Tag: Premium

Laura Helmuth thinks it should be important even to those who don’t care about the show:

A female Doctor would go a long way toward making up for the show’s recent regression into tiresome stereotyped sex roles.

The Doctor travels with human companions, usually one lovely young woman at a time.

As Ted Kissell writes at the Atlantic, the recent companions have been weaker and younger than the ones who accompanied the earlier Doctors.

Has Helmuth been watching the same show I have? Is Clara supposed to be weak? The woman in the photo, by the way, is the first female Time Lord in the series, Romana, in her first incarnation. Even the Times of London has weighed in:

The shift from male to female authority is difficult in politics and business but it is surely not beyond the capacity of the Doctor.

I’m cool as long as she isn’t called a Time Lady. And especially if they snag Helen Mirren. Alyssa Rosenberg argues a gender change is what the Doctor would want:

Wouldn’t he be curious, after all this time, to wonder what it’s like to occupy a woman’s body and to see what it’s like to live with a different set of gender roles (really, many different sets of gender roles)? Aren’t there some circumstances and societies where it might be more advantageous for the Doctor to be female or non-white? If the doctor was set up as an explicit exploration of masculinity, cycling him through all kinds of men’s bodies would make more sense, though it wouldn’t explain the Doctor’s continuing whiteness. But it’s not. And keeping the Doctor white and male over and over again is a contradiction to the show’s sense of wonder and exploration.

Previous Dish on the next Doctor here and here.

Last week, Avik Roy, a former Romney healthcare policy advisor, wrote a post titled, “Rate Shock: In California, Obamacare To Increase Individual Health Insurance Premiums By 64-146%.” The post was picked up by large parts of the Republican blogosphere and has racked up over 1.2 million views in under a week. One part of Roy’s piece:

If you’re a 25 year old male non-smoker, buying insurance for yourself, the cheapest plan on Obamacare’s exchanges is the catastrophic plan, which costs an average of $184 a month. (By “average,” I mean the median monthly premium across California’s 19 insurance rating regions.) The next cheapest plan, the “bronze” comprehensive plan, costs $205 a month. But in 2013, on eHealthInsurance.com, the median cost of the five cheapest plans was only $92.

In other words, for the typical 25-year-old male non-smoking Californian, Obamacare will drive premiums up by between 100 and 123 percent.

Ezra Klein did the same searches Roy did. He found a plan for $109:

Click to buy the plan and eventually you’ll have to answer pages and pages of questions about your health history. Ever had cancer? How about an ulcer? How about a headache? Do you feel sad when it rains? When it doesn’t rain? Is there a history of cardiovascular disease in your family? Have you ever known anyone who had the flu? The actual cost of the plan will depend on how you answer those questions.

According to HealthCare.gov, 14 percent of people who try to buy that plan are turned away outright. Another 12 percent are told they’ll have to pay more than $109. So a quarter of the people who try to buy this insurance product for $109 a month are told they can’t. Those are the people who need insurance most — they are sick, or were sick, or are likely to get sick. So, again, is $109 really the price of this plan?

Ezra writes that Roy is not “just comparing apples to oranges,” he is “comparing apples to oranges that the fruit guy may not even let you buy.” Cohn piles on so bad you want to look away:

Insurance bids from eHealthInsurance are for new customers only. Insurers who sell to individuals—that is, insurers who sell in the “non-group market”—frequently raise rates dramatically, and unpredictably, because a particular group of customers have become too expensive to insure. In other words, if you buy on eHealthInsurance, you might get a reasonable rate the first year, only to experience eye-popping increases a year or two later. That won’t happen on the exchanges, because, under Obamacare, insurers can’t charge different prices to new and existing customers.

Roy responds to his critics:

The key thing to remember is that back when Obamacare was being debated in Congress, Democrats claimed that it was right-wing nonsense that premiums would go up under Obamacare. “What we know for sure,” Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber told Ezra Klein in 2009, “is that [the bill] will lower the cost of buying non-group health insurance.” For sure.

In 2009, was Ezra saying that it’s ok that premiums will double for the average person, because a minority of people will pre-existing conditions will benefit? No.

