Month: June 2014

Last week, Dan Diamond spotlighted one:

Insurers sat out of the exchanges for different reasons in year one. Some were wary of the start-up risks. Others were openly taking a wait-and-see approach. Still more, it seems, didn’t want any part in the first year’s batch of customers, who were expected to be older and sicker.

And while the technical problems associated with the exchanges have been legion, plans that participated have reported predictably higher revenue, if unclear profits. One million more consumers signed up than expected…and while they weren’t as young and healthy as the insurance companies had hoped for, they were more customers.

Now, more plans want their chance to chase those dollars.

Kliff comments:

It’s not just new entrants into the exchanges that’s increasing competition.

In Washington, for example, there are two plans that only sold in small parts of the state that now want to sell everywhere. Both United Health Care and Moda, a local plan, are increasing the geographic area of where they plan to sell coverage.

The only state that hasn’t reported an increase in carriers for 2015 is Oregon. There, all 12 carriers who sold in 2014 plan to sell again in 2015, but no new insurers have proposed rates. It’s possible that this has to do with Oregon’s incredibly challenged Obamacare rollout — or it could reflect the fact that Oregon had one of the most competitive Obamacare markets to begin with.

More nationally though, the trend seems to be clear: More insurers are getting into the Obamacare game in year two.

Jason Millman adds:

The development is important for a few reasons. For one, recent research suggests that more competition in the exchanges could help temper premium increases. Other new analysis shows that exchange plans, on average, are cheaper than individual plans offered outside the insurance marketplaces. And given the narrow networks in exchange plans, more insurers could mean better access to providers.

In New Hampshire, the exchange’s only insurer last year had excluded 10 of 26 hospitals in the state from its network, meaning the exchange’s customers were limited in their choice of care providers. In 2015, though, New Hampshire will have five insurers selling individual and family health plans on the exchange, state officials announced [last] week. That also includes the expansion of two non-profit, co-op plans that received start-up funding from the Affordable Care Act.

Neil Padukone connects the high incidence of rape in India to its urban design choices:

Most of New Delhi is built according to what urban planners sometimes call “single-use” design: sections of the city are devoted almost exclusively to one use (industrial, institutional, retail, or residential) and separated from each other by open space, roads or other barriers. … This is in contrast to “mixed-use” planning, which carefully integrates residential, retail, institutional, and cultural spaces into the same area—areas that are easily accessible by walking, bicycle, or mass transit.

There are many reasons planners favor mixed-use design, including smaller carbon footprints and increased access to economic opportunity. Easy and efficient access to work, leisure, home, and childcare makes juggling responsibilities much easier, particularly for women. But one of the most important benefits of mixed-use planning is what the urbanist Jane Jacobs famously called “eyes on the street.” If an area is used for multiple purposes, there will always be somebody—a homemaker, shopkeeper, pedestrian, peddler, or office worker—keeping a passive watch, inadvertently but effectively policing it 24 hours a day. Street vendors, for example, may be the most perennial pairs of eyes that monitor any streets, and even police have tapped this human resource.

Two girls who were gang-raped and murdered in Uttar Pradesh last week were attacked while going to relieve themselves in a field at night. Hayes Brown discusses how the absence of private toilets poses a serious safety problem for women in the poorest parts of the world:

Some critics have said that the focus on sanitation as an issue ignores the larger issue of rape and deterring men from assaulting women in the first place. As an article from First Point India explains, however, nobody is arguing that “the sole reason for sexual violence is the lack of a loo. It is an undeniable fact, however, that the absence of a safe toilet adds to the vulnerability of women. And there are numbers to show it.” The First Point article cites a BBC report in which “a senior police official in Bihar said some 400 women would have ‘escaped’ rape last year if they had toilets in their homes.”

Diksha Madhok pushes back on that alleged link with the above chart:

[I]f a toilet shortage is fueling rape in India, then their presence should lead to lesser crimes against women. But data analyzed from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show that there is no inverse relation between rape and toilets. Quartz India compared the states with the highest and lowest toilet density against their rates of rape, defined as those reported per 100,000 women.

The state of Mizoram has one of the lowest number of households without toilets. Yet, the rape rate against women remains a stubborn 21, much higher than the national average of 4.26. Meanwhile, only 20% of households in Jharkhand have a toilet, but its rape rate is one-fourth of Mizoram’s.

Update from a reader:

As an Indian living in India, I strongly favour mixed-use urban spaces. That said, if this was the reason for rape, it would be a reason for all sorts of other crimes. But violent crime against men is relatively rare in India. As a man, I feel perfectly safe walking in quite seedy-looking neighbourhoods – far more than I would in New York or Paris. With women, two sorts of crime occur: (1) molestation (rape is merely the extreme end of a spectrum) and (2) “chain-snatching”, ie grabbing their gold chains and running. The solution to (2) is presumably not to wear gold chains, but social customs die hard. As for (1), I remain convinced that this is a societal problem exacerbated by inadequate policing by poorly-trained and often prejudiced personnel.

