Month: November 2013

There Are No Easy Fixes

Barro analyzes the Obamacare bills moving through Congress:

[Sen. Mary Landrieu’s] bill would obligate insurers to continue offering all the plans they offer today unless they entirely exit the health insurance business in a state. What will Republicans do with this proposal? Do they really want a federal law that says health insurers can’t enter or exit specific lines of business?

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) has introduced a bill in the House that would allow insurers to continue offering plans that would have been prohibited under the Affordable Care Act, but his bill is vulnerable to the criticism that it will still lead to a raft of plan cancellations as insurers choose to discontinue plans because the ACA has changed the financial incentives they face.

If Congress really wants to make sure people can take their plans, it will need to use the heavy-handed Landrieu approach; the light-touch Upton approach won’t work.

Ezra Klein is against Landrieu’s bill:

The bill Landrieu is offering could really harm the law. It would mean millions of people who would’ve left the individual insurance market and gone to the exchanges will stay right where they are. Assuming those people skew younger, healthier, and richer — and they do — Obamacare’s premiums will rise. Meanwhile, many people who could’ve gotten better insurance on the exchanges will stay in bad plans that will leave them bankrupt when they get sick.

Erick Erickson sees the Landrieu bill as a trap for Republicans:

Here’s what is going to happen.

The House, with the help of a good number of Democrats, will pass the Upton plan and send it to the Senate. Harry Reid will substitute the Landrieu plan and send it back to the House. The House will be forced to either vote for the Landrieu plan or be characterized as siding with insurance companies against people.

In one fell swoop, the Democrats will have the GOP on record saving Mary Landrieu’s re-election in Louisiana by casting her as the one who saved Americans’ health care plans, and also getting on record as really being in favor of fixing Obamacare with the use of mandates.

Sargent checks in on House Democrats:

A senior Democratic aide tells me opposition to the Upton plan will be increasingly difficult to maintain among House Dems if the administration doesn’t offer a workable fix of its own. The aide adds the need to maintain House Dem opposition has been made more urgent by another problem: Senate Dems (the latest being Dianne Feinstein) supporting their own politically expedient “fixes” that could also undermine the law.

Though he thinks it’s bad policy, Jon Walker doubts the Upton bill would do much damage to Obamacare:

[I]nsurance companies have spent months preparing for the switch over to the exchanges. They have already cancelled many of these plans and tried to move people to new ones. Trying to undo that in only a few weeks it a lot of work for just another year. There is a good chance many insurance companies will simply choose not to offer these plans any more.

This law would probably result in a few hundred thousand healthier and wealthier people not joining the exchanges next year. While that would impact the actuarial models the insurance companies were using to set premiums on the exchanges, I think the impact would be modest and not of great concern. I feel the danger is being greatly overstated.

But Sarah Lueck foresees major problems with the bill:

While the Upton bill would extend the availability of non-ACA-compliant plans only through 2014, there would be pressure next summer and fall to extend their availability through 2015 or (more likely) permanently.  That would permanently raise premiums in marketplace plans, further discouraging healthy people from enrolling and threatening the marketplaces’ long-term viability and, hence, the extension of coverage to millions of uninsured near-poor and middle-income Americans.

Straight Out Of Dickens, Ctd

A reader writes:

I’m glad you’ve brought to light the resurgence of pertussis (whooping cough). Julia Ioffe’s description of what it’s like to have the disease is right on, but your readers need to know that it’s even worse for babies to get pertussis. It can kill them. Immunity does wane over time, but there’s something you can do to decrease your risk of getting pertussis, as well as helping to protect those around you: make sure you’ve gotten a booster shot called Tdap (which includes a booster for tetanus and diptheria as well) that’s been available for adults since 2005. Please use your large readership to spread the word.

Another:

I teach at Ohio State University, where we’ve had a low-level pertussis pandemic for several years now. I caught it myself in 2007, along with several of my friends. My doctor told me it’s common at the university because small kids get it and pass it on to their college-age siblings (whose vaccinations have worn off) and they bring it back to campus with them. As it turns out, I’ve been afflicted with a chronic cough since then, and it appears this will be with me for the rest of my life (I’m now 64). Pertussis has a side effect called bronchiectasis that is permanent damage to the bronchia. I spend the first hour of every day coughing.

