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The Mediated Man, David Brooks versus Thomas Paine

Commonsense-153pxYesterday I read David Brooks editorial about the mediated man and his allegation that because Mr. Snowden’s life is “unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society”, Mr. Snowden sees his battle as that between  “the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state” and that he would be “more likely to share the distinct strands of libertarianism that are blossoming in this fragmenting age”. Since I had just read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” on Sunday, I was surprised with his analysis. It is as if Mr. Brooks borrowed the idea of mediating institutions from “Common Sense” and then promptly forgot that Thomas Paine used this “common sense” to argue against the absurdities of British rule. Thomas Paine did not mince his words. He was at least as vehement about the absurdities of British rule as Mr. Snowden has been about the absurdities of blanket data gathering by the U. S. government. Here is the opening paragraph of “Common Sense”.

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

“Common Sense” was popular in 1776 because common people could hold two common sense thoughts in their minds at the same time. For many of them their life was “embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world” and yet at the same time, they were very concerned about abuses by the British government. Their response surprised many of the pundits of that day since it was both measured and civil to “the gigantic and menacing state”. I guess that it is not surprising that Mr. Brooks would make the same mistake. Random acts of violence was no longer a solution for the common man. Within a short period of time this common sense argument had initiated a public debate about independence from England which resulted in the Declaration of Independence.  For today’s generation Mr. Snowden is their voice just like Mr. Ellsberg  was the voice of the Viet Nam war generation.

Here is the part of the David Brooks article I quoted.

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of libertarianism that are blossoming in this fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of authority, the strong belief that hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to transparency, the assumption that individual preference should be supreme. You’re more likely to donate to the Ron Paul for president campaign, as Snowden did….

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Tradecraft and 9,000 Year Old Beers

Last Saturday my wife and I watched Zero Dark Thirty. My wife hated it because of the long stretches of black screens. Since I knew the plot I found myself getting bored while anticipating the next scene. Although the acting and the script was well written, we did not get caught up in the movie. I ended up giving it three stars on Netflix. The one thing that fascinated me was the use of the word, tradecraft. In honor of the movie I will see how many posts I can write in a row that using the word tradecraft.

First off is a fun article on ancient brewing. Business Insider has a great slide show on an event, Here’s What 9,000-Year-Old Beers Taste Like, where the folks re-created ancient brews at The Bell House thanks to the World Science Festival. This is a great example of excellence in the brewing tradecraft. If you can use a little bit of forensic science to come up with palatable clone of the 9,000 year old brew, you are a darn good brewer. The Midas Touch beer was the most appealing of the ancient brews to me.

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The Game is On!

Wow! On Sunday the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released partial transcripts of its interviews with several IRS agents. The Administration releases important data on Friday afternoon and Congress releases explosive testimony on Sunday. The game is on and John Hinderaker of the Powerline blog was on top of it. It is hard to reconcile micromanagement with the Administration’s rogue agent explanation. The cover-up just reached a new level. Here is part of what he said. You can read the rest of it here.

Earlier today, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released partial transcripts of its interviews with several IRS agents. These interviews formed at least part of the basis for Chairman Darrell Issa’s characterization of White House spokesman Jay Carney, who claimed that the IRS scandal was the work of a couple of rogue agents, as a “paid liar” on CNN this morning. You can read the partial transcripts here. These are some excerpts:

Q: But just to be clear, she told you the specific names of these applicants.
A: Yes.
Q: And she told you that Washington, D.C. had requested these two specific applications be sent to D.C.
A: Yes, or parts of them.

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Is Anyone Surprised That Unions Are Coming Out Against The Affordable Care Act?

There is a good reason for the unions to come out against the Affordable Care Act. With ACA health exchange rates this low, the thump-thump sound you are hearing is the sound of the bus running over the unions. If unions have to choose between maintaining union membership or embracing Affordable Care Act, the choice for unions is simple.

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Is ACA Health Insurance Rates Settled Science?

At the end of April Kaiser’s Subsidy Calculator estimated that individual health insurance would cost $8,137. I ran the calculator today on a single adult earning $60,000 and the premium for a “silver” plan is estimated at $3,018. Now if use the $205 per month amount quoted in cost in Avrik Roy’s Rate Shock article for a “bronze”  plan, it is $2,460 in California. Are health insurance rates that much harder to calculate than temperatures from tree rings?

