Month: December 2013

A reader writes:

I hope this thread takes off with reader comments like many of your others! There is a lot of room to maneuver between the cruel, artless, and deliberately upsetting lies encouraged by the revolting Jimmy Kimmel and the cold, unblinking presentation of reality to children. Indeed, I find bullshitting one’s children is a singular and abiding joy of parenthood! For example, I have insisted for years to my now seven year-old son that (a) chocolate milk comes from brown cows, and (b) dogs can drive.  He has never really believed me, but I have stuck to my guns with increasingly unlikely embellishments (e.g. not just any dog – only those that can pass a special driving test).

I believe there is value for children in sniffing out and articulating why certain massive whoppers peddled by their normally-trusted parents are untrue. In this way, healthy skepticism is developed without making children distrustful (as perhaps you should be if your parents will reduce you to tears just because a second-rate comedian told them to) or naive (believing adults always tell the truth).

Another is on the same page:

Count me as yet another defender, and practitioner, of lying to one’s offspring. When done right, it is good for their souls. I refer to the paradoxical cults of Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny.

What strange mythic beings those three are! They are neither gods nor fictional characters; they are a hybrid of the two. The child is expected both to believe and then later disbelieve! They start out as Truth Revealed, but end up as Fun Lies. They enact, within the child’s own lifetime, a mini-Enlightenment. Their final sermon is doubt; their greatest miracle is their own refutation.

For Santa doesn’t just die, like some plain old corn god; it turns out that he never even was. He was a lie, a trick, a prank. But the disillusionment is gentle; for the presents were real, and they keep coming. The god fails, but parental love remains.

I see Santa as an initiation rite into skepticism. He is a noble lie; for he turns children into philosophers. Santa is the patron saint of unbelief.

Another:

My oldest came home in 2nd grade and said a bunch of kids at school were telling her that Santa isn’t real and it’s just her parents.  She then asked me if that was true.  In my defense, I was nursing her infant sister, wasn’t sleeping, and wasn’t thinking.  I thought she knew the truth and was testing me.  So I told her that Santa isn’t real and that we gave her all her presents.  She freaked out.  She started crying hysterically and mourned Santa as if he died.  It was horrible.  I called my husband at work and he was so angry at me.  It was awful.  So now I lie:

Mom, have you ever tried any drugs?
Answer: Nope
Mom, were you a virgin when you met Dad?
Answer: Yep
Mom, what does tea-bagging mean? (got this one when she was in 6th grade)
Answer: It’s a new political movement.  Taxed Enough Already.

How the hell was I supposed to explain tea-bagging to an 11 year old? The Jimmy Kimmel stuff is funny, though a bit cruel, and I wouldn’t do it to my kids, but sometimes you just have to lie.

Another:

Fantasies about Santa Claus can be seen as part of psychological development, as we move from pre-rational, to rational, then onto trans-rational (hopefully). I may not believe in Santa anymore, but I’m glad he’s still around, as a reminder of generosity. In the same way, the Garden of Eden may be fully believed at one point, dismissed as fantasy later on, but hopefully seen in a trans-rational perspective as a valuable meditation on good and evil. Most of us get stuck at some stage or another. Perhaps religion, understood differently, can act as a sort of conveyor belt.

Another notes:

I have to object to the reader’s characterisation of the “Christian tendency to turn religious holidays into occasions for inventing impossible narratives (a flying fat man and a giant bunny delivering toys and candy respectively).” I’m sorry, but that is a British/American tendency, not a Christian one. Spain, for one, did not turn either Easter or Christmas into any such thing, nor did any country in its vicinity.

Another narrows that point even more:

I suspect that for the common difficulties of balancing truth with commercial myths – Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny – the problem is uniquely American. Growing up in England, as I did, to American parents, none of these were on the map. Christmas had Father Christmas, but he was a minor and distinctly human figure – good for a sack of chocolate gelt or Cadbury bar, but not the main chance. Santa, the fairy, and the bunny didn’t exist. I suppose we missed out on certain fantasies, but they weren’t missed. It was nifty enough to get a few coins under the pillow as payment for a tooth, or to find a bright blue egg behind the couch – no explanation needed. A straightforwardness worth emulating, I think.

