The private military contractor Blackwater “has sent a
private sector warship equipped with helicopters to the Gulf of Aden, and is
offering its services to shipowners concerned with Somali piracy. “
Blackwater Worldwide executive vice-president Bill Matthews
said: “We have been contacted by shipowners who say they need our help in
making sure goods get to their destination. The McArthur can help us accomplish
that.”
I have no comment, other than to ask this:
Why is it that I hand over 50% of my income to the
government and submit to humiliating violations of my privacy on a regular
basis, and it can’t even perform the one role it is constitutionally authorized
to do? Why is a private company with a
single ship able to do what the worlds superpowers, with their massive budgets
and huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons cannot?
Are they even pretending to “defend our freedoms” or is mindless repetition
of that phrase enough to fool the masses into surrendering theirs?
When arguing against the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act last year, I wrote
If discrimination based on comprehensive genetic screening is legal, we can expect health providers to tailor plans according to our individual risk factors. That might be to the disadvantage of a minority of high-risk individuals, but greater information about risk factors will lower uncertainty, and thus lower rates overall. Furthermore, insurers will offer incentives to people who take proactive steps to discover health risks and take steps to alleviate them. Expensive procedures such as frequent biopsies or preemptive removal of organs might be fully covered for individuals whose genetic profiles uncover a high cancer risk.
Unfortunately, Congress did not heed my arguments, and banned genetic discrimination anyway. It is now illegal for health insurers to take genetic factors into consideration when setting premiums. What effect do you think the law had on the incentive of insurance companies to pay for their customer’s genetic screening?
If the goal of the law was to encourage genetic screening, it clearly had the opposite effect. In response, celebrities are now “fighting for women to have access to MRIs and genetic testing.” Having coerced insurance companies to ignore the results of genetic testing, people now want to coerce them to pay for it.
Do you think that people who find out that they have a higher probability of having an illness with genetic factors would be more likely to purchase more health insurance than individuals with a low probability of genetic illness? As I wrote last year,
It does not take an economist to predict that rates would immediately rise, as healthy people, refusing to pay for their neighbor's health risks, stopped using insurance altogether. As the young and healthy jump ship, insurance companies would have to increase rates, accelerating the trend. Without further government interference, the health insurance business would disappear completely, shortly after millionaires on their deathbeds became the only people able to afford policies.
Are you still wondering why healthcare is so expensive in the U.S.?