Wire Report

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies

As director of information policy studies, Jim Harper focuses on the difficult problems of adapting law and policy to the unique problems of the information age. Harper is a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee. His work has been cited by USA Today, the Associated Press, and Reuters. He has appeared on Fox News Channel, CBS, and MSNBC, and other media. His scholarly articles have appeared in the Administrative Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review, and the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. Recently, Harper wrote the book Identity Crisis: How Identification Is Overused and Misunderstood. Harper is the editor of Privacilla.org, a Web-based think tank devoted exclusively to privacy, and he maintains online federal spending resource WashingtonWatch.com. He holds a J.D. from UC Hastings College of Law.

CATO- Thanks to the push for a more transparent Congress, we’re getting a better look at what new health care regulations might shape up to be. Alas, not a very good look: with weak justifications, the Senate Finance Committee is working on a strange “plain language” description of the bill, and apparently not planning to read or release the final language¹.

I’ve found something worth noting, though, in each of the bill versions I’ve seen. The Senate Finance Committee’s Rube Goldberg plan for health care in America has a provision establishing paragraph talking about “Eligibility Verification.”

If you want to access the “state exchanges” or collect the federal tax credits created by the bill, your eligibility will have to be verified. Here’s what it says:

Eligibility Verification. In order to prevent illegal immigrants from accessing the state exchanges or obtaining federal health care tax credits, the Chairman‘s Mark requires verification of the following personal data. Name, social security number, and date of birth will be verified with Social Security Administration (SSA) data. For individuals claiming to be U.S. citizens, if the claim of citizenship is consistent with SSA data then the claim will be considered substantiated. For individuals who do not claim to be U.S. citizens but claim to be lawfully present in the United States, if the claim of lawful presence is consistent with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data then the claim will be considered substantiated. Individuals whose status is expected to expire in less than a year are not allowed to obtain the tax credit. Individuals whose claims of citizenship or lawful status cannot be verified with federal data must be allowed substantial opportunity to provide documentation or correct federal data related to their case that supports their contention.

CHAIRMAN’S MARK
AMERICA’S HEALTHY FUTURE ACT of 2009
Page 27

Translation: Every American who wants to access a “state exchange” or get the tax credits in the bill would have to submit data about themselves to the Social Security Administration or Department of Homeland Security for verification. If you don’t do it, no exchanges or tax credits. If your data doesn’t match, no exchanges or tax credits, unless you can convince SSA or DHS bureaucrats that you are who you say you are.

If you’re one of the millions of people about whom the Social Security Administration has bad data, plan to spend long hours waiting in line to plead with indifferent federal bureaucrats for health care access. When attacks and complications on the verification system break down, they’ll move to “strengthen” the system. Get ready to dig up your birth certificate—they’ll want to scan it into their computers—plan to be photographed and fingerprinted, and get ready to stand in line for your national ID card.

Related Materials
	Chairman’s Mark – America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 (PDF 1.53 Mb)

Source(s): ¹Washington Examiner “Congressional leaders fight against posting bills online” by: Susan Ferrechio, Published Oct. 6, 2009

Allison Bricker

This past Wednesday, both the 111th Congress and President Obama reauthorized and expanded eligibility under Title XXI of the 1935 Social Security Act, the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan (SCHIP). During the public ceremonial signing of this new expanse of government largess, President Obama said:

“In a decent society, there are certain obligations that are not subject to trade offs or negotiations, and health care for ‘our’ children is one of those obligations.”

President Barack Obama
February 4th, 2009

At first blush, it sounds like a noble undertaking with the best of government intentions. However, instead of attempting to co-opt everyone’s child as a ward of the state, thereby increasing the strain on an already overtaxed public and insolvent Social Security system, why not fix the system for the existing promised beneficiaries of government run health care; veterans?

