By making them unemployed.

This year, it’s harder than ever for teens to find a summer job. Researchers at Northeastern University described summer 2007 as “the worst in post-World War II history” for teen summer employment, and those same researchers say that 2008 is poised to be “even worse.”

According to their data, only about one-third of Americans 16 to 19 years old will have a job this summer, and vulnerable low-income and minority teens are going to fare even worse.

Minimum wage is a really bad idea. Its built off the assumption that entry level positions should be able to support a person. The problem is that the value a minimum wage position offers an employer is not valuable enough to justify the cost of supporting the employee. As a consequence, using the states monopoly on coercion to forcibly regulate the cost of labor in these positions forces employees to eliminate these positions to avoid a loss in value.

This really is a perfect example of how liberal regulation to ‘help the poor’ actually hurts the poor. Just think, liberals want to regulate health care to help the poor. I’m sure that will end well.

Apparently the universal health coverage in Massachusetts in costing more than predicted.

The subsidized insurance program at the heart of the state’s healthcare initiative is expected to roughly double in size and expense over the next three years - an unexpected level of growth that could cost state taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars or force the state to scale back its ambitions.

State projections obtained by the Globe show the program reaching 342,000 people and $1.35 billion in annual expenses by June 2011. Those figures would far outstrip the original plans for the Commonwealth Care program . . .

The state has asked the federal government to shoulder roughly half of the program’s cost from 2009 through 2011, but there is no guarantee of that funding.

“The state alone cannot support that kind of spending increase,” said Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a business-funded budget watchdog group.

The best part is that the state bureaucrats are trying to find a way to get the Federal government to pay for their predictable miscalculation. Apparently I should pay for free health care for the citizens of Massachusetts. Sigh. It gets old people wanting to use the state’s coercion to force me to subsidize their unattainable attempt at Utopia. In high school their should be a mandatory course on learning about how incompetent the state is just so our children can learn how unwise it is to use the state as the solution for any thing. It could come between a Biology course, forcing scientific value on our children, and a course on Intelligent design, forcing religious values on our children.

If we just teach our children the values of distrust and contempt for the state, this country would be so much better. It would extra super duper better.

Worse idea ever?

It’s exactly the same situation as if we charge a 25-year-old the same amount for a year’s term life insurance as we charge his 75-year-old grandfather: it may make the insurance more affordable for Granddad, but it does so by overcharging young Elmo. Add in the “mandate,” so Elmo can’t opt out, and we have a universal care plan that forces Elmo to pay for services he doesn’t get so that Granddad can pay less for the services he gets. But it’s “voluntary” — you get to pick your insurance plan to some extent — and it’s not “tax-supported” because you are just paying the insurance company directly.

Except for the cost of administering the plan itself, and the wages they take through a garnishee if I don’t “volunteer.”

So in this mandated universal coverage plan, the government comes and makes me give someone money so it can be distributed to other people, and I don’t have any choice about participating. Where I come from, we call that a “tax.”

Whatever it is, it ain’t insurance.

More on the worst idea ever:

But this is not true. We force everyone to pay into fire departments because fires have very bad negative externalities: if your house catches on fire, unless you live on a rural farm, there’s a good chance that your neighbor’s house will burn down too. Fire prevention is a genuine public good; most health care, with the exception of things meant to stop the spread of infectious disease, simply isn’t.

One can make a modestly compelling moral hazard argument for a mandate–people will be tempted to free ride on the rest of us, knowing that we won’t deny them health care in extremis, so the only thing to do is make them pay up front. But I’m persistently disturbed by the notion that most of our fellow citizens are intellectual children who need to be forced to do what is good for them even at massive cost to their liberty, and ours.

Recently Darwin responded to a post of mine on health care.

I don’t want drug companies to make less money off of their inventions. I want this country to spend the same amount on universal healthcare as it does on the current system. We can spend the same amount of money, give the corporations the same amont of profit for their innovations, and still provide better care to more people, for several reasons:

You suggest that the state pays the pharmaceutical companies the amount that they would of made had the state not monopolized the market. The problem: how does one determine the profit for future drugs. With out a market system in play your bureaucrats and experts will no longer have any actual data available to them to determine the price of new drugs. As the years go by under universal healthcare, the less information experts and bureaucrats will have about actual prices and have to ‘determine’ price. Given the nature of politics it would be VIRTUALLY impossible for price determination to not become political.

