Tag: Premium

In response to the numerous policy cancellation stories, Chait argues that the individuals experiencing rate shock are getting a good deal, in the long-term:

[I]t is true that some people actually are getting decent individual health insurance, and have to pay more under Obamacare. Before, insurers could charge them a rate based on their individual likelihood of needing medical care, and some people are lucky enough to present a very low actuarial health risk. Now those people will have to pay a rate averaging in the cost of others who are less medically fortunate.

Have those healthy 5 percenters who do have decent insurance “lost” under Obamacare? In the very immediate sense, yes. That is what Obamacare advocate Jon Gruber is getting at when he concedes that 3 percent of Americans will be worse off under the new law. They’ll be paying higher rates in 2014 than they would have.

Yet this takes an oddly narrow view of their self-interest. You may pose a low actuarial risk today, but you cannot be certain your luck will continue for the rest of your life (or until you qualify for Medicare). Even people living the healthiest lifestyles suffer illnesses and accidents, or marry people who have a uterus. Those who are paying a higher rate are getting something for their money: a guarantee that some future misfortune won’t lock them out of the market. You might call such a guarantee “insurance.”

Barro zooms out on the healthcare debate:

[P]oliticians run around talking about how wonderful American health care is. Republicans have a de-facto agenda of opposing any reform to the health insurance system. Democrats are reduced to lying and saying their reform efforts won’t change anything for people who like the coverage they have, because huge numbers of Americans have decided for some insane reason that they like the crazy expensive, often spotty, not-especially-effective coverage they have.

I support Obamacare because I believe it will improve our terrible health care system on the margins. Subsidies will tend to be shifted toward people who need them and away from those who don’t. More people will be covered. Modest cost control improvements will be implemented, such as through a tax on high-cost plans and new payment systems that encourage providers to focus on producing good outcomes rather than providing expensive treatments.

But the real problem with Obamacare is that it does not change the American health care system enough in the direction of other countries’ systems. Republicans are wrong to warn that Obamacare will turn America’s health care system into a European-style one. I wish they were right.

Reader thoughts on Obamacare’s losers here.

It’s the smart way to go, says Mike Riggs:

Imagine you’ve been asked (or offered!) to take drugs from one state to another. How would you do it? Flying would be your absolute worst option. You’d have to keep your cool while going through passenger screening, and pray that your checked cargo (which has all your identifying information attached to it) doesn’t pique the curiosity of luggage screeners. And if your luggage gets lost between Hartsfield-Jackson and O’Hare? There’s no easy answer, I’m afraid. Probably best to kiss your sleeping children goodbye and run for the border.

What about Amtrak?

You handle your own luggage, which means it won’t get screened and it won’t leave your sight. While TSA agents now haunt some stations, they don’t subject passengers to searches. But it’s still a formalized mode of transportation. Amtrak takes a lot of information from passengers, even if they pay for their ticket with cash. There are also dogs in some stations. They probably sniff only for bombs, not drugs, but do you really know for sure?

“I could drive myself!” You could absolutely do this. No tickets, no checked bags, no drug dogs – unless you get pulled over.

The bus sounds downright relaxing:

Tickets are cheap and you can buy them with cash without telling the bus company too much about yourself. Companies like Bolt Bus even allow passengers to buy tickets with cash from the bus driver. When you board, there’s no system to make sure you are who you say you are, and other passengers don’t really care either. Maybe your luggage ends up under the bus, but you put it there yourself. Basically, you can stash your stash and then take a snooze.

Jonathan Cohn argues that most Republican healthcare plans would be more far disruptive than the ACA:

With Obamacare, a small number of people lose their current insurance but they end up with alternative, typically stronger coverage. Under the plans Republicans have endorsed, a larger number of people would lose their current insurance, as people migrated to a more volatile and less secure marketplace. Under Obamacare, the number of Americans without health insurance at all will come down, eventually by 30 or 40 million. Under most of the Republican plans, the number of Americans without insurance would rise.

Honest Republicans would justify their policies by arguing that Medicaid is a wasteful, inefficient program not worth keeping—and their changes, overall, would reduce health care spending while maximizing liberty. In other words, forcing people to give up their coverage is worth it. I don’t agree with those arguments, but they are honest. But they should stop pretending that it’s possible to address the problems of American health care without disrupting at least some people’s insurance arrangements—because, after all, they want to do the very same thing.