Sargent touts the Medicaid expansion:

The larger story is that the Medicaid expansion is emerging as an early Obamacare success — a rare area where the law may already be putting Republicans on the defensive. A new report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finds that over 1.4 million people in October were deemed eligible to enroll in Medicaid or CHIP. There was a far larger jump in applications where states are expanding Medicaid than where they aren’t — another sign Obamacare may benefit far more people in states where GOP governors are not trying to block the expansion.

Last week, Alex MacGillis argued that the politics surrounding the Medicaid expansion are shifting:

Governors and legislators rejecting the expansion have been warned over and over that they are leaving hundreds of millions in federal dollars on the table. But now other numbers are coming to bear as well – states are rejecting expansion are actually being [fiscally impacted] twice, because they are not only leaving that money on the table but also bracing for big cuts in federal funding for hospitals that see an unusually high share of uninsured patients. The law calls for cuts in that funding since the whole idea was that fewer patients would now be uninsured. Already, at least five hospitals have closed in states where Medicaid wasn’t expanded. This gives even more ammunition to the health care industry lobbyists in states urging lawmakers to come around on expansion. Meanwhile, it’s becoming more evident just how much expansion-accepting states are benefiting at the expense of taxpayers in expansion-rejecting ones, a fact that politicians in the the latter states, including some Republicans, are sure to latch onto sooner or later.

Obamacare enrollment numbers are picking up. But it remains unclear what percentage of enrollments are being transmitted correctly to insurance companies:

Bob Shlora of Alpharetta, Ga., was supposed to be a belated Obamacare success story. After weeks of trying, the 61-year-old told ABC News he fully enrolled in a new health insurance plan through the federal marketplace over the weekend, and received a Humana policy ID number to prove it. But two days later, his insurer has no record of the transaction, Shlora said, even though his account on the government website indicates that he has a plan.

Why this is happening:

The enrollment records for a significant portion of the Americans who have chosen health plans through the online federal insurance marketplace contain errors — generated by the computer system — that mean they might not get the coverage they’re expecting next month. The errors cumulatively have affected roughly one-third of the people who have signed up for health plans since Oct. 1, according to two government and health-care industry officials. The White House disputed the figure but declined to provide its own.

Sarah Kliff has been unable to get much information about these errors from the administration:

We don’t know how many inaccurate 834 transmissions went out. Three reporters — one from the Los Angeles Times, one from The Wall Street Journal and I — asked Bataille for information on how many of the 834s sent out so far have had an error. This is a question that I’ve asked on three previous calls, a point made by the Los Angeles Times’s Noam Levey as he asked for his second time.

This is where Monday’s media call started to get more tense than the dozens that have happened in the past, with reporter after reporter asking about the numbers of 834 errors and not getting a response from the administration. As The Wall Street Journal reporter reasoned, if the administration knows that 80 percent of the errors are coming from a certain bug — then simple math should figure out the total number.

Back in October, Laszewski explained why this could be a disaster:

[If] they fix the front end for consumers and thousands of people or hundreds of thousands of people being enrolled before they fix the back end, we’ll have a catastrophic mess. When insurers are getting 10 or 20 or 50 enrollments a day they can clean the errors up manually. But they can’t do that for thousands of enrollments a day. They have to automate at some point.

Last week, Ezra talked to Mark McClellan, who helped implement Medicare Part D, about this problem:

Come January there will be people who had their plans canceled by Obamacare but didn’t or couldn’t sign up for new insurance. There will be people who signed up for new insurance but their application got lost in the tubes. Some of these people will be sick, and interruptions to their care will be dangerous — not to mention widely publicized. “There’s is a 100 percent chance that this will happen to a nontrivial number of people,” McClellan, who’s now at the Brookings Institution, said. “So the Obama administration needs some kind of plan in place for resolving those cases as rapidly as possible and making sure they get the care they need.”