Before I would even consider universal health care you would have to convince me how price determination would never become political. I would argue it’s impossible. As one drifts farther away from the markets the more difficult it becomes to not rely on politics to determine price and once you reach a certain threshold, all pricing becomes political. Seriously you should examine the hundreds of failed attempts of the last century of price control. It never works.

The drug companies could produce ten times the amount of pills they are making now for only a very small increase in their overhead costs, because most of the costs are in development, not production. The only reason for them to produce less is so they can cahrge more, followingthe classic supply and demand formula. If the government just pays them a lump sum (the same amoutn they’d make under the current system) to produce as many pills as are actually needed, they’d still have just as much incentive to invent new products, but everyone could benefit from them much more quickly.

This proposal still has the problem of delineating how price is determined once the information of the free markets is no longer available.

Pharmaceutical companies that enjoy the rights to exclusively sell a drug do not have to under produce to increase revenue. They simply charge more money because the state has granted them a monopoly on production. To this end they probably produce as much of the drug as necessary to supply those willing to pay the price. The exorbitant price reflects the high cost of research and development of the drug. As someone that does research you should know first hand how much highly educated people, equipment, and resource cost to do research. This cost must be rolled into the cost of the drug otherwise the company goes out of business. Plus the company needs to turn a profit, yes so that dividends can be paid to the stockholders, but also to reinvest a large portion into the development of future drugs.

2. A huge amount of the money currently going into the healtchare system pays for HMO’s, which are for-profit middlemen who are completely unneccesary to the actual healthcare process. If take them out of the picture, we can give that money to researchers and doctors, and provide even more incentive than we have now.

I have no idea what percent of health care goes towards HMO. I have no problem eliminating middle man to bring down the cost of health care. You know what won’t eliminate the middle man from health care? State sponsored health care. How can you be so blind as to fail to see how universal health care will create an entire army of bureaucrats whose job will not essential to health care but necessary to make the system work. What’s worse is that by monopolizing health care, the state will feel no competitive force to reduce this bureaucratic staff. Like many social program it will become a ever aggrandizing bureaucratic beast consuming more and more of the GDP. If you honestly want to reduce the cost of middle men in health care you would not aver the state as the solution.

On a personal note, Ana is currently not going to a doctor to get her joint problems looked at, because if tehy find any type of condition, no matter how treatable it is, she can never get health insurance again. More generally, doctors routinely discourage people from getting tested for AIDS, because insurance companies will decline them or raise their rates just for getting tested (even if teh test is negative).

You sound like an idiot stating that no matter what the condition the insurance companies will refuse to treat Ana for the rest of her entire life. It could turn out that she has no condition and in that instance it’s seems very likely she would find health care rather easily. The larger point you are trying to make is that a certain segment of the population will be afflicted with a condition that will preclude them from health insurance.

This is no doubt a tragic outcome. Fortunately people like you are free to set up a charitable foundation in which you and other like minded people can pool your resources together to pay for the medical treatment of those unable to find insurance companies willing to distribute the treatment cost to other policy holders. In fact because I trust you, I would be willing to donate some of my money towards your charity. Let me know when you have it set up.

It seems wise that insurance companies raise rates when one gets themselves checked for HIV. Willingly being checked for HIV implies a riskier lifestyle increasing the probability of increased medical expenses down the road as compared to those that live a more tamer lifestyle. It makes sense that insurance companies hedge their bets by increasing your rates to offset the increase cost you pose to the other policy holders and the company in general.

Why should people that explicitly chose safer lifestyles to avoid expensive health care be forced to pay for those that have selected a riskier lifestyle? Why should risk taking people be allowed to throw off the mantle of responsibility for their choices just because they don’t want to assume the cost of that risk today? You advocate that companies that externalize costs by dumping pollution into the river should be forced to pay for that cost. Why do you give a free pass to those that wish to externalize their healthcare costs to others?