When I complain to my engineering students that we live in a society that no longer believes in science, they always assume I’m talking about the GOP. I quickly remind them that there are as many lunatics on the left as there are on the right.

On that note:

A lesser recognized culprit in all of this is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

No matter your politics, the name Kennedy carries a certain intellectual heft that, when combined with Jenny McCarthy’s celebrity, creates a perfect storm of legitimacy given to bunk science. This Slate article sums it up nicely.

Another looks to the right:

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has promised a hearing in the Congressional Oversight and Reform Committee to address “the government’s failure to address the autism epidemic.”  The last time Issa’s committee gave voice to Jenny McCarthy’s angry mob was in November 2012, when witnesses and congressman made inaccurate and unscientific claims about the safety of vaccines. Why again? Maybe because Issa received $40,000 in donations from Jennifer Larson, a Minnesota business owner and member of the anti-vaccine Canary Party.

Issa also appeared at Jenny McCarthy’s annual Autism One conference in Chicago, where a Who’s Who of medical quacks blame autism on vaccines, and aim to cure it with unproven remedies such as bleach enemas, chemical castration drugs, and chelation. Yes, bleach enemas.

The reader follows up:

Somebody just sent this [pdf] to me. It’s the agenda from last week’s congressional briefing, which paved the way for Issa’s anti-vaccine hearing in December.  Issa’s flirtation with anti-vaccine crazies has escaped major media attention so far. I hope you can help bring this travesty to light.

If Healthcare.gov Misses Its Deadline

Despite reports to the contrary, the White House still claims that Healthcare.gov will work well by the end of the month. Ezra suspects that “that no one knows for sure whether the Web site will be repaired by the end of the month.” How much damage would missing the deadline do?

The answer depends on two things. First, does the White House’s evident inability to repair the Web site in a timely fashion (or even, at this point, an untimely fashion) lead congressional Democrats to panic and support bills — like a yearlong delay in the individual mandate — that make it harder for the law to succeed even once its digital infrastructure is fixed?

The second question, of course, is how far off-schedule the White House really is. If HealthCare.gov is working smoothly for the majority of users on December 1st but it only works smoothly for the “vast majority” of users on December 15th, that won’t matter much. If the Web site remains more or less unusable into 2014, that’s obviously a much bigger problem for the law.

Cohn outlines contingency plans:

For starters, the marketplaces could rely more heavily on alternative methods of enrollment, particularly “direct enrollment” from insurers and through online brokers like ehealthinsurance.com. From the get-go, Obama Administration officials assumed that at least some people would get insurance this way. And they designed healthcare.gov with that possibility in mind. It is supposed to have a special portal—in effect, a side door into the federal online system for people buying insurance directly from insurer websites. As I understand it, the idea is that you’d apply for insurance at a company website or broker, you’d get sent over to healthcare.gov to figure out whatever financial assistance was available to you, and then you would take that determination back to the insurer or online broker—where you’d be able to enroll and buy a policy, potentially at a discounted price.

Why this hasn’t already been done:

The danger with direct enrollment through insurers is that applicants will check out one company’s options and never realize other companies might have better alternatives. That’s obviously not such a problem with the online brokers, but officials had separate worries about relying too heavily on those sites. For example, could they be counted upon to make sure consumers understood what they were buying?

At this point, however, transforming the existing, opqaue market into a more competitive, transparent one must come second to making sure everybody can get coverage on time. That’s why administration officials have been huddling with insurers about how to make more use of direct enrollment.

Club Tripod, Ctd

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More members write in:

We rescued Harry, a harrier hound that closely resembles a beagle, from a road accident when he was one. He stayed with us (and ran “like the wind”) for 15 years. He lacked a right-rear leg but he was the envy of the other male dogs – he could whizz on the fly! Gotta love them tripods!

Another:

As the owner of a three-legged kitty, I thought I’d give you a heads up on a term a friend of mine taught me (she had a speedy three-legged dog). It’s “Tripawd” instead of tripod. It’s a little cutesy – but, well, it’s really cute too!

