Even if you are not enrolled in a traditional Health Maintenance Organization or an Accountable Care Organization (ACO), you can expect a return to some of the heavy-handed health insurance industry practices that were so unpopular in the 1990s and gave rise to the “patient bill of rights” proposals. The reason? The new healthcare...
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Accountable Care Organizations are the portal through which we will all march toward a truly nationalized healthcare system. I don’t know any advocates of ACOs who are not also advocates of global budgets, under which providers are given a fixed amount of money to spend and forced to ration care if the funds prove...
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In these blog posts and in my book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, I have focused on the effects of the new healthcare law on quality and access to care. But what about the hidden economic cost to you? Let’s look at some of the taxes that have received too little public attention. You...
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The notion that the Second World War is responsible for ending the Great Depression has met growing skepticism among economic historians, thanks in no small part to the work of Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs. Beginning with an article that first appeared in the Journal of Economic History in 1992, Higgs has argued...
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This year, litigation proceeds about the ObamaCare requirement dealing with health insurance and abortion drugs. The mandate requires employers to provide health insurance coverage that includes abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization. Employers are compelled to provide these in spite of religious beliefs about abortion. Failure to comply results in fines of $100 per employee per day....
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Following up Carl’s post, while Bork is remembered largely as a Constitutional scholar, his important early contributions dealt with antitrust. He was sharply critical of the modern application of US antitrust law, while remaining wedded to the Knight-Friedman-Stigler idea of perfect competition as a welfare benchmark, leading to a number of confusions and contradictions....
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The Independent Institute is delighted to announce the publication of the 25th Anniversary Edition of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, by Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs. First published in 1987, this classic work introduced to the reading public the notion that national crises—the Great Depression, the two...
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Ronald Coase, the 101-year old, Nobel Prize-winning economist from whose essay, “The Lighthouse in Economics” the Independent Institute takes its logo, is at it again: tweaking his fellow economists for being out of touch with reality in a new piece in the December 2012 Harvard Business Review (HBR), “Saving Economics from the Economists.” Economics...
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Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, have warned sellers against “price gouging” in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Their words and policies are supposed to help people during a catastrophe, but the opposite is true. As columnist Matthew Yglesias explains in Slate, stopping...
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I continue to encounter many discussions in which the author or speaker bemoans the economic order’s drift toward socialism or, in some cases, its actual existence as such. If this characterization were simply a matter of linguistic imprecision, it might not matter much. But it is much more than a matter of terminology, because...
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