The San Francisco Bay Area is, of course, a Mecca of American left liberalism. \u00a0But unnoticed throughout the rest of the nation, it is also nurturing ground for free-market intellectuals and home to two major institutions for free-market economic and political thought, the Hoover Institution and the Pacific Research Institute.<\/p>\n
On Friday night former presidential candidate, flat tax advocate, author, magazine publisher, and now Internet entrepreneur Steve Forbes addressed the annual dinner of the Pacific Research Institute (which I chair).<\/p>\n
In the heart of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi\u2019s congressional district, Forbes spoke to the kind of excited, applauding crowd that normally gathers only in campaign season. If you haven\u2019t seen him at a podium lately, this was a different man from the wooden nerd of the 1996 and 2000 presidential primary trails. \u00a0He was witty, wry, animated, even, I hesitate to say this, fiery. \u00a0He scorned the economic thinking of the Obama administration and was hardly more complimentary of the financial-crisis performance of the Bush Administration during its last year.<\/p>\n
And he pushed national discussion on the president\u2019s health overhaul plans a step beyond where it has so far been. \u00a0He urged rejection of a \u201cBrezhnev Doctrine\u201d for the social democratic upheaval that the Speaker and President have embraced.<\/p>\n
If either a forthright or masked government seizure of the health markets becomes law, he said, conservatives should not accept it — \u201cBrezhnev Doctrine\u201d-style \u2013 as a permanent thing. In the 1980s, he recalled, Thatcher rolled back supposedly invincible union domination of the British economy. \u00a0And Reagan ended with victory the supposedly permanent Cold War with the Soviets. \u00a0If the current plan passes, we can and should make the 2010 mid-term elections a referendum on overturning it.<\/p>\n
And we can win, he said. Forbes cited polls that show the public doesn\u2019t want the plan any more than it wanted similarly modeled catastrophic care for the elderly that Congress adopted in the late 1980s and repealed a year later. \u00a0Following enactment of that program, angry crowds of senior citizens chased then Ways and Means chair Dan Rostenkowski down the streets of Chicago. They were enraged at the cost and limits the plan imposed on them. \u00a0We are seeing the same opposition arise again, only earlier.<\/p>\n
What Forbes did not say was that it is an old rule of politics: you can\u2019t fight something with nothing. \u00a0This is surely why the Administration and its allies have repeated like a mantra that all their opponents can offer is \u201cno.\u201d \u00a0It is a smart strategy, if only because the president has a couple of hundred IQ points on the media that has so worshipfully covered him. \u00a0For if the mainstream media were anything but brain dead, the ploy would have crashed on launching.<\/p>\n
They would only need to visit the free market think tanks of the Bay Area to understand alternatives. \u00a0For nearly two decades the Bay Area has been a center of creative and insightful thinking on health reform. \u00a0Take just a couple of examples:<\/p>\n
Pipes has also been a leader in developing alternatives. As she put it in her book, The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care<\/em> (for a free download or to purchase the book, click http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/6rzagq),<\/span><\/a> \u201cIf we want to bring costs down and extend coverage to more Americans, we have to open the health care marketplace to competition — by abolishing costly government regulations and reforming the tax code to make insurance more affordable. We can solve the health care problems that plague the United States. \u00a0But we won’t solve them if we continue to believe the many myths that plague the health care debate.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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- Hoover Institution economists John Cogan and Daniel Kessler:<\/span> In their 2005 now-classic Healthy, Wealthy and Wise<\/em> (available from Amazon here: http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/yhk46x8<\/span><\/a> ), these nationally known economists and experts on the federal budget laid out (together with Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia University Business School) a similar plan for reform. \u00a0Included in their check list: 1) equalizing tax treatment for individuals and companies, so individuals aren\u2019t penalized for buying insurance on their own, 2) ending state mandates that drive up the cost of health insurance (Note: in the current New Jersey gubernatorial campaign, the GOP candidate has embraced this position, NJ being one of the nation\u2019s most mandate shackled states. \u00a0The incumbent Democrat is pounding him, saying he wants to end mammograms for mothers. \u00a0All health policies sold in NJ must include mammogram coverage, no matter who is covered. \u00a0So the GOP candidate\u2019s reply should be, \u201cNot for mothers; they\u2019ll keep their choice. I want to end mammograms for fathers, for which we all pay now.\u201d); 3) medical malpractice reform.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n