2016 Oct 26^th

The happy news for Trump today is that premiums for the Affordable Care Act are going up… way up. There are multiple reasons for this; insurance companies, by law, must cover all applicants, even those already diagnosed with cancer whose treatment can cost thousands. There is also no restriction on how much drug companies can increase their prices once they know their customers have the insurance to pay whatever the company wants to charge. The result is that many insurance companies drop out and those that remain increase their premiums.

Trump, in his rallies (all televised for free by the biased media) has declared that he has an alternative plan…and he does. One commentator, savvy about these matters who has read the plan, claims that he is certain that Trump, himself, has never read it. Kellyanne Conway who has read it says that adult children who can now stay on their parent’s plan won’t be able to do that on the Trump plan. She wasn’t sure about the preexisting condition issue. There are far too many issues involved for a blog like this to take a serious look at the plan; moreover, there is no guarantee that the plan would survive the carving it will face in Congress.   

Thomas Swell has a typical column this morning’s paper. This time he is complaining that for the last seven years the Republican Congress has not had, “…the incentives and the guts to remove the President from office.” Dr. Sowell seems to fancy himself a constitutional scholar far superior to any member of congress. Do you suppose he remembers what happened the last time the house impeached a President?

Sowell continues his rant about the really, really awful candidates running for the presidency. He finally settles on Donald Trump for president. He believes that Hilary Clinton would be harder to impeach because of, “….howls of sexism from the media across the country that ugly sexual bias was behind any opposition to anything she did….Donald Trump has no such exemption.” The upshot of this cynic’s view of the candidates is to vote for the one who is more impeachable.

Sowell talks readily about impeachment. I don’t believe he understands that impeachment is a process by which the House of Representatives makes an accusation and is similar to an indictment. There still must be a trial by the Senate and two thirds of the Senate must vote to convict the President for the President to be removed from office.

At this time only 54 percent of the Senate members are Republicans so any effort to convict a Democratic President has about the same chance as the 50+ bills sent by the House to the Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The leaders of the House, unlike Sowell, know perfectly well that impeaching the President would be an exercise in futility and simply increase the number of people laughing at them.

Once again, Sowell should stick to economics.

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