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The truth is that it is natural, as well as necessary, for every man to be a vagabond occasionally. - Samuel H Hammond
I’ve been feeling rather bitter because my liberal friends - who support Obamacare - get their health insurance through their employers while I buy mine individually. I believed that this meant I would have to give the IRS information about my income and health insurance while they would not. It looks like I was wrong. According to Avik Roy at The Corner (and do read the longer post at Forbes):
To enforce the individual mandate, the IRS needs to know whether or not you have purchased insurance this year. It will also need to know the specific insurance policy you have, in order to ensure that it meets Obamacare’s “minimum essential coverage” requirement.
To enforce the employer mandate, the IRS needs the same information from employers in terms of the specific policies employers purchase for their workers, and also the hours worked by every part-time employee. In addition, your employer will need to know what your household income is, in order to ensure that the coverage it offers you is “affordable” to you by the law’s definition.
This makes me feel less bitter about my friends (it’s probably a sign of a serious moral failing that I rejoice to know they, too, will fall under the watchful eye of the IRS). However, it also made me realize something I had known but not fully understood before: The individual mandate means no one has the right to be left alone any longer.
Let’s say I work until I’m 50 and save my money. I then decide to retire and become a vagabond. I convert my savings to cash and keep it in a no-interest checking account. I live off the cash, never earning a salary or interest or capital gains. I have no reason to interact with the Federal government since I owe no taxes. I do not maintain a residence which means I have no reason to interact with State or local government. I can, if I want, legally step outside the grid.
Under Obamacare, that will change. I now must interact with the IRS. I have to tell them how much money I make and what health insurance I purchase. If I do not purchase health insurance, they will fine me. I can no longer legally step outside the grid.
That seems to me to be a terrible loss. I know that very few people want to take that step but I believe we have lost something precious by making it impossible for people to do so without breaking the law. How did we end up in a situation where my life is now subject to my government’s beck and call?
On Face The Nation this past Sunday, Bob Schieffer asked Senator John Cornyn if Attorney General Eric Holder should step down. Cornyn replied:
You know, I-- I've lost confidence in the attorney general a long time ago over his cover-up over the fast and furious investigation. And the bogus claim of executive privilege when Congress tried to get to the bottom of that, which in part resulted in him being the first attorney general held in contempt of Congress. I think it's past time for him to go and for the President to appoint somebody who the public can have confidence in.
I was struck by Cornyn inserting the Fast and Furious operation into his answer because it’s not the first time I’ve noticed a Republican, questioned about one of the Administration’s current problems, bringing up Fast and Furious. I hadn’t really been paying attention - although I will going forward hence the title of this post - so I can’t cite previous instances but it always seems to be done in passing. I don’t know what it means, if anything, but it’s an interesting way to keep an old, presumably dead scandal in front of the public.
A post at The Corner about unintended consequences of Obamacare got me thinking about health insurance again. The post is worth reading (although it’s bad news for people like me with significant health problems) but that’s not what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about this from Megan McArdle:
Certainly, this [the Oregon Medicaid study] bolsters my belief that health insurance should provide financial protection from catastrophic events, not wrap-around first-dollar coverage. Those who used to read me on The Atlantic may recall that the McArdle Plan for Healthcare involved the government picking up the tab for any medical expenses above 15-20% of income: simple, progressive, and aimed at the actual problem we know health insurance can fix. Unfortunaely, Obamacare made that sort of coverage functionally illegal.
That kind of plan tied to income would be great but it’s unlikely to happen while Obama is President.* What might be possible, though, is to modify Obamacare to permit true catastrophic health insurance. You know, the kind Secretary Sibelius is so clueless about. Perhaps the Republicans could agree to pass something the Democrats and Obama want if and only if the bill to do so includes a modification that adds catastrophic insurance policies as one of the options under Obamacare. Ideally, I’d like to see these with a range of deductibles: $1,000; $5,000; $10,000; $15,000; and so on. That way they would be available to people with a range of incomes.
Presumably the cost for a catastrophic plan would be less than for those that cover doctor’s visits for annual exams, flu shots, dropping a pot lid on your toe (don’t ask), and kids with colds. That might encourage people to purchase catastrophic plans which would increase our sensitivity to the cost of medical care and that, in turn, might actually decrease spending on health care a little.**
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Notes:
* I haven’t found a lot of specifics on the “McArdle Plan for Healthcare” but my impression is that she would set a single percentage to be spent on health care before government coverage kicks in. If I were going to take a serious look at this kind of policy, I’d considered percentage brackets, with those who have less money having to spend a lower percentage of their income before the government steps in - much like the brackets we now have for income tax rates.
