Monthly Archives: February 2010

White House Health Care Plan

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The White House plan is online. I haven’t had time to read it myself, but there’s a quick summary at Talking Points Memo.

Among the highlights, which Brian goes over in more detail here:

  • A delayed start to a new tax on high-end insurance plans. It would go into effect in 2018, not the 2013 as initially proposed.
  • Ends the Nebraska deal giving a federal government subsidy for Medicaid.
  • It has no public option but creates an exchange system.
  • Was crafted to be in line with using reconciliation as a tactic for final passage.
  • As we reported earlier, the measure proposes giving the government new power to block insurance rate hikes.

Marc Ambinder provides another bulleted list. These are just some of the bullets:

  • it proposes to cover 31 million Americans who don’t have health insurance;
  • it creates a new federal facility to help states crack down on insurance industry abuses and unfair rate increases;
  • it includes significantly ramped up efforts to crack down on waste and fraud within the Medicare/Medicaid systems — this is a nod to Republicans (Peter Roskam and Mark Kirk are behind proposals to do just this);
  • it adds a Medicare tax of 2.9% on unearned income — hitting the wealthy; it immediately closes the Medicare Part D donut hole gap — something seniors should notice before the November 2010 elections if this gets through Congress;
  • it increases tax credits to families to help them buy insurance; it spends $11 billion on community health care centers
  • it increases fees for brand name (as opposed to generic) drugs, depriving the pharmaceutical industry of an extra source of profits

See also E.J. Dionne, “The Elephant at the Health Care Summit”

Profiles in Courage

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Random stuff I learned while chasing links around the Web:

First off, NBC’s Brian Williams ought to get the last week’s Stupid Award for this:

How do you ask the Dalai Lama to leave the White House if you’re trying to keep his visit from becoming too public? Well, judging from the trash bags that he had to walk around, the Obama White House had him exit through a door seldom used by anybody but household staff. It’s where the West Wing meets the main residence. China, however, did notice the visit and called in the U.S. ambassador to China today to protest.

By my count, last week’s was the tenth visit the Dalai Lama has made to the White House, and the fourth sitting POTUS he has met there. I understand he met with George H.W. Bush once, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush four times each, and now Barack Obama once. These meetings are always kept as far under the radar as they can be kept. Clinton didn’t even put His Holiness on the official schedule, but would arrange for him to meet with some lesser official and then casually drop by. The two Bushes handled Dalai Lama visits about the same way Barack Obama did — very quietly, and not in the Oval Office.

The one exception to this was October 2007, when George W. Bush attended the ceremony at which the Dalai Lama was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. The award set off a round of celebrations, protests and police actions in Tibet that played a part in the March 2008 uprising. There are reasons to keep these things low key other than placating China.

And as far as I know, the White House exit he used Thursday is the same one His Holiness always uses, although don’t quote me on that. The Dalai Lama will be on Larry King live tomorrow night, I understand, and maybe Larry will ask him about the trash bags if he runs out of questions about Tiger Woods.

As I wrote at The Guardian, the Dalai Lama is a walking dilemma for presidents. They can’t meet with him, they can’t not meet with him. Either way, they get slammed by somebody.

But the suggestions that the White House seriously was trying to hide the visit from China is more than ludicrous. It was in the papers. There were reporters there (His Holiness threw snow at them in a manner that suggested a purification ritual). The White House issued a statement and uploaded a photo of the meeting to the White House Flickr.com page. The Chinese were paying close attention, believe me.

BTW, His Holiness wore flip flops to the White House. He’s so cute.

Other profiles — I learned from Phil Boehmke at the right-wing site American Thinker that it takes real courage for a prominent and self-employed right-wing publisher to stand in front of a right-wing audience and badmouth lefties. So, folks, whenever you are facing terror — like it’s 6 a.m. and you realize you’re out of coffee, or there’s a big spider in the pantry, or something — and need someone with real courage, be sure to call on ol’ Andrew B.

How Stupid Do You Have to Be to Work for Cato?

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Yesterday I linked to a Paul Krugman column titled “California Death Spiral,” in which Krugman explains succinctly how insurance markets collapse. In short, “If too many healthy people decide that they’d rather take their chances and remain uninsured, the risk pool deteriorates, forcing insurers to raise premiums. This, in turn, leads more healthy people to drop coverage, worsening the risk pool even further, and so on.” If you’ve been paying attention to the health insurance issue, this is fairly self-evident.

