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In a good explanation of the health insurance premium rate review provision in President Obama’s proposed health care bill, Wonk Room says:
Since conservatives will surely claim that rate review is some kind of government take over of private industry or a burdensome new federal requirement for insurers, it’s important to note that states that have instituted rate review house profitable insurance companies and maintain competitive and vibrant markets.
Um, no. I hope that conservatives are intelligent enough to claim that rate review is best handled by States, especially since the Wonk Room post itself says (emphasis mine):
According to the New York Times the Health Insurance Rate Authority, “made up of health industry experts that would issue an annual report setting the parameters for reasonable rate increases based on conditions in the market.” What’s ‘reasonable’ will vary from state to state.
Although Wonk Room talks about the success some States have had in beating back health insurance premium rate hikes they considered unreasonable, it also claims that “state governments often lack the resources or political will to keep insurers in check.” Perhaps, but why is that my problem? My State of New Jersey regulates its health insurance companies within an inch of their lives and I’m sure some of my State tax dollars go to pay for that regulation. I don’t see why I should also pay for the Federal government to "take care" of States whose voters aren’t willing to do the job themselves. Or who even - heretical as it no doubt seems to Obama - don't think the job needs to be done at all.
(Via Legal Insurrection via Neo-neocon)
I’ve caught up on responding to comments that have come in while I was out of commission:
Yes
Great minds
This sounds familiar
And I deleted a comment on a very old post. I’m so proud: the Spambots have found me.
If I wasn’t such a coward I’d try installing the widget that shows recent comments. Maybe someday...
[I’m struck speechless by reading that President Obama’s “new” health care proposal apparently includes (via Neo-neocon) price controls on health insurance premiums. I haven’t looked at the White House posting myself yet and hope that it will turn out to be not really as described. Failing that, I hope voters will be smart enough to realize that this way lies disaster. For now, though, I need to write about something less fraught and figured that if Megan McArdle can write - however dangerously - about makeup, I can certainly write about candles.]
I’m a Yankee Candle junkie. So sue me. It’s a relatively harmless addiction: there’s a limit to how many candles I can burn so I don’t have to mortgage my house to feed my habit and it has the pleasant side-effect of making the house smell good even when it’s, shall we say, not looking its best.
The problem with my addiction is the usual: I’m dependent on my supplier. And Yankee Candle shows a distressing tendency to discontinue candles I really like. The most heart-breaking of these discontinuations is Rainbow’s End (tm). This is a lovely candle. It’s a watery almost aqua color described as having:
A fresh, clean and cool scent like the country air after a storm
To me it smells nice, definite, but not specific. That is, it doesn’t smell like anything. Not fruit or flower or food or wood or Christmas or autumn. When I found Rainbow’s End years ago, it was a revelation because so many of the Yankee Candle scents classified as “Fresh” (i.e., not found in nature) smelled like dryer fabric softener sheets. That’s changed now although YC still sells the scent Clean Cotton and as far as I’m concerned you get the same effect by draping a piece of Bounce over a lampshade. And since I hate the smell of dryer fabric softeners, finding a non-specific candle that didn’t make me think of laundromats was wonderful.
Rainbow’s End has been discontinued for years now. It’s been so long that the last time I was in a Yankee Candle store the two women who worked there had never even heard of it. I check from time to time but I’ve never seen it among the “temporarily revived” scents YC makes from time to time.
I have one lone Rainbow’s End votive candle left, stored away safely. I hate to burn it: it’s the last of its kind. And yet if a candle never burns, is it really a candle?
*****
If you’re interested in reading the Roy Edroso article that prompted McArdle’s “feminine” response, it’s here. I can’t decide if it’s incredibly stupid or incredibly funny. Probably stupid since this level of arrogance is too frightening to ever be truly funny. Althouse considers pity the appropriate response.
