1) The Government Is Taking Over the Health Care Industry
As we mentioned yesterday, one of the industries that saw the biggest increase in prices over the past year was health insurance. The costs rose by more than 12%. Clearly nothing is becoming more “affordable” when it comes to health care coverage. But the Wall Street Journal editorial page notes another troubling trend in health care based on the just-released Census Bureau report on income, health and poverty. Private health insurance is getting squeezed out of the market. Here are the numbers:
Change in Health Insurance Coverage 2020-21
Private plans -1.5 million
Medicaid +3.2 million
Medicare +1.7 million
How predictable was this?
At the time of Obamacare’s passage we predicted that this was just another big leap to get across the river to socialized medicine in America. The first step would be to expand Medicare and Medicaid and subsidize private plans, and the next step would be to make the government plans so widely available - Biden has all but eliminated work requirements for welfare – that private coverage would eventually be concierge care for the very rich. Everyone else would be insured by Uncle Sam. We don’t waste even one tear for the private insurers. They were the biggest supporters of Obamacare -because of the subsidies for private plans. The insurers got in bed with the enemy – and now they are getting a knife right in the back. We predict the shrinkage of the private market will continue and we will be talking about Uncle Sam Inc. when it comes to the health care industry.
2) US Economic Freedom is Falling
Speaking of America’s drift toward big government socialism, Canada’s Fraser Institute just released its latest Economic Freedom of the World rankings. The latest edition shows just how damage COVID lockdowns have done. The U.S. rating is now lower than at any time since 1975. This is almost all because of the strict and profoundly unwise lockdown policies under Covid.
What’s scary is that this does not include yet the vast expansion of government under Biden. That will surely show a gigantic leap in the wrong direction given the $4 trillion of added spending and the hundreds of billions of dollars of new regulatory burdens.
Hong Kong remains in the top position, although its rating is falling fast. Singapore came in second. The next highest-scoring nations are Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Australia, United States, Estonia, Mauritius, and Ireland. Countries that are falling even further behind include Japan (12th), Canada (14th), Germany (25th), Italy (44th), France (54th) and Mexico (64th).
When Biden’s scheme to double the IRS budget and hire more than 80,000 new IRS agents passed Congress, Iowa Senator Jody Ernst demanded an audit of the IRS itself.
Ernst just announced that the Treasury Department’s Inspector General has agreed to her request to audit the IRS to ensure that its own tax collectors are paying what they owe.
"Hundreds of employees at the IRS itself may have willfully failed to pay their own tax bills, including tax collectors and even a criminal investigator,” she told her colleagues this week. “A total of 1,250 IRS employees had not paid their tax bills in full or on time… Before Biden’s army of auditors starts harassing innocent taxpayers, let’s first make sure the tax collectors have paid their own taxes.”
This is a great idea. What is even more urgently needed is a forensic audit of how the agency itself spends its tens of billions of dollars. Who is it auditing? And why? We are worried and you should be too that the Biden administration will weaponize the IRS against the Dem’s political enemies – just as he has the Justice Department and the FBI. And just as Obama used Lois Lerner to target conservatives on the “enemies list.”
4) New York Times Staff - “Just Stay Home!”
The snowflakes who work for the New York Times are refusing to return to the office even three days a week -- a full two and a half years into COVID.
Management is having to cope with 1,316 Times staffers who insist they will stay home. The leading union for Times employees cites “workplace health and safety” issues.
It appears most Times employees don’t really have an irrational fear of offices, but they have learned from teachers unions how to use their leverage to extract every possible concession before they trudge back to work directly with colleagues. Some are demanding pay raises while others want more subsidies for commuting. Some are even complaining it is a violation of their human rights to have to show up at the office. Gee, we wonder what the political slant is of these “reporters.”
Times supervisors are trying to entice reluctant workers back by offering anyone who actually returns the office “cute” branded lunch boxes. The holdouts aren’t impressed. Studies show that in most cases when workers don’t show up for work, their productivity falls.
In the case of the New York Times, we regard that as a good thing.
5) Monkeypox Update
The latest World Health Organization report came out yesterday. Here are some highlights:
WHO 9/14 global monkeypox report:
• 98.1% male
• 95.0% men who have sex with men
• 45.6% HIV positive
• 90.6% of transmission events were a sexual encounter
• 59.8% exposed in party setting with sexual contacts
• 0.6% aged 0-17
• Zero children reported exposure in a school setting.
Cases appear to have peaked without ever moving beyond the original high-risk group in any significant numbers.
