Peter Orszag was President Obama’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Like many high-ramking Democrats, he landed on his feet as Vice Chairman of Citibank. He also writes a very good column for Bloomberg View.
His latest column discusses financial incentives to quit smoking. Unfortunately, it ignores an obvious challenge to the thesis he supports: That poor people can be paid to quit smoking.
Read the entire entry at NCPA's Health Policy Blog.
Research and commentary from a former senior executive in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
Showing posts with label tobacco tax. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tobacco tax. Show all posts
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Monday, July 20, 2009
SCHIP's Race to the Bottom
The New York Times reports that 13 states have sought to bail out out their public-health bureaucracies by raiding taxpayers in the 37 other states. They have marched to the trough to take advantage of the SCHIP expansion signed by President Obama soon after he took office. (The newspaper didn't quite put it like that.)
SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program), of course, creates a "race to the bottom" of government dependency because a state has to spend its own taxpayers' money to "prime the pump" that fills the trough with federal dollars. One silver lining to the cloud of recession is that most states simply do not have access to enough of their own taxpayers' funds to execute this raid.
We can all be thankful.
SCHIP expansion is popular, because it's "for the kids" and the expansion is primarilly financed by taxes on smokers. What the NY Times neglects to note is that SCHIP crowds out private coverage by at least 56%, which will get even worse as states enrol kids from higher-income households, as I've discussed before.
Furthermore, the Wall Street Journal notes a side effect of Government's unhealthy addiction to tobacco taxes - violent crime as states "go to war" on cigarette smuggling (which would not exist without discriminatory taxation).
We are effectively in an era of neo-prohibition, where governments' demonize smokers' peaceful habit in order to seize their earnings to fund a state take-over of children's access to medical services.
SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program), of course, creates a "race to the bottom" of government dependency because a state has to spend its own taxpayers' money to "prime the pump" that fills the trough with federal dollars. One silver lining to the cloud of recession is that most states simply do not have access to enough of their own taxpayers' funds to execute this raid.
We can all be thankful.
SCHIP expansion is popular, because it's "for the kids" and the expansion is primarilly financed by taxes on smokers. What the NY Times neglects to note is that SCHIP crowds out private coverage by at least 56%, which will get even worse as states enrol kids from higher-income households, as I've discussed before.
Furthermore, the Wall Street Journal notes a side effect of Government's unhealthy addiction to tobacco taxes - violent crime as states "go to war" on cigarette smuggling (which would not exist without discriminatory taxation).
We are effectively in an era of neo-prohibition, where governments' demonize smokers' peaceful habit in order to seize their earnings to fund a state take-over of children's access to medical services.
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