Buy Healthcare Or Go To Prison

From Politico:

This doesn’t happen often enough.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it “Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold.”

The note was a follow-up to Ensign’s questioning at the markup.

One Reason European Health Care Works: America

From “The Pharmaceutical Umbrella,” by Benjamin A. Plotinsky in City Journal:

A 2006  article by Henry G. Grabowski and Y. Richard Wang in the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs makes plain, the lion’s share of new chemical entities (NCEs)—that is, genuinely new drugs—are invented in the United States. Between 1993 and 2003, the authors found, 437 NCEs were introduced around the world. America was responsible for 152 of them—far more than any other country—with Japan coming in second with 88 and Germany a distant third with 42 (see chart above).

Why is this important? One reason for America’s drug dominance (though far from the only one) is America’s unsocialized medicine. Here, with the exception of a few programs like Medicaid and the VA system, the government doesn’t regulate the price of drugs, so when a company invents something big—the latest miracle cancer drug, say—it strikes it rich, making its executives hunger for more. Take away the profit motive, as government-run medicine often does by forcing drug companies to sell at discounted prices, and innovation will dry up.

So socialist Europe, by using American drugs is profiting from good old-fashioned American free enterprise. the lesson is to be skeptical of reports speaking glowingly of socialized health-care systems.

HT: Carpe Diem

International Economies and Counterfeits

Below are spreads produced by Erik Martinez and Shawn Sims for Crisis Fronts Degree Research Studio @ Pratt Institute (click each to enlarge):

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The Mason/Dixon Pop/Soda Line

(Click to enlarge)

HT: Infectious Greed

Quote of the Day

“A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity.”

~ Thomas Jefferson

Most Ironic Book Bannings

Below is 11point.com’s list of “the most hypocritical, ignorant, and, based on the content of the books, ironic” bans:

• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury: The sci-fi classic is about a future government that bans and burns books. ‘Nuff said?
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain: The anti-slavery classic is still banned in places for its use of the word “nigger.”
• The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie: A book satirizing “narrow-minded” aspects of Islam inspired Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to put out a hit on the author.
• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl: Banned in Alabama for being “a real downer.”
• The Harry Potter series, JK Rowling: Religious watchdog groups outlawed a series that teaches “love, understanding, and tolerance.”

For the complete list, click here.

GDP of U.S. Cities vs. GDP of Comparable Countries

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Is Minimum Wage an Effective Anti-Poverty Policy in Japan?

Kawaguchi Daiji (Faculty Fellow, RIETI) and Mori Yuko (Hitotsubashi University) have recently released a study on the effectiveness of minimum wage as an anti-poverty policy in Japan. Below is the abstract:

This paper considers whether minimum wage is a well-targeted anti-poverty policy by examining the backgrounds of minimum-wage workers, and whether raising the minimum wage reduces employment for unskilled workers. An examination of micro data from a large-scale government household survey, the Employment Structure Survey (Shugyo Kozo Kihon Chosa), reveals that about half of minimum-wage workers belong to households with annual incomes of more than 5 million yen [$55,615] as a non-head of household. A regression analysis indicates that an increase in the minimum wage moderately reduces the employment of male teenagers and middle-aged, married females, while it encourages the employment of high school age youth.

In other words, overall employment drops while higher wages push high school aged youth to pursue employment instead of education.

US vs. Europe: Life Expectancy and Cancer Survival

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Quote of the Day

“Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.”

~ Thomas Sowell