Month: August 2009

by Conor Clarke

Yesterday I wrote a fairly tepid defense of Justice Scalia's position on the execution of a potentially innocent man, Troy Davis. Perhaps, I ventured, his position was not "molded out of unalloyed craziness." I got a lot of emails about that: "No no," you all said, "the composition of Scalia's madness is really quite pure." And, you know what, that's probably right. But before I backpedal completely let me offer up the main responses I received, which fall into these two categories. First:

Check. Second:

And mate.

I should add that I stand by the general point of my post, which was that procedural rights normally aren't things that stand or fall depending solely on the outcomes they generate. But I read the quotes above as making two good points about this. First, it's not clear Troy Davis's procedural rights were satisfied. Second, even if those procedural rights were satisfied, the outcome in this case is so deeply terrible that it calls into question the value of the original procedures.

I also enjoyed Alan Dershowitz's opening hypothetical on this.

by Patrick Appel

That's Michael Scherer's take after reading a new poll that shows little movement on public support of health care:

What matters is what happens in September and through the fall. Will Obama get Republican support? (On this point, the right wing backlash, especially to the degree it impacts people like Sen. Chuck Grassley, matters a great deal.) Will he be able to pass meaningful reforms? (Including ones that liberals cheer, and industry lobbyists decry.) Will be be able to pass anything? By the time we learn the answers to these questions, the August excitement is likely to seem little more than a distant dream.

There is a problem with this line of thought: arguments that make it outside of the beltway need to be seeded early and have plenty of time to incubate. The debates of August will mutate into the debates of September and beyond. That is why the primary attacks against Obama and McCain were seeded months and months before the election.

by Conor Clarke

Steven Pearlstein has a fantastic Washington Post column this morning, laying out more reasons why the left should let go of the public option. But I found myself disagreeing slightly with his summary of the debate:

I agree with the second sentence but not the first. My feeling is that the all-consuming importance of the public option was "imposed on the debate" by the right, not the left, and most of the liberals who have sworn a blood oath to defend it are playing a defensive and reactive game. Incidentally, though, this is a third reason why I feel a little uncomfortable letting the big health-care showdown take place over the public option: The left isn't the side that picked the battleground. A month ago, the public option didn't suck up half the oxygen it does today. The fact that it has so suddenly become the left's lodestar for the entire debate suggests to me that the left is not picking its battles with sufficient care.  

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I have had severe trouble with acid reflux for decades, and so have been taking prescription acid blockers for most of that time. Our insurance has a good prescription drug plan, so this has not been a financial problem for us.

But.

Several years ago, my wife pointed out an article in our local newspaper about how an area gastro-intestinal specialist was starting to perform a procedure that used a new piece of equipment to remedy my kind of ailment. Well, I said, let's wait until he's been doing this a while before I submit to this novelty. So, I waited. A few years later, I ended up in this doctor's office and asked him about the procedure. He told me that he had done it numerous times, that the results had been good and held up over time, but that he wasn't doing it any more, because insurance companies stopped covering it.

From his perspective, it happened this way. Before the new procedure, sufferers like me had two options: major surgery of the esophagus, or permanent reliance on acid blockers. Given that choice, most chose acid blockers, even though insurance companies would cover the surgery. With the new procedure, though, there was a third, intermediate option that was much less traumatic than surgery, yet significantly more expense than maintenance medication. The insurance industry started out being willing to cover the procedure, since it was tremendously less expensive than surgery, but as more and more people who had been avoiding major surgery decided to undergo the less invasive procedure, the insurance industry saw a net increase in their expenses. So, they stopped covering the new procedure. Quite late in the game they decided, not that the high-tech was risky, or that it was ineffective, or even that it was not cost-effective, but that it was "experimental." So, they wouldn't pay for it anymore.

I think it would have been $10,000, at the time, for me to pay for the procedure out of pocket. Not anything like the cost of major surgery, but way outside of my means.

