Our View - Monday

Health Care Obamanation
Presidential hopeful on wrong track

With most of the local focus on Tuesday's primary races, especially in the closing hours of those campaigns, the presidential face-off has been temporarily moved to the back burner. But it won't be long before folks are discussing it again, and talking about more than whether Barack Obama has much in common with Paris Hilton. One of the topics sure to gain center-stage attention is health care and how Americans get it.

As election time nears, the candidates move toward the political center. This can make the differences between Obama and John Mc-Cain seem smaller. But on health care, the contrasts are stark and indicate the difference between the two candidates - Obama is all about mandates while McCain relies more on market forces.

Most of what voters have heard from the opposing camps recently has been about energy plans and oil drilling, but during the party primaries the candidates spoke more about their ideas to address what many see as a health care crisis in the United States. The issue was a big talker in the Democratic Party.

How the two major parties view health care points to a difference in basic philosophy. Democratic plans stressed providing increased, preferably universal, access to health care, while GOP proposals addressed costs, believing more Americans could get health insurance if health care was more affordable. The next phase of the campaign promises to highlight those basic differences.

Obama's plan is basically a series of government-enforced mandates on employers to provide insurance coverage to employees. Forcing employers to provide and pick up the tab for coverage sounds appealing, until one considers who will actually pay the bill.

Employer-provided health insurance began as a result of a labor shortage during World War II and the postwar years. Because of wage and price controls mandated by the federal government, employers were forced to compete for workers using means other than simple salary. Thus was born the benefits package. It's not much different today; benefits, including health insurance, are part of an employee's total compensation. If employers are forced to buy insurance for employees and their families, it's unlikely companies are going to pay those costs. The premiums will be reflected in lower wages, deferred raises and fewer employees.

Hardest hit will be entry-level and low-wage workers. According to economists Katherine Baicker of Harvard and Helen Levy of the University of Michigan, forcing employers to provide coverage for workers would cost about 315,000 jobs. In a paper for the Employment Policies Institute, the two also noted that more than 40 percent of currently uninsured workers are working at jobs that pay within $3 of minimum wage. Those workers are most at risk from any increase in business costs.

Employer mandates also would do little to address the cost of health care. If anything, it likely would boost the prices charged by insurance companies and health care providers. To forestall that possibility would require more government regulation of those industries, further driving up costs. And when regulations drive up costs and keep compensation low, industries often see an exodus as workers leave for more lucrative, less regulated careers. In this case, that would lead to fewer choices in health care providers.

Another problem with government mandates to require health coverage is mission creep. That's when bureaucrats and politicians see their meddling isn't producing the desired results (usually because it can't), so they pile on more mandates requiring more comprehensive coverage. Residents of Massachusetts have seen this up close as a result of health coverage mandates imposed under then-Gov. Mitt Romney in 2005. Since then, laws have been added to limit deductible payments and to phase in prescription-drug benefits not required under the original law. Requiring dental and other coverage is on the horizon. Other mandates likely will come as health care providers see there's money to be made in mandates and clamor for their specialties to be covered.

Under a President Obama with a willing Democratic Congress, such expansion is practically guaranteed. When he was in the Illinios Senate, Obama voted against new mandates for benefits a grand total of zero times, and in the U.S. Senate Obama co-sponsored an expensive bill requiring mental health parity. At least he's consistent.

Along with his consistency in meddling in employee benefits and insurance policies, Obama also demonstrates bad judgment with his ideas on pharmaceutical pricing. A full discussion of those plans will have to wait for another day, but for now it's enough that you know his record shows a tendency to punish, through restrictive regulations, the companies that provide life-saving drugs to the world. He has supported legislation that would effectively import foreign price controls into the U.S. market, severely limiting the ability of pharmaceutical makers to recoup research and development costs that can run as high as $800 million per new drug, according to a report in the February 2003 issue of Journal of Health Economics.

The way health care is provided in this country doesn't work well for everyone. But improving it for those on the lower end of the economic ladder doesn't have to come at the cost of making it worse for everyone else.

Consumers ready to drill

A mere 39 percent of Californians, well known for their devotion to environmental causes, once supported new oil drilling offshore. But only five years later, as gasoline prices tripled, a majority of Californians now favor more drilling off the coast. Relying on windmills, sunshine and OPEC to meet our energy needs increasingly is viewed as wishful thinking as the price to fill a gas tank reaches $50, or even $100, for an SUV.

Californians' changing sentiment reported two weeks ago by the Public Policy Institute of California was shared a week earlier in a Rasmussen Poll showing offshore drilling supported by 57 percent of Floridians.

Yet, drilling on 85 percent of the Outer Continental Shelf is prohibited by a congressional moratorium. The Democratic-controlled Congress was unmoved when President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling last month and apparently remains unmoved.

"Polls are showing that, even in liberal states and congressional districts, most people now favor lifting the offshore and (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) bans," says Myron Ebell, energy director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "And more and more people are figuring out that Congress is the problem and are getting angry about it."

For good reason. Only 25 years ago, 60 percent of petroleum consumed in the U.S. was domestically produced. Today, that figure is 25 percent. Increasingly, we are at the mercy of foreign suppliers.

Opposition to offshore drilling among Democrats is wavering in the face of soaring gasoline prices. Sen. Barack Obama, the party's presumptive presidential nominee, has indicated he would be open to "compromise" that permitted drilling with environmental safeguards.

Despite growing public demand, despite surging prices, the blockade persists. Does the Democrat leadership want energy prices to climb ever upward with no reliable strategy? Does it really think such an approach will force the public to adopt still-utopian energycreation schemes like windmills and solar panels as foundational energy sources? The sensible public, however, appears to want the freedom and realism to meet its energy needs today, not in some futuristic utopia.