Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'insurance'

November 19, 2014

Medical Care As Marketplace Commodity

My mother, a registered nurse, worked for years for our small town doctor. She would drive around the countryside, going to check on elderly folks or those who didn’t drive. We had a number of people who came to our house regularly for things like allergy shots. Continue Reading...
December 16, 2013

Government Takeover Of Health Care

Avik Roy of Forbes has never been what you’d call a fan of Obamacare.  Now, however, he’s calling the mandated insurance program “lawless” and “unconstitutional.” Why? The White House—having canceled Americans’ old health plans, and having botched the system for enrolling people in new ones—knows that millions of Americans will enter the new year without health coverage. Continue Reading...
March 05, 2012

The Economics of Contraception

One of the justifications for the HHS mandates (amended now to require insurance companies to provide contraceptives free of charge) has been purely economic. The idea is that the use of contraceptives saves insurance companies (and by extension the rest of us) money, as it is less expensive to pay for condoms or birth control pills than to pay for a pregnancy and birth. Continue Reading...
September 22, 2010

Mandating Monolithic Medicine

Among the warnings sounded as the Democratic health care reform bill was being debated was that the federal insurance mandate included in the bill—even though not national health care per se—would essentially give the federal government control of the insurance industry. Continue Reading...
October 08, 2009

Impossible Promises on Health Care

I still haven’t quite gotten to a thorough fisking of “Exhibit B,” yet, and will have to be satisfied with arguing the following thesis in the meantime: It is impossible to increase insurance coverage in America without increasing medical spending. Continue Reading...
September 07, 2006

Ex Ante vs. Ex Post Government Action

I haven’t started Marvin Olasky’s new book yet, but here’s a bit from the abstract of a new NBER paper, “Rules Rather Than Discretion: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina,” by Howard Kunreuther and Mark Pauly. Continue Reading...