Another:

I am totally beside myself to have my favorite blogger now join the three-leg club!  Ruby was found living behind a dumpster with an injured leg back in 2008.  We took her in, hoping to find her owner or a new home. After two surgeries the vet said Ruby would be better off if we just amputated the injured leg. By this time, finding a new owner for her was out of the picture and if I was at all uncertain, seeing her post-surgery in the vet’s office made it clear that I would throw myself in front of a bus for this dog.

It took about a year of very short walks around the block to build up her strength but she was soon running, jumping, chasing, etc. all over the neighborhood.  We moved to Minneapolis several years ago and Ruby and I (well, really just Ruby; I just became the guy with the 3-legged dog) became minor celebrities around the hood.

I can’t tell you how many wonderful experiences this has given me.

Children are totally in awe of Ruby and often run right up to her and crush her with affection.  There was a public housing project down the street that had a number of older guys who had clearly lived hard lives and who hung out on the building’s patio every day.  When we’d walk by they’d call out “Ruby!” and we’d hustle over where they would crowd around her and love on her and I would spend hours chatting and hearing their life stories.  With these guys, it was hard not to notice the quick bond they had with Ruby and equate this with the fact that they had various internal and external wounds of their own.  I got to know all of these people through their interest in Ruby and cherish that I got to interact with people I otherwise wouldn’t have.

Ruby and I recently moved to a new city and I cried my eyes out when leaving because of all the relationships we had to leave behind that we had built up through these chance encounters.  Mostly because they were not people that I will likely keep in touch with or probably ever see again … just neighborhood folks, some quite old and not with much time left, but no less meaningful than lots of other relationships.

But as with anything, the curiosity factor continues here in Portland as people are constantly stopping and asking what happened to Ruby or wondering if they can pet her.  I’ve already met dozens of people whom I’m now friendly with this way. As for your life with a 3-legger, you will soon notice that peoples’ inquiries are so standard it’s comical.  Basically, I can almost guarantee that strangers will come up to you and say one of the following:

1.  “Oh, they do so well, don’t they?”
2.  “It’s like they don’t even know”
3.  “Was she hit by a car?”
4.  (child to parent) “That dog only has one leg!”  – something cognitively deceptive going on with kids

So get used to your stock response to these …

Another:

Welcome to the 3-legged dog club!  We got ours a couple summers ago:

Clover

She is awesome and her story is pretty incredible. A lot of people came together to rescue her.

Another:

When I was growing up, my family inherited Missy, a young yellow pup, from my uncle when we moved into his old house. Missy had lost one of her rear legs due to two separate accidents in the span of a year or so. Aside from the initial recovery, you would have never known that Missy was down a limb, as she was as quick and as active as any four-legged farm dog. Missy’s remaining rear leg grew quite powerful and she learned how to use it well as she was particularly adept at helping us wrangle hogs at full speed. I have vivid memories of watching Missy traverse our farm on her three legs, finding her way across creeks, under fences, generally wherever she needed to be.

While I don’t remember exactly how old she was when she passed, Missy lived a good fifteen years or more after her accident, outliving countless cats and at least one pup who was a good ten years her junior. Best of luck to you and Bowie and may you have many many years with each other.

Another flags an amazing video we’ve posted before:

Three legs? Pshaw, try two:

Another reader:

Yet another niche Dish community!  My dog, Miss Jack, isn’t a tripod, but she is terribly gimpy due to abuse when she was two months old. We were living in Sierra Leone at the time where I was working on a maternal and child health project. After I had taken her into my home and while she was still using only three of her legs, I invited a fellow dog-lover and colleague over to meet her. My colleague took one look Jack, turned to me and said, “Blech! How could you love a dog like that?” Ironic, considering she worked on poverty alleviation in a post-conflict country known for its amputee soccer teams! Needless to say, Jack never seems to notice her limp and attracts far more love on the streets because of it.

Another shifts focus:

I went out with a few friends this past weekend and one of the couples told us about the dog they had just adopted, Flo. When Flo was younger (I think a few weeks old) her owners neglected her, which resulted in her eyes getting extremely infected and eventually removed.  Look at this awesome pup:

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Can Francis End The Church’s Civil War?

