rubin, contributed significantly to the disaster we saw on Wall Street."

Lew answered that "the problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation," and after discussing those issues, added that he didn't "personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don't believe that deregulation was the proximate cause."

The Huffington Post can hardly believe it, stressing that experts and policymakers, "including US Senators, commissioners at the Securities and Exchange Commission, top leaders in Congress, former financial regulators and even Obama himself have pointed to the deregulatory zeal of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations as a major cause of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." The article further alleges that "experts agree on most of the several factors that led to the crisis," and since they agree, evidently, the argument requires no further explanation.

Repeatedly "Wall Street greed" and "inhuman capitalism" are attacked for a recession that started in one of the single most regulated sectors of the US economy: the housing market. The past decade experienced President George W. Bush's attempt to bring about his "ownership society" and the country today is witnessing the results of this experiment. Through consistent all time low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve and through an enormous increase in size and influence of the government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enterprises, Washington promoted homeownership by artificially extending credit to people that, put simply, could never dream of affording their own house---let alone pay back their loans.

That is not to say that the private sector is free from blame entirely. But consider that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, supposedly privately owned, were publicly chartered and represented the archetype of unfair competition. Consider the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 that "encouraged" banks to lend to uncreditworthy borrowers and sought to end "discriminatory" credit practices against low-income neighborhoods. And consider that the very banks who let themselves be pressured into participating in this madness were "bailed-out" by the government with billions of dollars of taxpayers' money. Was this a free market at work?

In a truly free market, failure is possible and consumers are aware of the risk---with the result that they rationally and voluntarily assume less of it. What the US economy needs is not more government oversight. What is needs is more personal responsibility.

Obama Denies Vilifying Business

President Barack Obama denied vilifying businesses at a CNBC town hall event in Washington DC on Monday. He praised the free market system instead, claiming that he wants government to "get out of the way" of innovation and job creation.

The president has been criticized fiercely in recent months from both within the business community and the Republican opposition about his apparent war on capitalism. On health care and financial reform as well as BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico this summer, Obama used strong language to denounce private health insurers, banks and the embattled energy conglomerate. He alleged that medical insurance companies were driven by a "business mentality" that supposedly prevented them from caring about patients. He complained of "fat cat bankers" on Wall Street who awarded themselves "excessive" bonuses while knowingly perverting the financial system and leaving the country on the brink of economic collapse. And he publicly lambasted BP's Chief Executive Tony Hayward. Indeed, the president interpreted the Gulf oil spill as the result of "of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility---a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves." The lesson to be learned, he said, "is that we need better regulations, better safety standards, and better enforcement."

On Monday, the president reiterated this sentiment, noting that "basic rules of the road" have to be in place so that "consumers, workers, ordinary folks out there aren’t taken advantage of by sharp business practices." He added: "I don't think there's anything in there that's inherently anti-business."

The administration previously urged businesses to stop complaining. After passing a health care reform bill that puts insurers at a disadvantage and is expected to cost business dearly; after threatening the high tech sector with antitrust investigations in spite of it being nearly the only profitable and certainly the only free market left in America; after using BP's oil spill last April to impose an unlawful moratorium on deepwater drilling throughout the Gulf of Mexico and launch an attack on Big Oil altogether; and after hammering out a financial reform scheme that leaves the prime instigators of the recession, the semi-government entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac untouched at the cost of multibillion dollar tax hikes and regulation on the part of private banks, the president and his administration are evidently trying to assure businesses by saying---it could have been a lot worse. "There's a big chunk of the country that thinks I've been too soft on Wall Street," said Obama.

Wall Street isn't convinced. Nearly half of financial workers polled recently by CNBC said that increased regulation under the Obama Administration is bad for the economy. Just 34 percent believes that the new regulations have had a positive effect.

The president knows though that "what sets America apart" is that it has "the most dynamic free market economy in the world. And that has to be preserved," he believes.

We benefit from entrepreneurs and innovators who are going out there and creating jobs, creating business. Government can't create the majority of jobs. And, in fact, we want to get out of the way of folks who've got a good idea and want to run with it and are going to be putting people to work.

That's not how things look for the average businessman however, no matter the president's championing of small business. Instead, a government knows best mentality appears to pervade in Obama's America and although the president can hardly be blamed for it entirely, his party is largely responsible for implementing superfluous regulations on every level of government. Companies of any size and character are confronted with an array of laws and taxes throughout the country so dazzling that no small businessowner can reasonably be expected to know which apply to his field of work and how.

The president may not be to blame entirely for this positively anti-business environment but it is the very notion that he professed last Monday---that some "rules of the road" are necessary to protect the common man from ferocious business practices---that inspires lawmakers in every state to enact laws that limit the entrepreneur's freedom and his ability to innovate and create jobs.

When government believes that it is morally empowered to regulate people's business activities, its willingness to do so will be limited by political expediency alone. In the wake of the recession, the Democrats in power have had the political capital to extend regulation in many, indeed major sectors of the US economy. A majority of American voters now appears to realize that government simply can't micromanage the nation's economy nor spend it into recovery. The president, for one, has already begun to adopt a more conciliatory tone.

Originally published at the Atlantic Sentinel, September 21, 2010.