Chait thinks this is why Republicans have failed to propose a real Obamacare alternative:

Every iteration of an alternative conservative health-care proposal would impose far more disruption on the status quo than would Obamacare. Most conservative plans involve drastically curtailing the tax deduction for employer-based insurance. That would create cancellation notices for many times the number of people currently seeing them. Even the more modest plans to scale back Obama’s regulation of the individual market would run the GOP into a political minefield. Which regulations do they want to strip away? Discrimination against people with preexisting conditions? Discrimination against potentially pregnant women? Mental-health parity? Every single one of those changes creates millions of angry potential victims.

This is exactly why the actual Republican Party health-care plan is not repeal and replace, but repeal and cackle. Republicans are on strong ground exploiting fear of change. They have understood perfectly well that they must avoid having to defend a different set of changes to the status quo. They have kept their various replace ideas safely to the side for exactly that reason.

Beutler piles on:

[S]mart conservatives — which is to say, policy wonks without much cachet on Capitol Hill — would replace all insurance with subsidized catastrophic coverage and tax-preferred health savings accounts. Nobody with private insurance or Medicaid would get to keep what they have, no matter how much they like it.

Reihan objects:

To be sure, there are some people who think that government policy should lean against comprehensive insurance. David Goldhill, author of Catastrophic Care, favors something like single-payer catastrophic coverage. Brad DeLong has floated the idea as well. The conservatives I think Beutler has in mind certainly like the idea of catastrophic insurance. It’s just that they have no problem with allowing people to buy comprehensive insurance if that’s what they’d like to do with their money, and they recognize that low-income and disabled individuals will need larger subsidies than other people. …

One can definitely imagine alternatives to Obamacare that would be more disruptive than Obamacare. If consumers were banned from purchasing comprehensive health insurance, for example, there would definitely be a lot of disruption. But by and large, “reform conservatives” favor more modest measures that are designed to ease the transition to a more sustainable system.

Yuval Levin reflects on last month’s two big political stories, the populist-fueled government shutdown and the technocrat-led Obamacare roll-out:

If abject populism or gross technocracy were our only options for governing ourselves, the experience of this past month would be enough to leave us in despair. And it does sometimes seem as though we imagine those are our options. But I think the past month should actually be cause for hope that we might see beyond these two dead ends. Not only are technocracy and populism not the only choices we have, they are not really quite alternatives at all: They are in a sense two sides of one bad coin.

In their extreme forms, the forms we have seen this month, both populism and technocracy assume that the answers to our most profound public problems are simple, and are readily available. One assumes that the people possess these answers, and that they are denied the power to put them into effect by some elite that wants to oppress them; the other assumes the experts possess these answers, and they are denied the power to put them into effect by a system that empowers heedless and prejudiced majorities or the venal economic interests of the wealthy over the attainment of the objectively obvious good of the people.

That’s an interesting take, and I largely agree with it. The conservative alternative to today’s Republicanism would be a) never to risk the US and global economy just to make a point – let alone be reckless enough to wait until the very final minutes before possible default to concede, and b) to craft policies that only reform what can practically be done, without any grand scheme of progressive general improvement.

Where I’d differ with Yuval is in his excessive critique of the ACA. Our current healthcare and health insurance market is dreadful. The private sector is grotesquely inefficient and often inhumane. Insurance that can be canceled when you really need it, that screens any sick people out, that costs a fortune compared with other countries, that burdens the economy in ways not seen in our competitors – is not something conservatives should want to conserve.

And any serious reform of it will have to be technocratic.

The ACA, moreover, was not a technocratic dream invented out of the blue. It’s actually a product of federalism in the best sense – it models a successful and existing system in one state, Massachusetts, and attempts to replicate it on a bigger scale. If I had my druthers, I’d favor the states taking the lead on this, rather than the feds. I’d end the employer subsidy and create HSAs and a marketplace not unlike Obamacare’s to empower individual insurance policies. But if I am asked to pick between Obama’s vision and nothing (which is effectively the GOP’s position), I’ll go with Obama’s and aim to amend it as time goes by.

My difference with the GOP is that I do not question the sincerity or legitimacy of this president or the importance of upholding the law. I also favor universal coverage. The president won two elections with this policy out in the open. We should give him the chance to make it work, instead of hurling spitballs, egging on sabotage, and mindlessly piling on. And we should acknowledge that being bankrupted because you are sick is not a good thing. It’s inhumane; it’s cruel; and it’s not like other products that people can do without. “Amend it, not end it” would be my preference. That’s neither technocratic in any overweening sense, nor populist pabulum.