It is no secret that veterans routinely receive second-rate care under the Department of Veterans Affairs. From the well publicized Walter Reed scandal, to the more often unreported numerous suicides due to over medication¹, deaths due to gross negligence², or outright denial of treatment³, the VA is an inside look at just how a fixed cost universal system operates. Make no mistake; universal health care for all Americans will suffer from the same inherent problems of all fixed-cost systems, bureaucracy and a static budget.

All fixed-cost systems such as the Department of Veterans Affairs operate on an annual budget appropriated by the Congress and approved by the President. All off or over budget items require additional “Emergency Spending Supplemental” bills prior to procurement. Therefore, bureaucrats are in place to institute everything from moratoriums on overtime to calculating the number of allowable procedures on any given day. Thus, the bureaucratic administration of the system cannot help but view the need for care as secondary.

One such example is that of Dr. Peter Holmes* who during his time as a surgeon at the VA saw on average, twelve veterans per week in need of total knee reconstruction. Of those in need, the VA allowed him to conduct one operation per week.

However, desiring to help the growing backlog of veterans, he discovered that contrary to the “approved” procedure, simply ordering the crutches at intake instead of post operatively allowed him to complete two total knee replacement surgeries as opposed to one. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Holmes was called down to the administrator’s office and directed to cease the streamlined method, as the second manufactured joint was not allotted within the orthopedic surgery budget.

Thus, the question I propose to President Obama; Is health care for our Veterans one of those obligations, or are they subject to trade-offs and negotiations within your definition of a decent society? Save the young future taxpayers not the dead, injured and disfigured ones, is that your mantra Mr. President?

Presumably, his answer would be no, and if this is the case should not the Federal government first fix a system incapable of providing quality care to the approximate 3 million veterans (1% of the total population) in lieu of creating a system in need of caring for an estimated 8.1 million low income or uninsured children?

How can we expect a quality functioning system tasked with serving over double the number of patients to emerge when over the last 79 years the Veterans Administration has not found a working formula to care for those willing to sacrifice their lives in defense of this nation?

How is this in any way decent? How dare this or any other President or Congressional member play on our compassion for our most innocent and fragile members of society, children, when this government has yet to fulfill its promise to care for those willing to sacrifice their lives. Only scoundrels and snake oil salesman can utter such empty promises without shame.

Further, this sick plutocratic plan filled with nothing but the rhetoric of “hope” intends to fund itself via a 62.66 cent increase in the Federal Cigarette Tax⁴. Unfortunately as the government has been busy beating us over the head with how harmful smoking can be while subsidizing tobacco crops for export to 3rd world nations⁵, a funny thing happened, droves of people actually quit smoking.

Thus in order for the government’s promise to fund the sure to balloon cost of SCHIP, our nation will need an additional 22.4 million smokers⁶. Therefore I propose in order to fund  socialized kiddie care, we just kill two birds with one stone. Instead of giving little Timmy and Sally lollipops at the conclusion of their office visit, let the government doctor stick a few Camel Wides into their mouths so they might help puff our way towards a “healthier” communist tomorrow.

Souce(s): ¹CBS News “Veterans Suicides: How We got the Numbers” • ²MSNBC “Hospital Scrutinized Over Veterans’ Deaths” • ³ Bloomberg “U.S. Veterans Denied Helath Care, Retired General Hoar Says” • ⁴American Lung Association “Federal Cigarette Tax About to Become Law” • ⁵News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) “House ready to consider tobacco plan” • ⁶The Sacramento Bee “Another View: I voted against SCHIP bill over its flaws”

*Editor’s Note: Dr. Holmes has since left the VA and formed a charity called the “Kneed Foundation‘. His charity pays the hospital bills of low income and uninsured children in need of orthopedic surgery. Freeing him and his associates to place quality and necessity of care over a need to remain on budget.

Joseph Marohl

Here are some words from Matthew Parris, gay British Conservative, in yesterday’s The Times (UK) on the present financial crisis:

“This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily by complicated credit instruments that it took a while for the market to rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed. The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it’s the correction to a long run of irrational confidence. All that stuff about the emerging Asian giants wasn’t just phrasemaking for party conference speeches. It was true. We’re falling behind. We face a mountain of debt: the difference between the life we are able to sustain and the life we were enjoying.

