The Unbroken Window

We examine whether and to what extent consolidation in the U.S. health insurance industry is leading to higher employer-sponsored insurance premiums. We make use of a proprietary, panel dataset of employer-sponsored healthplans enrolling over 10 million Americans annually between 1998 and 2006 to explore the relationship between premium growth and changes in market concentration. We [...]

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I don’t care about whether we balance the budget (federally or state or locally). Is it better to live in a world where the President and Congress run a $0 deficit, but are spending $4 trillion of other people’s money every year? Or is it better to live in a world where the President and [...]

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Mississippi. Did you know that the PPP adjusted output per person in Mississippi, the “poorest” state in the United States, would rank it just about equal to the output per person in France? And similarly, Mississippi is richer than places like Italy and Spain. And you can even visit Mississippi for a fraction of the [...]

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In the last election, DC went 92% for President Obama. And the conventional wisdom is that DC is largely populated by trend, progressive-minded cosmopolitan folks. If this is indeed true (and I think it is), then why is it that DC seems to be as racially segregated as any other city in the US? See [...]

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Rent-seeking is the new venture capital model, Kleiner Perkins managing partner Ray Lane explained to an electric car-conference here Wednesday. In an extraordinary speech, Lane laid out how market socialism can guarantee profits for politically connected VC firms like Kleiner — far more preferable to the old model of “throwing a dart at a dart [...]

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… is that they sometimes kill their prey. Gov. David Paterson warned Thursday that New York could lose $1 billion under the Obama administration’s decision to cut executive pay at seven companies that received federal bailout money. “I’m not going to defend the people who run these companies,” Paterson said. “They frittered a lot of [...]

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… we celebrate the passing of legitimacy and the rule of law here in America. Next, every pharmaceutical, hospital and insurance executive in the nation was held out as a prime obstacle to health-care nirvana. And that was their reward for cooperating. When Humana warned customers about cuts to Medicare under “reform,” the White House [...]

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Sorry to post so many links, but some are too good to pass up: Lack of competition has lulled Democrats into a complacency that borders on corruption. In recent years, two of the signature achievements of the New York City Council have been orchestrating a massive fraud against taxpayers by allocating money to phony nonprofits [...]

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Last week, several sites linked to this article in the NY Times discussing how Saudi Arabia hopes the be compensated for their losses if the world moves away from oil. I suspect many of you would find this laughable, and that was the intent of those links. However, before you chuckle too hard at the [...]

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Perhaps I’ll honor Henry Hazlitt with this series. Here was Hazlitt’s Economic lesson: The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. What is [...]

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