Month: August 2009

by Patrick Appel

Thoreau, a libertarian, makes his case for sitting out of the health care debate:

Does that mean I think the government solution will be better than a process of market evolution?  Almost certainly not.  It is, however, possible (even if unlikely) that the government solution will be better than the status quo.  Laugh if you will, my fellow libertarians, but nowhere is it written that one heavily-regulated system is automatically better than another just by virtue of being a status quo system that some big (and politically connected) businesses happen to like.  The state can deliver flawed systems with flaws of varying degree, and while I have no great confidence in the state’s competence I also have no sound basis on which to conclude that any and every regulated system will work out in practice to be worse than the status quo.  We must wait and see before claiming the pyrrhic victory of being right about the suckitude of the new system.

by Patrick Appel

The Obama administration revises that needlessly inflammatory and factually incorrect DOMA brief from awhile back. John Aravosis isn't fully appeased:

I don't want to fail to praise the administration for doing better, but to some degree the only reason this is "good" is because of how "bad" they did on the previous brief. In the end, they're still defending a discriminatory law that the president himself has called "abhorrent." The fact that they're doing it more tactfully is, I suppose, nice – and they are no longer using language that undercuts us on a variety of other civil rights, so that's good – but again, we're praising them for no longer doing things that they shouldn't have done in the first place. And in the end, they're still defending discrimination.

Aravosis argues that the Obama DOJ doesn't have to uphold legal precedent by citing this Richard Socarides post. The main point:

[In] a case where, as here, there are important political and social issues at stake, the president’s relationship with the Justice Department should work like this: The president makes a policy decision first and then the very talented DOJ lawyers figure out how to apply it to actual cases. If the lawyers cannot figure out how to defend a statute and stay consistent with the president’s policy decision, the policy decision should always win out.

This sounds a whole lot like Bush's manipulation of the DOJ and OLC. I'd like DOMA repealed as much as anyone, but pursing policy changes by manipulating the DOJ is not the best way to get this done. Dale Carpenter's post on the original brief stuck the right balance.

by Conor Clarke

The National Review published an editorial this morning pointing out, correctly in my view, that Sarah Palin did a great disservice by claiming that Obama's health-care plan would lead to euthanizing "death panels." Quite naturally, resident National Review goofball Andy McCarthy rushes chivalrously to Palin's defense, criticizing the editorial in a post titled "Palin Was Right on the 'Death Panels.'" He writes:

Setting aside the non-sequitur "evil empire" analogy, I want to try to take this seriously. In a sense, McCarthy is actually raising deep and profound philosophical questions about the nature of truth and the meaning of public discourse in an open society. And in another, more important sense, McCarthy is just lying flagrantly about the bill, embarrassing himself and his magazine, and doing an injustice to the American people. But let us delve more deeply into this matter.

The claim that "critics could never quite discredit" Palin's comment about how Obama's health care plan would create death panels to euthanize the elderly and the disabled is, actually, true. Since many people still believe that Obama will have us all sitting before his tyrannical death panels, the claim has not been discredited. It is, furthermore, difficult to know how one would disprove the claim dispositively, just as it would be difficult to disprove the claim that a teapot orbits Saturn or that a thousand angels dance on the head of a pin. It is hard to prove negatives.

On the other hand, there is no actual evidence that Obama will create anything resembling the euthanizing "death panels" of Palin's original note. There is absolutely nothing about it in the house version of the bill (which would have let Medicare cover the totally uncontroversial and totally voluntary end-of-life counseling). The administration has repeatedly declared that it has no interest or intention to propose anything resembling the Palin death panels. There is, to my knowledge, no evidence that any Democratic lawmaker ever did. So it's a bit odd to say that Sarah Palin did "a tremendous service" by advancing a story for which there isn't even the sickliest reed of evidence.

Why? Because reasoned public discourse depends on a shared set of factual assumptions. We aren't going to have a very good discussion if you deny the existence of reality or claim that the sun revolves around the earth. Or if you posit the existence of death panels. But it's good of Andy McCarthy and Sarah Palin to remind us just how stupid such discussion can get.

by Patrick Appel

Vaughan at Mind Hacks was not impressed by Emily Yoffe's article on information addiction. Jonah Lehrer's thoughts here. No need for Blog Addicts Anonymous, it appears.

by Peter Suderman

Is the public plan dead? It's not entirely clear. Yesterday on CNN, Kathleen Sebelius suggested that a public plan isn't essential to reform. And at a town hall meeting on Saturday, Obama said that it's "just one sliver" of the overhaul he has in mind. But as Marc Ambinder reports, some administration officials are now backing away from what Sebelius said.

