Year: 2013

Reihan faces America’s economic predicament:

If the labor market position of less-skilled workers is going to get even worse in the coming decades, we have to think seriously about finding new ways to make work pay.

For example, we could try to streamline the various benefits federal and state governments have used to raise incomes at the low end to foster a more work-friendly approach to fighting poverty. Oren Cass, domestic policy director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, recently outlined such an approach in National Review. The basic idea is that while the non-working poor will continue to receive in-kind transfers, channeled through state governments, the working poor will receive cash transfers instead. Low-income households will receive support in either case, but they will receive support with fewer strings attached if they find and hold on to gainful employment.

University of Arizona sociologist Lane Kenworthy, author of the forthcoming Social Democratic America, has called for an expanded employment-conditional earnings subsidy that would rise in sync with economic growth. And in Switzerland, a coalition of activists are campaigning for a basic income, an idea that has been championed by left-libertarians, egalitarian socialists, and even a number of pro-market conservatives who see it as a less bureaucratic, more straightforward alternative to the welfare state. This basic income would not be employment-conditional, which raises the danger that it would encourage people to exit the workforce, as Annie Lowrey observes in the New York Times. But some still find the idea compelling.

Kathryn Joyce lauds a new program, People and Animals Living Safely, which allows domestic violence survivors to bring their pets to shelters:

Earlier this year, a New York City woman – I’ll call her Mary – tried to leave her abusive husband. She contacted a shelter, but the shelter wouldn’t take pets. Nor would any other shelter in the city. Mary’s son said he couldn’t leave his three cats behind. And so, since Mary couldn’t leave without her son, she stayed outside the shelter system.

Pets do not get much attention in research on domestic violence, but there is reason to believe that situations like Mary’s are amazingly common.

A 2007 summary of available research, published in the journal Violence Against Women, found that in the dozen or so shelters in the country that collect data on the issue, between 18 and 48 percent of women said they had delayed leaving their abusers because it meant leaving their pets. In one study conducted in upstate New York, researchers found that among women who had seen their pets abused, 65 percent had put off seeking help. Presumably, many others with pets never leave home at all.

In 2008, there were only four shelters in the country that accommodated domestic animals. Today there are 73, but that’s still only about three percent of shelters nationwide, and to date, no program in a city as large or dense as New York has allowed women to “co-shelter” directly with their animals. That might be changing. In June, Mary, her children, and their cats became the first participants in a program called People and Animals Living Safely, a six-month pilot conceived by the Urban Resource Institute, a non-profit that runs four shelters in New York City, and the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, a nonprofit coalition of animal rescue groups. Now Mary, kids, and pets live together in a sparsely furnished third-floor apartment in the Urban Resource Institute’s biggest shelter.

The program likely has a side benefit of preventing cruelty to animals. More than 70 percent of pet owners entering domestic-violence shelters report that their batterers threatened, injured, maimed or killed their family pets, according to the American Humane Association.

Douthat doubts the fix Obama announced last week will have much of an impact. As an alternative, he suggests rewriting Obamacare’s regulations “to allow insurers to sell less comprehensive plans on the exchanges”:

What partial deregulation would accomplish … is to allow some of the lower-cost plans the law abolishes to be actually revived and made available on the exchanges as “bronze” options in 2014 and 2015, rather than just temporarily grandfathered for a year or so outside them. And this would have two potential upsides for Obamacare. First, it would ease the rate shock that people with cancelled plans experience when they go shopping for new coverage on the exchanges (and in the process hedge against potential further rate increases in the new few years). And second, it would offer a carrot, in the form of cheaper options than the exchanges currently provide, to lure in some of the uninsured who might otherwise be more inclined than the White House expected to just pay the fine (or dodge it) and continue without coverage. (If you want more people to buy a product from your website, figuring out a way to lower the price is a time-tested method …)

Barro pushes back:

We should expect that catastrophic plans will be about 5% cheaper than bronze plans.

Opening these plans up to the broader market would help a little with sticker shock, but not very much. The insurance consultancy Milliman warns that ACA rules “may make it hard to differentiate” between catastrophic and bronze plans, since the catastrophic plans and bronze plans must both limit out-of-pocket expenses to $6,350 for an individual subscriber.