I had shoulder surgery on Monday which was pretty minor and went very well. I got a nerve block for pain which meant my left hand was insubordinate for a couple of days (and still occasionally seems to harbor rebellious impulses). Further, the dregs of the general anesthetic and whatever the opposite of dregs is of the pain meds are resulting in spectacularly brilliant thoughts that I suspect wouldn’t seem nearly as brilliant to anyone who read them.
All of which is a long way of saying I have lots of stuff to say about lots of stuff - including the interesting comments that have come in over the last week - but probably won’t be saying it for at least a few more days.
Back to Xanadu.
A few days ago, I said I wanted climate change scientists to provide the world with:
Raw temperatures for all land measurements for as long as we have them broken out into individual measurement stations. ... The next column in the spreadsheet should contain the adjusted temperatures. The next column in the spreadsheet should explain how the adjustment was calculated.
Prompted by a Times (UK) article headlined, “World may not be warming, say scientists”, TigerHawk is calling for the climate science community to:
hit the reset button on the whole project. Post all the raw data, then post all the adjustments with the explanations therefore. Do it in bloggy form, allowing for comment fields. Post the software used in the models, and use change control (which requires ex ante justification for any change), just as one would require for any mission-critical software. Use open-source programmers, when appropriate, who might well produce better code for a given routine. Harness the distributed power of the web, act in the open, and see what the data look like and the models predict then. Do all of that, and many more people will believe the result.
The additional step of posting and improving the model software is valuable but before we even start considering what the models predict for the future, we need to know for sure what the data are telling us about the past and the present. Thus I believe posting the data is the first step and should be done immediately rather than making it part of a package deal with the software - which could take forever to get up.
This seems even more urgent given the recent surprising interview with Professor Phil Jones. According to the Daily Mail (Via Watts Up With That), Professor Jones:
agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not. [snip]
admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend. [snip]
said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.
If the report of the interview is accurate, this all seems like kind of a big deal and even more reason to make the data available.
On a completely unrelated topic, Megan McArdle has given sort of a throw-away endorsement of the idea of government-provided catastrophic health insurance:
The problem with both sets of plans [Republican and Democrat] is that the [Republican] voucher cap would never withstand the assault from angry and frightened seniors, while the [Democratic] provider caps and treatment disallowals would never withstand the pressure of various other interest groups. That's why I want to turn the Federal government into an income-based catastrophic insurer, for expenses that exceed 15-20% of AGI. I don't think there's much hope of controlling cancer treatments or heart surgery. But I think we could eliminate a hell of a lot of unnecessary day to day expenses--the ER visits of convenience and CYA tests for diseases there's no indication the patient has. But the only way we'll do that is by making the consumer responsible for those costs. Short of that, we're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
I don’t remember her writing about this before although it’s possible I just missed it or she wrote about it before I began reading her regularly. If I could figure out a way to search just the text of her posts and not the comments, I’d try looking for earlier posts by her on the topic. Unfortunately, a Google search turns up 252 hits; I checked out the first few and all the references to catastrophic insurance are the comments. It would be interesting to see if she’s fleshed out her thoughts, taken a look at the costs, and so on.
I snarl about Reclusive Leftist quite often but today she’s hit one out of the park. She’s discussing feminism, Sarah Palin, liberalism, and polar bears. Go, read “The Unresolvable Paradox”.
During the campaign, John McCain proposed an across the board spending freeze on all Federal programs except the Department of Defense, veterans programs, and entitlements. Barack Obama responded that McCain’s proposal amount to "using a hatchet where you need a scalpel." Now President Obama is proposing a spending freeze. His Administration argues it is still a scalpel because the freezes will be targeted; some programs will increase will others will decrease, thus freezing the level of spending without freezing where the spending goes.
I don’t have any argument with the Obama Administration’s claims. They are quite correct that it is possible to have a targeted spending freeze in which you leave alone or increase funding for programs you believe are valuable while decreasing funding for programs you believe are not valuable. They clearly understand logic. They also clearly do not understand the politics behind the government’s inability to control spending.