I just want to second everything Kermit sings. I loved New York City with a passion until I tried to live here. It’s been over a year and I am horribly home-sick. So we’re going to move back to DC next month. I miss my DC apartment (1500 square feet of a school classroom I got for a steal in 1991); I miss my friends, many of whom I’ve known for decades, and some of whom I bonded deeply with during the plague years of my 20s and 30s; I miss the relative calm; I miss the green; I miss the increasing vibrancy of the city – which somehow doesn’t make it harder to live in. I miss the oases of quiet and the energy of a new emerging city that is both a second Brooklyn and a global hub of media and politics.

But I’ll be commuting to New York City for up to two weeks a month – as a visitor. So it’s more like finding a home I love while keeping New York close. I realize I’m married to Washington, and it’s best for me to think of New York as a mistress. Besides, I need to be here for the Dish (all my colleagues are New Yorkers), and for AC360 Later. I also have many friends here I think I’m more likely to spend time with if I’m not actually struggling every day to handle the, er, challenges of actually settling into the massive metropolis. And in this experience – to love and yet leave this amazing place – is not new, I’m relieved to say. Eryn Loeb just reviewed a new essay collection Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, an anthology inspired by Joan Didion’s 1967 essay of the same name:

As laid out by Didion and the anthology’s contributors, it happens like this: First there’s anticipation, imagining how your life will finally make sense when you arrive. The actual experience of living here is one of finding your place, followed by an intense feeling of ownership. You can stay at that point for years. But eventually, sometimes without knowing it, you begin the slow slide toward a moment of decisiveness. Sometime after that, there’s the actual leaving. And then, the having left. Living in New York turns out to be a process of earning nostalgia — hoarding enough memories to give you the kind of claim on a place that makes it possible to leave it. When you reach your limit and set out elsewhere, memories are your consolation prize. (Bonus points for writing about them.)

If you’re tired of hearing about how New York is the center of the universe, you’re not alone.

Even those of us who live here and love it get annoyed at the relentless fascination with the city, the way people project so much onto it and then feel betrayed when it doesn’t live up to their expectations. (Emma Straub, who grew up here, captures this tension nicely in her essay, writing, “because my hometown is New York City, everyone else thinks it belongs to them, too.”)

But even in basic ways, the city is still special enough to justify the fixation. It’s concentrated. It’s diverse. It’s where a lot of important things have happened and influential people have lived, and so it is full of history and legend. It’s a place of ideals, “where anything is possible.” And yet it’s also a place of limits, one people leave when their desire for more space or stability — or very often, a family — begins to clash with reality.

Previous Dish on New York and its discontents here, here, here and here. Update from a reader:

I’ve lived in NYC for exactly 11 years as of today. But on Thanksgiving weekend, I’ll be packing up all of my stuff and moving into a home in Vermont that my father left to me after his death this year. My girlfriend and I just got engaged – and she’s converging on VT that weekend as well from Chicago to settle down with me.  I’ll still be working for the same NYC firm up there remotely.  So I’ll have a slim tether keeping NYC in my life – which feels just about right.  I didn’t want to totally break up with this place, despite the fact that it has ground me down into fine powder.  I look forward to missing the city again and coming back to visit it.

I’ll also be running the NYC Marathon on Sunday – which feels like a real nice way to say goodbye to the place that I once deeply loved, but now curse every day.

Readers push back against this post:

Some people are going to lose, but look at this chart from TPM. Considering all the changes, 3% “losers” is pretty darn good.  Like Gruber said, “… no law in the history of America makes everyone better off”. Indeed.

Josh Barro identified significant problems with that chart. A reader from the 3 percent writes:

I’m one of the people who got a “cancellation” letter. Blue Shield told me the individual policy I have for my healthy 17-year old will end Dec. 31. They said if I do nothing they will enroll my son in a new plan that will be $7 more per month. It is just about equal to the old plan, except the co-pays will double, and vision care has been added. It is November, and my son has had zero visits to the doctor this year, so no co-pays have been shelled out. He has terrible vision and needs an annual eye exam. I figure it will all even-out over the course of the year. Put me in the “no big deal” category of the 3 percent whose individual policies went away.

Another reader:

Mr. Laszewski doesn’t say what “Obamacare rule” purportedly makes his current coverage not “good enough.”  Maybe that’s so, and maybe it isn’t, but it’s hard to evaluate his complaint based on no information.

