Month: August 2009

The Old Bike-Pedestrian-Car Cage Match

by Patrick Appel

Ryan Avent asks for pedestrians and bicyclists to unite against cars:

Pedestrians have sidewalks and cars have their lanes, and a cyclist must navigate his way between the two, which isn’t easy or comfortable. For a pedestrian to complain about cyclists is to misunderstand all the main sources of imbalance in the sharing of the road — cars are the most dangerous and take up the bulk of the space, and it’s only because pedestrians and cyclists are jockeying for the small area of relative safety at the edge of the road that conflicts between them arise. Cyclists simply aren’t the problem. Undue deference to cars on city streets is the problem.

Yes, but the roads for bikes wouldn't exist without the cars.

The View From Your Sickbed

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I'm a bankruptcy lawyer, so I'm in one of the two groups that will be hurt by real health care reform (insurance companies being the other). About a third of my clients are in bankruptcy due to medical bills (another third have some medical bills, but it's not what pushed them over the edge). Almost all of them thought their health insurance would cover the problems they had. Many had gone to great lengths ahead of time to make sure their treatment would be covered, only to find out after the fact that their insurance company wouldn't pay. They've heard every excuse in the book (or in the fine print of the policy): experimental treatment, lifetime cap, high deductible, missed deadlines, lack of notification, pre-existing condition and so on. To me, the worst part of the American health care financing system is that you can't tell what your treatment will cost. I know folks who have flown to Pakistan to have operations they couldn't get in the US because nobody in the US (unlike Pakistan!) would agree in writing ahead of time what it would cost them.

Creepy Ad Watch

by Chris Bodenner

At least according to 100,000 Swedes who joined a Facebook group called "Jag är rädd för tjejen i Apolivareklamen” (“I am scared of the girl in the Apoliva commercial”):

Perhaps she's singing some malevolent melody us English speakers can't understand. Are they any Swedish-speaking readers who could translate?

(Hat tip: AdFreak)

Voting: Life And Death

by Patrick Appel

Reihan Salam defends the health care protesters:

To get a glimpse of America’s future, consider France. The French have the health-care system that Americans desperately want: it combines private providers and patient choice with a large and generous public insurance system, one that keeps out-of-pocket costs extremely low for working families. The French system is also dramatically cheaper than our own. But whenever there's a move to tweak the system in some way—say, to gently nudge patients to get the approval of a general practitioner before seeing a specialist—the French go absolutely mad with rage. Doctors go on strike, massive street protests ensue, the riot police come out: it's a crazy scene.

And it makes perfect sense: as more life and death decisions are placed in the hands of democratically elected legislators, politics become more than an occasional nuisance. When your wages are stagnant or your health insurance premiums are zooming skyward, you don't blame your boss or bad luck; instead, you blame the knuckleheads running, or rather ruining, the country. You come to feel as though you can't just wait until the next election: You need to make your voice heard now—even if that means taking to the streets or throwing a punch.

This sounds plausible. I wonder how much of voter participation among the elderly is reliant on medicare. If government run health care predicts voter engagment, then more government intervention would also produce a spike in voter turnout, no?

The Obama Of Newsmen

by Chris Bodenner

Jacob Gershman explores why neoconservative pundits love Jon Stewart:

[H]e's providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs — torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care — that explode on other networks. "Shepard Smith did the same discussion [on torture]," says [Cliff] May. "He kept yelling me at me: 'This is where I get off the bus! Not in my name!' He wasn't arguing with me. It was just assertions and anger. That's not what Jon deals in."

To be sure, Stewart wants to outsmart and discombobulate his conservative guests. He loves catching them in inconsistencies. "I feel like you just trapped me," a grinning Kristol told Stewart, after Kristol conceded that the government provides "first-rate" health care to American soldiers. "I just want to get this on the record," said Stewart. "You just said … the government can run a first-class health-care system."

The whole post is worth reading. Several of my friends argue that Stewart is toothless, but I think his deference is what sets him apart – both in civility and effectiveness. Plus, it makes his occasional pwnage of people like Cramer and Carlson all the more satisfying.

The Glass If Half Full?

by Patrick Appel

Nate Silver doesn't believe that the unemployment rate will hit ten percent:

[T]he conventional wisdom seems to be that the odds are about 2:1 in favor of unemployment hitting 10.0 percent in at least one month between now and next spring. While that’s certainly possible, I’d posit that the actual odds are more like the reverse – 2:1 against double-digit unemployment. That doesn't mean that I'd run out and buy stocks, which are already trading at a price that would imply they've fully priced in something between a U-shaped and V-shaped recovery, or that I'd cancel my plans to go back to school to go out and find work. But I think we've grown so accustomed to bad news that we've forgotten how to recognize good news when we see it; leading indicators have been turning upward for months now, both in the United States and in other countries, and now we finally have a jobs report that reflects that optimism. A lot of folks think I'm making too much of Friday's employment numbers; I'll take 2:1 that they're making too little of it.

Gitmo Grandstanding

by Chris Bodenner

Kansas Senators Brownback and Roberts have placed a confirmation hold on a top military official because of a completely unrelated beef with the administration:

Concerned that their state could become the home for some Guantánamo Bay detainees, Kansas’ two Republican senators have placed a hold on the nomination of Rep. John M. McHugh as Army secretary. […] Sens. Pat Roberts and Sam Brownback are seeking answers from the Obama administration about the possible moves of some detainees to the prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Secretary Gates, another Kansas Republican, is "furious." As a Fort Leavenworth native myself, and someone who has written about the Gitmo transfer, I'm with him. And the NIMBY grandstanding will only get greater, since the administration just flagged the two prisons under final consideration: the Leavenworth DB and the Standish Maximum Correctional Facility in Standish, Michigan.

(I will actually be in both towns over the next week doing some reporting, so if there are any Dish readers in Leavenworth or Arenac County who have a particularly useful take on the local debate, email me at cbodenner@theatlantic.com and I'll buy you a cup of coffee.)

The Counterintuitive Facts On Preventive Care

by Patrick Appel

On Friday the CBO released a letter regarding the costs and benefits of preventative care and government wellness programs. The extra tests tend to increase spending overall but are worth it:

[J]ust because a preventive service adds to total spending does not mean that it is a bad investment. Experts have concluded that a large fraction of preventive care adds to spending but should be deemed “cost-effective,” meaning that it provides clinical benefits that justify those added costs: Roughly 60 percent of the preventive services examined in the review cited above have additional costs that many in the health care community consider to be reasonable relative to their clinical benefits. Still, providing that preventive care would represent a net use of resources rather than a source of funding for other activities.