Year: 2013

 
Shaunacy Ferro points to a new study that shows that since 1999, “the rise in drug deaths hasn’t been evenly spread out across the country, but has gone up most dramatically in rural areas”:

In 1999, only 3 percent of U.S. counties had an annual drug death rate of more than ten people per 100,000. By 2008, 54 percent of counties did. However, the increase has been most dramatic for rural populations, which according to the CDC have some of the highest rates of prescription drug abuse and overdose. Rural counties saw higher increases in age-adjusted death rates between 1999 and 2009. As you can see, the maps show about the same death rates for rural and urban populations in 2008-2009, but most rural areas started out with significantly lower drug deaths than urban areas back in 1999.

Jason Koebler looks at the data and sees more than just a “rural” problem:

The CDC and law enforcement groups say that much of that increase has been driven by the availability of prescription opioids such oxycodone and anti-anxiety drugs. The abuse of prescription painkillers are often seen as a “rural” problem, but data broken up by county suggests that cities have almost as much to worry about.

Between 1999 and 2009, drug poisoning deaths grew by 394 percent in rural areas and 279 percent for large metropolitan areas, according to the CDC’s county-level look at the data. The highest death rates from overdoses occurred in heavily populated areas, according to the study, published Tuesday in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.

In response to Twitter going public, Benjamin Kunkel pens a manifesto arguing that “social media can either be profitable or it can be social. In the end, it can’t be both”:

The IPOs of Facebook and Twitter should therefore be reversed, through the socialization of both companies and other social-media services that attain a similar scale. The time has come, in other words, to socialize social media. Keynes long ago called for “a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment” in modern economies, while leaving room for the skill and inventiveness of entrepreneurs “(who are certainly so fond of their craft that their labor could be obtained much cheaper than at present), to be harnessed to the service of the community on reasonable terms of reward.” The broader question can await another day. But large social media companies particularly invite socialization—that is, going public in the sense of public ownership—for the reasons that follow.

One of the reasons he outlines:

Social media should be socialized because attaining profitability (through ads or fees) is impossible without degrading the service.

So far executives hope to turn a profit by providing ad space and/or by data-mining users so that information can be sold to advertisers to use more broadly. The more social-media services are infiltrated by ads, the less the user enjoys the fundamental social right of choosing her own company. On Twitter I follow who I want and don’t follow the others. On Facebook, as IRL, I choose my friends as well as those people I find it socially convenient to call “friends.” And as with social life generally, there are no directly assessed fees for participation, any more than I have to pay a toll to walk down the street with a friend (or follower).

Advertising degrades this freedom. I don’t get to choose whose ads I see, or whether I want to see any. Some people may enjoy corporate advertisements—and they should be able, accordingly, to follow Burger King or Pfizer. But I have something to advertise as well: my opinions, the articles I write, the books by other people I think you should buy, et cetera. That is my freedom, just as it’s yours to follow or block or unfriend me. We only lack this freedom when it comes to corporate entities with the budgets to override our choices. And everything suggests that as Facebook and Twitter try to increase revenues and share value, they will pollute social media with ever more ads.

Meanwhile, Kentaro Toyama argues that social media is less and less a liberating force:

[W]hat both Chinese censorship and American surveillance show is that there is nothing inherently democratizing about digital networks, at least not in the political sense. Far-reaching communication tools only make it easier to impose constraints on the freedom of expression or the right to privacy. Never before have Chinese censors had it so easy in identifying subversive voices, and never before has the NSA been able to eavesdrop on the private communications of so many people.

Silicon Valley feeds us a myth of technology trumping politics, but if anything, it’s the other way around. How else would the NSA have been able to strong-arm nine tech giants like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft into cooperating with its PRISM program? What’s telling was the embarrassed semi-apology that these firms issued to the public – their excuse came down to, “We didn’t want to. What we did wasn’t so bad. They made us do it.” Meanwhile in China, Internet companies are a seamless extension of the government’s censorship machine.

Alyssa ponders Lily Allen’s new music video:

The video is simultaneously pastiche and critique, referencing everything from Robin Thicke’s discussions of his anatomy in balloon writing to Miley Cyrus’ use of twerking African-American backup dancers as objects, and linguistically playing off Three 6 Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp.” And as apt as the song and video feel now, it’s also part of a long tradition of female pop stars whose brands rely on the idea that they’re different from their fellow pop tarts making music and videos that explicitly swipe at the conventions of their industry.

But she has misgivings:

The truth is that, as much as I adore Pink and Lily Allen in particular, artists like them and songs like these effectively function as a pressure valve for Big Music. By giving these women money and a platform to critique the industry in which they’ve succeeded, large labels prove exactly how tolerant and expansive they are, while continuing on their merry way to make the kind of music and images Allen, Jewel, and Pink deplore.

Prachi Gupta is much harder on Allen:

Allen opted to just stuff some sexist shit into a box, wrap it in a bow that says, “The contents of this box are sexist, so fuck this box, but also, go ahead and open the box.” Lily Allen is smart enough and talented enough that she doesn’t need to repackage that shitty box. She can throw it out and make something better.