TNC strikes back at Alwan’s understanding of what “bigot” means:

The notion that bigot has “its origins in the general notion of close-mindedness” would be news to etymologists. The origins of the word ”bigot” are unknown, but the current theory holds that it is an import from Middle French denoting someone who was sanctimonious or hypocritically religious. Alwan is concerned about the word bigot becoming “perverted,”  to exploit “its toxicity.” But this happened long before Alec Baldwin. As late as the 1700s, the word was brought to English with its French meaning. That it was perverted into other meanings is unremarkable. Language does not exist encased in glass and formaldehyde. And the perversion of words is not a cosmic felony, it is how language actually works. …

Alwan’s definition of a bigot, as a “global” label encompassing their humanity, as someone who is wholly unpersuadable, wholly without conflict, and wholly without doubt, is not a description of humans, it is a description of myth.

Reviewing the recently released Orwell: A Life in Letters, David Pryce-Jones bizarrely calls the question “a puzzle that none of his biographers or critics have been able to solve.” His own answer? That a “sense of enjoying unfair advantages was enough to make rebels of a good number of Eton scholars,” including Orwell, which led to the “social masochism” that Pryce-Jones goes on to describe:

In the intensive effort to be déclassé, he well and truly put himself through it. Changing his real name of Eric Blair to George Orwell suggests the manufacture of a new and different personality fit for writing. A disturbing glee emerges from the accounts he gives of the hack journalism and flawed novels he is obliged to publish, all the while sinking lower and lower among down and outs. Cheap housing, grime and dirt, bad smells, and horrible duties in a kitchen are to him what country house settings and their trappings were to Jane Austen. Describing how close to death he was at one point in a Paris hospital, he makes sure that the reader is more attentive to the slumminess of the ordeal rather than the fact of his survival.

Uncomfortable and deprived of basic amenities, the houses he lived in were riddled with health hazards to someone with chronically weak lungs. Wherever he settled in the countryside, he set about growing vegetables and raising hens—Was this out of a genuine feel for nature, or role-playing about being poor and needy? Did he enjoy fishing for the sport, or because it is supposed to be how English proletarians spent their leisure time? As to money, he wrote to his friend the social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, “it will always be hand to mouth as I don’t see myself ever writing a best-seller.” Meeting up with him, [Cyril] Connolly was appalled that hardship had left “ravaged grooves that ran from cheek to chin” on his old school-friend’s face.

And, of course, he died far too young of untreated bouts of pneumonia that all but destroyed his lungs. But Pryce-Jones, I think, is being absurdly obtuse. There’s no mystery here at all. Orwell made it plain why he was a socialist in countless articles and reviews and books.

He viewed capitalism as horribly predatory for the poor and cared about them; he believed that ending private education could reduce all the quotidian cruelties that a rigid class system entails; he felt that only socialism could truly face down fascism; he was still naive enough to want to abolish the stock exchange because he wanted an economy that benefited the many and not the few; he passionately supported a robust welfare state on the lines of the post-war Labour government out of a patriotic love of his fellow countrymen and women. He despised Toryism, privilege and jingoism in all their manifestations. He was also, of course, a serious anti-Communist, which is why some now on the neoconservative right cannot fathom him.

Above all, I think, he believed that class numbed people to the lives of their fellow citizens. It wasn’t masochism that prompted him to slum it in London and Paris; it was a desire to understand what was actually going on by living more fully on the margins and writing about it with candor and freshness. His project was the fore-runner of the new journalism, as well as so much else. I don’t share Orwell’s socialism a bit, even though it is much more understandable from the viewpoint of someone surviving the 1930s and the war than it would be today. But I love him despite that, even as I read him in my Thatcherite teens. Because he was so much more than ideology. And so much more than just a writer.

Previous Dish on Orwell’s letters here.

