The Conflict of Interest in a Silent Oligarchy Being Engaged in Its Public Policy

Goldman Sachs, which had played a role in enabling Greece to hide its public debt, urged investors in March of 2010 to buy shares in two big health insurance companies, UnitedHealth Group and Cigna. The reason: their rates were sharply up and competition was down. According to The New York Times, the White House claimed, “ the Goldman Sachs analysis shows that while insurers can be aggressive in raising prices, they also walk away from clients because competition in the industry is so weak.”[1] Rate increases ran as high as 50 percent, with most in “the low- to mid-teens” — far higher than overall inflation. 

The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

1. David Herszenhorn, “Obama Wields Analysis of Insurers in Health Battle,” The New York Times, March 6, 2010.

Regulating Commerce by Mandate: The Death of American Federalism?

The mandate to buy health-insurance may be an unconstitutional encroachment of the U.S. Government onto the liberty of its citizens. Furthermore, the rigid federal rules in the health-insurance reform law of 2010 may represent yet another way by which the state governments have been rendered servile in begging Washington for breathing room in a domain that may be rightly theirs, constitutionally (i.e., beyond the enumerated powers assigned to the U.S. Government). The bigger story in this jurdical piece on healthcare is perhaps whether American federalism itself was finally being extirpated and expunged in favor of consolidation. 

The full essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires.