Tuesday, April 14, 2009 - Posts
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Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Defending Robert Samuelson's attack on Dem health care plan and Obama's "post-material" economy, blogger D.A. argues that it's only "an aspirational preference" for "everyone to be insured." In other words, it's not a preference people would make spending "their own money in the absence of compulsion by the government." ... I think I like aspirational preferences. "All men are created equal" seems like an aspirational preference. Can't buy it at the mall. It seems like it would be hard to achieve any desirable form of equality--equality before the law, equality of opportunity, or social equality--simply by aggregating the choices of individuals spending their own money. ... 1:08 A.M.
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Did John McTiernan Make the Wrong Self-Serving Paranoid Conspiracy Film? Die Hard director John McTiernan, who pled guilty, withdrew his plea, and is now awaiting potential indictment in the Anthony Pellicano scandal, has apparently made a film blaming Karl Rove for pursuing Pellicano. The theory? According to the NYT, McTiernan sees
the Pellicano prosecution as having stemmed from a pre-emptive strike against a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential candidacy.
Mrs. Clinton, the film says, was widely reported to have had help from Mr. Pellicano when her husband was accused in 1992 of having had an affair with Gennifer Flowers.
According to an elaborate turn of events asserted in the documentary, the Pellicano prosecution was intended to churn up dirt that was then folded into an anti-Clinton campaign video that was planned for use if she were nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate.
I'd say McTiernan's thinking too small! If I were making a paranoid conspiracy documentary about Rove and Pellicano, I wouldn't focus on Hillary. I'd focus generally on the "thousands of hours of encoded tapes from wiretaps" the FBI supposedly found when they raided Pellicano's office. Who knows who is on those tapes? Lots of Hollywood bigshots, presumably. Whoever has those tapes might, in this conspiracy theory, be able to blackmail half the big showbiz donors to the Democratic party--donors to Hillary and Obama. Of course, the tapes were in the possession of government law enforcement officals--not Bush operatives. But, hey, would that have stopped Richard Nixon or John Mitchell? We're making a crazy film here! ... I know when I heard about the stash of tapes, I began to drool (figuratively). And I'm not Karl Rove. ... 12:20 A.M
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Headline in WSJ: "Emanuel Now a Backer of Immigration Action" The evidence?
For his part, Mr. [Rahm] Emanuel said his views haven't changed, though people may be viewing him in a new light now. In any case, he said, his job now was to represent the president's views.
"It doesn't matter what Rahm thinks," he said in an interview. "It matters what President Obama thinks." [E.A.]
Yes, sounds like he's had a total change of heart! ... 12:18 A.M.
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
My colleague Timothy Noah argues that a) Congress "must" enact health care reform because "health care costs have spiraled out of control," and b) the "consensus" (that is, insurer-endorsed) cost saving solutions are inadequate:
Some of these (more electronic recordkeeping, more preventive care, tighter restrictions on malpractice litigation) would be worthwhile even if they didn't save money. Others methods [such as "best practices" protocols] risk creating more problems than they solve. But the bottom line is that the insurers' basket of proposals would not, even by their own reckoning, cut health care costs; instead, they would cut the rate of growth in health care spending by 6 percent to 7 percent.
Therefore, c)
If you really want to rein in health care costs, then consensus reform options like creating a comparative effectiveness board won't get you very far. For the true spending hawk, I see no practical alternative to the "socialist" public option.
First, just because rising health care costs have eaten up all of the average American's wage increases, it does not necessarily follow that either this rise was unwarranted or that health care costs need to be controlled. Maybe Americans, like richer people everywhere, want to spend more money on health care (as opposed to, say, newspapers) and advances in health care have given them more valuable services to purchase (or have their employers purchase for them). That's probably not true--and almost certainly not 100% true--but you can't tell it just by looking at Noah's big graph. (Nor do I understand Robert Samuelson's column, which seems to argue that because health care is not "material" it isn't a valuable service and can't be the basis for capitalistic economic growth.) If the graph showed that rising expenditures on computer technology had eaten up all the increase in Americans' paychecks, would we immediately declare a "computer cost crisis" and demand that rising laptop expenditures be constrained? Or would we say, "Hey, people are spending a lot more on computers these days"?
Second, the savings you get from the "public option"--savings on marketing and administrative costs, ability to use the massive purchasing power of the government to bid down prices--seem like one-shot propositions. We switch to a public plan, we save our 20-30 percent on administration and bargaining, and then the rise in health care costs resumes, thanks to ever-fancier technology and complex treatments (that actually are effective--just expensive). Soon costs have eaten up the 20-30 percent and are back on a rising path to consume a growing share of GDP, no?
The lesson I would draw isn't that we shouldn't try to reform health care, or that we shouldn't try to reduce costs. It's that we shouldn't reform health care in order to reduce costs, and that we shouldn't expect health care reform to in itself control the health care entitlement problem that's scheduled to devour the budget. We should reform health care to provide long life, security and peace of mind to Americans, while we resign ourselves to the likelihood that this will consume an ever-larger portion of our economy. 1:44 A.M.
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Brendan Loy:
Does Mickey Kaus really think that low-wage workers in Mexico and Central America play this much attention to... [the progress of amnesty plans in Washington]
Um ... yeah! That is, they hear the news, perhaps false news, that legalization is or is not in the offing. Why wouldn't they pay more attention than the average American? The news affects them more directly, no? (If you look at Spanish-language papers in the U.S, certainly, you'll notice a rather intense focus on immigration-related developments, especially the possibility of legalization.) ... 1:42 A.M.
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