I have to admit I have been wondering about this myself. From Philip Greenspun’s Weblog, this March 25 post:

Can I buy last minute health insurance?

It seems as though the 1000-page health care bill is soon to become law. A friend of mine suggested the following strategy:

Consider a family in Massachusetts that earns $100,000 per year. They decide not to pay $20,000 per year for health insurance in 2013 when the bill takes effect (we already have the highest rates in the U.S. (source)). They get fined 2 percent of their income by the IRS, which costs $2,000 per year, plus pay a bit out of pocket for routine checkups. When a family member is diagnosed with cancer and needs treatment, they sign up for health insurance at $20,000 per year. The insurance company cannot deny them coverage based on the preexisting condition that was diagnosed a week before. After the cancer has been treated, they drop the insurance.

What’s the flaw in this strategy?

And here are some replies:

There is absolutely no flaw in that strategy, and you’re by no means the only person to have written about this. There are three plausible hypotheses out there, as far as I can tell: (a) The Democrats are fools, too enamored with their own savior complexes to understand even the most simple manifestation of unintended consequences, (b) The Democrats are crazy like foxes, and know this will bankrupt our health insurance industry, and when that happens we will be forced to have the government step in with single-payer insurance, (c) The Democrats know the bill will be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional (you can’t force private parties into contracts) well before the provisions set in, thereby paving the way for a single-payer system…

Health insurance either needs to be single-payer, or we need a truly free market system. This over-regulated, pseudo-capitalistic, quasi-socialized mess we’ve got now is a disaster. I’m fairly libertarian, but I have to admit that if you’re going to go with the notion that access to a $1M CAT scan machine is somehow a basic human right, then you really need to have a single-payer insurance system.

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One flaw (in the example) is the amounts. A family earning $100,000/year would not be charged $20,000 in premiums; I believe the law caps premiums at something like 8% of income before subsidies kick in and/or the mandate is dropped. So the difference between paying the premium and paying the mandate wouldn’t be so extreme — and maybe not so different from the typical health care expenses for a reasonably healthy family. But the mandate penalty is fairly low so it looks as if gaming the system like this could be advantageous to at least some people. One question will be whether social norms evolve to make doing this taboo — my guess is not, but there will certainly be a big push for it. If it becomes too big a problem, the rules will certainly be revised to forbid it before Blue Cross goes bankrupt.

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Perhaps you didn’t know that the month of February included Personal Brand Week, launched by professional services and auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Personal Brand Week was created to help students develop their personal brand as a way to find employment. This e-book guides you through the entire week. From the introduction:

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Former Federal Reserve economist and economics professor Arnold Kling doesn’t like the new health care law. From The Daily Caller:

Health care bill woke a sleeping giant

For many Americans, March 21, 2010, is a date that will live in infamy. Unlike Pearl Harbor or the September 11, 2001, attacks, which offended nearly all Americans, the health care legislation only angered a significant proportion of the population. However, those of us who are outraged are motivated to wage a long fight, and our aims go much further than rolling back this one bill.

The health care legislation represents a culmination of a sequence of unpopular major initiatives from Washington. First, there was Henry Paulson’s massive transfer of wealth from the people most hurt by the financial crisis to some of the people most responsible for it. Next, came the massive, ill-conceived stimulus bill, which was not timely, targeted, or temporary but instead a pure power grab by Washington. Health care legislation is merely the latest straw.

The American people are watching their country being transformed from an exceptional, vibrant free economy to a broken European welfare state, and many of us do not like the direction of change. We may not know exactly what is in the health care legislation (does anyone?), but we know its intent to assert government authority over health insurance. We know that it creates a large entitlement, paid for in large part by unspecified future cuts in Medicare.

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A California voter initiative to legalize marijuana has officially qualified for the November ballot. From the web site Ballotpedia:

Tax Cannabis 2010 is the pro-legalization campaign’s official site, at which you can listen to a radio ad currently running in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles, where medical marijuana dispensaries have already proliferated. The state legalized medical marijuana in 1996.