Now Michael F. Cannon, the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies, responds by saying that Krugman doesn’t understand insurance markets.

Cannon’s argument — First, he says that Krugman is unfamiliar with the work of University of Pennsylvania economist Mark Pauly. According to Cannon, Pauly has shown that “health insurance markets are way ahead of politicians — and way ahead of economists — in solving the problems that bedevil health insurance markets.” As proof of Pauly’s genius, Cannon links to an abstract of an article Pauly wrote in 1995 about “Guaranteed Renewability in Insurance” and to a description of a book on risk pooling that Pauly co-authored and which was published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Yes, I’m … so not persuaded. But this is a common trick of rightie think-tank fellows. If they don’t have an actual argument, they pull the name of some Authority Figure out of their butts and claim he has an argument. We don’t know what that argument is, but we’re assured it exists.

From here, Cannon goes on to say a colossally stupid thing:

Healthy people dropping coverage would not lead to across-the-board premium increases in California, because California allows markets to set premiums. Only when the government imposes the kind of price controls that Krugman wants does an “adverse selection death spiral” follow.

This entire debate came about because Anthem Blue Cross and other insurers in California are imposing huge premium increases on their customers, and they are doing this in spite of the fact these companies are making substantial profits. As Cannon says, state regulators in California have very limited power to control rates, so insurers can pretty much charge whatever they feel like charging.

There’s your “free markets,” Mr. Cannon.

Note that Krugman did not argue that the premium increases are being caused by a “death spiral,” but that Anthem Blue Cross claims that’s why it’s raising its rates. So either there is such a death spiral in spite of the lack of regulation in California’s insurance markets, or Anthem is price gouging. Take your pick. Either way, the free market ain’t doing squat for the consumer.

You might remember that Cato is the same pool of geniuses who endorsed the idea of insurance insurance as the solution to the health insurance crisis. If you missed it, the plan is to give insurance companies a completely free hand to risk-rate premiums, so that as people get older and/or sicker their premiums would go up. And to keep you from being priced out of health insurance if you get sick, you’re supposed to take out a separate policy of “health status insurance” that will insure you against catastrophic increases in your health insurance. (No, I’m not making this up. Read Cato’s insurance insurance manifesto here.)

This brings me to the question asked in the title of this post — how stupid do you have to be to work for Cato? Because, based on his own arguments, I conclude that Michael F. Cannon is either (a) a complete idiot, or (b) paid to churn out verbiage that has the approximate look and feel of reasoned arguments to defend positions that are really matters of religious faith (i.e., “free markets” fix everything).

I’m leaning toward (b), because Cannon’s invocation of the economist Mark Pauly is a classic example of the “appeal to authority” logical fallacy. We have no way to know how Pauly concludes (assuming that he does) that health insurance markets are already at work solving the problems of the health insurance markets, and apparently have been doing so since 1995. And to pull this trick to discredit a Nobel Prize-winning economist takes cojones.

It’s also a signal to anyone with a brain that Cannon doesn’t have a real argument. But I’m sure he’s very persuasive to people who want to remain loyal to the Magical Free Market doctrine. This is Cannon’s real role — not to provide a real argument, because there isn’t one, but to provide something that looks and feels like an argument to give the True Believers something to hang on to.

Health Care Reform: Not Dead Yet

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David Herszenhorn and Robert Pear write in the New York Times:

President Obama will put forward comprehensive health care legislation intended to bridge differences between Senate and House Democrats ahead of a summit meeting with Republicans next week, senior administration officials and Congressional aides said Thursday.

Democratic officials said the president’s proposal was being written so that it could be attached to a budget bill as a way of averting a Republican filibuster in the Senate. The procedure, known as budget reconciliation, would let Democrats advance the bill with a simple majority rather than a 60-vote supermajority.

We don’t know details. The plan is supposed to be posted on the Web on Monday. Congressional Republicans are still whining about how nobody listens to them, and maybe they’ll skip the health care summit because the Dems already have their minds made up about what they will pass, although it’s not clear congressional Dems have any more idea what the White House is coming up with than anyone else.