I’m pretty sure the reason McCain proposed an across the board spending freeze was because he knew that once you get into the details of which programs are valuable and which programs are not, suddenly somehow every single penny being spent is absolutely crucial. It’s going to be very, very difficult for the Obama Administration to identify any programs that have no enthusiasts. At a bare minimum, it’s a pretty safe bet that someone’s salary is being paid by every Federal program and if the program is big enough so that cutting it will actually help our bottom line, then probably a lot of somebodies’ salaries are being paid by it.
Plus, I suspect that most Federal programs do benefit some group. It may be a group the Administration thinks doesn’t need support or a group the Administration thinks doesn’t deserve support but it’s awfully easy to make a heart-wrenching argument for the value of almost any Federal program in existence. Someone, somewhere is going to be hurt by any Federal spending decreases and once those who will be hurt are paraded in front of television cameras, there’s a good chance there will be a collective, “Aw, why are you picking on them?” from a lot of people. It’s easy to see that cutting funding for swine research will hurt those decent, hard-working Iowa farmers; it’s a lot harder to see that keeping funding for swine research means money out of everyone’s pocket, money we could all use to buy bacon.
President Obama had hoped to address the problem of government spending another way. He wanted Congress to pass a bill establishing a Bipartisan Task Force to consider tax increases and spending cuts. The recommendations of such a Task Force would then be presented to Congress for a simple up or down vote. The Senate declined; as far as I can tell, the House never considered it. Despite what I have occasionally read and heard from the Left, the Senate’s declination was bipartisan: 36 Democrats, 16 Republicans, and 1 Independent voted for the bill; 22 Democrats, 23 Republicans, and 1 Independent voted against the bill.
Even if the Task Force had come into being, I’m not sure how much good it would have done. The fights over which programs are too valuable to cut would simply have moved into the Task Force deliberations and, as far as I can tell, there would have been no requirement that the Task Force recommend any spending cuts or tax increases at all, much less substantial ones. It would have been far too easy for the Task Force members to either come up with extremely minor cosmetic recommendations or just throw up their hands, declare they couldn’t get anything done, and blame the other side.
What we need is something to concentrate everyone’s mind. Here’s what I propose. Let’s pass a bill that says we’re going to cut Federal spending by 10% each year until we’re spending 50% of what we’re spending now. We’ll hit about 53% in the seventh year. If we decrease spending by 5% the eighth year, we’ll hit just about 50%.
We’ll also adjust Federal tax revenues in lockstep but at a slightly lower rate: 9% per year. By the seventh year, the Federal government will be taking in not quite 57% of what it is taking in now. If we decrease taxes by 4.5% the eighth year, Federal tax revenues will be just about 54% of what they were when we started.
We’ll be taking in more than we’re spending which will let us start to pay down our debt. The money no longer being taken by the Federal government in taxes can certainly be taken in taxes by the States or by local governments if their residents want to continue to receive the same government services they used to get from the Federal government. Otherwise, it’s money in the pockets of individuals and corporations.
What spending and taxes will we cut? Well, that’s up to Congress to decide. If they want, they can cut the whole 10% of spending from a single program. They can decide to cut nothing from Defense and everything from Education - or vice versa. That’s up to them. However, if they don’t make those decisions then the cuts happen across the board. And I mean the whole board, including Defense, veterans’ benefits, Social Security, Medicare, agriculture subsidies, public health, everything. Nothing is shielded.
The same rules hold for tax cuts. Congress can give the entire tax cut to individuals with lower incomes or to corporations or to the middle class. However, if Congress cannot decide how to allocate the tax cuts then every person and every corporation gets a 10% reduction in their taxes - all their taxes including those for Social Security and Medicare. The taxes get calculated just that way too, no fiddling with tax rates. The first year we all calculate our taxes under the existing tables, then take 9% off whatever we owe the government. The second year, we do the same calculations and take 17% off what we owe the government. And so on.
It would be great to trim the Federal government’s fat with a scalpel. But if the surgeon doesn’t have the guts to operate, better a butcher with a hatchet than letting the country die from its own gluttony.
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