** Under this modification to Obamacare, as opposed to the McArdle Plan, the insurance companies would still insulate people from true health care costs. When I get a medical procedure, my insurance company decides how much my provider will be paid. So long as insurance companies continue to do so, the insured will continue to pay less than the true cost - and the uninsured will continue to pay more.
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Reading:
These were the Atlantic posts I found that talk about the “McArdle Plan for Healthcare”. They date from February of 2010.
The Benefits of Health Benefits - This began as a response to an Ezra Klein post. The Klein post has links to a number of other McArdle posts, all of which are interesting.
The Limited Benefits of First Dollar Health Care Coverage- Follow up to previous post.
I want to revisit an article I referenced in my “Three problems” post. In that post, I wrote about how the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, believed that food stamps should not be used to buy junk food:
Not only should people know how their tax dollars are being spent, but food stamps shouldn’t pay for junk food at all, the National Center for Public Policy Research said Friday. [snip]
...said David Almasi, the National Center’s executive director. “When it comes to public assistance, I want people buying what they need with my money and not what they desire.”
My conclusion was that under the Lifelong Endowment, this wouldn’t be an issue because:
... everyone can spend their Lifelong Endowment money however they want. If they want to get all their calories from Coke and chocolate bars, that’s their business. That takes care of Almasi’s problem.
The more I thought about it, though, the more uncomfortable I got. Why shouldn’t people be able to spend their food money however they want right now?
I did a little more poking around and discovered that it’s not just the National Center for Public Policy Research that is concerned about how food stamp recipients are spending their food dollars:
Seven journalist and government watchdog organizations have called on the Agriculture Department to release information on how much money retailers that accept food stamps make from the program and what products food stamp dollars are purchasing. [snip]
The organization heads who signed the letter were from the National Freedom of Information Coalition, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Association of Health Care Journalists, Investigative Reporters & Editors, the Association of Food Journalists, the National Association of Science Writers, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The Association of Health Care Journalists reports that:
This information could show which businesses benefit from the program and also inform public policy debates about obesity and its causes... [snip]
According to “Food Stamps: Follow the Money” a report by the advocacy group EatDrinkPolitics, the data Morisy obtained showed that in one year, “nine Walmart Supercenters in Massachusetts together received more than $33 million in SNAP dollars – over four times the SNAP money spent at farmers markets nationwide.”
And the letter sent by the seven organizations states that:
Additionally, the USDA does not disclose which products are purchased with SNAP dollars – or how much is spent on each product, in aggregate – information that is extremely relevant to the public-policy debate about causes and health consequences of obesity, particularly in children. As medical professionals and policy makers call for limits on the use of food stamps to buy “junk food” and soft drinks, data about the type and healthfulness of food purchases is necessary to inform the discussion.
This arrogance on the part of the seven organizations that wrote the letter as well as on the part of the National Center for Public Policy Research is breathtaking. What business is it of theirs - of mine, of anyone’s - where people spend their food money and what food they spend it on? Receiving public assistance does not render someone an idiot, a child, or a pawn of the evil Walmart. Those getting food stamps remain perfectly capable of deciding where and how to spend their food dollars.
And who decides what is and isn’t the right food? I suspect the seven organizations would classify “the right food” as that bought at farmers markets (which will make for interesting eating in Massachusetts in the winter) and the kinds of fresh, organic, sustainably farmed foods that eat up money twice as fast as Walmart’s frozen vegetables (which they probably consider all to the good since poor people eat too much anyhow). The National Center for Public Policy Research, on the other hand, might tend toward some modified version of the draconian “50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away” approach, perhaps supplemented with the very Walmart frozen vegetables so disdained by the seven organizations. The first group is doing this for the food stamp recipients’ own good health; the second for their own good moral fiber. Yet somehow they both end up claiming the right - nay, the obligation - to tell other people what to do and how to live.
I believe that even people on food stamps are smart enough to make their own decisions about what they eat. If they choose badly then they, just like everyone else, will have to live with the consequences of their decisions. Being poor is tough enough; let’s not make it tougher by treating the poor like naughty children who must be forced to eat their vegetables and sent to bed without dessert.
A while back, Grim posted and Cassandra linked to the Dove “Real Beauty” video that went viral. I watched the video, thought it was lovely, and wanted to send it along to a couple of (female) friends. Since those friends would probably fall down in a dead faint if exposed to the poem in Grim’s sidebar, I went looking for another source. When I did, I was amazed and kind of appalled at some of the reactions. There was a lot of hilarity, a lot of scorn, a lot of trashing of Dove’s parent company, and so on. I was taken aback and ended up not sending my friends a link to the video. I didn’t however, give the reactions serious thought until I read what Ace had to say about the ad:
Dove did an ad, intended to go viral, putting across the message "Hey Ladies, you're more beautiful than you think."