More Stuff to Read:

Paul Krugman, “California Death Spiral.”

Ezra Klein, “Selling insurance across state lines: A terrible, no good, very bad health-care idea”

Matt Yglesias, “Breaking: Michelle Obama Reads Books.”

On the “Mount Vernon Statement”

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The conservative “old guard” has released a political manifesto called the “Mount Vernon Statement,” which to me is a textbook example of what happens when people ignorant of history attempt to interpret a historical document. Or, in this case, it’s possibly not so much that they are ignorant of history but that they are incapable of thinking outside their ideology box.

This ideological myopia creates howlers such as the claim the Founding Fathers were vitally concerned with “economic reforms grounded in market solutions.” I don’t think so. The Founders lived in the dawn of the age of industrial capitalism, but I’ve never noticed that they were much influenced by industrial-capitalist thought. Most of them were old-money Agrarian Age aristocrats, remember.

Indeed, if you think about it, the whole idea of naming a [free-market] manifesto after Mount Vernon — a bleeping slave plantation when George Washington lived there — reveals their aversion to actual history as opposed to symbolism and allegory (see the previous Mahablog post).

Another oddity noted by Jack Balkin — the word equality does not appear anywhere in the Mount Vernon statement. “It is hard to speak of fidelity to the Declaration and to the Constitution without once mentioning equality as a central value behind the Declaration and the Constitution,” he says, with profound understatement. “The Declaration’s most famous passage announces the self-evident truth is that all men are created equal.” Today’s Mount Vernon crew do bring up the Declaration, but only so they could work in a mention of God, who is inconveniently missing from the Constitution itself (courtesy of the “godless liberals” who wrote it).

Another anachronism — the Mount Vernon crew claims the Constitution “supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end.” Um, where is the “opposing tyranny in the world” clause?

The first statement in the document that set off alarm bells for me came in the first paragraph —

We recommit ourselves to the ideas of the American Founding. Through the Constitution, the Founders created an enduring framework of limited government based on the rule of law. They sought to secure national independence, provide for economic opportunity, establish true religious liberty and maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government.

The Constitution was indeed created to maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government. However, today’s movement conservatism does not believe in “republican self-government.” In the article by Michael Lind I discussed in the previous post, Lind wrote,

Likewise, the idea of popular sovereignty, though it dates back to John Locke in the 17th century, need not inspire reactionary reverence for existing institutions, much less a desire to restore an alleged golden age. On the contrary, the sovereign people have the right to remake their political and social order every generation or two, in order to achieve their perennial goals in changing conditions.

This was the view of Abraham Lincoln, who said in his Second Annual Message to Congress: “As our case is new, we must think anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.” And it was the view of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 in his Commonwealth Club Address: “Faith in America, faith in our tradition of personal responsibility, faith in our institutions, faith in ourselves demand that we recognize the new terms of the old social contract.”

At the high level of public philosophy, the debate between the tea party right and progressives boils down to this: Do we think that fidelity to our predecessors means mindlessly doing what they did in their own time, even though times have changed? Or do we think that we should act as they would act, if they lived in the 21st century and had learned from everything that has happened in America and the world in the past 200 years?

To put it another way: The American Revolution was a beginning, not an end. The real equivalents today of the American revolutionaries are those who view the republic, not as an 18th-century utopia to be restored with archaeological exactitude, but as a work in progress to which every generation of Americans can contribute.

The conservative idea of “republican self-government” makes the Constitution into a straightjacket, taking away the ability of We, the People to use government to address our concerns, as opposed to the concerns of 1787. Government is an active thing. Government in any form is assessing changing conditions and making decisions based on current needs and available resources.

Since Reagan, however, conservatives have slapped the hands of anyone who actually wants to practice “republican self-government.” Government is supposed to be drowned in the bathtub and replaced by corporate oligarchy.

Come to think of it, maybe they hadn’t forgotten Mount Vernon was a slave plantation.

Anyway, it should be noted that the tea partiers are way underwhelmed. “Old school movement conservative leaders have ceased to be relevant in any meaningful way,” one wrote. The tea partiers are writing their own manifesto, called the “Contract From America.” And yes, that old school movement conservative and old whore Newt Gingrich saw this movement and managed to position himself in front of it. (This is all linked on the tea partier site, which is set up so that you can’t link to individual items on it. Not user-friendly.)

