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.

Over at the Denver Post, Amy Oliver-Cooke from the Independence Institute and William Yeatman from the Competetive Enterprise Institute have a teriffic co-authored op-ed on the ¨false bill of goods¨ being sold to Coloradans as part of the ¨New Energy Economy.¨ Money quote from the piece:

Up until 2007, Xcel was obligated to provide electricity at “least cost.” Now, however, the Public Utilities Commission says that climate change — rather than affordability — is the “main driving force” behind resource planning. Xcel customers are poorer as a result, no matter how the politicians spin the costs of green energy.

Whole thing available here.

You can also catch Amy and William doing a little free-market critique of Xcel Energy´s tiered summer pricing scheme (aka the air-conditioner tax) in this Denver Business Journal piece from back in June.

Colorado’s electricity industry has been centrally planned since Woodrow Wilson was in the White House. During that time, competition among electricity providers has been illegal. Yet without competition, there is no incentive for improvement, which is why the American electricity industry hasn’t changed fundamentally in 100 years.

Read the whole thing here.

The Colorado Springs Gazette has an outstanding editorial on Amendment 63, the “Right to Health Care Choice” citizens amendment, calling it a “great idea” that has become certainty. One money quote out of many:

Amendment 63 would make Colorado an attractive haven for health care development, competition, and medical tourism, thus improving the health care options of Coloradans and boosting the economy.

This country hasn’t prospered and flourished because of federal mandates. We have flourished because of freedom. Amendment 63 will be one giant step in protecting freedom for Coloradans.

Read the entire terrific piece here.

Over at the Denver Daily News Independence Institute Senior Fellow Barry Poulson takes Mayor Hickenlooper to task for prescribing for Denver more of same bad federal “affordable housing” medicine that helped get us into our current financial mess:

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper recently signed on to “Take Root Denver,” a new affordable housing campaign sponsored by the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, a “government sponsored enterprise” more commonly known as Freddie Mac. Hickenlooper touts this as a new program to assist residents with calling Denver “home sweet home.”

But the federal mandate to provide “affordable housing” is fundamentally flawed, and a significant cause of the financial crisis. In other words, Mayor Hickenlooper and Freddie Mac have prescribed for Denver more of the same bad medicine that got us into our current financial mess.

Freddie Mac subsidizes and guarantees mortgage loans to individuals who do not qualify for loans from private lenders. These loans have very lax standards. Individuals can qualify for loans making a minimal or zero down payment. They do not need a good credit rating, nor need to earn the minimum level of income that private lenders would require to qualify for the loan.

These lax standards induced many individuals to invest in homes they could not afford, loans that are now in default. The government guarantees and subsidies for these loans also induced many financial institutions to invest in mortgage-based securities at the heart of the financial crisis. The federal mandate that Freddie Mac subsidize and guarantee mortgage loans has saddled the institution, and ultimately American taxpayers, with hundreds of billion of dollars in debt.

The origin of the financial crisis can be traced to government policies encouraging unqualified borrowers to assume risky mortgages, and to government mandates that financial institutions extend loans to these borrowers. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) loosened standards applied in non-prime lending. Through federal legislation such as the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), and agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the government pressured lending institutions to extend credit to unqualified borrowers.

The financial crisis was exacerbated by the quasi-governmental institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These institutions created a moral hazard by implicitly guaranteeing mortgages. By the time they collapsed in 2008, they together held $5 trillion in mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. They continue to incur billions in losses, requiring government bailouts.

If mortgage lenders had not been forced to abandon traditional underwriting standards on behalf of an ‘affordable housing’ policy, the financial crisis and taxpayer bailouts would not have occurred. Qualified mortgage borrowers would have purchased homes at competitive market prices. Now all homeowners, including qualified mortgage borrowers, must suffer the consequences of the mortgage meltdown and collapse in home prices

We must end the myth of “affordable housing.” As economist Thomas Sowell has argued, an affordable house is a house you can afford. This means restoring traditional market criteria for mortgage lending: meeting strict income standards to qualify for a loan, and requiring a minimum down payment from creditworthy borrowers.

Residents will call Denver “home sweet home” when the housing market stabilizes. That will only happen when lending institutions write off mortgage loans in default, when individuals are in homes they can afford, and when housing prices stabilize. The best way to achieve that objective is to return mortgage lending to the private marketplace. In the absence of government subsidies and guarantees, private mortgage lenders have an incentive to lend to creditworthy borrowers, and to require minimum standards for individuals to qualify for these loans.

