“Gulf Coast Needs Immediate, Retroactive Relief from Death Tax, Says AFBI; Small Industry in Region Must Rebuild, Provide Job” — press release

Good Posting about the kinds of issues that people ought to be giving some attention to, now.

Here’s a contest. Name the actions the administration could take which serve their agenda but have little if any relevance to actual problems that need to be addressed. For example I just listened on the radio and the administration is relaxing environmental protections (you know so we can increase the fuel supply) and suspending labor work rules (you know so we can respond more vigorously).

Or maybe FEMA could direct donations to Pat Robertson’s (you know the guy the close personal friend of Charles Taylor who likes to suggest taking out foreign leaders and supreme court justices) operation blessing. Here just for example are at least 30 legitimate places to to donate.

Or yeah, it’s five days after it the national hurricane center forecast this catastrophe, time to get back to work on repealing the estate tax. If only we could find a rich corpse!

But wait, how about we eliminate the minimum wage.

The President and Bill Gates are throwing some love to the anti-science anti-secular crowd. The president signals that he thinks teaching anti-evolution poppycock in the schools is just fine. Meanwhile Bill gives 9+ Million dollars to the creationist PR mill’s front office, i.e. the Discovery Institute

Massachusetts, where I live, has a Republican governor who has been attempting to make progress on the healthcare debacle. The other day an article appeared in the paper with the latest chapter in this ongoing attempt. The word “freeloading” appeared in the article; to suggest that the current refinement’s goal is to remove options for freeloading on the system.

Freeloading is a problem in all collective action systems. It’s one of the reasons that classical minded economists run screaming from the analysis of public goods – you know, like public schools, public roads, public health, environmental regulation, etc. etc. More mature economists get a gleam in their eye and roll up their sleeves, of course.

One way to pull the rug out from under any collective activity is to highlight how some people are, or might, be getting
a better deal than others. For example you announce that families with more children are freeloading on the public schools, or that my acquaintance who got encephalitis is freeloading on the health care system. Of course that was probably caused by cut backs on the public health expense of keeping the mosquito population under control.

My first thought when people mention freeloading as a problem around healthcare is Wal*Mart. World’s largest corporation which manages to avoid much of the responsibility for healthcare that comes with being an employer. Employer responsibility for health care was one of the bargains struck by American society during the 20th century; it arose out of union negotiations. Over the last 30 years corporations have discovered that as unions weaken and their political power has increased they can opt-out of that bargain. The society has yet to reach a new consensus about how to bear this responsibility.

Of course there are lots of other candidates for the the role of healthcare freeloader; or to use more exaggerated speech – parasites. A lot of money has been spent to cast malpractice lawyers into this role, though the data would seem to suggest it’s the malpractice insurance providers who benefit from that subplot.

My impression is that since we have a total breakdown in the consensus about where the responsibility for healthcare resides we have fallen into a messy trap where all the players spend vast amounts of resources attempting to shift responsibility to somebody else. The business community created that mess. All now compete to see if they can shift costs someplace else.

The governor’s plan is to force individuals to buy health insurance, much as we force everybody to buy car insurance in this state. So today’s casting for the role of freeloader is individuals. That’s a very popular move on the right, shift risk onto the weakest player in the social game.

But looking more closely it’s interesting to note that the governor is, at the same time, trying to force employers to provide health insurance. To make them pick up the responsibility they dropped over the last few decades. Of course the details of that make all the difference.

One last detail, states are not allowed to work on problems like this without the permission of the Bush administration. To institute any change in the regulatory framework the state has to be granted a waver. Only one state has managed to get a waver that allowed them force firms to bear some of the responsibility, i.e. Hawaii.