The tea partiers want specifics, apparently, and not mushy bromides, which suggests they haven’t entirely given up on “republican self-government” even if the solutions they favor are grotesquely wrong-headed. Credit where credit is due.

Why Sarah Palin Is a Goddess

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Michael Lind writes about mythological politics and the tea partiers, saying,

This is the key to understanding the otherwise inexplicable accusations by the populist right that Barack Obama is a socialist or fascist or whatever, as well as fantasies about a global secular humanist conspiracy. We are dealing with a mythological mentality, based on simple and powerful archetypes. Contemporary figures and current events are plugged into a framework that never changes. “King Charles (or King George) is threatening the rights of Englishmen” becomes “Barack Obama is promoting socialism” — or fascism, or monarchism, or daylight saving time.

As in other cases of mythological politics, like messianic Marxism, this kind of thinking is resistant to argument. If you disagree, then that simply proves that you are part of the conspiracy. Inconvenient facts can be explained away by the true believers. It’s hard to come up with arguments that would persuade people who think that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are totalitarians to change their mind.

This is something I’ve written about in the past. It’s important to understand that the political “thinking” of the True Believers on the Right is a thick soup of myth, allegory, and archetype. Stuff like, you know, facts, are irrelevant to them.

Lind traces the major themes of rightie mythology back to 18th century Britain, but in some ways I think you have to go back even further. The ur-myth that under-girds all the other myths is the old Zoroastrian struggle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil. However, [with righties] “good” and “evil” are matters of intrinsic identity, not actions.

I remember Sunday School literature from the 1950s that showed images of Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev standing with Satan, while Jesus bestrode the United States, his arms wrapped protectively around a couple of innocent white American children. Even many who aren’t old enough (or Bible Belt enough) to have seen images like that have been influenced by the mythology such images represented.

If one believes America the Pure and Righteous is protected by Jesus, and America’s enemies are minions of Satan, then a great many other assumptions flow from that. Among these is the belief that public display of religious totems like Ten Commandments monuments is essential to keeping America “strong,” e.g., armored against demon enemies.

It also explains why the Christian Right wants obeisance to Jesus to be made compulsory. For them, religion is not about personal devotion or worship; it’s war. And you’re either with ’em or agin’ ’em.

Further, as I’ve said, “good” and “evil” are understood to be intrinsic qualities that reside in certain individuals and groups regardless of what they do. One chooses to take the side of “good” by being loyal to the “good” tribe, a.k.a., “us.”

An example of the importance of archetypes in rightie thought can be found in the blogosphere’s reaction to homicides allegedly (she hasn’t been tried yet) committed by Alabama University professor Amy Bishop. Like most leftie bloggers I haven’t written about Bishop because, to me, it’s a crime story, and I rarely comment on crime stories.

But a number of rightie bloggers have blown Bishop up into a Big Bleeping Political Deal, pointedly calling her a “leftist” or a “socialist.” How so? Apparently someone called Bishop a “socialist” on her RateMyProfessors page, so it must be true. Also, she went to Harvard.

In other words, we in Rational World have no way to know anything about Bishop’s political beliefs, or even if she has any. Further, there is nothing about the homicides that suggests a political motive, so a rational person wouldn’t think of the homicides in political terms. Some are claiming a racial motive, because the three individuals killed were non-white, but one of the people she shot who survived is very obviously white. Since these were people Bishop knew, it’s not unreasonable to assume her motives were personal.

But bloggers who have pointed out there is no obvious political component to the Bishop homicides, notably Steve M and Steven Taylor, have been subject to vile counter-attacks from the Right for suggesting the homicides were not political.

The weird truth is, I don’t think the rightie bloggers calling Bishop a “leftist” have said she had a political motive. So why are rightie bloggers making such a Big Bleeping Deal about her alleged politics? Because it so neatly fits the mythological archetype of “leftist” and “socialist” that lives in their heads, that’s why. As the “American Power” blogger explained, “I have never hypothesized on Bishop’s motives. It’s enough fascination at the simple truth of a Harvard leftist in league with some of our worst criminal murderers and jihadi terrorists.”

