Correction, please!

Mandates & Medical Costs

ITEM: The August 21st USA Today declared, "Finger pointers [who] can't settle on who's to blame for health costs" aimed in all directions. "Patients and employers should not expect relief from rising costs anytime soon. The blame game is heating up because no one really has an answer on how to slow the increase."

CORRECTION: Let's think how costs might be contained. Perhaps more health care decisions might be returned to individual Americans operating in a competitive free market with less government interference. If the government or other third parties provided, say, free or subsidized automobiles, no doubt there would soon be a "car crisis."

Some factors driving up demand simply involve human nature -- such as wanting something for nothing, or calling for the latest well-publicized treatment. Spending on health care is growing rapidly, says the Cincinnati Business Courier, "as new drugs and technologies become available, more people use more services and hospitals and physicians demand better pay from insurers. 'We seem to have this insatiable appetite for care and coverage,' said Doug Miller, vice president at Horan Associates, an insurance brokerage. 'And as long as someone else is paying for it, the price goes up.'"

Advances in technologies and pharmaceuticals often do cost more. But government particularly drives increases, as shown in a recent study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. For example, there are over 1,500 mandated benefits at the state and federal level, with more looming. "Man dates increased 25-fold over the period 1970-1996, an average annual growth of more than 15 percent."

Mandates and regulations alone represent $10 billion of the overall increase in health premiums -- yet another indication of the expense of supposedly free benefits.

A Case of the Vapors

ITEM: "A scientific consensus has formed," reported the New York Times for August 18th, "that greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping emissions released by automobiles, power plants and industrial factories -- are causing the average temperature to increase, setting off environmental reactions ranging from rising water levels to droughts."

CORRECTION: There is quite a bit of dispute about the presumed indisputable assertions handed down as fact by the Times. For example, Dr. Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served on the National Academy of Sciences panel on climate change often cited by global-warming enthusiasts, has repeatedly pointed out that there is no unanimity on this subject. As he said of the 2001 NAS study, there was a range of views in the full report, which made it clear "that there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them."

In contrast to less accurate surface temperature recordings, which fluctuated during the last century, more telling measurements since 1979 have involved satellites across the entire globe. By this standard, even the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledged there has been an average temperature increase of only 0.05[degrees] C over 10 years -- zero change, statistically.

Bailing Out Brazil

ITEM: A $30 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund "could help Brazil ride out turbulence," ran the headline on an official Xinhua agency article in the August 20th China Daily. With "the IMF credit, which was much larger than expected, investors took the view Brazil is now saved from turning into another Argentina, Brazil's southern neighbour which is in the grip of its worst economic crisis in memory."

ITEM: Brazil, reported USA Today for August 20th, "is the only Latin nation with the economic and political heft to drag the continent down with it.... That's why President Bush reversed his no-bailouts policy and got behind a $30 billion International Monetary Fund rescue extended to Brazil...."

CORRECTION: Putting American taxpayers on the hook to rescue big banks shouldn't earn acclaim. As the congressional Meltzer Commission correctly concluded: "The IMF creates disincentives for debt resolution when it lends to insolvent sovereign borrowers."

That aid does not work should not be surprising to the Bush administration. Many of its officials previously berated bailouts during the Clinton years for Mexico, Russia, Thailand, Argentina, and, yes, Brazil. Despite its self-defeating policies, Brazil repeatedly is rewarded. In addition to the latest U.S.-backed IMF aid, it will pick up $7 billion more from the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank; it also got $41 billion in 1998 and $15 billion last year.

Who would make such seemingly irrational loans? International bankers who don't have to risk their own money, that's who. Large U.S. institutions with a significant Brazilian exposure include J.P. Morgan Chase, FleetBoston Financial and Citigroup, where President Clinton's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is now a director. While in office, Rubin finagled bailouts for Russia, Mexico, and other problem nations.