Ayesha Siddiqi brings race into the debate:

It is not feminist to mock talented dancers of color for exercising skills Allen doesn’t possess. It is not feminist to claim that women who cook and dance provocatively are as damaging as a manager barking at her to lose weight. It is not feminist to remain blissfully colorblind in a world that functions along race.

Allen responds to critics:

The message is clear. Whilst I don’t want to offend anyone. I do strive to provoke thought and conversation. The video is meant to be a lighthearted satirical video that deals with objectification of women within modern pop culture. It has nothing to do with race, at all.

Yglesias is pleased by Snapchat’s refusal to sell to Facebook for $3 billion:

The company’s founders and investors may or may not be making a terrible mistake. But from the sidelines, I think one should almost always root against the acquisition exit. It’s boring. It’s lame. The bet when you turn down $3 billion is that there’s some chance that in the future your company will be worth $30 billion or $300 billion and you want to reach for those stars and dare to dream.

Joshua Gans calls this “jaw droppingly bad analysis”:

Ultimately, while it is easy to pull apart these arguments, the actual real history of entrepreneurial firms tells us that most of them succeed by cooperating with established firms rather than competing with them as Yglesias is cheering here. As a person responsible for much of that research (see here, here,here and here to name but a few), let me tell you that the struggle in getting acquired is getting a big payout from stronger incumbents; something Snapchat, like Groupon before them, seem to have overcome. To be sure, there are companies like Google and Dropbox (who each turned down a small amount), that end up doing quite well. But they are the exceptions rather than the rule. Snapchat may prove me wrong but I have to say, kids, you should have taken the money.

Robert Laszewksi explains what Obama’s announcement means for insurance companies:

This means that the insurance companies have 32 days to reprogram their computer systems for policies, rates, and eligibility, send notices to the policyholders via US Mail, send a very complex letter that describes just what the differences are between specific policies and Obamacare compliant plans, ask the consumer for their decision —  and give them a reasonable time to make that decision —  and then enter those decisions back into their systems without creating massive billing, claim payment, and provider eligibility list mistakes.

Sarah Kliff considers insurers’ options:

[I]nsurers are in a bit of a tricky spot. It will look pretty bad if they don’t allow people to keep enrolling in their 2013 plans; as the president said, its a whole lot harder to blame the cancellations on Obamacare. But if they do allow that to go forward, it could screw up the risk pool in the new insurance marketplaces by letting the younger and healthy people (who would likely stick with their skimpier plans) stay out of the exchange. They’d essentially be siphoning off the exact same customers they were hoping to woo into the exchanges.

Beutler has no sympathy for insurers:

Obama’s remedy is a justified comeuppance for carriers who defaulted beneficiaries into obscenely expensive plans, which they characterized as “comparable” to the canceled coverage, without apprising them of their options, and blamed the whole disruption on Obamacare. It’s a scolding reminder to particular insurance companies that their lack of integrity exacerbated a problem that might have been contained if they hadn’t acted with such avarice. They are now reaping the whirlwind.

Drum echoes:

I think that most of the canceled policies have been canceled because insurance companies wanted to cancel them. They were designed in the first place to entice buyers away from their old grandfathered policies, and insurance companies did this explicitly so that they would be free to cancel them when 2014 rolled around. This allowed insurers to replace them with more expensive policies without taking any heat for it. They could just blame it on Obamacare.

This is just speculation on my part, so don’t take it to the bank. But I think Obama’s main goal here is to remove this handy excuse.

But, as Suderman points out, the administration needs the cooperation of insurance companies if the law is going to succeed:

Obama is creating a long-term policy problem in order to solve a short-term political problem. Even if this temporarily reduces some of today’s political pressure, those long-term policy problems will rebound to create additional political problems as time goes by. Premiums will rise, and if consumer demand turns out to be lower than expected as a result, plans may withdraw from the market. At the same time, insurers, who have been targeted by the administration for blame and had their assurances about the state of the law (and thus their business plan) upended, will be less likely to cooperate with the administration. They are already frustrated with the administration, and this will hasten the break between them. The opposition of insurers will add a new layer of opposition that the administration must contend with in order to make the law—which is built around the goal of making insurance coverage accessible—work.

Rich Lowry questions the legality of the administrative fix:

In attempting to stem the panic of congressional Democrats, Obama has thrown the insurers who had bought into Obamacare under the bus, a move that itself could harm the law’s long term prospects. He has once again acted unilaterally and (presumably) lawlessly rather than going to Congress, but he has undercut his own spin that Obamacare is the immutable “law of the land” and in his press conference, admitted that many of the law’s failures are on him rather than the result of Republican sabotage. We’ll see now whether the president has at least stabilized his position on Capitol Hill. Regardless, a bad day for him and the law.

Nicholas Bagley reviews relevant law and finds that “the administrative fix may be vulnerable to even sharper claims of illegality than the delay of the employer mandate.” Ramesh expects the change to only make the law worse:

In recent weeks, proponents of Obamacare have been arguing that we shouldn’t make too much of its early troubles, because President George W. Bush’s prescription-drug program saw early fumbles, too. (The people behind Obamacare may not be good at building websites, but they’re great at manufacturing excuses.) It’s perverse, of course, to suggest that the difficulties of a smaller, far less complex program are a good omen for Obamacare. But the bigger problem is that Obamacare is vulnerable to adverse selection in a way that Bush’s program was not.