Broccoli for the Free Lunch Society.

According to Wikipedia, the expression "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch", is now often reduced to TANSTAAFL.  As I consider the three days of  hearings this week at the Supreme Court (now often reduced to SCOTUS), this "free lunch" phrase keeps coming back to me.

The tradition of free lunches dates back about 130 years.  Saloon keepers would offer "free lunch" along with the purchase of at least one drink.  Although the lunch was often more valuable than the first drink, savvy business owners could rely on the likelihood that the customer would buy more than one drink.  This tradition lives on around the globe from the opulent "aperitivo" in Milan to "happy hours" convened throughout the USA.  Allowing potential customers to believe they are getting something for nothing is a profitable enterprise and is most popular in casinos.  Naturally, the "house" always wins or the practice would not continue.

Business works like that.

I wonder though, is that the way society works best?  And if society works best if citizens live in economically and socially sustainable communities; shouldn't everyone share the costs and benefits of access to good health?

In the Affordable Care Act (ACA) debate it's time to recognize what saloon keepers have known for over a century---TANSTAAFL.  In a brilliant paper by MIT professor Jonathan Gruber (available to subscribers at National Bureau of Economic Research), the impossibility of continuing to allow healthy citizens to opt-out of medical insurance is presented.

Even now,  when folks argue that individuals have a right to avoid paying into a system that could begin address the long-acknowledged health care distribution problem, I wonder who is "the house" in our current system.  Who are the individuals or businesses who, like the casinos, find the free lunch model so profitable?  Who are the winners who continue to cling to a system that is clearly broken?

There is no question incentives can alter behavior patterns.  For example, the modern health insurance sector blossomed in 1943 when the IRS recognized that employer-sponsored health insurance was a business expense and therefore deductible from taxes.  It doesn't take long to see the connection between good business practice---pay a small premium to keep your workforce healthy---and the creation of a tax policy incentive that reduced the tax bill of companies who chose to provide health insurance.  This is both good public policy and good business, the balance at the very heart of "sustainicity."

As Paul Krugman noted in his recent column Broccoli and Bad Faith, "Here’s what Charles Fried — who was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general — said in a recent interview with The Washington Post: “I’ve never understood why regulating by making people go buy something is somehow more intrusive than regulating by making them pay taxes and then giving it to them.”"

Thinking about Justice Scalia's broccoli-based musings,  I find the daisy chain that links the individual health insurance mandate to the individual produce mandate to be nearly impossible to imagine. In making the connection, I fear that this Justice disrespects the notion that access to health care is among the most basic rights for everyone in modern society.

When I think about sustainicity and the idea that the best economic systems build both social and economic capital---there is never a free lunch for our local, national or global communities. Whether or not broccoli is served it's pretty clear to me that---TANSTAAFL.