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Ross Douthat hopes so:

Ever since the Second Vatican Council, the church has (as most people know) been locked in a kind of low-grade institutional civil war, between a liberal/progressive/modernizing viewpoint that had its moment in the 1960s and 1970s, and the more neoconservative perspective that set the tone for John Paul II and Benedict’s papacies. (I say neoconservative because this was essentially a quarrel over the meaning and implications of Vatican II’s liberalizing reforms, between factions that had both supported them, with critics of Vatican II confined to the sidelines and the fringe.)

For my generation of Catholics, wherever our specific sympathies lie, this inheritance of conflict has created a hunger for synthesis – for a way forward that doesn’t compromise Catholic doctrine or Catholic moral teaching or transform the Church into a secular N.G.O. with fancy vestments, but also succeeds in making it clear that the Catholic message is much bigger than the culture war, that theological correctness is not the only test of Christian faith, and that the church is not just an adjunct (or, worse, a needy client, seeking protection) of American right-wing politics. This desire has been palpable in the Catholic blogosphere for some time, and I think you can see it percolating in many of the publications in whose pages the old intra-Catholic battles were so often fought.

Me too. And that is why Francis’ insistent emphasis on the faith as a way of life – and not an ideology – is so brilliant a way out of this debilitating conflict. And that way of life demands a humility that is simply not consonant with the harsh rhetoric of, say, Cardinal Dolan, over comparatively trivial matters, or, for that matter, the iconoclastic over-reach of some reformers in the wake of the Second Council. Would a humble faith like Saint Francis’ be aligning with the Republican right in a culture war? Is the calm gentleness of Jesus compatible by the rigid enforcement of total obedience to a set of increasingly detailed doctrinal non-negotiables that we are somehow supposed to will ourselves into believing, even when our own lives belie them? The questions answer themselves.

I see Francis increasingly like Jesus in the Gospel story of the woman caught in adultery. I wrote about this last year in this way:

She is about to be stoned. Does Jesus uphold the law he came to fulfill against the woman? No. He demands that those without sin cast the first stones. And he forgives the woman – while insisting she not sin again. Actually, he does more than forgive. He says: “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”

This is the Christian model of sexual morality, it seems to me, as it is of morality in general. Jesus poses an impossible standard and then refuses to condemn an actual tangible human being who fails to reach it. Since we are all completely ridden with sin, we equally have no right to condemn anyone else, even if we are living the most upright lives according to the law.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And in this classic scene in which religious authorities stand ready to deploy their power to punish sin, Jesus does something strange. He physically defuses the dynamic. She is cowering; they are threatening; they demand he uphold the law. What does he do? He sits on the ground and doodles in the dust. He is neither condemned nor condemner. He breaks that circle. He does not condemn. He forgives.

So I am a sinner.

Francis is defusing the binary dynamic and the authoritarian dynamic. His first words in the America interview were: “I am a sinner.” In the standing-only battle lines of the church’s civil war, Francis has sat on the ground, breaking the cycle, neither condemned nor condemner, just a sinner.

And it is increasingly clear this is not just public relations. The Papal Nuncio to the US just told the US bishops the following:

Pope Francis, Vigano said, “wants bishops in tune with their people.” The pope “is giving us by, his own witness, an example of how to live a life attuned to the values of the gospel. While each of us must take into consideration our adaptability to the many different circumstances and cultures in which we live and the people whom we serve, there has to be a noticeable life style characterized by simplicity and holiness of life. This is a sure way to bring our people to an awareness of the truth of our message.” Vigano quoted liberally from Pope Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi, which, he noted, Francis has called “the greatest pastoral document written to date.” It was promulgated in 1975.

“The first means of evangelization,” Paul VI wrote, “is the witness of an authentically Christian life, given over to God in a communion that nothing should destroy and at the same time given to one’s neighbor with limitless zeal. As we said recently to a group of lay people, ‘Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers. and if it does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.”

Or in the words of Saint Francis: “Preach the Gospel everywhere. If necessary, with words.”