Law enforcement groups and all of the gubernatorial candidates, including Democrat Jerry Brown, widely caricatured as Governor Moonbeam during his first stint as the state’s chief executive in the 70s, oppose full-scale legalization. Here’s a site from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration called Speaking Out Against Drug Legalization.

And hyere’s one of our most clicked-on links (no idea why), a graphic of potential tax revenue from marijuana production state by state, including the number of marijuana-related arrests in the U.S.

In February, Google made an announcement:

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From the UK artist Shardcore, a currency-defacing project called Money, that’s what I want.

For those of us living in a capitalist society, there is an inexorable link between our lives, our perceived happiness, and the bits of paper we exchange for goods and services. A banknote has no inherent value, it is merely a reference to a sum, held in our names, by the issuing authority – in the UK, the bank of England.

There is an imbalance of opportunity inherent in cash, the rich have access to more of the world than the poor. Many people are obsessed with money, the ‘creation’ and acquisition of wealth in-and-of itself. This is, of course, an illusion – the actual value of money is a flexible agreement within a society mediated by the shifting tides of the economy. When that agreement of trust is compromised the ramifications can be substantial. Witness the recent crash in world markets, leaving this country, and many more, with unimaginably large debts, created in our name to prop up ‘the banking system’.

I started a campaign of subtly defacing currency about two years ago. Using a custom ink-stamp and UV ink, I have been tagging all the money that passes through my hands. To date, that’s now well into the thousands of pounds. The stamp itself is invisible, until illuminated under a blacklight – commonly used in this country to check for counterfeit notes.

This work is really about how we use these pieces of paper as markers of our passage through time. We spend to live, and live to spend. Each note we hand over gets us a little closer to death…

Video:

That last item we posted was quite skeptical of the government’s National Broadband Plan. Still, the site at Broadband.gov does provide a tool to test your Internet connection speed, which is pretty cool…

On Cafe Hayek, George Mason economics professor Russ Roberts dissects from a libertarian perspective a CNN story about the government’s recently announced National Broadband Plan. The initiative is aimed at providing every American “affordable access to robust broadband service,” among other goals.

Says it all

Here’s an amazing story from CNN because it’s so ordinary. It’s about a top-down government initiative that sounds good – giving more broadband access to Americans. Who’s against more Americans getting broadband? The FCC has a plan to get it done. Go Broadband!

So here’s the story.

Like a photographer without a camera, or a mechanic who doesn’t own a car, Kelli Fields is a webmaster without high-speed Internet access. By day, the 42-year-old uses a broadband connection at work to update a university’s Web site, which she built and codes from scratch. But when she goes home at night, the rural Oklahoman struggles with a dial-up Internet connection so slow, she does chores to pass the time while Web sites load. Her high school-age son is so fed up with the glacial pace of their Internet connection that he asks his mom to update his Facebook page from the office.

That sounds frustrating. But is this a serious social problem the government needs to fix?

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From the blog Pink Slip:

I was in CVS the other day – looking for Good ‘n Plenty, if you must know – when my eye was grabbed by a bright blue box that held a fish plaque that plays the McDonald’s “Give Me Back That Filet-o-Fish” jingle.

Only $19.99!

If people are back to frittering away good money on objects like this, then perhaps The Great Recession is over.

Yay!

Harry Markopolos, the man who tried futilely for 10 years to expose the largest Ponzi scheme in history, has written a book about his failed crusade called “No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller.” In it, Markopolos relives his tragic tale, how he discovered Bernard Madoff was a fraud, how he tried for years to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate, how no one would listen. Curt Nickisch, from WBUR in Boston, got the first radio interview with the man who’s still coming to terms with the fact he’d always been right about Madoff, but it didn’t do any good.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 16:07 — 11.1MB)

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