Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

If Obamacare fails, one sure political consequence is a revival of pressures for something more sweeping, for a single-payer program. Nowadays advocates of such a program in the US call it "Medicare for all." One of the points they make draws on the supposed efficiency of Medicare. Overhead costs are only 2%. Private insurance plans have overhead at 20% of spending. So the former must represent a better way of doing things than the latter ... right? Holman Jenkins made several valuable points about this in a recent WSJ column, among them these: First, the 2% figure is a dubious one to begin with, since Medicare's overhead costs are in fact picked up by other parts of the Federal government. Much of a private insurer's "overhead," for example, is bill collection. That portion of "overhead" for Medicare corresponds to tax enforcement so it is picked up by the IRS. The 20%, then, contains items the 2% doesn't. [Also, HHS' budget i...

Now I really must say something about NFIB v. Sebelius , SCOTUS' big Obamacare decision, or you will think me a shirker. Let's start with this datum: Chief Justice John Roberts is only the second SCOTUS Justice in the institution's history with that surname. Its a fairly common surname in English-speaking countries, so I don't know whether 2-out-of-112 is a lot or suspiciously few. Anyway, the coincidence seems worth mentioning because the previous Justice Roberts [ Owen Roberts , a Hoover appointee on the court from 1930 to 1945] has gone down in history as the Justice who made the big switch, who turned the court from one with an anti-New Deal 5 Justice majority into one with a pro-New Deal 5 Justice majority by his own change of heart under political pressure in 1937. Reference Guide The usual accounts of that "switch in time" are sometimes too simply and broadly written, and certainly it wasn't all about Roberts. Chief Justice Hughes...