The same Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that are implementing the “affordable housing” agenda got us into the housing pickle and financial crisis. They should be gradually phased out of the mortgage market. Critics will argue that private lending institutions are not able to perform the functions of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. But that is the point: no lending institution should be promoting mortgage lending to individuals who cannot afford to own a home. The Federal Housing Administration should return to the original role of insuring mortgage loans to low-income borrowers who can meet minimum standards to qualify for such loans.

There is no reason why Denver should be the guinea pig in a repeat of failed housing policies promoted by the Obama administration.

Today the Colorado Secretary of State announced the approval of the “The Right to Health Care Choice” citizens initiative for this November’s ballot. The initiative is now officially titled Amendment 63. The Health Care Choice for Colorado Issue Committee collected a total of 135,000 signatures that were handed in on July 30th.

If approved by voters in November, Amendment 63 will amend Colorado’s Constitution in two meaningful ways. First, the State of Colorado would be prohibited from forcing its citizens to purchase a public or private health insurance product, either on its own, or on behalf of the federal government. Secondly, it would constitutionally protect fee-for-service health care by ensuring Coloradans the right to choose to pay out of pocket for health care services and products.

For defending the Second Amendment rights of a Florida man. According to the Sun Sentinel (Broward County/Palm Beach area), the American Civil Liberties Union is petitioning a court to “help an 85-year-old man get his guns back from the Broward Sheriff’s Office.”

Says the ACLU’s cooperating lawyer:

Under the Second Amendment, he has a right to have his guns in his house. He’s not a convicted felon,” Butin said. “It is unusual for the ACLU. But the ACLU supports all constitutional rights. We don’t pick and choose.

Bravo to that.

The lineup for tonight’s (Friday, July 16) Devil’s Advocate w/Jon Caldara has changed. Instead of Reason Magazine Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie as previously posted, tune in for a one-on-one conversation between Independence Institute president Jon Caldara and U.S. Senate candidate Jane Norton. That’s tonight at 8:30 PM, right after Colorado Inside Out, on Colorado Public Television 12.

You can still catch Jon Caldara and Nick Gillespie talking new media and the nanny-state on next Friday’s Devil’s Advocate.

Colorado taxpayers now have something to celebrate: the return of the Taxpayers Bill of Rights, the nation’s most effective tax-and-spending limits. July 1 marked the end of the Referendum C five-year “time out,” the largest tax increase in Colorado history.

On Tuesday, July 13 at 10:00 AM, a group of state and national organizations, including the Independence Institute, will gather in the third floor pressroom at the Colorado Capitol to highlight what the end of the Ref C “timeout” and the return of the best taxpayer protections in the country means to Colorado working families.

Participants include:
* Jon Caldara, President of the Independence Institute
* Amy Oliver Cooke, founder of Mothers Against Debt and director of the Colorado Transparency Project for the Independence Institute
* John Stephenson, State Government Affairs Manager, National Taxpayers Union
* Colorado State Senator Shawn Mitchell
* Joshua Culling, State Affairs Manager, Americans for Tax Reform
* Marty Nielson, President, Colorado Union of Taxpayers
* Laura Carno from Americans for Prosperity, Colorado.

“We plan to celebrate the return of TABOR, which is great news for Colorado families and bad news for big government spenders,” said Independence Institute President Jon Caldara.

He added, “There is a reason why the tax-and-spenders hate TABOR, it works. It forces lawmakers to do their job, prioritize the budget and live within their means.”

Check out Independence Institute Research Director Dave Kopel’s testimony at last week’s Elena Kagan Supreme Court nominee hearings.

Independence Institute president Jon Caldara’s efforts to put his “Right To Health Care Choice” citizens amendment on Colorado’s November ballot got a boost this week from the Colorado Supreme Court, which heard a challenge to the initiative’s title.  From Law Week Colorado:

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday that proposed initiative 45, which would prohibit state law from requiring people to buy health insurance, meets the state’s single subject requirement for ballot initiatives.

The court, in its 5-2 decision, also held that the proposed initiative’s title, “Right to health care choice,” is neither misleading nor an impermissible slogan.

This follows closely behind another significant legal victory for Caldara’s initiative, this one in federal court.  From the Denver Post:

A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction Friday [June 11] that bars the Colorado secretary of state from enforcing rules that would have prohibited petition circulators for ballot initiatives from being paid by the signature.

A recent state law had banned pay-per-signature initiatives because legislators believe the practice invites fraud.

But citizen-initiative groups, including the pro-marijuana group SAFER and the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank, sued the secretary of state in challenging the rules. The groups asked U.S. District Judge Philip Brimmer for a preliminary injunction barring the rules until the end of trial.

It’s been a good month for citizens’ ability to petition their government.