Well, things are not working exactly has insurers had planned. Just ask United Healthcare.

United Healthcare is the largest U.S. insurer by enrollment, and the company is warning that it may withdraw from Obamacare in 2017. The insurer has already suspended advertising for its Obamacare coverage and stopped paying commissions to insurance brokers for signing people up. It literally doesn’t want consumers to buy its products.

On a United Healthcare call Thursday with Wall Street analysts, Josh Raskin of Barclays asked, “Simply, how long are you willing to lose money in exchanges?” and then followed up, “Are you willing to lose money again in 2017, Steve?” United Healthcare CEO Stephen Hemsley replied: “No, we cannot sustain these losses. We can’t really subsidize a marketplace that doesn’t appear at the moment to be sustaining itself,” adding that “we saw no indication of anything actually improving.”

Not only are enrollees in the insurance market sicker than expected, but thanks to budgetary language passed last year, the insurance companies' shortfalls are no longer the taxpayers' problem. Obamacare's "risk corridors" were designed to transfer some money from profitable insurers to less profitable insurers as a way to shield less successful insurers from the deep losses that could force them to leave the marketplace. Under the original plan, taxpayers would pick up the remainder of the shortfall—a bailout for insurers, negotiated by insurers, and financed by taxpayers. Today, the insurers will bear that risk alone, and appropriately so.

Of course, whether these taxpayer protections will endure in the years to come may depend on the pull of insurance industry cronies— not only in the private sector, but also those cronies who are currently part of the adminstration. The Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney vividly captures the current, and appalling, health care scene:

This is where the intimate network of the Obamacare insiders comes in. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — which issued the pledge to fully bail out United Healthcare and its cohorts — is run by acting administrator Andy Slavitt. Slavitt is the former CEO of United Healthcare (while he held that position he contributed to Obama's 2008 election)….

Meanwhile, the insurance lobbyist leading the industry's push for more Obamacare bailout money is Marilyn Tavenner, Obama's previous chief of CMS, now head of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). AHIP says risk corridors aren't the group's top focus, but Tavenner is speaking out on it.

In summary: Tavenner helped build the risk corridor program, and then went to the industry that would get the money. Slavitt left the insurer with the biggest losses, and now is the government official promising to bail out his former employer.

You can call it regulatory capture or you can call it a revolving door, but it is cronyism all the same. And it's of a kind that is especially troubling: the kind where cronies don't just try to regulate their own industry, but also try to loot the Treasury while they're in power. The question now is whether Congress will accommodate these cronies by explicitly removing last year's taxpayer protections or will stand by if Obamacare's bureaucracy tries to sidestep the law and hand out money to insurers anyway. We should find out one way or another in the next month or so; stay tuned.

The post Obamacare Cronyism: Where Does the Bureaucracy End and the Insurance Industry Begin? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

PPACA’s negative economic effects only compound the problems of a slow recovery in which young people in particular are hurting financially. The official unemployment rate in the United States is 8.3 percent, but for people ages 16-25, it is almost double that, at 16.5 percent. The Wall Street Journal describes the situation as “Generation Jobless,” and while college graduates have better opportunities than non-college graduates, they are still making less and saving less than if they had graduated in better economic times. There is no doubt that people of all ages are suffering, but unemployment during some of the most important wealth-building years could be disastrous when today’s young adults are ready to retire — both personally and for the country.

Unfortunately, PPACA only worsens the situation because it raises taxes. Yesterday, Americans for Tax Reform highlighted the (at least) four tax hikes contained in PPACA which hurt young people. The first two are especially troubling to me: the “excise tax,” for not buying a government-approved insurance plan; and the “medicine cabinet tax,” which prevents people from using flex accounts and Health Savings Accounts to pay for non-prescription, over-the-counter medicine. The former penalizes people for not purchasing a government-approved health insurance plan; the latter reduces choice and flexibility with one’s personal health dollars.

Young people are less likely to draw deeply on prescription medication benefits or other health care services than older and less healthy policyholders. The result? The government forces young people to pay for insurance plans that they do not need and will not use, and prevents them from taking full advantage of HSAs — health care dollars they would control and manage as part of their own personal budgets. Essentially, the government is forcing young people to subsidize the health care of others during some of their most economically fragile years.

That is bad policy and bad news for young people. PPACA may be marketed as “reform,” but it harms young people, who already are hurting economically, by raising costs and reducing choice.

The post Reminder: Health Care ‘Reform’ Law Raises Costs On Young People appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Several of the speakers have since noted the growth in both the quantity and quality of young liberty activists over the last few decades. In his Washington Examiner column, Cato Institute Vice President Gene Healy recollects that when he founded a college libertarian group in the early 1990s, “we considered ourselves lucky when we could get a couple of dozen socially awkward malcontents together to grumble about the government.”

But economist Bryan Caplan probably summed it up best: “Twenty years ago, a pack of libertarian students would have been roughly as awkward and freakish as attendees at Comic-Con … or, say, me. Now I see hundreds of students who aren’t just smart, but smooth.”

My college experience was not nearly as benighted as Healy’s or Caplan’s. I helped lead a libertarian group at Washington University in Saint Louis from 2001 to 2005, and we were extremely active: holding weekly meetings, bringing speakers to campus (sometimes multiple times per semester), debating other student groups, helping to publish a biweekly conservative-libertarian student newspaper, etc. The group was a major force in campus political life, but we were still outnumbered and isolated. There were only a few other large and active libertarian college groups across the country (Loyola New Orleans, Hillsdale College, and George Mason University spring to mind), so we felt like the last of a dying breed, a remnant of brighter days.

