Health Care Reform --- Behemoth Bureaucracy vs. Nimble Entrepreneur

 

|Peter Boettke|How do you want to fight disease and promote better health among yourself, your family, your friends and your neighbors?*
Obamacare_Chart-1  HT: David Hebert---------------------*You can learn a lot about the "vision" conflict evident in this policy reform by revisiting the municipalities debate where Vincent and Elinor Ostrom began their research program in institutional analysis and development.  See part 1 of Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development --- I am linking to the Kindle Edition which is less than $20 and you can join the e-book revolution.  Anyway, there is indeed an "intellectual crisis" in America public administration and public policy analysis, namely the lingering legacy of the 'progressives'.

Related

  • |Peter Boettke|Bad science led to monopoly politics is how Richard Epstein sums it up.If you doubt this, read someone like Herbert David Croly's The Promise of American Life (1909), let alone Woodrow Wilson. Centralization of administration as a means for the rationalization of politics guided by science. 

  • |Peter Boettke|Claudia Williamson has a very good post this morning over at Aid Watch, summarizing the Bloomington School framework applied to the problem of development assistance.  This is actually a must read for anyone studying development economics, and thinking about the political, strategic and institutional implications.

  • |Peter Boettke|In a discussion last night on a talking heads show, the viewer was told that health care is a policy discussion, not a structural change to government.  In short, people should not get so mad, and the hot rhetoric of the debate is evidence of unreasonableness rather than civil discourse.This morning on NPR, I heard that Republicans were finding little loopholes and forcing re-votes based on these.  One of those was related to changes in the federally funded student loan program that was in the health care bill.

  • |Peter Boettke|The Mercatus Center Event - Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development - is available online.  Lin was fantastic, and the breadth and depth of her interests was on full display.

  • |Peter Boettke|

  • I presented the following simple theory to two notable health care commentators last night.  Congressmen are looking to sell their voters for the highest "price" possible and they know Obama really wants, and indeed needs, to win a health care victory.  As health care reform "falls apart," these Congressmen face the risk that they will get nothing for those votes.  Suddenly their cartel falls apart and they lower the price for those votes.  A deal is then possibl

  • |Peter Boettke|Britain and Germany are preparing to cut government spending in an attempt to get their respective public debt under control.  This is at the same time that under our current administration (and intellectual climate) the US seems fixated on becoming more "European" in our public policy direction.What can we learn from Britain and Germany, and if we don't learn will we become Greece?  And even if we do learn, can we avoid being Greece?

  • |Peter Boettke|

  • Let's say you favor one of the health care plans currently under consideration.  Should you believe it would have been easier to switch to your favored plan in, say, 1972 rather than today?  I suspect the answer is yes or maybe even "very yes."  And probably you are stressing the imperative for change now rather than ten years from now.  That strikes me as an internally consistent set of views.

  • She is slated to spend a week or two visiting with us this spring, through the sponsorship of the Mercatus Center.  Pete Boettke and Paul Dragos Alicia just published a book on her thought.

 
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