Month: August 2009

by Patrick Appel

Freddie DeBoer challenges this post by Megan on why she doesn't support national health care. Matt Steinglass attacks from a different angle:

by Chris Bodenner

In my hometown paper I just came across this quote from Kansas Gov. Mark Parkinson (D), who opposes the Fort Leavenworth transfer:

The stigma of what Guantanamo Bay has come to represent must not be attached to the Heartland. That stigma would be a weight around the neck of our state’s national image.

What about our national image to the world? Also, as The New Yorker's Amy Davidson notes:

New York is as much Heartland as his state is.

If Parkinson is going to play the "Real America" game, he should acknowledge this: Kansas overwhelmingly voted for Bush and Cheney in 2004, when detainee policy and torture allegations were widely known. If any region is "attached" to the "stigma" of Gitmo, it's the "Heartland." Also, if Parkinson is really worried about stigmas, he should try to avoid headlines like this:

Guantánamo Detainees: Kansas Scared, Michigan Says Bring ‘em On

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

The reader in this post mentioned the codes. Until about a year ago I worked for a non-profit children's hospital.  I was on a team implementing electronic medical records and other software.  One of our tasks was to find a way to automate the insurance referrals/authorizations process, which was essentially impossible given the inefficiencies inherent in the system.  Here's the whole gory process.

The hospital employed a group of about 30 people whose job it was to get authorizations from insurance companies before planned outpatient visits & procedures.  (There was a different group who worked on the inpatient side.)  Here's a day in the life of one of those employees:

1. Pull up a list of upcoming appointments, along with the code for the expected procedure.
2. Find Patient A's record.
3. Locate the phone number for their insurance company (this is why they photo copy your insurance card – it's on there somewhere).
4. Call the insurance company and wander through their phone tree.
5. Sit on hold.
6. When the person on the other line answers, identify the patient and recite to them the code of the procedure.
7. Wait until the insurance company representative decides if they will pay.
8. If they agree to pay, the insurance company representative recites a different code back indicating their approval.
9. Write down the insurance company's code and hang up.
10. There's a system that actually records these phone calls so the hospital has additional proof that the insurance company agreed to pay.  The employee now writes down yet another code from the voice recording system – the "receipt" for that call, essentially.
11. Input all of this into the hospital's record keeping system.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Of course we know that just because the insurance company says they will pay, it doesn't mean they really will.  There's a whole different team of people who have to pick it up on the back end in that case.

A reasonable person would think that this approval process is simple for the hospital and the insurance company to automate–there's no need to have two people sitting on the phone all day reading numbers to each other when computers can send numbers back and forth all day.  The only problem is that the hospital would have to automate it with every insurance company, and the insurance companies don't have much of an incentive to bother with it.

by Chris Bodenner

Rick Santorum is looking to run for president.

by Patrick Appel

Mark Thompson sighs:

The Obama plan doesn't do enough to control costs but getting more Americans coverage isn't nothing. Ezra Klein argues the getting everyone covered must happen before cost control is politically possible:

Reformers in Massachusetts would have told you then, and will tell you now, that creating a near-universal right to coverage was a necessary first step in building the political will for true cost controls. For Samuelson to argue against a Massachusetts-style reform plan on the grounds that he would like us to move away from fee-for-service is to be truly hostile to the evidence. Of the 49 states that have not implemented a Mass-style reform plan, none of them are moving away from fee-for-service. Conversely, the one state that has passed a Mass-style plan is moving quickly to attack fee-for-service.

National politics and state politics are different beasts, but I hope Ezra is right. It's very difficult to definitively show how proposed legislation will impact future legislation (the Avent–Manzi global warming debate proved that much).

by Chris Bodenner

Derek Thompson checks in with the "mancession":

According to AEI scholar Christina Hoff Summer, 80 percent of all job losses in the last two years were among men — not surprising, considering the implosion of manufacturing and the housing construction bust. As a result, male unemployment has far outpaced female unemployment and given that the fastest growing sectors of health and education are already female-dominated, it's likely the trend won't reverse itself soon.

Amanda Hess points to chart above and sighs:

Of COURSE the “mancession” yields clearly phallic statistical data! If there’s any silver lining to men losing, it’s that they’ll have a lot more time on their hands to uncover all the secret penis line drawings hidden in everyday objects.

More (non-phallic) charts here. Headline reference here.

by Patrick Appel

This is amazing:

According to Public Policy Polling (PPP), a North Carolina polling firm, only 24% of self-identified Republican voters in the state believe Barack Obama was born in the United States.  47% do not believe that Obama is American born, and 29% of Republicans aren’t sure. One part of PPP’s data might reassure sentient readers somewhat:  7% of those who voted for John McCain do not believe Hawaii to be a part of the United States.  Now perhaps this is just another irrational expression of Obama hatred.  But, it may also be older voters who never quite absorbed the news that our 50th state is indeed our 50th state.

Italics mine.

by Chris Bodenner

This is pathetic:

The United Nations said on Tuesday that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has congratulated Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad […] The U.N. spokeswoman said Ban's letter was a "customary letter on occasion of inauguration" but added that the text would not be made public. […] Okabe added that the letter was not an endorsement of Ahmadinejad, but "takes advantage of the occasion of the inauguration to express the hope that Iran and the United Nations will continue to cooperate closely in addressing regional and global issues."

Keep right on hoping.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

by Patrick Appel

Orly Taitz, head birther, ups the crazy:

[Taitz] marched her troops straight over to the secretary of state's office and did the exact same presentation all over again. Then she headed to the FBI to do it a third time. And the whole time, she never stopped talking: Goldman Sachs runs the treasury.

Obama is a puppet.

There's a cemetery somewhere in Arizona where they just dug 30,000 fresh graves, which wait now for the revolution.

Baxter International — a major Obama contributor — developed a vaccine for bird flu that actually kills people.

Google Congressman Alcee Hastings and House Bill 684 and you'll see that they're planning at least six civilian labor camps.

Google an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about train cars with shackles.

The communist dictator Hugo Chavez way back in 2004 purchased the Sequoia software that runs our voting machines and the mainstream media won't report any of it — not even Fox because Saudi Arabia bought a percentage of Fox in 2007.

This is the stuff that the media never gives Taitz a chance to say because it's so focused on the news hook of the "birther" issue. (And, believe me, this has been merely a tiny sample of what I saw on my road trip this spring.) But this is the stuff that reveals who she really is, and what this movement really is.

How does this not surprise me?

(Hat tip: Martin)