Month: November 2011

The humiliation continues. Peter Beinart offers the counterintuitive take here: it's Romney's shape-shifting that will require him to be more "conservative" in office. I'm with Peter. In office, Romney would be terrified of offending the far right. He would double down on no revenue increases, appoint Christianists to the Court, and think of GHW Bush as a cautionary tale. His very reputation for convenience will require more ideological rigidity in office. He would have none of Reagan's or Nixon's ability to violate core conservative ideas.

Los Angeles, California, 10.15 am

Obama asks the question.

Courtesy of Pejman:

Someone ought to tell Cain that telling journalists not to talk about a particular story makes them all the more determined to talk about it. And giving them a “journalistic code of ethics” (whatever that is) isn’t going to get them to abandon a discussion of the story either. 

Ya think? At least he hasn’t yet complained, a la Palin, that his First Amendment rights have been violated. But give him time.

So we now have a clear Romney plan. It's essentially the Ryan Plan for Medicare with a hefty dose of reassurance, much vaguer results, and a small twist. In his own words:

First, Medicare should not change for anyone in the program or soon to be in it. We should honor our commitments to our seniors. Second, as with Social Security, tax hikes are not the solution. We couldn’t tax our way out of unfunded liabilities so large, even if we wanted to. Third, tomorrow’s seniors should have the freedom to choose what their health coverage looks like. Younger Americans today, when they turn 65, should have a choice between traditional Medicare and other private healthcare plans that provide at least the same level of benefits.

Competition will lower costs and increase the quality of healthcare for tomorrow’s seniors. The federal government will help seniors pay for the option they choose, with a level of support that ensures all can obtain the coverage they need. Those with lower incomes will receive more generous assistance. Beneficiaries can keep the savings from less expensive options, or they can choose to pay more for a costlier plan.

Ay, there's the rub. What are the chances that private insurance companies will be able to offer "the coverage seniors need" at lower prices than the government? Private insurance companies are much less efficient than the public sector, and their services costlier. And if the premiums for fee-for-service Medicare will be based on providing "the coverage [seniors] need," then which senior would pick a cheaper plan with fewer benefits or less personalized care? There's no there there, unless official Medicare is so ham-strung that private companies can compete. But that seems to push the cost curve in the wrong direction, no? Avik Roy suggests that the private companies can cut costs more easily than Medicare for one reason:

they are able to set up preferred provider networks, in which they steer their patients to the most cost-efficient hospitals and doctors. Traditional Medicare, on the other hand, is legally required to provide access to any health-care provider who accepts its fee schedule.

But even Roy acknowledges that the plan as-is cannot work outside urban areas with competitive hospitals and even if it did work, might shave costs by at most around 8 percent. We also don't have an actual dollar number to put on Romney's Medicare insurance "premium support," because what's guaranteed is not a money amount but a fixed level of care. So the great virtue of Ryan's plan – its brutal transparency about government's future liabilities – is erased. Roy concedes:

We simply don’t know how much we could save from competitive bidding.

So I remain skeptical about this scheme's ability to rein in costs, and find the reflexive view that markets can work well with the over 65s and healthcare to be more wishful thinking than reality. A seventy-year-old with faltering memory and a ruined hip is not likely to be the most ruthless consumer – if only because he has no expertise to judge the options for him. I feel lost half the time.

I'd also like to know how Romney, having repealed Obamacare, would help people with pre-existing conditions get coverage if they once lose it. And how his plans would bring insurance to 45 million currently without it. And how many young adults under 26 would lose coverage when Obamacare is repealed. But those are questions the GOP has just decided are irrelevant. For many of us, that is not an option.

Heh:

Tomorrow Mississippi will vote on a constitutional amendment that defines fertilized human eggs as persons. David French applauds and claims that "scientists are virtually unanimous in declaring that the result of conception is a human child with a distinct DNA different from his or her parents." Robert VerBruggen counters:

What’s not clear to me … is why “distinct DNA” should be the criterion by which we judge personhood for moral and legal purposes. As Reason’s Ronald Bailey has pointed out, 60 to 80 percent of human embryos — post-conception, with distinct DNA — are naturally destroyed by the woman’s body. Are we to see this as a large-scale massacre of human beings, develop drugs to prevent it from happening, and require all women who have unprotected sex to take them? Certainly, we would be willing to take measures like this if post-birth infants were dying in comparable numbers.

I went over all this at length in The Conservative Soul. My general view is that it is a little perverse to take the sacredness of life more seriously than the Almighty. Karl Smith adds another wrinkle:

Everyone is aware that it is possible for the egg to divide post conception and produce identical twins. I think most of agree that identical twins are separate people. Thus, there must be at minimum some secondary process of personification, in which the single person becomes multiple people. How does this take place? Its important because the method in which secondary personification takes place might render the “distinct DNA” theory of personification superfluous.

Dr. Science weighs in:

Human life does not "begin", it is transmitted. Human personhood is not a biological concept: it is the state of being a human being for legal and moral purposes. Laws and morality need a clear line between "person" and "not a person", biology does not care. We may need to pick a line, but that's something *we* are doing, it is not dictated by "biological facts".

Indeed. The biological line is as blurry as a Craigslist head-shot.

And she will take to the airwaves today, flanked by Gloria Allred. Finally having a face and someone able legally to give us specifics about allegations against Cain will change things. But an obvious question – not answered in the reports I'm currently reading – is why she did not file a charge at the time. If it begins to look as if money is involved, then Cain could pull a Clinton – and survive. Still, as Ben Smith notes:

Ask Governor Whitman and Rep. Weiner how encounters with Allred usually turn out.

I'll liveblog the presser at 1.30 pm.

Tracking the spread of sexual-harassment denialism beyond the Derb, Dahlia Lithwick worries that the Cain contremps reveals fundamental hostility to women in the GOP:

The real lies here are the claims of millions of frivolous suits in which jurors award liars with pots of money and television contracts. The legal standard for proving a hostile work environment is high and usually requires showing a pattern of bad behavior. If anything, experts say that the current system under-punishes as opposed to over-punishes, and that most victims of sexual harassment on the job will never come forward at all…[T]o claim that they must be false because all women lie and all harassers are just joking is a terrifying proposition. Even more than the outright antagonism of so many conservative pundits, what’s worrying to me is the indifference of so many Republican voters:  New poll results show that 70 percent of Republicans say the sexual harassment scandal makes no difference in their vote. It’s no longer just a Republican war on women. It’s a war on the idea that any woman might ever tell the truth.

It’s particularly odd since so many of them spent so much time in the 1990s piously reminding the rest of us that Paula Jones had a case (she did), and that a president could be impeached for it (completely bonkers). At some point, between the “illegals” and the gays and the women, the GOP is going to run out of large segments of the society to fear and/or despise. It’s a strange strategy for a wannabe majority party.