When Speaker Nancy Pelosi had the audacity to say that we need to pass Obama Care “in order to find out what is in it,” she probably never thought a great little organization would actually come up with a way to let the masses know exactly “what’s in it.” Coloradoans for Personal Choice and Competition in Health Care is doing just that. Through a coordinated town hall series, they are telling all Obama Care’s dirty little secrets all throughout Colorado. Author, publisher, and health care expert Dave Racer will be the guy in charge of cutting through the euphemisms and rhetoric coming out of Washington about this government takeover of health care. He will be joined by special guests as well as they make their way from the south of Colorado to the north. The town halls start in Colorado Springs on September 30th and end in Evans the next day on October 1st. Check the tour schedule here for a date and location near you.

This of course ties in very nicely with Amendment 63 – the Right to Health Care Choice initiative. As of now, Obama Care is the law of the land, and we ought to do our best to figure out what that means exactly. But if the voters of Colorado prefer to have a choice in health care and pass Amendment 63 this November, we might have to create a town hall tour letting the rest of country know that Colorado is a sanctuary state for quality health care in America.

The 7,000 plus member Colorado Medical Society (CMS) had its annual meeting last weekend, and the Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590, aka Obama Care) was a main focus of the gathering. The CMS apparently surveyed its membership, and according to an excellent Colorado Public Radio news piece, around half of CMS member doctors think the federal health care law “will make health care worse, not better,” around a third say the law “will make health care better,” and the rest call it “a mixed bag” or are not sure.

In other words, CMS member doctors are split over the Affordable Care Act. This begs the question then, did the CMS also survey its membership on Amendment 63, the “Right to Health Care Choice” citizens amendment before sending a spokesperson out to speak against 63?

Since the Secretary of State certified Amendment 63 (and even before that, actually), Edie Sonn, who is the director of public affairs for the Colorado Medical Society, has been widely quoted (including her CMS title) by numerous media outlets speaking against Amendment 63, usually in connection with the campaign against Amendment 63, called Colorado Deserves Better. Here’s an example from an August 26 Denver Business Journal piece on Amendment 63 making it on to the November ballot:

Colorado Deserves Better, a group of medical professionals and consumer advocates opposed to Amendment 63, immediately issued a statement that it will press voters to defeat an amendment it called costly, complicated and unnecessary.

“This constitutional amendment will lead to higher health care costs for insured individuals and businesses as they are forced to absorb the costs of the uninsured,” said Edie Sonn, director of public affairs for the Colorado Medical Society. “In addition, Amendment 63 could incite a frenzy of lawsuits, costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

This cost shifting argument is of course incorrect and misleading, as the Independence Institute’s Brian Schwartz has pointed out. But that the public affairs director of the CMS is actively speaking out against 63 certainly gives the impression that she is representing the position of the Colorado Medical Society (or at the very least, speaking on behalf of the CMS leadership), yet nowhere on the Colorado Deserves Better website is the CMS listed as being officially opposed to Amendment 63. Similarly, a perusal of the CMS website shows no statement of opposition to 63.

We do know that not all CMS member doctors agree with Edie Sonn. Here is a comment left on the HuffPost Denver from Paul Hsieh, MD, a CMS member doctor from Sedalia, Colorado:

The mandatory insurance idea forming the core of ObamaCare has already been tried — and failed — in Massachusetts, resulting only in skyrocketing health costs, a desperate shortage of doctors, and significantly longer waits for medical care than in the rest of the country. Some Massachusetts patients must now wait almost a year for a routine physical exam.

As a practicing physician, such Massachusetts-style problems are the last thing I want here in Colorado. Colorado voters can avoid the mistakes of Massachusetts by supporting Amendment 63.

So we are actually quite curious as to whether the CMS ever surveyed its membership on Amendment 63, and whether there is any more or less a consensus among the CMS member doctors concerning Amendment 63 as there is concerning Obama Care.

The Politico website is reporting that the Obama administration is asking Congress to amend one of the many odious burdens on free-enterprise contained in the massive tax bill health care reform bill, H.R. 3590 (aka Obama Care). According to Politico:

The Obama administration Monday urged senators to scale back a tax reporting requirement in the health care law. The law requires businesses to track all cumulative purchases from vendors that total $600 or more in one year. The provision was designed to raise revenue for the health care law but has been universally panned by the business community, which anticipates a mountain of new paperwork to comply.

