CATO sucks – reject aff ev from it

At the very least, a think tank’s “director of health policy studies” should not bury strong counter-arguments from experts. But even in Cannon’s longer discussions of this issue, he at no point takes the objections seriously. He says that the short-term plans “free consumers to avoid coverage they do not want” and cites studies showing that millions would choose the short-term plans, saying that this “would produce significant social-welfare gains” (because the more people’s market preferences are satisfied, the better). But the whole argument of the critics is that the gains of “increased choice” and “letting health people opt to have less coverage” are outweighed by the costs of destroying the whole framework by which the Affordable Care Act has succeeded in getting so many people into plans with strong basic coverage. That’s the AMA’s argument, and if you’re going to be a serious public commentator on health policy, you can’t pretend to readers of the Wall Street Journal that the argument doesn’t exist.

So, the Cato Institute: Never trust them. Because these sorts of people are just not going to represent the issues fairly. They’re not going to report the conclusions of experts accurately (Cannon cites the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to show that industry professionals agree with him, and ignores the many medical practitioners who don’t). They’re going to pick quotes from studies that sound good, and unless you have academic journal access and can check for yourself, you’ll never know whether the studies contained other important findings. In an academic setting, this would border on malpractice. These people may have charts and statistics and degrees, but they are just not scholars. They already think that laissez-faire capitalism is correct, and they think it because it’s what their economic theory tells them must be true, and so any empirical evidence to the contrary will be ignored. (Again, if you truly won’t be satisfied until I go through a dozen more of their publications and show all the same tendencies, I can do it. But just try it for yourself.)

Honestly, I’m just exhausted by the existence of these people. It’s so hard to figure out the truth in a complicated world. I wish I didn’t have to deal with a whole army of propagandists who couldn’t care less about neutral scholarly inquiry. They might be right, or they might be wrong, but I’m always going to have to investigate for myself since their publications are useless. So I generally don’t bother responding to the Cato Institute because it’s always going to require such a battle: They will do everything in their power, they will strain themselves to their limit, to prove that regulation is bad and laissez-faire is good. (This is, by the way, why Charles Koch has given them so much money, and the Institute used to be called the Charles Koch Foundation.) All these “economic liberty” places are the same. The Free Enterprise institutes, and the Economic Education funds. You could pile up mountainous evidence of market failures or regulatory success, and they’d die before they conceded the point.

I know everybody on the left will greet my conclusion here with a yawn: Breaking news—the Cato Institute care about their free market ideology more than they care about facts! But it’s still so unbelievable to me that this can be an influential think tank that anyone takes seriously. It’s worth remembering that the actual profession of economics is far less rigidly committed to laissez-faire than the “economistic” commentators who serve as the field’s public face. You can see the difference by looking at how Cato writes about these issues versus the scholars Cato actually cites. The real papers have nuance. They are scholarship. This is bullshit, and can never be trusted.