David Frum apparently found a policy substantially identical to the one he currently has on the D.C. Exchange for $200/month more, and acknowledges that that is the likely cost of community rating.  High income wealthy people who are currently in the individual market are going to pay a bit more under Obamacare – that’s the cost of not quizzing people about preexisting conditions.  In any event, he didn’t lose his coverage.

Another:

Sorry if I cannot muster much sympathy for someone who can afford a Cadillac Plan. After I finished grad school and before I had my first real job, I had to muddle through without health insurance for about 9 months. I got one lousy urinary tract infection (read: INCREDIBLY treatable) and it ended up costing me a little over $800 because the initial antibiotics didn’t work. Oh, and I had a catastrophic plan. Some help those are! So yeah, sorry if I’m not bringing out the violins about some rich dude having to pay more for his extravagant plan.

Another:

I know a lot of people are commenting on the rate shock some people are experiencing when looking on the exchanges for insurance, even those who have very expensive health insurance today. I think there’s a very big piece of the puzzle most people commenting on this rate shock are missing.

Insurance companies on the individual market are in a bit of a fog for next year with pricing their coverage options. Many of them have never had to cover as many benefits as they are now. Many of them have no idea how many claims new people purchasing their coverage will make. They all know for sure that the premium rate review rules will stop them from making up potential losses next year with bigger premium hikes in the future. The confluence of these events has potentially pushed companies to overprice their plans.

What people are forgetting is there is a stopgap that prevents these companies from gouging people if they did end up overpricing. Plans on the exchange must spend at least 80% of their premium on actual health care services; similarly, businesses offering insurance to their employees must spend at least 85% of their premium on actual healthcare services. If they fail to do so, they are legally obligated to send their beneficiaries a rebate check for the difference. That will stop insurance from getting too expensive.

Of course, if it turns out the companies are spending enough on healthcare to avoid sending rebate checks, then the insurance companies will have done their job and actually paid for their beneficiaries’ healthcare! People love getting refunds on their taxes. I presume people will love getting refunds on their health insurance as well.

Another:

It’s worth remembering that Cadillac plans create serious cost problems for our healthcare system.  If they are tax-deductive, then it’s a huge tax expenditure, but even when not, they encourage over-utilization.  There should be cost sharing mechanisms that put a slight disincentive on healthcare spending, especially utilization all over the place, where there are no shared medical records, tests are likely to be duplicated and there is more defensive medicine due to this.

As a physician, I see a lot of patients with disabling neuromuscular conditions.  Many are forced to stop working, and thereby lose their insurance.  I see this over and over again.  There is just no comparison the gain these patients are getting by being able to get insurance, compared to this guy who has to either pay more for a Cadillac plan, or get a more regular plan.

One more:

At the very end of Robert Laszweski’s post he states that he will actually be keeping his Cadillac plan until at least December of 2014. It seems like an important point to make that he left hanging until the 2nd to last paragraph. A lot can change in 14 months …

J. Bryan Lowder likes spoilers. He calls them “a prophylactic against mediocrity in shows of middling appeal”:

In truth, if the spoiler does her job well, you will leave with an appreciation of the episode at least equal to, if not better than, those poor souls who gambled their lives watching the whole thing. Memory is organized in flashes, moments, and a few pithy, secondhand ones recounted on a newsfeed are, considering cost-benefit, preferable to recording some myself over a long hour. (And honestly, I find the practice so seamless that I often can’t remember whether I actually watched something or spoil-watched it.)

You could say that, in my support of spoil-watching, I’m arguing for a CliffsNotes approach to television—and why not? Every good student knows there are texts worth reading in full and texts for which it is perfectly appropriate, even necessary, to skim. As students of pop culture, we should jealously guard our time with the former and, each according to his taste and ability, help each other get on with the latter as quickly and efficiently as possible. Such a utopian arrangement won’t spoil anything, I promise.

Ex-architect Christine Outram assails her former peers, arguing that those in the field simply “don’t listen to people”:

Let’s face it, most commercial buildings, hospitals, and police stations are underwhelming. And even when they are pleasing to the eye, it doesn’t mean they are built to address human needs: If you don’t believe me, read this New York Times review of Santiago Calatrava’s buildings. No wonder architecture has become a niche vocation. You don’t connect with people any more.

The problem is that architects seem to pray at the feet of the latest hyped-up formal language. I dare you. Flip through an architectural magazine today. Find any people in the photographs? I didn’t think so. Find plenty of pictures that worship obscure angles and the place where two materials meet? You betcha.