(Photo: Alessandro Di Meo/AFP/Getty Images)

What Obamacare’s Critics Are Saying

A new report from Heritage’s Edmund Haislmaier claims that the healthcare exchanges won’t encourage competition:

For the vast majority of states, the exchanges will offer less insurer competition than the state’s current individual market. Most of the insurers whose principal business is employer-group coverage appear to expect significant erosion in that coverage segment due to Obamacare inducing employers to drop their current group plans. Given that the distribution of exchange enrollees will likely be skewed toward the lower end of the 100 percent to 400 percent of FPL income range (and thus, eligible for reduced cost sharing), participating insurers are offering exchange plans with limited provider networks and a significant number of Medicaid managed-care plans opted to join the exchanges.

The insurers who have elected to participate in the exchanges are mainly a mix of Blue Cross carriers seeking to extend their current market dominance, group-market carriers seeking to retain enrollees when employers drop coverage, and Medicaid managed-care insurers expanding into a market that they view as very similar to their current business.

In fact, Obamacare’s complicated, income-based design of premium and cost-sharing subsidies will result in the exchange market essentially offering something like Medicaid managed-care for the middle class.

Avik Roy is worried about Healthcare.gov’s security:

One of the most underappreciated, but important, problems with Obamacare’s troubled health insurance exchanges are their inadequate safeguards against identity theft and misuse of private information. We’ve now learned that an important government report detailing “high risks” to the security of the Obamacare website was concealed from a key official, Henry Chao. The concealment misled Chao to believe that there were no longer any high security risks to the launch of the federal exchange, prompting him to recommend the approval of healthcare.gov. “I’m not even copied on this,” exclaimed Chao in aNovember 1 interview with the House Oversight Committee, where he was presented with the security report for the first time. “It is disturbing…This is…a fairly non-standard way to document a decision.”

It’s not clear whether or not the concealment was intentional. “I don’t want to think the worst of people,” Chao told investigators. But he acknowledged that it was “kind of strange” that he wasn’t included on the email that contained this critical information, given that there were people that report directly to him that were included on it, along with his direct superiors. “Why I’m surprised is that [Teresa Fryer, the Chief Information Security Officer] had me do this, file this process, but [didn’t] copy me on the [Authorization to Operate] letter. I mean, wouldn’t you be surprised if you were me?”

And Peter Suderman takes the administration to task for inflating its enrollment numbers:

[T]he administration isn’t actually counting enrollments. Instead, it’s counting the number of people who have placed health plans in their online shopping carts—not necessarily people who have signed up and agreed to be billed, and certainly not people who have actually paid the premium for the first month of coverage. It’s the equivalent of Amazon counting a TV sold every time someone puts a TV in his or her online shopping cart, regardless of whether or not they actually go through the checkout process.

 

The Reality Of Serious Weight Loss, Ctd

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A reader writes:

One aspect of substantial weight loss that hasn’t been brought up in your discussion thread is the effect it has on your sex life. Yes, once the euphoria has worn off, you have to come to terms with the disappointment that your new body is not what you envisioned. But you also have to face the fact that even a modest amount of excess skin may actually make you less physically attractive than before. Those who have not found love or a secure relationship may see weight loss as a key to finding new social and romantic opportunities. This was certainly true for me, but I was shocked to discover that my body after weight loss appeared to be more repulsive to potential lovers than it had been before. I have experienced the look of disappointment and shock on the face of a new lover – even after I had been open and honest about my body. For me, the realization that I may never again be physically intimate and experience the joy of being held, caressed, and loved is actually worse than the health and social problems of obesity.

The above photo from Julia Kozerski is entitled “Lovers Embrace”, from her (NSFW) series Half. Another reader:

It’s been over four years since I started getting my life and weight under control. I joined a support group and the weight just slid off. It’s been three years now since I lost the last of 170 pounds. Those first months in my “new” body were disconcerting.

I carried a photo of the “old” me around to show people I met. I was telling them they weren’t really talking to this normal-looking person, but rather that fat guy. It took a long time for me to shake that habit.