Criminal murderers and jihadi terrorists? She went to Harvard. What more do you need to know? People who go to Harvard are like that. And there need be no political motives, or any motives at all, for a “leftist” to be a violent, murdering criminal, because that’s just the way “leftists” are. See how it works?

In fact, suggesting any motivation at all to Bishop, even an evil and irrational motive, seems to enrage some righties, who equate understanding motive with making excuses for the murders. Rational people don’t think that way, of course, but we’re not talking about rational people. We’re talking about people whose worldview is entirely shaped by myth and archetype, not by reason.

Which brings me to why Sarah Palin is a goddess. By that I don’t mean she has actual godlike powers. I’m talking about her role in the rightie mythological cosmos, and why pointing out her obvious shortcomings will put no dents in the tea partiers’ loyalty to her.

By “goddess” I mean a goddess in something like (but not exactly) the tantric sense, in which a deity becomes an archetype for one’s own deepest nature. Palin, by contrast, is a near-perfect embodiment of an ideal. She is (to a rightie) beautiful, sexual, and maternal; she is powerful enough that the Evil Ones who live in Washington and who speak seditious things on the Teevee must kowtow to her. Through her folksy speech and shooting skills she evokes other American archetypes from more wholesome, earlier times, like Daniel Boone. But she also wears modern clothes and has a Facebook page.

Like most tantric deities, Palin has has both benevolent and wrathful aspects. As a wrathful goddess she gives voice to her followers’ deepest fears and hates and resentments. But she also has a bright smile and sometimes carries a baby, showing a benevolent side. Her followers both love her and identify with her; she is an archetype representing their own deepest selves, or at least the selves they’d like to be.

She’s a goddess, I tell you. And because she is a goddess is makes no difference to her devotees that she has few real accomplishments, no coherent ideas, and probably doesn’t know Bern from Budapest. It does not matter if she writes crib notes on her hand and needs several months to think of a name of a newspaper she actually reads. In fact, it does not matter to them if she reads at all. Whatever she does is exactly right, because it is her doing it, and she is a goddess.

It’s important to understand this, because it shows us why it’s futile to treat Palin as just another politician or media star. It was pointless to make fun of the crib notes, for example. I doubt anyone could bring Palin down but Palin herself. If she somehow grossly and blatantly violated the ideal she represents, her followers could turn on her. But until she does that, she is invincible in the eyes of the devoted.

There’s a long analysis of the tea party movement in today’s New York Times that’s worth a read. Essentially, the “movement” is a collection of fearful people grasping at incoherent ideas the way drowning people grasp at lifebuoys. It brings to mind what Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer (pp. 59-60)–

The power of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. … whether or not [organizations] develop into mass movements depends less on the doctrine they preach and the program they project than on the degree of their preoccupation with unity and the readiness for self-sacrifice. … Such diverse phenomena as a deprecation of the present, a facility for make-believe, a proneness to hate, a readiness to imitate, credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible, and many others which crowd the minds of the intensely frustrated are, as we shall see, unifying agents and prompters of recklessness.

Because the incoherent ideas the tea partiers grasp are plucked from the American psyche, those ideas can be traced back through earlier times in American history, as Lind says. But the ideas themselves are not the point, and so I disagree with Lind that understanding where ideas come from is key to understanding the tea party movement. What unifies the tea partiers is something primitive, pre-cognitive. As Hoffer says elsewhere in The True Believer, fearful people give up individual autonomy to become part of a movement, and within the movement they find the freedom to hate, bully, torment, and torture with impunity — and with the blessings of the goddess Sarah.

Onward Christian Kidnappers

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Here’s an update on the crew of evangelicals who got caught trying to smuggle stray children out of Haiti.

First, the lawyer who has been representing the evangelicals in Haiti courts faces sex trafficking charges that pre-date the Haiti kidnapping episode. He also has no license to practice law in Haiti. Make of that what you will.

It appears the accused kidnappers for Christ have yet to be released. But never fear; their cause has been taken up by U.S. righties, who are outraged at how the kidnap crew is being treated. Glenn Greenwald points out that U.S. righties have, um, a double standard.

In other news — there’s a long article from the New York Times Sunday magazine on the ongoing efforts of conservative Christians to use public schools to indoctrinate children. Highly recommended.