The last two days have apparently seen a surge in ACA enrollments on Healthcare.gov – in two days as many new Obamacare beneficiaries as in the whole of October. David Corn sees Obamacare’s introduction as make or break for both parties:

[W]ithin months, it may well be that abstract arguments over the nature of Obamacare will be trumped by the realities of the Affordable Care Act. Eventually, there will be stats and facts to consider: how many people receive insurance through the exchanges, what happens with premiums, the direction of health care costs, customer satisfaction, and the like. Though the results may be open to debate for a while, it is distinctly possible that one side or the other will be proven right (or wrong). If the website functions, millions sign up, and the health care market doesn’t crash, and premiums don’t zoom up—and this will be on top of the already existing benefits of Obamacare, including removing preexisting conditions restraints, allowing young adults to remain on their parents’ policies, reducing out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for seniors, and forcing insurance companies to devote a higher percentage of premiums to health care coverage—where will the Republicans be? Not only will they be failed doomsayers; they will have lost the No. 1 item on their why-you-should-vote-GOP list. Their anti-government crusade will be derailed. They will be a train without a motor.

Should Obamacare not work, then Obama’s vision—which reflects the progressive tradition of the past century—will be a flat tire. He will no longer be able to advance the cause of government activism. Expand Head Start? Create an infrastructure bank? Why should government be allowed (or trusted) to increase its reach? He can talk about helping the middle class. But how? The failed rollout of the website was a problem in so many ways but especially because it suggested that government cannot perform competently. A more extensive failure with Obamacare would suggest that government cannot be used in the manner Obama wishes to see it utilized.

What’s at stake in this never-ending debate over Obamacare are the foundational premises of each party. The success of Obamacare could be close to a death blow to the GOP. Ditto for Obamacare and the Democrats, should it collapse.

Yes and no. I don’t really want to see government expand from its current size and cost and ambition. I’m not a progressive and backed Obama because of his pragmatism. The reason I support the ACA is partly moral – if I can’t in good conscience employ anyone without health insurance, I can’t in good conscience acquiesce to a system that leaves millions out in the cold; part fiscal – I don’t believe in free-riding and see the need to reform a system that has close to no effective cost controls; and part because of all the possible proposals to end the cruelties of the past – bankrupting people with pre-existing conditions, yanking insurance from people just when they need it – Obamacare squares the most circles. So I wouldn’t mind very much if Obamacare both addressed these core problems better than the past and nonetheless prevented liberalism from going after any more lofty progressive objectives. In fact, that would be my ideal result. But, of course, I may be a parish of one again.

Drum, for his part, is optimistic for his side:

By the middle of 2014, Obamacare is going to have a huge client base; it will be working pretty well; and it will be increasingly obvious that the disaster scenarios have been overblown. People with employer health care will still have it and very few will notice even a minor change in their normal routine.

Given all this, it’s hard to see Obamacare being a huge campaign winner. For that, you need people with grievances, and the GOP is unlikely to find them in large enough numbers. The currently covered will stay covered. Doctors and hospitals will be treating more patients. Obamacare’s taxes don’t touch anyone with an income less than $200,000. Aside from the tea partiers who object on the usual abstract grounds that Obamacare is a liberty-crushing Stalinesque takeover of the medical industry, it’s going to be hard to gin up a huge amount of opposition. And that’s doubly true since, as Sargent says, the Republican Party will have no credible alternative for a benefit that lots of people will already be getting.

Bernstein expects Obamacare to eventually fade away as an issue:

That doesn’t mean that health care won’t be an issue. Expect, for example, Republicans to eventually fight over subsidy levels (and, perhaps, both parties to try to refashion subsidies to avoid perverse incentives on earnings). Expect, too, Republicans to eventually try to reduce ACA-connected taxes. There’s been some of that, but so far it’s mostly been restricted to things that could be outright repealed. Expect, too, plenty of oversight by this and future Congresses over all phases of it. After all, there’s more to oversee now.

The point is that even as the debate about “Obamacare” eventually fades away, we shouldn’t expect health care to vanish as an issue. Indeed: expect it to be more central to U.S. politics going forward.