Back to mixed-use spaces: in 2006, the Chief Justice of the Indian Supreme Court, Y K Sabharwal, ordered the sealing of commercial establishments in many residential areas. Thousands of such establishments were sealed, many of which had been functioning for decades. It turned out that Sabharwal’s sons, both of whom were in the real estate business, stood to benefit immensely from this order. Journalists from the Mid-Day newspaper who reported this were held in contempt of court and jailed. A good overview of all this is here.

The bottom line is, India’s separate-use urban practices encourage not only criminal activity, but corruption. And when it’s the Supreme Court, there is little recourse for citizens.

It’s likely to follow in the soccer tournament’s wake:

The host country has been producing 30% more TV sets than last year, according to the Asociação Nacional de Fabricantes de Produtos Eletrônicos (National Association of Electronics Producers)—which means that, by the end of this year, Brazil will have between 18-20 million more TVs than when it started. By May, over half of them had been sold to giddy Brazilians in anticipation of seeing their team, the big favorites, win the sixth World Cup of its history in high definition.

The paixão pelo futebol, as they say in Brazil of their passion for soccer, might have unexpected effects. For every new TV set that comes into a Brazilian home, an old one usually goes out. A study by the World Bank pointed out that Brazil currently produces 14 lbs. of electronic waste per person every year, which makes it the leader in this type of garbage in Latin America. And it is rising: the government expects the amount will go up to 17.5 lbs per person by 2015. Television sets account for the largest type of e-waste in Brazil.

Meanwhile, the strain on Brazil’s power grid is requiring it to burn more fossil fuels:

According to Ildo Luís Sauer, director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the University of São Paulo, there’s “a chance” a blackout could occur in the country during the World Cup due to a “critical situation of excess demand” on the national electricity grid. “Usually, in Brazil, during World Cup hours — especially during evening games — you have a composition of huge demand because everyone is at home watching them,” he said.

But it is a risk that the sprawling country seems unwilling to take. Javier Diaz, a senior energy analyst at Bentek, said Brazil is attempting to preserve hydro inventory levels by importing and burning more liquefied natural gas, “especially with the [arrival of the] World Cup.” “Brazil’s monthly LNG imports broke new records in February and March, importing 95 percent and 76 percent more than in 2013,” he said in an email. In fact, the country is currently firing all of its thermal power plants — LNG, coal, diesel and fuel oil — said Sauer, who added that it’s “quite unusual.”

Finally, Thomas Brewster reports that Anonymous hackers are launching an all-out assault on FIFA, World Cup sponsors, and the Brazilian government:

Anonymous is irate at the Brazilian government for spending hundreds of millions on stadiums and infrastructure for the World Cup, rather than funnelling funds into the poorest parts of the country. It’s launching digital attacks to coincide with the street protests that erupted across the South American country this week, which have highlighted the abject poverty and governmental abuse of citizens in Brazilian cities and favelas.

A representative of the collective told Reuters they planned to launch attacks on other big-name sponsors, including Adidas, Budweiser, Coca-Cola and Sony, yet they seem to have had limited success with those large organisations so far. That’s likely because they’re used to DDoS attacks and have the resources to fend them off. DDoS threats can be dealt with by various techniques. One method is to use “scrubbing,” where massive influxes of data are split between data centres to ease the pain. Another is to use DDoS detection technology, which picks up on huge surges of traffic and allows the user to quickly block connections from offending IP addresses.

Previous Dish on Brazil’s World Cup woes here.

Dahlia Lithwick worries that retention elections for state supreme court justices are becoming more and more politicized, particularly with the help of outside money:

Knocking off a state supreme court justice is one of the cheapest political endeavors going. It costs a few measly million bucks to buy a judge’s robe, which is vastly cheaper than a Senate campaign. But when politicians target elected judges and justices with political claims using political tactics (big money and inaccurate accusations), judges are forced to either respond like politicians or judges. Opting to do the former destroys the notion of impartial justice. Opting for the latter ends judicial careers.

And now here we go again.

Three justices on the Tennessee Supreme Court are facing an election-year attack, not for any particular decision they have authored or even for any unpopular opinion they have espoused. No, in an ugly campaign in Tennessee that appears to be getting ever uglier, Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, who is also the state’s lieutenant governor, is attempting to oust three state Supreme Court justices in their Aug. 7 retention elections, chiefly for the judicial outrage of having been appointed to the high court by a Democrat. Under Tennessee law, the governor appoints Supreme Court justices, and then they come up for retention elections every eight years thereafter. This is a pretty common set-up in states that elect their justices.