[Harold] Pollock’s suggestion is to tweak the definition of “essential health benefits” under the Affordable Care Act. In other words, he’d hold down premiums by letting insurers exclude more items from coverage. But it’s not clear what these exclusions could be, and Pollack doesn’t make specific suggestions. The additions that add lots of cost (mental health coverage, prescription drugs, substance abuse treatment) tend to be pretty important components of health care.

We can tinker a little with the comprehensiveness of coverage, both in terms of what services of covered and what fraction of the bills the insurer will pay. But there is no “fix” to the fact that the ACA creates a shadow fiscal transfer by charging higher health insurance premiums to healthy people in order to subsidize coverage for the sick.

Keating details the new change to China’s one-child policy (OCP):

Fisher looks at how the OCP has been enforced:

The awful persistence of forced abortions, sterilizations and infanticide in China reflect a contradiction in the Chinese system — and in the one-child policy itself. The senior leadership in Beijing may set national policy, such as today’s relaxation of the one-child policy, but it’s local- and provincial-level officials who choose when, whether and how to actually enforce those policies. If those mid-level officials want to do things differently — say, in the above case, by continuing to use forced abortions to control birthrates, even though Beijing banned that years ago — they often do.

This is probably the thing that Americans most misunderstand about China: It may be run by a giant authoritarian bureaucracy, but the system can get really messy. The people at the top have a lot less control over mid-level officials than outsiders often assume. Local officials will sometimes go their own way. So the question for Beijing becomes, How do you steer all those local officials to do what you want? The one-child policy is a study in how that can go wrong.

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Alyssa calls the Make-A-Wish Foundation’s Batkid event last Friday “a fascinating watermark in America’s obsession with superhero culture, and in our relationships to various aspects of geek culture”:

Miles’ wish offered San Franciscans the opportunity to participate in an act of kindness in person. And the specific nature of Miles’ request gives participants something more than warm fuzzies: it’s an opportunity to participate in a fantasy of their own on a grand scale, or to excuse indulging in a fantasy on the grounds that it’s philanthropic.

The vast expansion of comics and gaming conventions have provided fans of genre fiction with more opportunities to and spaces in which to cosplay, or to dress up as their favorite characters. But there’s an understanding that the convention floor is special space to assume a different identity that you can’t carry with you out of the center, at least not very far. And cosplaying is often relatively stagnant, an opportunity to pose for pictures, and maybe engage in a casual lightsaber duel. As much as individuals might dream of turning into an entire city into a canvas for their dreams of living out their identification with certain characters, it’s almost impossible to imagine having the clout to step into not just the clothes from a piece of fiction you love, but scenarios that could possible happen in the world where it’s set.

Miles’ request to Make-A-Wish provides an exceptionally rare opportunity not just for him to dress up as Bat Kid and liberate Lou Seal, the San Francisco Giants’ mascot, from the clutches of The Penguin, but for people who aren’t ill to jump in on the game.

David Frum wants the GOP to face reality:

Obamacare is a fact— a malfunctioning fact, like so much of the rest of the American healthcare system, yet a fact all the same. Its beneficiaries are rapidly coalescing into a vested interest, as the pharmaceutical companies and hospital insurance corporations and other providers are vested interests. Policy cannot realistically be made by dismissing such interests. They have gained something they will think is worth protecting. They will have the votes to protect it. If reform is needed, and it is, they will have to be offered something better.

Paul Howard and Yevgeniy Feyman recommend Republicans “make Obamacare a Trojan horse for conservative health-care reform”:

Based on data available for about 85 percent of exchange plans, about 77 percent have deductibles of more than $1,250 and qualify under Internal Revenue Service rules for a health savings account. For a 27-year-old purchasing coverage, the median HSA-eligible plan costs about $238 a month and typically comes with a deductible of about $3,600. The median plan without a high deductible, however, costs almost 30 percent more ($310) for a 27-year-old, though it has a significantly lower deductible (about $600).

Over the course of a year, the choice of an HSA plan can lead to significant savings. Here’s why: The typical 20-something with insurance spends a median of $770 annually on health care (excluding premiums and over-the-counter drugs). Opting for an HSA-eligible plan costing $238 a month ($2,856 a year), the median 20-something ends up spending $3,626 in one year on health care ($770 plus $2,856). However, with a traditional plan, total spending jumps to $4,320 in one year ($600 in out-of-pocket spending plus $3,720 in premiums). In other words, the HSA plan holder comes out about 20 percent ($694) ahead. That savings can then be funneled into an HSA or other spending.