FreedomTalks

Fourteen years ago when she was First Lady Hillary Clinton unloaded a health-care plan on the country. Complex, confusing, and restrictive, the thousand-page proposal outlined a radical overhaul of the nation’s health system, and a small band of grassroots activists quickly rose up to successfully oppose it. At 1,342 pages, it was the Hindenburg of […]

The read of the morning is Michael Tanner’s new Cato paper [PDF] comparing problems and successes in health-care systems worldwide. Most interesting is that The New Republic’s resident health-care guru (and government health insurance advocate), Jonathan Cohn, reviewed the paper even while disagreeing with its conclusions, meaning that you can pretty much bet that […]

Steve Chapman wonders why the presidential candidates aren’t more interested in the nation’s finances:
It’s good to know they are preparing themselves for that 3 a.m. phone call. But I’m not convinced any of them is ready for the 8 a.m. call from the budget director reporting that the deficit is raging out of control. […]

Let me associate myself with J.P. Freire’s remarks about the GOP framing of health care issues (via Megan McArdle).
Rep. Camp recited a good number of the talking points I’ve heard among the right regarding healthcare. The problem is that the debate is about a feel-good issue (the health of a family), and Republicans tend […]

Colorado’s “Blue Ribbon Commission on Health Care Reform” recently published it’s final report.  Predictably, the commission advocates the standard collection of mandates, subsidies (to families earning as much as $80,000), and “cost shifting.”  To quote the report: 

“Eleven (11) of the health care reform proposals submitted to the Commission included an individual mandate as a key […]

I’ve got to run to a briefing, but the quick version is this:
Conservatives and free marketers have many disagreements with McCain, and they’re right to. McCain-Feingold, McCain-Lieberman, the votes against the Bush tax cuts — these are not exactly small matters. But what he said today should get some attention from advocates of limited-government.
On […]

We all knew what was coming, and we all gathered round next to the TV here at the end of Blogger’s Row to watch Romney bow out of the GOP race. I stood next to Julian Sanchez, who’s blogging the convention for The Economist, and in front of Flip Romney — the guy in […]

Just got settled in here on blogger’s row at CPAC, and the place is already buzzing with the rumor that Romney plans to announce that he’s dropping out of the GOP presidential race in his speech.
Romney has become the conservative establishment candidate as  of late, but it’s worth remembering that the health-care plan he put […]

It strikes me as sort of amazing how increasingly brazen universal health-care advocates are in what they really want.  Here, for example, is Dean Baker at The American Prospect:
The simple story is that any effort to establish national health insurance will require some anti-free loader mechanism to prevent gaming. The logic is straightforward. Everyone agrees […]

For the children? Perhaps not. In the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson casts a skeptical eye on the current crop of presidential candidates and their promises to take care of the children.
Our children face a future of rising taxes, squeezed — and perhaps falling — public services and aging — perhaps deteriorating — public […]