Tag Archives: Heritage Foundation

What I’m Reading, April 2, 2014

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By Saffron Blaze (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsConservatives to women: Lean back, Dana Milbank, Washington Post, March 31, 2014

The conservative minds of the Heritage Foundation have found a way for Republicans to shrink the gender gap: They need to persuade more women to get their MRS degrees.

The advocacy group held a gathering of women of the right Monday afternoon to mark the final day of Women’s History Month — and the consensus was that women ought to go back in history. If Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s mantra is “lean in,” these women were proposing that women lean back: get married, take care of kids and let men earn the wages.

Paul Ryan’s April Fool’s joke, Steve Benen, MSNBC, April 1, 2014

Unlike most years, there’s no real point to the House and Senate Budget Committees presenting budget blueprints this year. Federal spending levels for this fiscal year and the next were already established in an agreement that was approved months ago.

But House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) today unveiled a 99-page document (pdf) anyway, not because he had to but because he wanted to. This is a political exercise, intended to make an election-year point. That’s not intended as criticism, per se – political exercises in election years are hardly outrageous – but it’s important to realize this is more of a Republican fantasy. There’s no pretense that this will actually become the nation’s budget.

Obamacare: Will The Haters Ever Stop Hating?, The Economist, April 1, 2014

Before it will be judged a historic success, Obamacare has more hurdles to clear (Charles Ornstein lays out a few). But the catastrophic-failure scenario envisioned by the ACA’s critics, in which low enrollment composed of disproportionately sick people leads to premium hikes and an adverse-selection “death spiral”, now seems unlikely (though it isn’t entirely out of the question, as our health-care correspondent writes). The solid enrollment is all the more striking given that Republican states have largely rejected the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid, and many Republicans and well-funded conservative groups (like the one that brought me that irritating ad) have fought implementation tooth and nail. Indeed, surging enrollment has spooked a number of Republicans into claiming that the registration numbers aren’t real.

Photo credit: By Saffron Blaze (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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That Other Time the Heritage Foundation Advocated for Affordable Health Care

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Khan approaching and looking at me

The inventory of Creative Commons images in a search for “Heritage Foundation” is rather small, so this is a picture of a jaguar named Khan from the Wildlife Heritage Foundation. How do you not include a picture of a Jaguar named Khan?

The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has been on the front lines of recent opposition to the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a “Obamacare”). It has not always been so opposed to aspects of the law like the individual insurance mandate, as it rather strongly supported such an idea way back in 1989. As it turns out, its support for various parts of the ACA was in evidence much more recently.

The “universal health care” that many Republicans have recently touted is formally known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) of 1986. In short, EMTALA states that hospitals accepting payment from federal programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, cannot deny treatment to a person due to inability to pay or insufficient insurance coverage, if that person is experiencing an acute medical emergency. The government does not directly cover the costs of care required by EMTALA, meaning that the costs either get unloaded as tax write-offs for bad debt, or they are covered by higher hospital costs charged to other patients and private insurers. EMTALA had the best of intentions, but it has had the effect of shifting the costs onto other private actors, not the public. Although the Tea Party has tried, no one has ever seriously argued in recent years that people should not have access to acute care because of a lack of ability to pay. It’s a fundamental human decency thing, at least in my opinion.

The Heritage Foundation generally agreed with these sentiments, i.e. that EMTALA had good intentions but caused many problems, as recently as 2007, and their analysis and recommendations included features now found in the Affordable Care—sorry, Obamacare that they so vehemently oppose all of a sudden. Back in July 2007, John S. O’Shea, M.D., a Health Policy Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies, wrote the following:

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) is another example of federal legislation that hurts the very people that it was meant to protect: low-income patients in need of emergency medical services. Enacted in 1986, the law is a con­gressional response to well-publicized cases in which patients were refused immediate medical treatment based on their inability to pay. Continue reading →

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That Time the Heritage Foundation Promoted the Individual Mandate, Citing “an Implicit Contract Between Households and Society”

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Stuart Butler publicity shotIf you have the means to purchase insurance for yourself, but refuse to do so because freedom, the taxpayers of the U.S. will  foot the bill to treat you for catastrophic injuries, because we are fundamentally a decent people. Don’t take my word for it, though. The Heritage Foundation said so back in 1989, when its Director of Domestic Policy Studies, Stuart M. Butler, Ph.D., promoted the idea of an individual health insurance mandate:

Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seatbelts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement. This mandate is based on two important principles. First, that health care protection is a responsibility of individuals, not businesses. Thus to the extent that anybody should be required to provide coverage to a family, the household mandate assumes that it is the family that carries the first responsibility. Second, it assumes that there is an implicit contract between households and society, based on the notion that health insurance is not like other forms of insurance protection. If a young man wrecks his Porsche and has not had the foresight to obtain insurance, we may commiserate but society feels no obligation to repair his car. But health care is different. If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street, Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance. If we find that he has spent his money on other things rather than insurance, we may be angry but we will not deny him services – even if that means more prudent citizens end up paying the tab. A mandate on individuals recognizes this implicit contract. Society does feel a moral obligation to insure that its citizens do not suffer from the unavailability of health care. But on the other hand, each household has the obligation, to the extent it is able, to avoid placing demands on society by protecting itself.

(Emphasis added.)

Here’s a PDF copy of the lecture (source), in case the HTML page goes away.

Photo credit: By Stuart Butler [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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