Month: February 2013

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who advised McCain on healthcare in 2008, and Avik Roy, who advised Romney on healthcare in 2012, want to reform Obamacare:

The great irony of Obama’s triumph … is that it can pave the way for Republicans to adopt a comprehensive, market-oriented healthcare agenda.  The market-oriented prescription drug program in Medicare has controlled the growth of government health spending. Similarly, conservatives can use Obamacare’s important concession to the private sector — its establishment of subsidized insurance marketplaces — as a vehicle for broader entitlement reforms.

While most Americans view their healthcare system as “free-market,” Switzerland actually has the most market-oriented healthcare system in the West. It translates into universal coverage and low entitlement costs. Swiss government entities spent about 3.5 percent of gross domestic product on healthcare in 2010, compared to 8.5 percent in the United States.

Aaron Carroll raises an eyebrow:

Do they know that the Swiss health care system has an individual mandate? Do they know that the Swiss health care system has arguably more regulations, such that they can’t even charge a 25 year old and an 80 year old a different price (like you can in Obamacare)? Do they know that the Swiss health care system regulates drug prices and fees for lab tests and medical devices? Do they know the most someone can pay for insurance in Switzerland is 8% of income (which is less than Obamacare allows)?

Josh Barro finds other problems with the article. Don Taylor reads the piece differently:

Holtz-Eakin and Roy’s piece was and is primarily political, and doesn’t really have much to do with any facts or policy. They both (and many others) have overstated the case against the ACA for quite a while in my mind; that doesn’t mean I don’t read their stuff. And Holtz-Eakin was Senator McCain’s chief health policy advisor and Avik was an advisor to Gov. Romney. Given all this, the main content of the piece was reform of Obamacare v. strident ideological language arguing against something without offering an alternative that has been the norm for most opponents of the law for the past 34 months. So, even though my first thought was “Switzerland! I thought you guys hated mandates” I am personally glad to welcome them down from the ledge.

Amanda Dobbins reviews the new Beyoncé documentary:

This is Beyoncé propaganda, a 90-minute self-paean to a pop star whose name is synonymous with control. What’s interesting — interesting enough that Beyoncé feels the need to address it in her own hagiography — is that “control” has become a bad word. “I don’t have to kill myself and be so hard on myself,” Beyoncé says of her perfectionism at one point. You can take that as a stab at self-improvement, or you can interpret it as a savvy attempt to answer her critics in the middle of a film designed to reinforce her Perfect image.

Nitsuh Abebe is on a similar page, noting that “some of Knowles’s best and richest music is literally about how it feels to be an obsessive overachiever.” Alyssa’s take:

I’m not someone who thinks Beyoncé owes us any details about her life she doesn’t want to share publicly. But I do think it’s intriguing that she wants to participate in the celebrity ritual of confessing trauma and pain, and insisting that she’s imperfect, without having to share any of what actually caused that pain, or revealing any of those imperfections. In simple narrative efficacy terms, being told only that someone feels bad, or needs their independence, or misses their husband isn’t actually very interesting to watch for an hour and a half: if Life Is But A Dream were fiction, I’d complain about the amount of showing, rather than telling, and say the characters were radically underdeveloped. Beyoncé’s inner life is not inherently interesting simply for being hers.

Jody Rosen argues “there’s no question that Beyoncé is a terrible judge of what is interesting about Beyoncé”:

Consider one topic that never comes up in “Life Is But a Dream”: race. You could make the case that Beyoncé has reached an unprecedented position in American life. She is a black woman who has claimed the mantles of America’s Sweetheart, National Bombshell, and Entertainer-in-Chief. (According to Nielsen, an audience of 1.8 million watched Saturday’s broadcast of “Life Is But a Dream,” a record for an HBO documentary, and three times the average rating for the network’s marquee show, Lena Dunham’s “Girls.”) Beyoncé is one half of an African-American royal couple rivalled only by the duo in the White House. She is by far the “blackest”—musically and aesthetically—of all the post-Madonna pop divas; she represents African-American women’s anger and power like no one in popular culture since Aretha Franklin.

Silver takes a very early look at 2014 Senate races:

Keep in mind that in each of the last four cycles, one party (Democrats in 2006, 2008 and 2012; Republicans in 2010) won the vast majority of the competitive races. If Republicans swept all the “lean” and “tossup” races, they would gain a net of eight seats from Democrats, giving them a 53-to-47 majority in the 114th Congress. If Democrats swept instead, they would lose just one seat and would hold a 54-to-46 majority. Considering the uncertainty in the landscape, estimates from betting markets that Democrats have about a 63 percent chance of holding their majority appear to be roughly reasonable.