Subsidy Calculator_20130602

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The Great Obamacare Divide

piggybankThe Affordable Care Act did not create the divide between the healthy and the unhealthy, it drove the wedge deeper. The healthy have always paid for the unhealthy but the costs have been spirally out of control for the last thirty years. Out of control health care costs was and still is the primary reason for health care reform. The Affordable Care Act took a different tack to fixing the health care problem. It decided that the only health care reform issue that was going to be addressed was an expansion of our chronic care system and this expansion would be accomplished by increased cost shifting. The key cost shifting policies implemented by the Affordable Care Act were to ban pre-existing conditions, use community rating to level out insurance premiums between age groups, to expand Medicaid, and to use a one size fits all approach to health insurance plans. As long as third party payer system remained intact and paying for the expansion, the goals of the Affordable Care Act were safe. When the healthy people realized that their insurance premiums were going up or their health insurance was being dropped because they were the people paying for expanded benefits, the results were predictable. According to a recent Fox News poll 56% of the people believe that they had a better health care plan before the Affordable Care Act reforms. The Affordable Care Act reforms drove a big enough wedge between the healthy against the unhealthy that the healthy noticed.

The majority of the people in this country are healthy. They are also likely to be skeptical of the argument that cost shifting policies will reduce future health insurance increases. Like most people they do not like to think about health care until it is necessary. Unlike the unhealthy group they are willing to evaluate their health insurance with the same cost to benefit lens they use to evaluate their auto or house insurance if it will save them money. They have concluded that the health care system has failed to fix their problem for twenty years and it is unlikely that the Affordable Care Act will fix it. The unhealthy and poor really do not have a choice about their health care so their attitude to health care is completely different than the healthy. They do not care who pays for the health care as long as they get the health care they want. So we have a group of healthy people who reluctantly care about health care costs and an unhealthy group that does not care at all. It is not surprising that a Rasmussen poll found out that 59% of the people would trade a less expensive health insurance plan for a bigger paycheck.

If they had a choice, 59% of Likely U.S. Voters would choose a less expensive health insurance plan that covered only major medical expenses and a bigger paycheck.

The healthy majority are willing to embrace “common sense” changes and the unhealthy minority do not care. The healthy want more choices that result in lower costs.  If they continue to be healthy, they reason that they should be able to use “their savings” for other high priority items in the family budget. It is their money. The Affordable Care supporters believe these savings belong to society and should be used to expand health care for those unhealthy people who have no choice. Solving this health care issue for the unhealthy is a major part of their world view of the “greater good” for society. In reality they have entered into a shell game with the insurance companies and health care providers to change the source of funds for the chronic care and uninsured patients. It is not surprising that the healthy people group view the “greater good” argument with skepticism. They understand the “greater good” talk, they do not see the “greater good” walk. To the healthy we have a health care cost problem and the problem with the unhealthy will not be solved by throwing more money at it. It will require a different type of health care reform than the Affordable Care Act. This health care reform has to be smarter about the health cost games being played by insurance companies and health care providers, increasing health care competition, and less focused on raising revenue. It is a regulatory environment that looks like it lends itself more to the state control than the federal control. This leaves the Affordable Care Act supporters with the “Jerry Maguire” dilemma if they want the Affordable Care Act to survive. Do you continue to argue that Affordable Care Act reforms are part of the “greater good” for society despite being significantly more expensive for the healthy or do you embrace your job as agent to the people and start showing them some results they can see in their wallet? Show me the money!

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My Wife Came Home With A Shotgun and I Blame Joe Biden

IMG_1731bWith shotgun shells as the only ammo on the shelf at Walmart and Joe Biden extolling the virtues of shotguns for self defense, I knew it was just a matter of time before my wife’s favorite gun shop reeled her in. Last year she got her CCW but she has been unable to practice due to the lack of 9mm ammunition. This week her favorite gun shop made her an offer she couldn’t refuse so “we” are now proud owners of a shotgun. If the objective of gun control legislation was to talk down gun ownership in America, the plan is having the opposite effect. Gun sales are booming. Now look what she is posing with!

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Good News for Obamacare

From the Wonkblog we get this bit of good news about Obamacare.

In 2009, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that a medium-level “silver” plan ”” which covers 70 percent of a beneficiary’s expected health costs ”” on the California health exchange would cost $5,200 annually. More recently, a report from the consulting firm Milliman predicted it would carry a $450 monthly premium. Yesterday, we got the real numbers. And they’re lower than anyone thought.