“Politicians cannot do much to jack up the first. So it falls to them to arrange and explain a reduction in the second. The great task facing the next British government is to help the country to recognise and embrace its fate: that we should get poorer, and slip with as good a grace as possible into the world’s second league. Yes, there is a rebalancing required: a rebalancing of popular expectation.”

Parris’s penchant for bile and outright hatefulness aside, and not so evident here besides, the column raises some pertinent points. The United States and the nations of Europe have not relied on productivity for some time. The idea of actually producing a product has been in decline since World War II. And, Parris points out elsewhere, it’s probably too late to turn back to industrialism and so, needless to say, much too late to return to agrarianism.

I suppose the reason we can not return to an economy based on productivity is that technology today has advanced to the point that inhuman technology can mass produce things more consistently and efficiently than human workers can—a circumstance that has relegated us humans to the role of consumers of what the machines produce for us (sometimes useful and wholesome, sometimes not).

Parris applauds India and China for thrusting ahead of the West in recent decades. In a world divided between venture capitalists with hedge funds and unskilled labor with desperate growling bellies, India with its rigid caste system and China with its totalitarian form of Confucianism have proved to have the traits evolutionarily favorable to survival. The Western democracies, with their quaint embrace of Enlightenment values like education, liberty, and equality and their Romantic obsession with individualism, humanism, and pleasure, have taken a serious fall on the course and can expect to be put out of their misery soon.

I suspect that Parris belongs to the set that blames the laziness of poor people and union members for the present decline. Lord knows, the upper classes have worn themselves out struggling to pull us up on our feet. And all we’ve done in return is clamor for even more liberties, decent health care, affordable living conditions, and equality for everyone. It must be awful for them. And when disaster strikes, they allow us 30 months to pull ourselves up to some measure of prosperity—and then the “free ride” of welfare and charity dries up. And, honestly, what more can they do? There are limits.

Responding to Parris’s column, Andrew Sullivan, British-born American little-c conservative, states on his blog this morning:

“I don’t understand why, after two decades of bubbling our way to phony prosperity through the dotcom chimera and the housing boom, it is somehow a ‘crisis’ that our standard of living is falling. It is surely a good thing that the standard of living is falling. It means that reality is beginning to return. A hangover may be painful but its cure is not a bout of more binging. My fundamental concern with the stimulus is that its spending be focused directly on real investment and immediate demand and that it be swiftly followed by a brutal assault on long-term entitlement and defense spending.

“We need to take a machete to social security and Medicare and a very sharp scalpel to all domestic discretionary spending. And we need to think very hard about big withdrawals of troops in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and about the foreign aid we give Egypt and Israel. Between the boomers at home and the expanding, unending empire abroad, the next generation will have no sane fiscal future unless something is done very very soon.”

I agree. The standard of living should fall—though I might add that it’s in society’s interest to ensure a reasonable bottom. Unless we want cities of slums and even more burgeoning criminal networks and gangs, not to speak of the current “Mad Max” scenarios the American bourgeoisie is currently envisioning, we need to protect, as much as possible, those who have not yet achieved what we regard as an average standard of living.

To the extent that constraints on the poor and the wealthy ought to be fair, if not entirely equitable, I support what some (including Sullivan) demonize as “class warfare.” The prosperous should not continue to go unchecked in their pursuit of even greater prosperity.

I suspect there’s enough blubber on the thighs of CEOs of most mega-gigantic corporations to feed every assembly-line worker. If we can limit welfare moms to 30 months of benefits, we can probably afford to limit Presidential candidates to no more than two residences. Outcries against government restraints on liberties almost never extend to the benefit of poor workers.

It just seems more reasonable to me, if restraint is needed at all, and I would always insist on no unneeded restraints whatsoever, to restrain the powerful, rather than the powerless. To burden further the already powerless is, de facto, to give undeserved, unjust, and unconscionable immunity and privilege to the powerful.