Kaid Benfield concedes some points but says “the issues involved with today’s architecture are a lot more nuanced than Outram acknowledges”:

First, I know lots of architects who are doing good, humanist, contextually sensitive design. Outram gives a passing nod to Jan Gehl in this regard, but only minimally. He’s hardly the only one (here are some great examples). Second, highly original, “statement” buildings and places are not inherently anti-human. One of my favorites is the modernist high-speed rail station just outside Avignon in France. It’s as much sculpture as rail depot, but it also is an utter delight to visit or pass through.  …

Third, I’m not sure it’s fair to compare retail to other kinds of architecture. Most of the cold, lifeless architecture I see is corporate or institutional. Retail establishments such as Starbucks are in the business of attracting customers and, if they have adequate resources and the location is right for business, I’d say they succeed at that more often than not. It may not be Great Architecture, but it works for people. Consider the amazing success of the enclosed suburban regional shopping mall, for example. The exterior architecture is generally hideous, as are the parking lots; but, on the inside, designers figured out exactly what people wanted.

Update from a reader:

Could not agree more with Outram. But it gets worse. These days I’m exposed regularly to grad students at one of the top architecture schools in the world, and the dehumanized understanding of architecture’s concerns is matched by what amounts to a fuzzier, more patron-pleasing version of the awful Le Corbusier school of architecture as a means of social engineering. Both the profs and, as a result, their students seem to believe that their primary job is to build “meaning” into their work in order to inspire a desirable response in its users (e.g. open-floorplan offices and glass-walled courthouses, to inspire dialogue, communication, equality before authority). There often seems to be no concern for the fact that to most people, the primary question asked of a building is not “what does it mean?” but “where’s the fucking bathroom?”

This said, I’ve visited that Calatrava train station in Lisbon, and it functions as beautifully as it looks.

(Photo: Santago Calatrava’s Estação do Oriente in Lisbon)

Piercarlo Valdesolo reviews research into the psychological and behavioral consequences of a belief in “pure evil” (BPE):

According to this research, one of the central features of BPE is evil’s perceived immutability. Evil people are born evil – they cannot change. Two judgments follow from this perspective: 1) evil people cannot be rehabilitated, and 2) the eradication of evil requires only the eradication of all the evil people. Following this logic, the researchers tested the hypothesis that there would be a relationship between BPE and the desire to aggress towards and punish wrong-doers.

Researchers have found support for this hypothesis across several papers containing multiple studies, and employing diverse methodologies. BPE predicts such effects as: harsher punishments for crimes (e.g. murder, assault, theft), stronger reported support for the death penalty, and decreased support for criminal rehabilitation. Follow-up studies corroborate these findings, showing that BPE also predicts the degree to which participants perceive the world to be dangerous and vile, the perceived need for preemptive military aggression to solve conflicts, and reported support for torture.

Meanwhile, Father C. John McCloskey reviews an updated version of True or False Possession: How to Distinguish the Demonic from the Demented, a 1960s guide by French neurologist Jean Lhermitte:

Written primarily for health professionals, True or False Possession is nonetheless of interest to any educated Catholic, in that it recounts from a Catholic viewpoint genuine suspected demonic possession and helps the layman, priest, psychiatrist and even family members to distinguish the real thing from mental illness and fakery.

However, when and if it is necessary to bring the victim to an exorcist for treatment, [editor] Dr. [Aaron] Kheriaty points out, “This author knows the permanent limitations of his science: This book does not attempt to detail cases of what may be considered true possession, for these by their nature would be outside the scope of the author’s clinical expertise. In such cases, the physician and priest need to collaborate responsibly and with respect for the insights of both science and theology.”

Not surprisingly, given the profession, the medical emphasis of the book is paramount, yet the author writes as a convinced Catholic and, as such, gives what is almost a short history of diabolical possession from the time of Christ’s exorcisms, as recorded in the Gospels, up to his own time. The author recounts examples of saints to whom the devil appeared, such as doctor of the Church St. Teresa of Avila: “She depicts the evil one as possessing hideous form, with a terrifying mouth and a regular proteus, able to transform and to multiply himself.” …

Many seeming cases of diabolical possession were in fact cases of simple insanity or mental illness, as Lhermitte explains. And many more were simply frauds that, in turn, caused mass hysteria in others who simply suffered from neurological illnesses that produce symptoms having nothing to do with the devil or hidden demons.