The amendment, from Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), would scale back the reporting requirements to cumulative purchases of more than $5,000 per year and exclude companies with fewer than 25 employees. So far, no Republicans have voiced support for the amendment.

“We are committed to reducing the gap between taxes legally owed and taxes paid,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote in a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Monday. “However, the administration believes that the burden created on businesses by the new information reporting requirement on purchases of goods that exceed $600, as included in Section 6041 of the Internal Revenue Code as modified by Section 9006 of the Affordable Care Act, is too great.”

Almost sounds like the administration is seeking some reasonable middle ground while Republicans are being obstructionist, until you read further and find out that the scaled back tax reporting requirement would be paid for by “imposing a new tax on oil companies.” Huh?

Before you try and wrap your head around the twisted logic of burdening an industry with a new tax to replace a tax reporting requirement that even the administration says is a “burden created on business” in the first place, check out the alternative:

Geithner and Sebelius said they strongly oppose the amendment from Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), which would completely repeal the 1099 provision. It would be paid for by removing money from a fund created by the health care overhaul designed to promote prevention and wellness.

On a unrelated note, if Treasury Secretary Geithner is truly committed to “reducing the gap between taxes legally owed and taxes paid,” then he really ought to be looking in his own backyard. The Washington Post recently did some digging and discovered that:

Capitol Hill employees owed $9.3 million in overdue taxes at the end of last year, a sliver of the $1 billion owed by federal workers nationwide but one with potential political ramifications for members of Congress.

One can only hope.

Akbar Ganji is a journalist and one of Iran’s leading political dissidents. His May 2009 speech to the University of Chicago Law School has recently been posted in the school’s excellent podcast series. The speech delves deeply into different ways of understanding Islam, and Ganji offers some very liberal interpretations which, he says, have substantial support among the people of Iran, and some important Muslim clerics. It is a wonderfully refreshing alternative to the bleak views of some Westerners and all Islamists who contend that Islam is necessarily totalitarian. Well worth 88 minutes of your time.

Also worth a listen: This new episode of Bloggingheads.tv, featuring Abdullah Antepli (Muslim chaplain at Duke University) and Hussein Rashid (Religion Dispatches).  Bottom line: the United States is the best country in the world for Muslims to live in, and today’s America is the most Shariah-compliant nation–because Shariah properly understood is not a legal code (contrary to what the governments of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan claim). While I didn’t agree with every single statement of the two speakers, their viewpoints were patriotic, honest, and constructive–a great alternative to the fifth columnists from CAIR and similar groups which the MSM too often present as representing “the” American Muslim viewpoint.

Denver Post writer and editorial board member Chuck Plunkett will be the featured speaker at the next Denver Liberty on the Rocks. That’s next Wednesday, the 15th at the Uptown Tavern at 7pm. Come on out and say you drunkit with Plunkett!

Got a spare $13 trillion to help Uncle Sam pay off the national debt? Check out Devil’s Advocate this week as I am joined by economist Linda Gorman from the Independence Institute and founder of Mothers Against Debt (MAD) Amy Oliver Cooke to discuss the both the federal debt and deficit, and the debt load being incurred by local Colorado governments. That’s Friday, Sept. 10 at 8:30 PM on Colorado Public Television 12. Re-broadcast the following Monday at 1:30 PM.

As Orin wisely notes in the immediately preceding post, the typical law review article first footnote disclaimer “all errors are the author’s alone”  provides no useful information to the reader. Below are some alternatives which I have used:

“All errors are society’s fault.” 29 Hamline L. Rev. 520.

“Any errors are the fault of no-one in particular; rather, society itself is to blame.” 68 Alb. L. Rev. 305.

“All errors are the authors’ sole responsibility, but persons aggrieved by any such errors are encouraged to sue the companies which manufactured our computers.” 34 Conn. L. Rev. 157.

“Any errors in this article are the fault of society, and cannot be blamed on an individual.” 18 St. Louis U. Pub. L. Rev. 99. 

“Errors are entirely the responsibility of sinister unknown forces, not the authors.” 30 Conn. L. Rev. 59.  

Feel free to use any of these, provided of course that you include a citation to the original source. :)

Orin’s post may also be considered an oblique foreshadowing of the 2014 bestselling book: Barack Obama, My Autobiography, Part III: The Four Presidential Years, with the first footnote stating, “All my errors were because I did not listen to Cass Sunstein.”