Now, think about this. Dove does not know any of these 30 million women. So Dove could not possibly say if these women are more beautiful than they believe themselves to be.
It's the equivalent of telling ten thousand randomly-drawn strangers: Remember, you're all above average in skating ability.
[snip]
And yet, thirty million views. Women are starved for this sort of positive messaging, even when, if you think about if for five seconds, 1, it doesn't make any sense that Dove could tell you this about yourself and 2, Dove is obviously a corporation attempting to get attention by peddling an embarrassingly-transparently cloying-ingratiating message to women in hopes they're so starved for a kind word they'll take it anyway.
In the same post, Ace linked to an essay on the ad by Virginia Postrel and I read that, too. After reading both of these, I began to wonder if I had watched the same ad. Here are the two things I think are going on.
First, Ace’s interpretation isn’t quite right. Dove isn’t telling women they’re above average in appearance; Dove is saying that women are more attractive than they give themselves credit for. It’s not like telling 10,000 random strangers that they’re above average in skating ability; it’s like telling 10,000 random strangers that they’re better skaters than they give themselves credit for.
Now, with skating ability there’s no reason to think that most people will underestimate (or overestimate) their skating ability. There is, however, good reason to think that most women underestimate their attractiveness. As Naomi Wolf points out in The Beauty Myth, advertisers usually sell to women by leveraging - or helping create - women’s unrealistically bad opinion of themselves:
The advertisers who make women’s mass culture possible depend on making women feel bad enough about their faces and bodies to spend more money on worthless or pain-inducing products than they would if they felt innately beautiful. (p. 84)
Dove is simply talking explicitly about the basis of most advertising to women: women focus on their flaws and that makes them easy prey. So, yes, it does make sense that Dove can tell us that about ourselves - as, I think, Ace’s comment that “[w]omen are starved for this kind of positive messaging” makes clear.
Similarly, there is Postrel’s statement that:
There are many reasons to choose some women and not others for the video, ranging from how well they speak to whether they were available for the big reveal. But it’s hard to imagine that the director didn’t try to make the most compelling movie possible, choosing the sketches that showed drastic contrasts. Few, if any, viewers realize they’re seeing only about a third of the subjects of the “social experiment.”
The point of the ad is not to sell women a particular idea of reality; it’s to evoke recognition. Most women know that their friends and loved ones see them as more attractive than they see themselves. The ad isn’t telling us that as if it’s a banner headline; the ad is simply talking about something we all know anyhow - and gently pointing out that it isn’t a very realistic way to go through life.
Postrel also says:
But the campaign also encourages the perception that it’s normal, if undesirable, for grown women to obsess about their imperfections.
My reading on this is very different. I think the ad recognizes that this is something grown women do; in other words, this is a normal (in the sense of “usual” or “commonplace”) activity. That’s very different from “encouraging the perception that it’s normal”. Again, the ad is not trying to create a reality; it is reporting on the reality that already exists.
The second thing I think is going on in much of the negative reaction to the Dove ad is a rejection of sentiment. That is, when something moves us, we look for a reason to short-circuit that emotion. Hence, Ace’s point 2, about Dove being a corporation, looking for attention, etc. And hence Postrel’s references to the ad’s cleverness, and her warnings about it being “highly selective” and about how the artist didn’t work as sketch artists usually do. These are ways of saying, “There we go. No reason to be moved after all. It’s all a trick.”
Yet, again, we are not moved to tears because the ad convinces us of something. We are moved to tears because of recognition of something we already know: we women are awfully hard on ourselves. What is wrong with feeling touched and relieved that someone is talking to us about that - even if that someone is a huge corporation trying to sell us something?
Perhaps the problem with being moved by an advertisement is the fear that we will not be able to interrupt the connection between being moved and buying the product. Thus, rather than say, “Great ad, doesn’t make me want to rush right out and buy Dove” we feel we have to say, “Bad ad” to stop ourselves from immediately maxing out our credit cards on bars of soap with one-quarter cleansing cream. It’s as if we are all terrified that our emotions will be used against us. Perhaps that’s what Postrel fears when she says:
However media-savvy we may be, we tend to believe that a “documentary” reflects reality -- even if it’s quite obviously an ad.
I think women are smarter than that. My own reaction, for example, is, “Great ad. Doesn’t make me want to rush right out and buy Dove. But when I do want to buy something and my choice is between a version made by Dove and a version made by someone else, I’ll choose the one made by Dove.”