(Hat tip: Books, Inq)

A reader reminisces:

I read with interest your post on Evangelicals and the morphing of Halloween into an adult celebration. I’m 65 and enjoyed Halloween in the post-WWII days that were unencumbered by the shibboleth of razor blades in apples.  It was a heady time of kids roaming the streets after dark unsupervised in mashed together costumes from parents’ closets and corked faces.  It was giddy and wonderful and the “evil” abroad was pretty much limited to the naughtiness of smashed pumpkins, trees festooned with toilet paper and car windows spattered with shaving cream.  My sister and I never engaged in the tricks but we, sheltered Catholic school girls that we were, never went home until people stopped opening their doors to us sometime after 9pm.

My generation got to fully indulge in the permission to be libertine for one night of the year.  We grew up to put on a costume as adults and use the excuse for a party, but for us it was never the event on steroids that it became for the generation that followed.

Parents became paranoid that their own neighbors were trying to poison their kids.  They raised their kids with the conscious message that anyone they didn’t know was a stranger who needed to be distrusted. Their Halloweens were anemic chaperoned affairs conducted in commercial costumes heavily influenced by TV characters or the witch/ghost/clown standards in acetate and screen printed masks.  At home, before they got to tuck into their loot, parents had to go through it to make sure there was nothing so onerous as a homemade cookie or popcorn ball and that each item was commercially prepared and individually wrapped.

No wonder their kids grew up to embrace the goth well beyond Halloween and usher in the slutty adult costume.  They didn’t have any idea how to “do” Halloween for their kids, so they huddled them together into suburban parties and marauded shopping malls. Eventually they hurled them into the sad church-sponsored Trunk or Treat things that are only marginally better than the gratuitous Halloween Horrors things they first used to hammer home their point and now do as annual fund raisers.  If they give out candy, they do it resentfully grousing that someone may have come into their neighborhood for a rotten 5¢ candy bar or that they’re “too old” and not entitled to have some fun.

Each year I still remember the fun I had.  Unfortunately, it’s also tinged now with sadness for what Halloween has been turned into.

Speaking of parents’ paranoia about poisoned candy, Dan Lewis dutifully debunks that enduring myth by detailing the “only known example of a person intentionally poisoning Halloween candy and providing it to neighborhood trick-or-treaters”:

On Halloween, 1974, an 8-year-old boy named Timothy O’Bryan died. His candy had, indeed, been poisoned. A few days prior, his father, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, took out a $40,000 life insurance policy on Timothy and Timothy’s sister, Elizabeth (then age 5), as an unimaginable way to get out of debt. The only way to collect required that at least one of his children die, so the elder O’Bryan laced some Pixy Stix with cyanide and cajoled his son into eating one before bed.

As murder would negate the insurance policy, the father had to cover his tracks. Already showing a wanton disregard for the lives of others—children, at that—he decided to potentially kill a few. He distributed some of the tainted candy to at least four other children (including his daughter), according to the Houston Chronicle, setting up the story that a neighborhood madman or demented factory worker had caused the tragic death of his son. Fortunately, he was unsuccessful. None of the other children ended up eating the poison, in part due to a quick reaction from authorities and in part due to dumb luck—an 11-year-old tried to eat the sugar in the Pixy Stix he received, but could not undo the staples that O’Bryan had used to reseal the package.

Like our reader, but from a very different perspective. Liz Galvao issues a cri de coeur to “rise up and take back our holiday” – for goths:

These days, a plague of indifference has consumed the goth community when it comes to Halloween. Even when I was a wee kindergoth, we had respect for the true meaning of All Hallow’s Eve. It wasn’t all Nightmare Before Christmas screenings and weirding people out at the mall. Sure, it had pagan origins or something, but at least we knew it didn’t belong to the posers in the store­-bought witch costumes. Goths these days couldn’t care less about the holiday. They’re more concerned with their Tumblr reblogs and sideways cross jewelry than with protecting the history of their people. …

I write to you now a reluctant but natural leader, like Robin Tunney’s character in The Craft. We must fight to end the commercialization of Halloween, because it is the only way we can survive. If we do not seize Halloween from those that would sell it to us, what is to become of our rich gothic subculture? Why avoid the sun and dye our hair black (red, green, purple)? Why pretend to understand Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari? Why read Poppy Z. Brite over Charlaine Harris? We might as well give up and name our dogs Bella. I stand here today, a proud gothic American, and I pledge to stand with you and fight. For if we do not reclaim Halloween for goths, then like Bela Lugosi, we are dead.

Previous Dish on goths here, here and here.