Ross Douthat pens another excellent column in yesterday’s New York Times. He observes that “obsessing about the paranoia of the masses is often a way for American elites to gloss over their own, entirely nonsymbolic failures.” For example, “Today, establishment liberals would much rather fret about the insanity of the Republican base than reckon with the unpopularity of Barack Obama’s domestic program.”

For a good example, see this recent episode of Bloggingheads.tv, featuring Michelle Goldberg (The Daily Beast) and Sally Steenland (Center for American Progress) talking each other into ever-higher levels of paranoia against the American people, based on gross misinterpretations of the Tea Party movement.

Over at the opinion page of the Colorado Springs Gazette, Independence Institute research associate and health care blogger Brian Schwartz exposes both the flaws and deceptions in the ¨cost-shifting¨ argument being used against Amendment 63, the ¨Right to Health Care Choice¨ citizens amendment.

While seductive at an emotional and superficial level, the ¨cost-shifting¨argument simply falls apart under some solid scrutiny.

Re-printed in its entirety:

Mandatory insurance takes what’s wrong with health insurance and makes it worse. It means higher costs, affordable insurance becomes illegal, and less incentive to please patients. Amendment 63 would block Colorado politicians from imposing mandatory insurance. It would also prevent the feds from pressuring the Colorado legislature to enforce Washington’s version of it.

In opposition, Edie Sonn of the Colorado Medical Society says Amendment 63 “will lead to higher health care costs for insured individuals and businesses as they are forced to absorb the costs of the uninsured.” This cost-shifting argument is both wrong and deceptive. Mandatory insurance will increase costs and impose much larger cost shifts.

President Obama says we’re “paying 900 bucks on average” because some uninsured patients don’t pay medical bills. He’s referring to a Families USA study that Independence Institute economist Linda Gorman has shown to be highly flawed. The study over-estimated the cost of uncompensated medical care. It “disregarded categories accounting for roughly 33 percent of the payments” for the uninsured such as auto insurance, community health centers, and various government programs.

The cost shift is no more than $85 annually per insured Coloradan, according to the Lewin Group’s 2007 “Baseline Coverage and Spending” report for the Colorado Blue Ribbon Commission. This amount is trivial compared to how much mandatory insurance increases premiums. Consider Massachusetts, which has mandated insurance since 2006. The most affordable plans sold through Massachusetts’ insurance exchange cost almost three times more than those available in Fort Collins. The Boston Globe reports that the premiums in Massachusetts are the highest in the country and emergency room visits and costs have increased.

Mandatory insurance entrenches the main cause of high health care and insurance costs: The patient is rarely the paying customer. Health care prices decrease or stabilize when patients pay, rather than insurers. Examples include Lasik, and cosmetic surgery, and whether you like it or not, abortion.

But patients are rarely customers because the tax code and other controls favor excessive insurance. The typical health plan is not insurance, but prepaid health care. If car insurance worked this way it would cover routine and predictable expenses such as oil changes and new brakes.

Prepaid health care insulates patients from the true costs of treatment. Patients are typically oblivious to prices or more affordable alternatives. Since the patient isn’t paying, physicians have incentive to exaggerate diagnoses such that third-party payers (insurers, Medicare, Medicaid) will finance expensive treatment. Prices of health care and insurance soar as a result.

Mandatory insurance makes this worse by banning lower-cost insurance policies. Politicians mandate costly benefits and limit deductibles, which both increase premiums and further distort insurance into prepaid health care. A typical mandated benefit increases insurance premiums by about 0.75 percent, concludes a 2008 study lead by MIT economist Amanda Kowalski.

Legal health plans under the Obama health control law must include at least ten mandated benefits such as laboratory, preventive and wellness services (HR 3590, sec. 1302). If you paid cash for such services you’d make sure they were necessary. Such discretion isn’t needed if your health plan pays.

The CMS opposes Amendment 63 by objecting to cost-shifting. But mandatory insurance does this, too. Instead of saving money to self-insurance, banning lower-cost policies makes people buy more costly and comprehensive insurance than they’d like.

For more affordable insurance and health care, politicians should repeal damaging political controls, not add them. For example, change the unfair pro-insurance tax code so it no longer punishes people for paying cash for medical care.

There’s no right to medical care, but we have the right to seek it through voluntary exchange. Colorado Amendment 63 would protect Coloradans from politicians seeking to violate this right.