Politicians guilty for expensive insurance

The Rocky Mountain News published my letter to the editor on Tuesday, May 6 (print scan).

Darla Stuart (Speakout April 22) writes that since “Colorado’s citizens and businesses deserve to know the real cost of the health-care insurance,” politicians should force insurance companies to provide “transparency.” But we really deserve to know how politicians have inflated insurance costs in the first place.

Tax policy encourages employer-based insurance, which essentially chains us to one insurer. Shielded from competition, insurers need not compete on price very much.

State-level bureaucrats succumb to special interests by burdening small-group policies with many benefits we do not need. The Congressional Budget Office reports that such mandated benefits increase premiums by at least six percent [p. 16, 20], and possibly more than ten. It also reports that community rating laws increase premiums by nine percent [p. 16].

What’s becoming increasingly transparent is where allegedly well-intentioned controls like House Bill 1389 will lead: politician-controlled health care and insurance where bureaucrats make decisions that rightfully belong to you and your physician.

Teen minimum wage costs them jobs

Daily Herald, Chicago, April 28, 2008

“Suburban teenagers might have trouble finding summer employment, but some businesses say they fear they’ll have even fewer work opportunities next year.

If an Illinois proposal to make the teenage minimum wage equal to adults’ pay becomes law, teen-friendly businesses may slice hours or give their 15- to-17-year-old workers the boot.” …

York Theatre in Elmhurst also would be forced to downsize its 40-person staff of mostly high-schoolers if the higher wages became law.

“Being a family-run company, there’s not a whole lot in the budget for payroll,” said Trevor Murakami, general manager of York Theatre.

See also this editorial in the Investors Business Daily:

As a basic point of economics, it’s a given that anytime you raise the cost of anything, you will use less of it. As such, the minimum wage hike that took effect in Massachusetts this year has been a job-killer for thousands of untrained youths, many of them minorities.

We’re not the only ones to see this, by the way.