One year from today, a new
president moves into the White House. This president will be eager to carry out
any number of plans — including, surely, plans to help the segments of society
that most need help. Extending a helping hand, after all, is one of the great
privileges and responsibilities of the presidency.
But before charging ahead with
such plans, the new president might do well to first ask him- or herself the
following question: What do a deaf woman in Los Angeles, a first-century Jewish
sandal maker and a red-cockaded woodpecker have in common?
A few months ago, a
prospective patient called the office of Andrew Brooks, a top-ranked orthopedic
surgeon in Los Angeles. She was having serious knee trouble, and she was also
deaf. She wanted to know if her deafness posed a problem for Brooks. He had his
assistant relay a message: no, of course not; he could easily discuss her
situation using knee models, anatomical charts and written notes.
The woman later called again
to say she would rather have a sign-language interpreter. Fine, Brooks said,
and asked his assistant to make the arrangements. As it turned out, an
interpreter would cost $120 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, and the expense
wasn’t covered by insurance. Brooks didn’t think it made sense for him to pay.
That would mean laying out $240 to conduct an exam for which the woman’s
insurance company would pay him $58 — a loss of more than $180 even before
accounting for taxes and overhead.
So Brooks suggested to the
patient that they make do without the interpreter. That’s when she told him
that the Americans With Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) allowed a patient to choose
the mode of interpretation, at the physician’s expense. Brooks, flabbergasted,
researched the law and found that he was indeed obliged to do as the patient
asked — unless, that is, he wanted to invite a lawsuit that he would probably
lose.
If he ultimately operated on
the woman’s knee, Brooks would be paid roughly $1,200. But he would also then
need to see her for eight follow-up visits, presumably with the $240
interpreter each time. By the end of the patient’s treatment, Brooks would be
solidly in the red.
He went ahead and examined the
woman, paying the interpreter out of his pocket. As it turned out, she didn’t
need surgery; her knee could be treated through physical therapy. This was a
fortunate outcome for everyone involved — except, perhaps, for the physical
therapist who would have to pay the interpreter’s bills.
Brooks told several colleagues
and doctor friends about his deaf patient. “They all said, ‘If I ever get a
call from someone like that, I’ll never see her,’ ” he says. This led him to
wonder if the A.D.A. had a dark side. “It’s got to be widely pervasive and
probably not talked about, because doctors are just getting squeezed further
and further. This kind of patient will end up getting passed on and passed on,
getting the runaround, not understanding why she’s not getting good care.”
So does the A.D.A. in some
cases hurt the very patients it is intended to help? That’s a hard question to
answer with the available medical data. But the economists Daron Acemoglu and
Joshua Angrist once asked a similar question: How did the A.D.A. affect employment among
the disabled?
Their conclusion was rather
startling and makes Andrew Brooks’s hunch ring true. Acemoglu and Angrist found
that when the A.D.A. was enacted in 1992, it led to a sharp drop in
the employment of disabled workers. How could this be? Employers, concerned
that they wouldn’t be able to discipline or fire disabled workers who happened
to be incompetent, apparently avoided hiring them in the first place.
How long have such do-good
laws been backfiring? Consider the ancient Jewish laws concerning the
sabbatical, or seventh year. As commanded in the Bible, all Jewish-owned lands
in Israel were to lie fallow every seventh year, with the needy allowed to
gather whatever food continued to grow. Even more significant, all loans were
to be forgiven in the sabbatical. The appeal of such unilateral debt relief
cannot be overestimated, since the penalties for defaulting on a loan at the
time were severe: a creditor could go so far as to take a debtor or his
children into bondage.
So for a poor Jewish sandal
maker having trouble with his loan payments, the sabbatical law was truly a
godsend. If you were a creditor, however, you saw things differently. Why
should you lend the sandal maker money if he could just tear up the loan in
Year Seven? Creditors duly gamed the system, making loans in the years right
after a sabbatical, when they were confident they would be repaid, but then
pulling tight the purse strings in Years Five and Six. The resulting credit
drought was so damaging to poor people that it fell to the great sage Hillel to
fix things.
His solution, known as prosbul,
allowed a lender to go to court and pre-emptively declare that a specific loan
would not be subject to sabbatical debt relief, transferring the debt to the
court itself and thereby empowering it to collect the loan. This left the law
technically intact but allowed for lenders to once again make credit available
to the poor without taking on unwarranted risk for themselves.
The fallow-land portion of the
sabbatical law, meanwhile, was upheld for centuries, but it, too, finally
gained a loophole, called heter mechira. This allowed for a Jew to
temporarily “sell” his land to a non-Jew and to continue farming it during the
sabbatical year and then “buy” it back immediately afterward — a solution that
helped the modern state of Israel keep its agricultural economy humming.
The trouble is that many of
the most observant Israeli Jews reject this maneuver as a sleight of hand that
violates the spirit of the law. Many of these traditionalists are also
extremely poor. And so this year, which happens to be a sabbatical year, the
poorest Jews in Israel who wish to eat only food grown on non-Jewish land are
left to buy imported goods at double or triple the regular price — all in order
to uphold a law meant to help feed the poorest Jews in Israel.
Such well-meaning laws surely don’t end up
harming animals as well, do they?
Consider the Endangered
Species Act (E.S.A.) of 1973, which protects flora and fauna as well as their
physical habitats. The economists Dean Lueck and Jeffrey Michael wanted to
gauge the E.S.A.’s effect on the red-cockaded woodpecker, a protected bird that
nests in old-growth pine trees in eastern North Carolina. By examining the
timber harvest activity of more than 1,000 privately owned forest plots, Lueck and
Michael found a clear pattern: when a landowner felt that his property was
turning into the sort of habitat that might attract a nesting pair of
woodpeckers, he rushed in to cut down the trees. It didn’t matter if timber
prices were low.
This happened less than two
years ago in Boiling Spring Lakes, N.C. “Along the roadsides,” an A.P. article
reported, “scattered brown bark is all that’s left of once majestic pine
stands.” As sad as this may be, it isn’t surprising to anyone who has examined
the perverse incentives created by the E.S.A. In their paper, Lueck and Michael
cite a 1996 developers’ guide from the National Association of Home Builders:
“The highest level of assurance that a property owner will not face an E.S.A.
issue is to maintain the property in a condition such that protected species
cannot occupy the property.”
One notable wrinkle of the
E.S.A. is that a species is often declared endangered months or even years
before its “critical habitats” are officially designated. This allows time for developers,
environmentalists and everyone in between to have their say at public hearings.
What happens during that lag time?
In a new working paper that
examines the plight of the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl, the economists John
List, Michael Margolis and Daniel Osgood found that landowners near Tucson
rushed to clear their property for development rather than risk having it
declared a safe haven for the owl. The economists make the argument for “the
distinct possibility that the Endangered Species Act is actually endangering,
rather than protecting, species.”
So does this mean that every
law designed to help endangered animals, poor people and the disabled is bound
to fail? Of course not. But with a government that is regularly begged for
relief — these days, from mortgage woes, health-care costs and tax burdens —
and with every presidential hopeful making daily promises to address these
woes, it might be worth encouraging the winning candidate to think twice (or
even 8 or 10 times) before rushing off to do good. Because if there is any law
more powerful than the ones constructed in a place like Washington, it is the
law of unintended consequences.
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