No Good Can Come of This

2008 is on the way out, and 2009 will be devoted to condescending commentary on Obama’s inexorable rightward drift and the left’s begrudging acceptance of it – this before they internalize it and begin to actively enable him. It is, after all, good to be king.

Two things need to be resolved before we exit 2008 – health care, and globalization. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on these subjects, to no resolution. But I see a common thread in both now, this after reading Zadie Smith’s essay in the New Yorker, Dead Man Laughing. I realized that her father’s wisdom was a truism – “no good can come of this.”

Start with globalization – one of my favorite TV shows is on the Science Channel – it’s called “How It’s Made”. In it, they show us the complicated and fascinating manufacturing processes behind products like hockey sticks and curling stones and charcoal briquettes. What I began to notice after a few episodes was that 1) the workers were usually Anglo men and women, and 2) the products were more often Canadian. I began to suspect that they still make things up north.

Dave Budge perhaps had the final word on the situation in a comment under my post “A Markist Dialectic“:

Ask any random economist, even Keyesians, and 95% of them will tell you that we’re better off with trade where we employ our resources to our most efficient production. What we’re experiencing now is the pain of globalization. But it won’t last forever and we’ll redeploy our excess labor in useful ways over time. That is, unless we stifle innovation with protectionist policies.

This is the right’s answer to the pain and dislocation of a trade policy dominated by the needs of capital. Accept it, internalize it, enable it. You can’t fight it. But far from Zadie’s proscription that no good can come of this, Dave is chipper and optimistic. Something good will happen.

What, exactly? Something. We’ll find some use for our labor. We make good movies. Perhaps we can all be actors. We make hamburger by the COSCO boatload. Perhaps we can all make burgers for one another. Maybe we can all become counselors, or join the military and attack yet new and innocent foreign places. Something good will happen.

In the meantime, we are shutting down industry, good-paying jobs are disappearing for ordinary people, and poverty is edging ever-upward into what we once called our middle class. But something good will come of it. We’re letting markets work, after all, and we don’t question the wisdom of markets.

Which brings me to health care. Again, Dave Budge, this time at Gregg Smith’s active and lively Electric City Weblog:

Prior to HIPAA Montana had hundreds of companies that wrote health insurance. Upon the act being put in force the number of companies writing health insurance fell to less than 10 (There are only 2 in Idaho and only 1 in Washingston.) HIPAA limited pre-existing conditions limitations to 12 months and accordingly many insurance companies left the individual insurance business in favor of selling group plans.

So, prior to 1997 your wife wasn’t uninsurable even with cancer. HIPAA is likely the most damaging piece of health care legislation ever written. It screwed those who need individual coverage by limiting competition, increasing premiums, and re-enforcing the employer based health care model.

And again, later:

There’s no point in talking to you about health insurance because A) you think health care is a right (at some arbitrary level of care) and B) you’re unwilling to see that it’s been the government that has created this bollixed system with all of its intervention. For every fix government enacts two or more problems are created.

HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a 1996 law that made it more difficult for insurance companies to deny coverage to people because of pre-existing conditions. It didn’t outlaw the practice, by any means. It merely said that if workers switch policies due to job change, that they could not be denied coverage due to a preexisting condition on a new policy if they maintained coverage and did not go for long periods uninsured.

Prior to that time, insurers would either refuse to cover someone with a preexisting condition, or exclude that condition from coverage while covering other ailments. That’s an industry fix, and a good one in Dave’s mind – don’t cover the one thing the person most likely needs coverage for. Under-insure them.

Ted Kennedy was behind HIPAA, and he looked at the market-driven system and thought to himself “no good can come of this”. What the hell is the point of insurance that doesn’t cover illnesses? He fixed it, and, as Dave notes, insurers fled the market. The game was up. Dave sees this and a failing on the part of government. The industry was only doing what comes naturally: Seeking profit, avoiding risk.

…you think health care is a right.

At last he, flustered with me and all of the bollixing of government, said what was true. We have it now on screen for all to see. Dave thinks that people who cannot afford coverage should not have coverage. That, dear friends, is our philosophical bottom line. I say where the market fails, fix things. He says that the market doesn’t fail. If a market outcome is bad, it’s destiny. Accept it. Internalize it. Enable it.

Oh, we’ll do it his way. Obama is drifting inexorably right. The left will begrudgingly accept it, internalize it, and then enable it. There’ll be no heath care fix, no middle class tax cut, no end to Iraq, no protections for workers displaced by globalization. We’ve elected a secret member of the DLC. No good can come of this.