From a reader:

Dear Jonah:
You mentioned in passing in pointing out the truly obvious (that NRO is
one of the best places on the web for free spirited debates that may be
for or against the Bush administration) that most NRO people were against
the Medicare drug bill.
I recently reeturned from the conference of the Association of Private
Enterprise Education (home of various free-marketeers, conservatives,
objectivists, small government foks, Austrian Economists, libertarians,
etc etc). Your own Jonathan Adler was present for a couple of panels. One
presenter (and I’m very sorry that I can’t recall which one, so you may
not want to use this piece) made the following very interesting point. He
couldn’t figure out conservative opposition to the Medicare drug bill
because a ) the entitlement was to treatment and was founded at the birth
of Medicare; and b ) the orginal refusal to pay for drugs was, in effect,
a price control…. a price ceiling of $0 that inefficiently biased
physician and patient choices for achieving the actual entitlement
(treatment) towards non-pharmaceutical intervention. I’d never heard this
argument on the Corner, and I thought you might find it interesting. Have
you ever heard this argument? Do you think it makes sense? Does anyone
know whether there is any evidence to suggest the amount of savings from
rationalizing the treatment incentives? Are the rationalizing savings
swamped by the costs of additional utilization?
I guess the best analogy I can think of here is when conservatives
supported expanding medicare and medicaid benefits to certain types of at
home care—were they supporting a new entitlement or recognizing the
inefficiency of a system that biased treatment towards in-hospital care.
Did total costs for this type of service go up or down? Or suppose a food
entitlement program covered beef and pork but not chicken. If a
conservative said “this is silly, let people have the broadest choice
possible” would they be favoring an expanded entitlement (chicken) or
trying to eliminate a distortion? What this suggests is that the real
problem with the drug bill is not that it creates “a new entitlement” but
rather that it looks so very much “fee for service.” But that leads
directly into debates about the other parts of that bill and elsewhere
—- the future role of managed care in medicare, which I’m sure that
some people understand, but not me.
Sincerely,
Please don’t use my name,
[Name withheld]
PS I have a PhD in Economics and I think Brad de Long is mistaken on
every count. The only reason I’m not adding a point by point reply is
that your other readers have eloquently made the same points I would have
made. However, if you want ammunition on who wants to control whose life,
how about: Hillary Care, Jimmy Carter and the thermostats, extreme
interpretations of endagered species acts affecting how private owners
can use their land, minimum wage laws, rent controls, telling Catholic
hospitals and charities what they can and not not offer their employees,
telling me how to invest 12 percent of my income for “retirement,”
telling a high school student what they can and cannot say over the
loudspeaker before a football game, college “speech codes,” marginal tax
rates, obsessively controling local zoning….just for starters.