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People with costly medical problems who lack the ability to pay for their medical care and also lack health insurance pose a social problem. The American way of dealing with that problem is to force the private sector to bear the full cost of solving it. In response, employers have adopted health plans that are attractive to the healthy and unattractive to the sick. More.

John Goodman and Steve Moore say that Trump’s idea of abolishing the SS benefits tax is too expensive. But it is probably the worst tax on the books. They show how to get rid of its worst features without a big loss of revenue for the government. More.

All government regulations face a persistent problem. By their very nature they are trying to keep people from acting in their own self-interest. Either they try to keep people from doing what they want to do, or force them to do something they don’t want to do. In health care, no one in the system, including the regulators themselves, has a self-interest in making sure the system works the way almost everyone thinks it should work. More.

Why do so many high-income, highly educated people vote for liberal political candidates? Is it because they feel guilty and they are altruistically voting against their own interests? John Goodman says its more likely that these folks are just as self-interested as everybody else.

Now that the Republicans have had their convention, more than one columnist is asking, “What big ideas do the Democrats have to offer?” John goodman has made some suggestions. Since liberals have basically exhausted any sensible good that can come from more regulation, his suggestions all involve deregulation –especially in areas that Democrats have shown a particular interest in – including housing, medical care, education and jobs. More.

Michael Cannon argues that all of our major health care programs (Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, etc.) came into existence primarily to solve problems created by previous government interventions. And, the reason why there is a continuing push for further reform is because all the programs that are supposed to be solving problems are creating new ones. More.

With 10% inflation, the average family can expect to lose 7% of its lifetime income to government.

This is the startling conclusion of a first-ever study by Laurance Kotlikoff and Alan Auerbach and their colleagues. The sources of the loss: (1) large parts of the tax code are not inflation indexed, (2) those parts that are indexed are indexed with a lag, and (3) Social Security benefits and other entitlements are also indexed with a lag. Our fiscal system is so incredibly complex that it has been impossible to measure the overall effects of inflation before now. Given the 20 largest federal/state entitlements, all administered differently by 50 states, that gives us 1,000 fiscal systems– to say nothing of all the different tax regimes. Hats off to the economists who spent several years developing the model that could give us a reliable answer. See John Goodman’s explanation of the study at Forbes.

Why do employers (including government employers) and insurers mistreat enrollees with costly health care problems?  When the New York Times describes the abuses, you are encouraged to believe that the blame rests with private insurance. In fact, the source of the problem is perverse incentives created by bad government policies. More.