This August I was forced off my existing plan again, so I bought another plan from Blue Cross / Blue Shield of Georgia. Yesterday, I was informed by mail that this plan will be canceled at the end of December, due to changing regulations. I will need to find a new plan by January 1.
Some on the left sometimes claim that the economy functions because of the reliability of the regulatory regime created by good government. This idea is demonstrably false: even though economies are improved by having a few good government measures like enforceable contracts, economic activity originates before governments and survives their collapse. Go out on some frontier, and you'll find people trading what they have for what others have that they need; go to a failed state like Somalia, and you'll find the same thing.
Still, the capacity of government regulation to provide stability and reliability is supposed to be one of its selling points. "HA!" SAYS I. I've never seen instability in a market like this. In addition to plans being ruled legal and illegal willy-nilly, there is the even greater issue of price instability. My costs have already quadrupled with the plan I started on in August. I can't wait to see how much more I'll be expected to pay for roughly the same health insurance next year!
Yep, that's the difference between regulations that assist in the enforceability and predictability of contracts vs. regulations that try to substitute for price signals. Price caps lead to supply collapses, first time, every time. Usually there's a period when the quality degrades to match the price cap for a while, but if you also strictly legislate the exact contents of the services or goods, you can speed that stage up and go straight to collapse.
ReplyDeleteOf course gov regulation of supplies and price will go crazy. They can't regulate the supply when they horde it.
ReplyDeleteThe point of regulating supply is a temporary measure to ensure that nobody buys it all up, like the Strategic Reserves.
The point of O care was to ensure that the commoners would not buy up expensive medical drugs and experimental treatments, that are reserved for the Ruling Class: Congress critters for example.
The point of O care was not to expand capacity or supply of in demand resources. If it did, then a bit of regulation would cover for price spike as supply increased and demand stabilized.
In some ways, this is also how immigrants think of the ICE laws. It's pretty unstable. Get in while it is easy, is common sense.
ReplyDeleteIf it was more under the Rule of Law, people wouldn't stay here for so long or go as crazy. They could go back to Mexico, if it wasn't for the drug cartels...
A lot of money going over the Southern border that an Operation Iraqi Freedom could fix and turn back into the US coffers. That would be a real war for profit.
The point of O-care was for the insurance companies to get their hands on gov't subsidy monies. I was in the meetings. Holy moly, such a pay day (they thought).
ReplyDeleteIf you had wanted to design an experiment to confirm my opinion that the government can't be trusted to regulate the economy, you could hardly have done better than this.
ReplyDeleteMany of your woes in this market are directly related to actions taken by Republicans and Trump which have caused many of these price increases.
ReplyDeleteG.
All of my woes are directly related to Obamacare screwing with this market. Absent that, none of this would have happened. We wouldn't even be in the situation in which 'actions taken by' or 'actions not taken by' this or that government official would cause me to lose my plan every year, or cause prices to spiral constantly upwards.
ReplyDeleteEverything the Republicans have done wrong is downstream of that. The only way to fix the situation is to get government out of my healthcare. They have perfectly proven their incompetence to regulate this market well.
"Many of your woes in this market are directly related to actions taken by Republicans and Trump which have caused many of these price increases."
ReplyDeletePlease. We know Trump was right there signing zerocare into law. And all those republicans voted for it too. Plus, Trump dropped the bomb on West Vietnam and ended WW1. We know all that already.
""Many of your woes"--Nope, not buying it.
ReplyDeleteMany of our woes are directly related to the...suboptimal...education system that produced so many like G.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
I see the talking point has changed. Up until a couple of months ago, it was "Obamacare is a shining boon! And any of you people who talk about having been harmed by it are just lying liars!"
ReplyDeleteConsider commodity money vs. fiat currency.
ReplyDeleteGold is the historical example. Yes, the amount of money exchanged in an economy is seldom in synch with the ability of the gold-production industry to find, mine, and refine the right amount of metal to support the money. There are booms and busts and bank runs. It's not stable.
But the instabilities are organic and to some extent, predictable. When money is tight and gold is hard to come by, the number of prospectors goes up, and people sell off the antiques. When money is readily available people invest in commodities other than gold. The booms and busts are the result of many individual decisions, and are thus more like ebbs and flows, generally.
With fiat currency the government decides and declares how much money will be circulating. An election, a new appointment to the central bank, a new theory or a diplomatic response to events across the globe, and interests rates rise and fall and printing presses speed or slow -- all on the whims of a very few. Those few are motivated to produce booms for other few and well connected souls, and similarly motivated to spread the pain of a bust as widely as possible.
The insurance companies, like William Gates' Common Core, have one agenda. When it meets with the Leftist alliance's agenda, then something will cook out.
ReplyDeleteEven amongst the Leftist alliance, there are seemingly incompatible ideologies at work. Femi nazis vs gaystapo vs black power Nation of Islam who hate gays. The alliance shouldn't work, but it does.
I blame it on elohim. http://www.thedivinecouncil.com/Heiser%20Elohim%20of%20Ps82%20Gods%20or%20Men%20ETS2010.pdf
The point made before about fiat currency is on point. It is why I mentioned that the Federal Reserve is not controlled by the feds... or by Americans for that matter.
In a democracy that people like to pretend has been a republic living at least, it's kind of strange to see something called the Federal Reserve in charge of something so important as the fiat currency of the USA, not being controlled by any Constitutional entities.
It's like the 4th estate. Some 5th column that sprung up. NO wonder people on the Alt Right like to talk about Deep State. The systems at work are as deep as onions.
Something else I found out while researching the causes and continuation of Civil War 1 in the US is that there were numerous incidents and fire fights that happened decades before Lincoln ever was called a Tyrant.
Utah War 1857. The Kansas free soil settlements vs Missouri slave raider border war. Sumner's Caning, of course. The Missouri Extermination order that was based on ethnic displacement of what they called a cult (probably still do), who were abolitionists or at least looked to be voting for anti slave factions.
The USA was not all that peaceful or full of "state rights", even before the South took up the manner. If Americans want to know the future, first they should figure out what the lies of the past were.
It was the dairies and journals, First hand sources, that really dispelled the illusion about CW 1 and what was running up to it.
ReplyDeleteThose first hand testaments, often not politically related, became very difficult to corrupt.
Who would be reading Elizabeth Kane's journal centuries later to figure out what happened between the North and South states over slavery? Me, but other than me, probably somebody but not a critical mass.