What Are the Arguments Against ObamaCare These Days, Exactly?: Focus
Picking up on In Lieu of a Focus Post: March 2, 2015 (Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality…): Janet Currie points out that the damage from a ruling adverse to the government in the King v. Burwell ObamaCare subsidies case is likely to carry a very heavy cost in terms of societal well-being along private health, public health, and economic growth dimensions.
Fifty years ago, Ronald Reagan argued against Medicare on the grounds that once we had Medicare we would find it financially unaffordable unless we drafted doctors into a low-wage socialist National Health Corps commanded by the Surgeon General, and that mass labor conscription could not be far behind. Ronald Reagan was, I think it is now generally agreed, overfearful and overwrought: the societal benefits to actually allowing the non-rich elderly to go to the doctor have outweighed the risks that we will start by drafting doctors, and end with Leon Trotsky’s industrial armies under the thumbs of Bolshevik bosses.
Today the rhetoric opposed to the individual mandate–excuse me, Mitt Romney’s “Republican Responsibility Principle” is much less heated: it is not that steps toward national health insurance will put us on a slippery slope to socialism, it is… what, exactly? How do you in any way enhance human freedom by causing an adverse-selection meltdown of the health-insurance markets for those who do not work for large bureaucracies? Economic freedom requires that there be a competitive marketplace and an associated prosperous division of labor for you to exercise your economic freedom in, for example…
I understand the argument that ObamaCare would be a policy disaster: it seemed wrong at the time, but I would have given a one-in-twenty chance that we would be sorry we passed ObamaCare because something would go badly wrong with the implementation and the subsequent market structure. But nobody sane makes such claims that it is a loser as a policy–that it is causing medical cost inflation or disrupting marketplaces–any more.
But what is the anti-ObamaCare argument now? Is it really just that it is in some invisible way a “job killer”, just as the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policies are “inflation bringers”?
- : Obamacare and Long-Term U.S. Economic Competitiveness https://equitablegrowth.org/research/obamacare-long-term-u-s-economic-competitiveness