Enten focuses on the House:

Since 1866 only thrice (1934, 1998, 2002) has the president’s party not lost seats in a midterm. In all three of those elections, they gained fewer than 10 seats, which isn’t even close to the 17 seats Democrats need to take the House today. The GOP will probably maintain control come 2014, but there still seems to be some misunderstanding about what type of national wave it would take for Democrats to take back the House. The Democrats currently have a 5pt lead in the HuffPollster national House ballot aggregate. If it holds through 2014, the Democrats would be in good shape to win a majority in the House.

He later bets “that the national environment for the 2014 midterm elections will turn against Democrats enough to keep them from winning the House.”

Yesterday, Rick Scott, Florida’s Republican governor, announced that he now supports implementing the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. Ezra sees this as a sign that Republicans are making peace with Obamacare:

The health-care law goes into effect next year, and implementation is sure to be rocky — all the more so because so many states have left the bulk of the work up to the federal government. But so long as Obamacare is accepted as the law of the land, and repeal is dismissed by most Republicans as little more than a pleasant fantasy, then a constructive process can begin in which Republicans seize on problems with the law as an opportunity to reform the reforms — and through that process, begin to buy into the new system. That’s how the fight over Obamacare ends, and the work of health-care reform continues.

Yglesias thinks Scott’s new position is the right one:

The way the Medicaid expansion works is that the federal government will foot over 90 percent of the tab for states that cover more patients. Meanwhile, residents of states that don’t expand Medicaid don’t gain any special exemption from the taxes that fund the program. So even if you think the expansion is deeply unwise, it’s a simple collective action issue.

Weigel considers the politics of Scott’s decision:

He knows full well that the Republican-run legislature has to sign off on the plan. Either legislators affirm it, and help out Scott in 2014, or they buck him, and make Scott seem — for the first time in recorded history — like a centrist. When Charlie Crist has joined the Democratic Party and beats you like a rug in early polls, that’s a decent menu of choices!

When the speaker is an Israeli. Another class act from George Galloway:

Google’s latest ad for Glass:

Waldman expects this type of device to catch on:

I could be wrong, but I have little doubt that eventually some version of this technology will be as ubiquitous as smartphones are today. It may not happen for ten or twenty years, but it’ll happen. And as it grows, people will find all kinds of uses for it that we can’t even contemplate today.

Meanwhile, Jason Bittel explains how the German military is readying “the closest thing to a real-life ‘heads-up display’ we’ve ever seen—like Google Glass for combat”:

Anchored by a helmet mounted display (which doubles as night vision and augmented reality), a soldier can access maps, waypoints, “Blue Force Tracking” (good guys), and “Enemy Threat Reporting” and “Red Force Visualization” (bad guys). And you just know the next version will have all sorts of drone integration – bringing the eye in the sky into the helmet. (The Brits are already using miniature surveillance helicopters.)

An excerpt from a new Lena Dunham profile:

Dunham developed an intense dread of sex as soon as she learned what it was. From the evidence presented on Girls, it’s unclear whether she’s ever fully gotten over it. “I’d come up with a theory that I thought made a tremendous amount of sense,” she says, “which was that you’d lay next to someone you loved, you wished for a baby and then the sperm and the egg met through the pores of your skin. My friend Amanda was like, ‘No, a man puts his penis in your vagina,’ and I was like, ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard; this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.’

I do remember distinctly the moment this dawned on me as well. I was in a Catholic elementary school, aged 10. We had a class on the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. I listened dutifully and then asked: “What’s a normal conception?” I saw the headmaster’s eyes roll back a little; he sighed; there was always one like me on most classes; and he then launched into an empirical discussion of the mechanics of sexual intercourse and procreation. All because of me! And what I remember about it is that I thought it was completely preposterous. He puts his what in where? It seemed utterly weird. I could maybe accept it when it came to rabbits, I thought on my walk home. But my mum and dad? No way.

Alyssa’s two cents:

In the first season of Girls, Dunham was confronting her childhood fears of having sex. Now the show is daring Hannah to not just go to bed with someone, but to enjoy something she once was scared of and didn’t understand.