Otherwise, I’m in favor of aan intelligently-design government solution; something has to change, fast.

Never thought I would see the day you would embrace intelligent design. People can change after all.

I have seen some ads by Hilary Clinton and she seems genuinely interested in universal health care. I really can’t state how much this scares me. I think I can honestly say that if given a choice between letting one of our cities be nuked by terrorists or implementing universal health care I would prefer the incineration of one of our cities. Even if I was in that city.

Universal health care is arguably the worst political idea out there. It’s worse then arguments for teaching intelligent design alongside evolution. Its worse then hamstringing the economy to prevent global warming. Its worse than restricting federal funding on stem cell research. Its worse than creating out of thin air the constitutional right to slice and dice a fetus. And its just a tad worse than a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage, but only by the slightest of margins.

It would be the worst legislation passed in my lifetime.

It so simple and basic. Innovation comes from competition. Government must have a monopoly on coercion which eliminates competition. Thus, there will be no innovation in health care if the government supplies it.

I don’t understand how so many intelligent and wise democrats, including Hillary, can be so foolish to not realize that state controlled health care will lead to much more suffering especially for poor people. How many more times does humanity have to learn the follies of government control before it gains the wisdom that giving people economic freedom leads to more wealth and happiness for all, especially the poor?

When will the immutable law that capitalism’s competition generates massive amounts of wealth be understood as common sense in the same capacity that force equals mass multiplied by acceleration or that man evolved from apes? Among the so called educated there is no politicking about basic physical or biological axioms so why should there be debate about basic economic axioms?

Here is an economic axiom whose time for embracement as common sense has come:

Capitalism generates the competition needed for invention and innovation which in turn generates wealth for the poor.

Man evolved from apes. Force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration. And capitalism creates wealth for the poor.

Educated democrats should recognize that keeping health care in the hands of capitalism will provide the poor with more wealth in health care than any state program could dream of. Those that would suggest otherwise should be treated with the same mockery and derision that evolution denying Christians receive.

This article goes into excellent detail about health care and how future technology will make Universal health care obsolete.

Statins end up very cheap for much the same reason that cholesterol did: there are huge economies of scale in farming cows for milk and fungi for statins, or in brewing up synthetic versions of almost anything. But it takes a delicate choreography of patent-protected monopoly and cutthroat competition to get the innovation first and the rock-bottom prices later. At present, the front end is financed mainly by the United States. Drug companies introduce most new drugs here first, and affluent Americans pay premium prices while the patents last. Less affluent Americans, along with public and private insurers in the United States, Britain, Canada, and the rest of the developed world, get a sharply discounted ride on their economic coattails. Three-dollar statins in New York in 1996 get 30-cent statins to London in 2006 and three-cent statins to Kuala Lumpur a few years later.

Governments are impatient, however, especially when they have promised to supply what they can’t possibly afford but can readily seize. The promise of universal care implies state-of-the-art care, so governments’ principal response has been to skip straight to the three-cent pill. In the developing world, the authorities just fail to notice when pirates manufacture knockoffs. Most developed countries have gone halfway there, by instituting a monopoly buyer to bargain against the monopoly patent. Some members of Congress want to let U.S. patients order drugs from Canadian pharmacies, so that Ottawa will bargain with Pfizer on behalf of the poor in Oshkosh. Others want to set Washington up as the monopoly buying agent for all drugs that it pays for.

Drug companies, however, are quite smart enough not to develop three-dollar pills for three-cent buyers. Collectively, these price-depressing strategies already make it unprofitable to pursue many drugs that treat rare diseases, and drugs for all but the most common diseases earn most of their profit in the unregulated U.S. market. From Big Pharma’s perspective, we are now about half a country away—the rich-America half—from making most diseases too thrifty to bother with. Wherever it’s implemented, every new scheme to undercut the value of an existing patent lowers the incentive to discover new drugs. Every such scheme sacrifices long-term global health for short-term political gain. Every last one of them is ice cream today, and never mind about tomorrow.

My left leaning readers should get in line at the tobacco store to play their part in providing infrastructure for poor kids.

Smoke it up.

Here is his video response to Hillary Clinton’s universal health care.