At one point, we tried to launch a national libertarian student group, much like what SFL has become. When we started planning for a conference, we thought 100–200 student attendees would be phenomenal, but we never achieved that because there wasn’t a great deal of interest in the idea outside of those few groups. If someone told us that, less than 10 years later, there would be a pro-liberty student group hosting a convention with more than 500 attendees (and many others turned away because of a lack of space), we would have laughed in his face.

I don’t think it has ever felt this good to be wrong. (Maybe in 2006, when the Cardinals surprised even me by beating the Tigers and winning the World Series, but I’m pretty sure this is better.) Students and young people in general are listening to the message of freedom being articulated by talented writers, filmmakers, artists, etc. — and by groups like the Show-Me Institute. I get dispirited on an almost daily basis when I see the government grow and grow, seemingly without end, but I have seen real changes in people’s beliefs since I first started tilting at these government windmills. That’s no guarantee that things will change for the better, but it is something. It’s hope.

The post A New Hope appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

State governments have overspent, largely on salaries that far exceed those in the private sector and benefits packages that dwarf what most Americans get. So now those governments are spending their money on powerful high-dollar lobbyists, with the paramount goal of getting access to more federal money. But the federal government is hopelessly in deficit.

The result is this: Local government officials are using your money to hire former government officials to ask current federal officials to give local governments more federal money — and future taxpayers will foot the bill for this whole racket.

The post Washington Examiner on Governments Lobbying Governments appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Thousands rallied in DC earlier this month to save a federal program that helps low-income families afford private schooling. On the same day, President Obama signaled that he opposes school vouchers, but will seek funding so that students already attending private schools may continue to do so through the end of high school. When they’ve graduated, the voucher program would die. That isn’t good enough.

Not only is it not good enough, it’s disgraceful to deny children the freedom to escape failing public schools so that they have a real chance at a better life. Every day that children are denied this freedom, the nation’s future grows dimmer.

Coulson suggests, however, that rather than relying on the fickle political whims of Congress and the president, the District of Columbia should take matters into its own hands:

But there is another option: The District of Columbia can create its own scholarship program.

Can DC afford it? Average tuition at voucher-accepting schools is about $6,600, according to a federal study released last month. By contrast, the city is currently spending about $1.3 billion on k-12 education, for fewer than 49,000 students.

That works out to well over $26,000 per pupil — comparable to tuition at the prestigious Sidwell Friends school to which the president sends his own daughters, Sasha and Malia. So DC could easily offer a voucher even larger than the one currently provided by the federal government.

I should reiterate here that tuition tax credit programs can be structured so that they actually save taxpayer money — providing a fiscally sound and sustainable alternative to the crippling system in which so many children are currently trapped, both in our nation’s capital and right here in St. Louis.

Anybody who’s skeptical about the wisdom of school choice should take a few minutes to watch this video of the rally to save D.C.’s scholarship program:

These children are our future, but the political and public education establishments are fighting harder every day to leave them behind.

The post Stand Together for School Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

First of all, Missourinet has an audio story about our recently released study of judicial selection (link via Mr. Combest). Check it out if you can. Next, the Washington Examiner has an article about tort reform success across America that mentions Missouri as an example. According to the article:

Since the reforms became law, the number of medical insurance companies in Texas increased from four to more than 30. Malpractice insurance premiums fell by as much as 31 percent.

This dovetails nicely with last month’s Missouri articles discussing insurance premium reductions for doctors, which we blogged about here at SMI.

I think the facts are pretty clear. Our judicial selection system is a good one for our state, although I believe small improvements can still be made to it (our study focused on the big picture and admitted minor changes could be either helpful or harmful). Even more importantly, the tort system had gotten out of whack before the "Missouri Plan" — particularly the venue laws — and changes needed to be made. Those changes have benefited our economy and our health care system. Now, unless some Law & Order twist happens in the next few seconds (like St. Luke’s Hospital announcing they are moving to St. Clair County, Ill.), I declare this post closed.

The post Court Reporting appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Also, in the Platte County Landmark you can find an editorial stating that the price of gas is dictated by corporate manipulation moreso than supply and demand. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. But I guess this chart, which clearly shows the growth of demand of more than a million barrells a day each year for the past four years, has nothing to do with price increases. Nothing at all to do with it, so let’s all go to the water cooler and bash the oil companies.

The post Gas Price Crimes and Milk Misdemeanors appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Show-Me Institute sent me to DC in July to take a look at one of Heritage’s CARR seminars, and decide whether the program was worth bringing to Missouri. Not only is the program incredibly valuable — for younger newcomers to journalism and old hands alike — but in a way, bringing this program to Missouri is like bringing it home. The textbook given out during the training sessions was written by none other than Brant Houston of the University of Missouri-Columbia.

One of the primary benefits of a program like this is that it shows essential skills can be taught in a non-ideological environment, even if the teachers have their own political points of view. Folks at the Show-Me Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Sunlight Foundation — in addition to all the attending reporters and editors — would all undoubtedly find many things to disagree about (and did, as evidenced by our lunch and dinner conversations). But the material presented in the training sessions was entirely informational — about how to use computers in researching articles, checking claims of fact, analyzing the use and misuse of statistics, and learning about all the new and varied ways Internet technology allows information to be gathered and used in ways unimaginable only a few years earlier.

These events wouldn’t have been possible without the generous support and organizational efforts of Don Hicks of the Missouri Broadcasters Association. We owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

The post CARR Training Returns Home to Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.