It seems pretty savvy to me to prefer a product made by a company that’s trying to sell me by telling me I’m fine the way I am over a product made by a company telling me there’s something seriously wrong with me that only its product can fix.
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Reading:
Cassandra is writing along somewhat similar lines and is doing her usual outstanding job. A must-read - although I’m afraid my post may fall into her “overthinking” category.
[Update: Do definitely read the comments to Cassandra's post. As of 11:45am on May 1, the commenters there seem remarkably media-savvy.]
Robert Samuelson is warning us that entitlements are going to have to be means-tested:
Sooner or later, the programs called “entitlements,” including Social Security, will be trimmed because they’re expensive and some recipients are less deserving than others.
Jonah Goldberg - and lots of other people - are telling us that an increasing number of disability payments are going to those who aren’t disabled:
... one rural Alabama doctor who signs off on disabilities for pretty much anyone lacking a good education on the assumption that their employment prospects are grim.
That points to the even bigger parts of the story. As the nature of the economy changes, disability programs are sometimes taking the place of welfare for those who feel locked out of the workforce — and state governments are loving it. States pay for welfare, the feds pay for disabilities.
The Washington Examiner (via Instapundit) reports that the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, is lamenting the fact that food stamps are being used to buy junk food:
Not only should people know how their tax dollars are being spent, but food stamps shouldn’t pay for junk food at all, the National Center for Public Policy Research said Friday. [snip]
...said David Almasi, the National Center’s executive director. “When it comes to public assistance, I want people buying what they need with my money and not what they desire.”
The thrust of these stories is that the government is giving money - our money - to people who don’t need it, don’t deserve it, and/or haven’t met the requirements for getting it; or, alternatively, that the people who are getting the money aren’t using it “right”. So what should we do about this? Well, what can we do except pass more laws and do more oversight: set eligibility guidelines for entitlements - and check financial records for those getting them; set strict definitions of disability - and send people on disability off to government doctors for inspection; limit what foods stamps can buy - and send enforcement officers in to be sure stores are abiding by the rules.
The "regulate and enforce" approach has a certain plausibility and I’m certainly sympathetic to the view that if someone is going to spend my money, I should get to determine whether they really need it and how they spend it. The problem is that the implementation of this approach means we’re going to give an even bigger bureaucracy even more license to paw through people’s lives. That I am not at all sympathetic to, both because of the whole bigger bureaucracy/more license thing and because I’d like to leave my fellow citizens with their dignity intact.
So let’s think about these issues in terms, once again, of the Lifelong Endowment. You can read the whole long explanation of the Lifelong Endowment at the link but, put simply, with the Lifelong Endowment everyone pays some percentage of their income into a pool. Then the money in the pool is divided evenly among all of us. If you make less money, this is a net gain for you; if you make more money, this is a net loss for you. What would these issues look like if we had the Lifelong Endowment instead of our current benefit systems?
First, the means-testing is built in: the less money someone makes, the more he or she benefits from the Lifelong Endowment. That takes care of Samuelson’s problem.
Second, no one has to prove he or she is disabled to get this money and no one gets more money if he or she is disabled. There is nothing to be gained by healthy people claiming disability and nothing to be lost by truly disabled people working as much as they can. That takes care of Goldberg’s problem.
Third, everyone can spend their Lifelong Endowment money however they want. If they want to get all their calories from Coke and chocolate bars, that’s their business. That takes care of Almasi’s problem.
With the Lifelong Endowment, we can rest assured that we are helping the less fortunate among us; we can stop worrying about whether our neighbors are getting away with something on our dime; and we can avoid empowering more bureaucrats to be more nosy. What’s not to like?
After reporting that a recent Pew Poll shows:
...just 28% rate the federal government in Washington favorably. That is down five points from a year ago and the lowest percentage ever in a Pew Research Center survey.
Peter Wehner at Contentions wonders why voters nonetheless “continue to vote for politicians and support policies that entrusts more and more power to the federal government[.]” He concludes by saying:
One might think that Republicans should be able to leverage the public’s skepticism toward the federal government in a way that advances their interests. Of course, that should have been the case in 2012, too–and what the GOP got instead was a drubbing.
America can sometimes be a most curious country.
Perhaps the reasons Americans continue to vote for Democrats is because no one has any faith that the Republicans are the slightest bit interested in entrusting less and less power to the Federal government. Given a choice between two political parties equally interested in building up the central government, why wouldn’t most people vote for the party that at least pays lip service to using that power to help others rather than to the one that sounds happy to cut all kinds of entitlement programs except the ones from which they themselves benefit?
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