Regulatory Fascism, Obamacare Style

NRO points out the obvious (which of course escapes all of our noble watchdogs in the Media). Sadly this sort of cynical rent seeking behavior goes on every day in America, and if you're not big and politically important, you get screwed.  We need to organize governance around systems that do not require constant regulatory intervention and 'exemptions' and manipulation.  They are simply tools for rent seekers.   The government has far too many knobs and dials that it can manipulate.  Knobs and dials that keep the ship of state constantly careening from one extreme to another.  Nobody but the lawyers profit from it.  One of the benefits of pushing things down to the states is that being smaller and simpler, they wouldn't be able to screw with as many things.  And if they did cause chaos, their citizens could simple decamp across the border.  It is this government accountability that is sadly lacking in our Federal behemoth and is why I constantly say:  break it (the Federal Government's central regulatory and taxing role in our lives), break it all up (and let the states handle these things).

One of the problems with massive, complicated government regulations is that they create a lot of room for regulator discretion, and therefore a lot of room for unequal treatment of different players in the market. Many opponents of Obamacare argued before the legislation was enacted that it would do just that throughout the healthcare sector—would empower the federal government to pick favorites rather than allowing for simple uniform rules that enable the kind of competition and consumer choice that can actually help control costs.

We can already see this happening in practice, even long before most of Obamacare’s most significant rules and regulations go into effect. The Department of Health and Human Servicesannounced yesterday that 30 corporations (including McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, and a New York teachers’ union) would receive exemptions from a rule that would have required them to raise the minimum annual benefit in their employee insurance plans.

The exemptions themselves are good news, since the rule would have forced these companies to drop their employee coverage, leaving almost a million workers without the insurance they had before Obamacare. But it means that these companies now need permission from the administration to offer their employees a benefit they have offered for years. And of course, many other companies—those without the lobbying operation of a company the size of McDonald’s, or without the access to liberal policymakers that a NY teachers’ union  has—can’t get the same permission, and so can’t compete on a level playing field, or offer coverage that might entice the best qualified people to work for them. This kind of government by whim, and not by law, is the essence of the regulatory state. We are about to see a whole lot more of it—unless the health-care law enacted in March is repealed.