The second thing I remember was a feeling of instant vulnerability. Having been used to being the biggest person in any room, I never felt physically threatened. Ever. Suddenly I was 200 pounds, not 370. A guy I used to outweigh by over a hundred pounds now had be by 40 or 50. What would happen if he turned on me? I’d never feared that in my life.

Hugs are strange too. That bulk I carried around was a great barrier to keep people away. Now they’re RIGHT THERE.

Lastly … intimacy. I’ve been 100 pounds overweight since adolescence. Needless to say, I didn’t get a lot of attention from women. I went my entire thirties without a single sexual partner. Now women check me out regularly. It’s still weird. I wish I could say I’m getting used to it, but I’m not.

Reddit had a great discussion a month or so back on weight loss and the struggle to quiet the inner fat guy/girl. I saw myself in a lot of it. Thanks as always for the discussion.

A New Media Model

The breakthrough in our attempt to go independent this time last year was when we discovered – well, Chas discovered – a small, newish company called Tinypass, that was able to run our meter system and take paid subscriptions from readers. Without any business staff, it was a godsend. Like us, it was a small group of people; and like us, we were refugees from traditional media, trying to start over. Throughout the last ten months or so, we’ve bounced around ideas, brainstormed problems, and shared reflections on this experiment. But we’re not alone, as this short video about the company and what it offers writers, journalists, musicians, artists and bloggers demonstrates (with a small cameo from yours truly):

With your help, and with six weeks to go, we’re now at $807K in our first year revenue, closing in on our goal of $900K. Tinypass made that possible; you made it happen. If you are a regular reader of the Dish, all we ask is that you consider if what we provide each day is worth $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year. If it is, please [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe”]. As you can see, this model is not just about us. It’s about building a future for a whole range of new media on the ashes of the old. [tinypass_offer text=”Help us get there.”] For subscribers who want to support us further, you can purchase a gift subscription for someone who might like the Dish. If you want to revive the future of actual content online – rather than ever-invasive ads and advertorials and traffic gimmicks – this is a place to start. A reader writes:

When you went indie and started your new website, I agreed that the only sustainable way of doing what you had planned was to start charging for the site. Yet, I never subscribed. Until today. Why? Still working on my dissertation with limited financial resources, the yearly fee was holding me back. Or more precisely, the subscription model was holding me back. I don’t like to subscribe. I currently don’t subscribe to any newspapers or magazines, though I have in the past. And it wasn’t the $19.99. That’s a more than reasonable amount. It was something else, too. I often read posts that I didn’t agree with, that held me back from subscribing. Do I really want to pay someone who held some views I was opposed to?howler beagle

What changed? I realized that just as with any newspapers and magazines I buy or bought in the past, I just wouldn’t agree with everything. I love the Economist but I have serious reservations regarding some of their views. Looking at your blog the same way as a magazine, I figured out that I could disagree with some posts, ignore others, and skip over those that didn’t interest me.

So, my reservations are gone. Actually, I feel like I have to subscribe to The Dish because I want to support a journalistic effort that pays its employees fairly. And one that takes care of its interns. Having been an intern myself and never having gotten any pay (whether it was at museums, theaters or interning for a member of the European Parliament), I really appreciate this aspect the most. Your monthly subscription model is also an incentive and allows me to give more, as it’s easier to pay $5 a month than $50 or 60 once a year.

What finally made me commit though was setting up a website for my photography. After having done that, I visited The Dish and discovered that you were also hosted on WordPress. And I could press the follow button. But I could not in good conscience do so while not subscribing. So I subscribed. And then I clicked that “follow” button.

A few more emails of new media pioneering are below. But first a dissent:

Count me as a paid member who will not be renewing his subscription next year. I have enjoyed your blog for a long time, but increasingly it seems you are using your public “voice” to push your agendas.

I enjoy spirited debate as much as the next guy, but that isn’t what we seem to be getting at the Dish anymore. Sure you post a few dissents and opposing opinions, but it occurs to me that those posts are chosen at your discretion. Are you really blogging both sides in your “debates”?