Still, yesterday's comments took a lot of the wind out of the public option's sails. And that's bound to disappoint the public option's many liberal supporters. As Patrick pointed out, Rachel Maddow thinks that losing the public plan would mean wasting a lot of effort. Perhaps. But viewed another way, it also looks like a fairly smart political play.

How's that?

Marc also noted that, although Obama clearly supports a public plan, he's also viewed it as a "bargaining chip." By putting it forward in earnest, giving it major support, and then reluctantly withdrawing it (if that's what he chooses to do), Obama will be able to make a major concession without killing reform entirely.

More than that, the public plan has drawn fire away from other parts of the plan that might normally have received a lot of criticism from the Right — the individual mandate in particular. Indeed, as Ramesh Ponnuru wrote last week, it's been somewhat surprising how little attention reform opponents have paid to other potentially controversial aspects of the plan:

It seems to me that those of us who oppose the Democrats’ health-care legislation in principle — who believe, that is, that it takes our system of financing health care in the wrong direction rather than that it moves too fast — should start concentrating less of our fire on the “public option” and more of it on the individual mandate.

…[T]he basic outline of Obamacare can survive ditching the public option. It can’t survive ditching the individual mandate. You can’t, for example, have a ban on insurers’ taking account of pre-existing conditions without such a mandate.

No doubt Obama would prefer to see a public plan included in reform. But he's also been consistent about hedging his support for it, refusing to say that it's a must-have. As he continues to play the difficult, delicate political game that health-care reform has become, it may turn out that the public plan's primary value has little to do with whether or not it's good policy — and everything to do with its usefulness as a political play.

Sapa, Vietnam, 3.30 pm

by Patrick Appel

$180 billion?

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

This has to be the #1 misquoted statement by Dawkins, and it's not surprising that someone did it again. Dawkins never claims that "imposing parental beliefs on children is a form of child abuse", he consistently says that labeling children as a Christian child or a Muslim child is child abuse and that's a pretty distinct difference. Geras obviously sees no difference, but the key is that if you label an infant a christian, this is obviously not something the child has had any choice in and gives the appearance of no choice.  Dawkins always goes on to point out that we do not follow the practice of labeling with anything else.  We never say that "this child is a capitalist child" or "this child is a republican child" and statements like those kind of sound absurd since they reflect some kind of choice by the child that he has never actually made.

It also seems wrong to equate the teaching of morality with the teaching of religion.  If the child at the age of seven follows all the ten commandments except 1, 2, and 4, does the child deserve to be punished?  If the child is punished for those, I'd back claims of child abuse.

by Patrick Appel

Radley Balko launches another volley. I don't agree with several of Mackey’s recommendations, yet I still think Balko is basically right. Jonathan Zasloff, on the other hand, wants to start picketing. Usually boycotters have demands. What exactly do these Whole Foods boycotters want, besides Mackey changing his mind?

by Patrick Appel

Megan responds to her critics and argues against nationalized health care once more. Continuing the lost innovation thread:

If liberals can build an alternative to the profit model that's at least as productive, in dollars spent, as the private sector, and looks reasonably likely to scale, I'll probably cave.  (I reserve the right to worry about rationing, but I find that worry less pressing.)  At the very least, my worries about the issue will move it to the back burner for me.  But the thing is, you have to do it first.  Use prizes, non-profits, the research agency Dean Baker's proposed, or any combination of the above.  You just have to do it first.  Right now, it's just too much of a gamble.

She writes later in the comments:

[M]ost uninsured people either don't go that long without health care (the number of uninsured counts everyone who lacked insurance for even a day during the year; the chronic figure is somewhere north of half the headline figure), won't be insured (they're immigrants), or don't use health care that much (they're young). The drug consumption by the remaining core of sick and chronically uninsured people, some of whom are already getting treatment through various charity programs, is not anything close to enough to restore the profits lost by price controlling the other 90-95% of patients. You can look up all these figures on your own and do the math yourself–it's pretty simple. Even making very conservative assumptions about price controls yields lower profits.

I'll be curious to see what Megan thinks of the bill should the public option be cut or greatly circumscribed, an outcome which looks increasingly likely. I'm not sure how the government is going to price control 90-95 percent of patients unless we have a taxpayer subsidized public plan that monopolizes the health care exchanges and eventually covers almost everyone. Maybe I am missing something.