Month: August 2009

The View From Your Sickbed

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

My employer offers health insurance coverage, but I have declined coverage because I am HIV+.  I have opted, instead, to purchase very costly insurance through the State of Illinois for persons who have the financial means, but are uninsurable.   My monthly premiums are $730.00. Many people don’t understand why I would voluntarily pay $8,760.00 in health insurance premiums a year when better coverage is offered free by my employer. The fact is, if I were covered under my employer’s group plan, I would astronomically raise his rates because we are a very small office. From my personal experience and the experience of my HIV+ friends, insurance companies all but reveal to employers the identity of the employees that have a big affect on premiums.   While the insurance carrier may not name names, in a small office such as mine it is easy for the boss to identify the “45 year-old male Caucasian non-smoking employee” referenced by the insurance agent. The implied message is, “get rid of that employee, your rates will become more affordable and we won’t have to insure someone so costly.”

Even though I consider myself very healthy and have never suffered an opportunistic infection, my annual prescription costs exceed $26,000.00 a year and my quarterly doctor visits run about $1,200.00 per visit because of the costly lab tests that must be performed.  Without ever being hospitalized or missing a single day of work due to my condition, my annual medical expenses still exceed $30,000.00 a year, and I pay approximately 20% of that out of pocket.

If I were to go on my employer’s health coverage, the unfortunate reality is that I will become too costly to employ.  With small businesses looking for ways to cut costs, it would only be a matter of time before they would find a reason to let me go.  I know it is illegal, I am an attorney, but people who do not believe such things happen in America are delusional.  Good employees are routinely let go for bogus reasons simply because they jack up the employer’s monthly health insurance premium due to a chronic illness.

The truth is, I’d rather spend $15,000.00 a year and keep my job, rather than go on my employer’s group plan and be looking for work in 3 months.

Is The Stimulus Helping Ordinary Americans?

by Conor Clarke

USA Today had a new poll out yesterday that found, among other things, that only 18% of the country says the Obama administration's stimulus "has done anything to help improve their personal situation." And I thought Matt Yglesias made a good point about this: The most widely dispersed elements of the stimulus — the almost $300 billion in tax cuts, distributed to far more than 18% of the population — were designed to be inconspicuous. Consumers were not supposed to realize what the tax rebate portion of the stimulus was going to "improve their personal situation."

I think this is a charmingly counterintuitive point, and worth lingering over. If you, the hypothetical dictator of a country mired in recession, were going to offer a tax rebate in the hopes of boosting consumer spending and aggregate demand in your fiefdom, you would have two options. First, you could issue a big lump sum check at the end of the year, or perhaps several smaller checks over the course of the year. Second, you could decrease tax withholding on each employee's paycheck. Both methods would boost short-run incomes by the same amount; the only difference is that, in the second case, most people wouldn't notice the boost — it would come as a small, unmarked addition to their regular paychecks. 

Obama opted for the latter method, on the theory that people are more apt to spend "regular income" than dollars that come bundled as specially marked, one-time, lump-sum "stimulus spending." The whole theory — backed by lots of behavioral research from Richard Thaler and others — is that people shouldn't notice the money, and file it in a separate "mental account." And sure, there are limits to the counterintuitive charms of this point: The simple fact that people don't notice the stimulus dollars is not affirmative evidence that the stimulus is working. (Since it's possible to imagine people saving money they don't notice.) But the mere fact that most people tell pollsters they don't notice the stimulus is not evidence one way or another. Relax, USA Today.

Reality Check

by Patrick Appel

I'm not sure how much this chart tells us (just because one doesn't approve of Obama's performance on health care doesn't mean they don't support reform) but it's not a great sign for supporters of the current health care bill:

Intrade has seen the chance of healthcare reform by December fall precipitously this week, which probably says more about shifted time-lines than the chances that something, however pared down, will make it through eventually.

Update. A reader writes:

The intrade contract requires a public option to be in the bill that's signed by the end of the year for it to execute.

That does change the calculus.

At The Gates Of The Fourth Estate

by Patrick Appel

Conor Friedersdorf hits it out of the park:

Breitbart aims to challenge the left’s influence on American culture. He believes that control over the arts and media are bigger prizes than Congress, the White House, or the Supreme Court, that they shape the nation’s future irrespective of what happens in Washington. Hence his ambition to wrest control of these institutions from the left—a project whose success requires that many more ambitious young conservatives enter creative fields. Will they?

It can’t help that Breitbart insists every conservative working in Hollywood or the media is subject to constant ridicule by the ruthless modern-day “Marxists” who dominate these

fields. How many would willingly enter a profession alongside malicious

colleagues and beneath ideologue bosses bent on destroying them?

The message delivered by Breitbart, Sean Hannity and other conservative commentators doesn’t merely misinform—it feeds a victim mentality on the right. In the talk radio telling, the liberal cultural elite isn’t merely wrong—it is nefarious, and it hates “real Americans.” That Breitbart calls the cultural left “totalitarians” is instructive. The word implies that the left is supreme, ruthless, and all-powerful. Pushing back from within existing cultural institutions is futile; conservatives might as well withdraw into an ideologically safe dugout, nurse their resentments, and pretend that the height of courage is picking off the least careful leftists with the rhetorical equivalent of sniper fire.