Enough with Pope Francis already! Is legalizing pot really worth the time you give it (medical benefits … please!)? Bush and Cheney are war criminals, always and forever, but Obama is nuanced and not given a fair shake. Sure Obama lied about the details of the ACA, but that is ultimately ok because the good outweighs the bad. Sounds like an excuse for torture as well! And I have yet to hear from one animal scientist or reputable meat industry professional in your crusade agains the meat industry (not concentration camp, torture industry). Your anthropomorphic inclinations are clouding your judgement and your perspective is suspect given the fact that your only dealings with animals seem to be your relationship with a house pet. Yeah Yeah … everyone has a right to their opinion, I know!

I refuse to lend my hard-earned dollars to a site that is pushing agendas. You can dismiss me. You can chastise me. You can call me ignorant. What you can’t do is have my membership or endorsement anymore! Doubt this will make it on your blog.

Another reader points to a new media writer trying to make it with a subscription model as well:

I’ve been an avid reader of your blog for about 4 years now. I first learned of you while I was living in China, and your blog was a great source of American news for me, especially since your blog pretty much flew under the radar of the Great Firewall. When you first started collecting payments for your blog, I wanted to help, but I was unemployed at the time, and I needed to save money. I kept telling myself that when I got my job, I’d sign up. But I got my job back in June, and I kept putting it off. I’d find reasons to do it later whenever I hit my limit. Though reading on my phone and on my PC gave me a little extra breathing room. I don’t know why I kept putting it off, maybe there was some part of me that just didn’t want to pay for web content (I know, it’s selfish).

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bill Bishop over at sinocism.com, he runs a fantastic China-focused newsletter. It’s mostly a collection of English and Chinese news about the country, but he clearly puts a lot of work into it every day and adds commentary whenever he can. He has been asking for donations and subscriptions for a while, since it takes a significant amount of time every day. He recently made a make-or-break request. He was looking to hit a certain threshold of subscribers so he could justify the time he put into it, but he only made it a little over halfway his goal. So, he announced that at the end of the month he was going to transition from a daily newsletter to a weekly one. Although I like reading his newsletter and will be sad to see it less often, I can understand his reasons.

I wouldn’t like to see your blog go the same route. I feel incredibly guilty for free-riding off your content for so long. So I’ve subscribed finally. Keep up the good work!

Another plug for new media pioneers:

I am a big fan of yours, and as a journalism teacher, I’m also a big fan of your new publication model (and I’m hoping it will work, so I can show my students that they can do this successfully too). I have purchased my own subscription and I’m thinking about buying one for my father-in-law, who is quite conservative but whom I have spirited, if still cordial conversations with.

I am also a fan of a man named Dan Carlin. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him, but I think you’d find him particularly interesting. Carlin is a podcaster. He’s a former TV reporter who then became a radio host for a few years in the Pacific Northwest, but eventually left that world because, being a staunch independent in what I think is the truest sense of the term, he didn’t quite fit the ideological mold. So he became an early adopter of the podcasting format not long after you hit it as a blogger.

Carlin does two podcasts. His “baby” is “Hardcore History,” where, as a self-professed “fan” of history and not a scholar, he tells stories on historical subjects. These are like extemporaneous audiobooks or long-form essays, and his storytelling is incredibly thorough from a research perspective while also being phenomenally entertaining.

His other podcast is called “Common Sense,” which is a current events podcast where he discusses his point of view on the current political topics of the moment. He reminds me very much of you as an independent thinker who has become disillusioned with the current political state of play in Washington and has ideas on how things can get better.

I’m sure you have more than a few Dishheads in the mix who, like me, are also fans of Dan. I also think it’s worth pointing out the remarkable similarities between your current model and his. As a loyal fan of both you and him, I encourage you to check out a few of his podcasts, which are available for free on iTunes: Common Sense and Hardcore History. (If you’re looking for a good sample of both, I particularly encourage you to listen to “Show 42 – Logical Insanity” from Hardcore History, and “Show 258 – Snow Storm” from Common Sense.) Carlin’s antiquated though reportedly soon-to-be-updated website is here.

I don’t know how ultimately useful you will find this information, but at the very least, I believe there’s a new media kindred spirit-ship to be found between the two of you.