A few years later, at a later appointment, I asked if the insurance industry had relented on the "experimental" status. No, I was told, and anyway, since the lack of insurance coverage had dried up the market for the technology, the company that made the device had gone bankrupt.

True, just one side of the story. But maybe believable?

by Patrick Appel

Dale Carpenter analyzes this NYT profile of Ted Olson, the distinguished conservative lawyer who filed a suit challenging the legality of prop 8:

One interesting thing about the article is how few right-leaning commentators are cited as publicly criticizing Olson, a stalwart of the Federalist Society and the conservative/libertarian legal movement since the Reagan era. Robert Bork doesn't want to get into a public argument about it. He just wants to know why Olson joined the other team. William Bradford Reynolds mildly chides Olson for taking "a more assertive view of how one should interpret the Constitution than you would normally expect Ted to take." A quote from Stephen Calabresi implies that Olson's lawsuit might echo "a certain libertarian squishiness at the Office of Legal Counsel [in the Reagan Justice Department] under Ted."

Carpenter goes on to pick apart that last quote and wonder about Libertarian support for marriage equality.

by Patrick Appel

Romain Laurent's new photo series tilts the world forty-five degrees. More images here.

(Hat tip: Like Cool)

by Conor Clarke

I have decently warm feelings about a public option, but I don't think it's a good site for an all-consuming pitched battle over the fate of American health-care reform. So it's nice to see that some members of the Obama administration think this, too, and my heart goes out to the White House staffer who said the following to the Washington Post:

Amen. The public option is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for successful health-care reform (defined as expanded coverage that is more cost effective). I understand the argument, made by Paul Krugman and many Democrats, that the public option might be an important "signal "of whether Obama is really the progressive [that] activists thought they were backing." But I am not convinced, for at least two reasons.

First, the "signal" argument is not a substantive point. I think there is a decent chance the public option will reduce costs in the 10-year window, although it depends on the details and the CBO report on this subject seemed rather speculative. But the "signal" argument doesn't hinge on those details. It hinges only on the intensity of support for the abstract proposition that the government should get more involved in the insurance industry.

Second, the health-care bills that are working their way through committee seem uniquely ill-suited for a litmus test. If you check out the congressional summary of America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, you'll find about 20 important provisions that have nothing to do with the public option and have received little or no attention in the public debate. Health exchanges? A prohibition on premium variance? These things have been swept under the rug. But if we get over the public option, perhaps we can get back to the rest of health-care reform.

by Patrick Appel

The Economist checks in on Asia's recovery:

Western populists will no doubt once again try to blame their own sluggish performance on “unfair” Asia. Ignore them. Emerging Asia’s average growth rate of almost 8% over the past two decades—three times the rate in the rich world—has brought huge benefits to the rest of the world. Its rebound now is all the more useful when growth in the West is likely to be slow. Asia cannot replace the American consumer: emerging Asia’s total consumption amounts to only two-fifths of America’s. But it is the growth in spending that really matters. In dollar terms, the increase in emerging Asia’s consumer-spending this year will more than offset the drop in spending in America and the euro area. This shift in spending from the West to the East will help rebalance the world economy.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

What just happened in three short days?  With one statement about the "public option" from Obama, the entire health care reform discussion shifted totally away from the right wing crazies and Palin's "death panels"  In just three days with one statement about the "public option", liberal Democrats who stood on the sidelines and barely jumped in to the death panel discussions, have finely stirred off their duffs to get into the fray and argument.

In just three days, the media has shifted its coverage away from the crazies and the lies and finally, some meaningful media attention to the real issues on the health care reform effort.  In just three days, the whole debate on health care reform has turned around and hopefully, now the debate and discussions can be about the real issues and real health care reform can happen.  Meanwhile, the ultra conservative right wing has been stymied. Obama is brilliant!

Noam Scheiber makes a related point. I'm not completely buying it, nor am I convinced that the worst of the health care fury is over.