I do think that media print journalism leans slightly to the left, for reasons I've outline before, but there is room for conservatives. And this brotherhood of imagined victimhood isn't helping their cause, or anyone else.


The Ill-Fated Bud Boycott

by Patrick Appel

DiA returns to the idea of American pot smokers not buying weed unless they know if is not from nefarious Mexican drug cartels:

[Is] my suggestion unrealistic? Maybe (some of our commenters objected on those grounds). But consumers make lots of decisions based on incentives that are fairly abstract—I want to support local business, I want a car that minimizes my petrol use, etc, etc. Clearly these abstract decisions motivate actual decisions, at least some of the time. As these abstract incentives go I don't think avoiding moral guilt is particularly esoteric. And it seems like a number of our commenters have already taken steps in this direction (those of you who said, don't buy drugs on street corners, I'm glad I live in Canada, and so on).

Megan wrote yesterday that most boycotts fail because the customers don't care. I'd tweak it somewhat: most boycotts fail because customers are not aware of the boycott and because customers don't care enough, two reasons why both the Whole Foods boycott and a Mexican weed boycott are not likely to win the day. Let's construct a simple equation for a successful boycott: Media Exposure X How Intolerable Business Practices Are X Ability Of Customers To Impact Business Sales = Boycott Effectiveness.

It's impossible to conduct a pot boycott, first and foremost, because it would be impossible to drum up the necessary media exposure, even though the business activities of Mexican drug cartels rate near the top of the intolerable scale. You can't get a celebrity spokesman to proudly proclaim he only smokes US-grown pot, you can't picket the establishments that sell Mexican pot, and you can't be sure you are succeeding because drug cartel revenues are not public knowledge. Illegality impedes organizing. Many of the "moral guilt" decisions are also opportunities for individuals to signal virtuousness and earn social accolades. Again, the illegality of the product makes this sort of signaling much more difficult. The comparisons to shopping at local business and buying a car with a high MPG are not equivalent because close substitutes and credible consumer information exists in those marketplaces.

I can't think of a single example of a sucessful consumer boycott of a black market.

Was I Too Hard on Roger Ebert?

by Peter Suderman

A reader says I was:

Here is a guy who, compared to most other movie critics, has been on the side of the audience most of his career – the original populist so to speak. Remember that Ebert was the first to embrace TV as a medium for criticism and took a lot of heat for it at the time. He and Siskel were called snake oil salesmen and accused of contributing to the cheapening of American film, exactly the kind of comments that you are criticizing him for now. And yet, through their show, Siskel and Ebert probably did more to to popularize independent and art films than just about anyone else.

Where people often misinterpret Ebert is that he has never mistaken populism for meaning that he has to skew his views to the audience's demands. For him, populism means reaching the largest audience possible, informing the opinions of the largest number of people possible. Whereas a certain portion of American film scholars believes that a movie like "The Hurt Locker" or "Ciizen Kane" (which Ebert helped restore to the American pantheon with his shot by shot analysis) should be excluded from the public and left to those who can "appreciate them," Ebert believes they should be seen by everyone. He also believes that audiences are much more sophisticated than we give them credit for and that he can, through criticism, help people see a side of movies they might otherwise miss. Which is the true populism?

Has he grown a bit reactionary lately? Perhaps. His recent writings have definitely shown a dangerous streak of nostalgia. But this should be taken in the context of his health (the man lost his ability to speak for god's sake) and his age. I don't think this is him trying to shore up his territory as you suggest. He has his Pulitzer and his standing with the public – two  things that will likely never be threatened. He clearly loves newspapers and doesn't enjoy watching them die, wants to share his memories of them while he still has the chance. Is that really something we should begrudge him?

Ebert's not my favorite critic, but he's as knowledgeable about movies as they come, and he's done great work on behalf of both smart cinema and smart criticism. I'm happy to grant him his nostalgia, and in some ways I even share it: Were I to design my own little Utopia, it would almost certainly include an oversupply of highly paid movie critics, and a movie-going public who took film very seriously. But I think the post I linked to went further than nostalgia, and edged into declinism and despair.

"If I mention the cliché 'the dumbing-down of America,' it's only because there's no way around it," he writes. "And this dumbing-down seems more pronounced among younger Americans." Among the reasons he gives for saying so? "Until a few decades ago, almost all high school graduates could read a daily newspaper. The issue today is not whether they read a daily paper, but whether they can." And this is from a post about his "fear that American movie-going is entering into a Dark Age."

I didn't care much for Transformers 2 either, and, like Ebert, I loved The Hurt Locker. But I don't think this sort of doomsaying is really warranted. Big, dumb movies are often popular, and smart, small films are often not. But that's been the case for decades, sagging newspaper sales or no. I hardly think it means a cinematic Dark Age is upon us.