As always, Sarah Kliff has the details. The California exchange will have 13 insurance options, and the heavy competition appears to be driving down prices. The most affordable silver-level plan is charging $276-a-month. The second-most affordable plan is charging $294. And all this is before subsidies. Someone making twice the poverty line, say, will only pay $104-a-month.

I checked my eHealthInsurance.com report for average health insurance premiums by state and the California number seems reasonable. Back in December I wrote the post, What if Individual Health Insurance Premiums do not go up as fast as expected, in which I speculated that lower than expected individual insurance premiums might be a likely result. It was based primarily on the fact that my health insurance premium was lower before Obamacare and doing nothing is a likely political compromise to avoid premium cost shock. For a large portion of the population the less we implement of Obamacare the better off we are. This was recently confirmed in a recent Fox News poll. So now I find myself in the odd position of rooting for increased incompetence in implementing Obamacare. Murphy rules and Obamacare supporters drool!

This month I wrote the post, Has Obamacare Started to Channel Jerry Macguire, when I noticed a pretty dramatic shift in health insurance premium estimates by the Kaiser’s Subsidy Calculator. I am still not sure why Kaiser changed their calculator but it does make Obamacare a lot more attractive to some people. It sure looks like Obamacare supporters have embraced the “Show me the money” mentality. Now we see the Washington Post report is echoing the same individual health insurance premium costs that I found in my previous posts.  So if we assume that all of these reports are true then we have a new set of questions to ask.

  1. What are large organizations going to do? In my post, Spending for Private Health Insurance in the United States, we can see that according to the NIHCM the price large organizations are paying for health insurance, $15,022, is much worse than the price being paid in the individual insurance market, $4,968. With further confirmation  by Kaiser and Milliman I was struck with the thought that somewhere along the way these large organizations are going to start believe that they are getting ripped off and their logical reaction will be to dump their employees into the exchanges. I don’t think the Obamacare supporters saw this one coming but the next logical step for these large organizations is to embrace a defined contribution approach to health care just like the small businesses who are using HRAs. It is time for large organizations to play a much smaller role in the health care for their employees. Zane Benefits has a plan to accomplish that. Isn’t that one of the major goals of health care reform?
  2. What are the high health care cost states going to do? According to eHealthInsurance.com the five highest health insurance premium states are Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, and Alaska. Their average health insurance premiums are much higher than California’s and Kaiser’s price. So if you are a resident of Massachusetts and your costs are $965 per month maybe it is time to ask your legislators for health care reform that lowers your cost. When your state’s health care costs stick out, it is likely someone in the state is going get  hammered.
  3. What is the health care industry going to do with the passive-aggressive health care consumer? One of the big differences between the people who are purchasing health insurance in the individual market versus the large group market is that they are savvy about health care prices. These consumers have mostly gotten over the health care hump and learned to shop for health insurance like they shop for auto insurance. It may be a shocker to some but they accomplished this without health care navigators. The large group participants on the other hand have not seen the health care hump let alone gotten over it. I expect they will exhibit a lot of passive-aggressive behavior until they get used shopping for health care in this brave new world. I cannot wait to hear the first reports of harried doctors complaining that their patients are asking them too many questions about costs and alternative treatments they cannot or do not want to answer. Life was so much simpler when no one cared about health care costs!
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The IRS Efficiency Argument

Okay, let’s go down the rabbit hole again. In testimony by outgoing acting Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Steve Miller he explains the targeting of groups with “tea party” and “patriot” as an inadvertent result of trying to improve efficiency in the IRS group for non-profit applications. So let us assume that you are in charge of this group and you are being swamped with new applications. You are confronted with several choices. The “efficient choice” is to let most of them through with just a cursory review. Desperate times calls for desperate measures and this is the choice that cleans up your backlog the quickest. If upper management wants a more thorough review then the they need to increase the budget for this group.

Instead IRS management chose the least efficient method to deal with the backlog. Instead of quickly dispensing with the non-profit applications, they chose to scrutinize primary small “tea party” groups in greater detail. These groups are pretty small fish in the pond. Whatever! As shown in the hearings this involved a lot of communication between the IRS and the applicants. A lot of the questions asked by the IRS in these communications do not appear to be relevant to the application. Some of the questions were against IRS policy and some are probably illegal. So as Hillary Clinton might say, “What was the point of all of this?” If efficiency was the primary concern, the IRS created more work for themselves in processing the backlog and opened the door to increased Congressional oversight and public scrutiny. Yea, that is how we improve efficiency in the IRS!