Laughing at Avik Roy on News Hour.

Avik Roy was featured on PBS' News Hour, talking about the status of healthcare insurance, and offered some choice quotes worth tackling.  Rather, he piled on the bullshit so high, I felt compelled to point out how ridiculous his assertions were.

"I do share the goal and I think a lot of conservatives do share the goal that a basic safety net that does provide basic health care for everyone is an attractive and worthy goal."

Uh huh.  Doesn't that sound like a Compassionate Conservative, stuck in his own cognitive dissonance?  For now, just remember that he supports a basic safety net, and I'll revisit this quote to show how he explicitly contradicts himself.

"The question becomes when you create a system that disincentivizes people from being economically productive."

That's a silly exaggeration of the Laffer Curve.  Do you know of any person who deliberately quit working to take advantage of Medicaid?  For starters, Medicaid rolls are limited in number, so not everyone who qualify for Medicaid are able to get into Medicaid. Quitting your job to get into Medicaid is a massive risk.

To directly apply this to the ACA: How stupid would you have to be, to quit your job or find a lower-paying job, to qualify for federal subsidies?  The subsidy is scaled so that you pay a maximum percentage of your income towards healthcare insurance, so getting a lower-paying job has no effect on your after-insurance income.

"The [ACA] in general is largely redistributed, but in the wrong direction and in an unfair direction."

So, what's the point of pooled insurance, if you receive exactly the share that you put into the system?  Why therefore, don't we just require people to put money away into a special medical savings account?  The obvious answer is, that the people who end up being the sickest, won't be able to keep up with their expenses, and therefore is no better than not having insurance.

Let's not forget that, pre-ACA, people with congenital diseases or problems, were promptly dropped from their plans, then were unable to find insurance because of these pre-existing illnesses.  So, even if they wanted to buy insurance, they were denied.

 "If somebody is born with Down syndrome -- I think most Americans would say a child that is born with Down syndrome, let's try to provide that child with adequate health care."

Single adults who'll never have children have zero vested self-interest in covering the treatment of Down Syndrome children, now do they?  So here we go: Roy's demonstrating his inconvenient bullshit, where he's against redistribution, but yet for it.  Same thing goes for genetically-related breast cancer: Why would men, without any family history of breast cancer, want to have to pay for predominantly women who get breast cancer?

"When the government starts to determine what the plans must contain that you have problems with access to care."

So back to that first quote from Roy.  In some alternate universe, the government can build a medical safety net program, but yet, not determine what these safety nets include coverage for.  And, because Roy is against government as central planner, the government rather throws money at poor people and tells them to use it to buy whatever insurance they want, no strings attached, no predetermined items that must be covered.  If a conservative tells you that the best solution is for government to give poor people money without strings attached, we must be in that alternative universe.

Avik Roy seems genuinely concerned about people who cannot afford healthcare coverage or treatment, yet the very solutions he points to, contravene his dogma.  I really think he should quit working for a think tank.