VIEW from behind the plow

Government intervention often hurts business

The Congressional business intervention tendencies of the last 75 years or so in America have made it increasingly more difficult for businesses – small business in particular – to thrive in the “Land of Opportunity.”

Columnist Veronique de Rugy says it’s about the unnecessarily complicated tax code.

That is certainly a great part of the problem but that’s not the whole problem. De Rugy suggests a flat tax.

Hoover.org. created an article on the damage of government intervention on the economy that said: “The COVID pandemic serves as a tragic example of the consequences of government price mandates. As demand rose for masks, personal protective equipment, and toilet paper, prices should have risen too. But that is not what happened. Anti-price-gouging laws prevented prices from rising. With the prices remaining largely fixed, businesses had little incentive to increase production and consumers bought more than they needed. Dangerous shortages followed. Hoarders bought up supplies, while doctors and nurses couldn’t get masks.”

It found further problems in government interference in healthcare, stating: Politicians are eager to enact laws that will lower health care costs and increase insurance coverage. Sometimes these laws directly subsidize care, but this comes at a high price. Between Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs, the federal government spends more than a trillion dollars on health care programs each year. Lawmakers must raise taxes or borrow money to pay for these programs. Politicians, of course, prefer to avoid making these tough political decisions. They favor policies that appear to lower costs or increase coverage without increasing government spending. One attractive option is simply to mandate lower prices.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), for example, created rules that prohibit insurance companies from charging higher premiums to individuals with costly health conditions. Congress hoped these restrictions would make health insurance more affordable. And, indeed, insurance companies lowered premiums for high-cost enrollees. But the insurers didn’t stop there. To pay for the premium reductions, insurers raised premiums on young and healthy individuals. In short, Congress didn’t lower health costs when it passed the ACA; it just shifted costs from one group to another. This cost shifting is called a cross-subsidy.

It’s a sorry game that distorts the market and puts younger, healthier citizens on the hook to pay for the less healthy.

A personal complaint

But that’s not all that irritates me. This is my personal pet peeve.

In earlier times, the Kingfisher Times and Free Press ran a couple of items in each issue– one of them “Hospital Notes,” listing the names of people admitted to the local hospital and “Ambulance Runs,” listing where local ambulances went to pick up the sick or injured.

It was a community service that let fellow citizens know when their friends and neighbors might need a little extra help.

Then Congress passed a law, HIPAA, prohibiting the use of names of such persons.

HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, purportedly to protect health information from disclosure without patients’ consent.

Note: The hospital didn’t use the names of patients who didn’t want to have their names published, anyway. I knew that and just listed those the hospital sent to us without question. It was nice for people who wanted to let folks know about their situation and it was an item that readers looked forward to. At least people asked about them when the newspaper quit running the two items.

The same act also prevented officers investigating accidents from listing the names of underage drivers involved.

It seems silly to me. Others went on Facebook and revealed their names but we couldn’t without breaking a federal law or at least putting the investigators in a tough spot in case someone complained.

From a newspaper point of view, items without name disclosure are incomplete.

One of the first things you hear in journalism class, grammar notwithstanding, is “names is news.”

I’m fairly sure those names are available on a public record that anyone can access.

In my thinking, it was just another way government, acting in a presumptuous way, stuck its nose in where it was unnecessary.

It affected mostly small town newspapers. Big papers didn’t take the time or use the space to print such things. It was unnecessary to include that wording in legislation that might otherwise have been justified.

What? Really

Did you read that President Joe Biden named George Soros and Hillary Clinton to Presidential Freedom Awards. Soros has attempted to tear down the constitutional U.S. for years with his donations to left-wing organizations. “Benghazi” Clinton, has been a Washington fixture for years and is equally as hostile to normal Americans.