I think it’s an unfair comparison to take the cheapest insurance program for the healthiest young adults today and compare it to rates in a system which is legally barred from discriminating in that way. So far, the universal rates seem to be coming in under expectations. We’ll see. Maybe there was some flim-flam about there being no trade-offs in Obamacare, especially for the young and healthy, back in 2009. But the real argument will take place when this is actually implemented. And it certainly won’t be fairly resolved by cherry-picking the cheapest plans now for the healthiest individuals and comparing them with predicted future costs.

The Dish will have our own experiment in buying Obamacare for our staff next year. We’ll keep you posted on what we find.

A Pakistani version of Glee, titled Taan – the Urdu word for “musical note” – is on the verge of becoming a reality:

The show revolves around the fictional Hayaat Haveli musical academy in Lahore. At its heart is a tension between a traditional music teacher and his younger rival, who trains budding pop stars, representing different faces of Pakistan. Among their pupils are the offspring of well-heeled bureaucrats and a talentless wannabe who dreams of becoming a Bollywood actress.

Some plotlines that differentiate it from its American counterpart:

One of the characters, Annie Masih is described as losing all her family in the 2009 attack on a Christian enclave in the town on Gojra, a real episode in which seven people were burned alive. Another storyline involves Fariduddin, a member of the Pakistan Taliban intent on blowing up the academy before he is eventually seduced by music.

Marya Hannun notes how the show plans on dealing with materials that might offend the country’s censors:

[A] love affair “between a Taliban extremist and a beautiful Christian girl” promises to give Rachel and Finn’s tortured romance a run for its money. And even more controversial is a planned storyline depicting a gay relationship.

The show’s creators have come up with creative ways to avoid angering authorities. Take the aforementioned plotline of two male lovers. “Let’s say in a certain scene, there are two boys talking to each other, they are not allowed to show their physical attachment to each other,” explains director Samar Raza, particularly since homosexuality is illegal in Pakistan. “So I bring a third character who says: ‘God designed Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.'” This third conservative character will theoretically enable Raza to discuss homosexuality while evading censorship.

Cameron Abadi studies the outgoing president and his legacy in Iranian politics:

Ahmadinejad, canny populist that he is, soon began to privilege secular Iranian nationalism over fealty to Islam, and thumbed his nose at the Islamic establishment throughout his second term. He began calling explicitly for an “Iranian Islam,” a culture unembarrassed by Iran’s pre-Islamic grandeur. Rather than endorse the Islamic Republic’s traditional neglect of Nowruz—Iran’s traditional pre-Islamic New Year celebration, which was openly reviled by Ayatollah Khomeini—Ahmadinejad invited other heads of state to celebrate the occasion in Tehran. (Ayatollah Khamenei left town during the festivities.) He has offered repeated praise of Iran’s most celebrated pre-Islamic ruler, Cyrus the Great; suggested that men and women be allowed to attend soccer matches together; and openly attacked prominent clerics for their illicit accumulation of massive wealth. Meanwhile, Mashaei, his closest advisor, twice declared that Iran was not enemies with the Israeli people (forcing Khamenei to clarify that Iran and Israel are not “friends”).

All of this had an effect on the current elections:

Khamenei loyalists have labeled Mashaei a practitioner of “black magic” and attacked Ahmadinejad for “sinful” conduct (the latter for the crime of hugging Hugo Chavez’s mother at his funeral) and both Ahmadinejad and Mashaei have essentially been excommunicated from the political elite. The coming election seems certain to result in a president who has little inclination of challenging the primacy of the religious establishment. By the same measure, it seems unlikely to produce a president with any real connection to the Iranian people. Khamenei has even speculated that he might eventually abolish the presidency entirely. Having abandoned years ago any pretense to democracy, Iran’s regime may now be beginning to abandon any remaining claims to popular sovereignty.

(Photo: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks to the media during a press conference at the Al Ahzar headquarters on February 5, 2013, in Cairo, Egypt. President Ahmadinejad arrived in the Egyptian capital, becoming the first Iranian President to visit Egypt since the Iranian revolution in 1979. By Ed Giles/Getty Images)

The Believer has posted his 1945 essay “The Freedom of The Press,” originally composed as the preface to Animal Farm, with footnotes by John Reed. An excerpt from Orwell with Reed’s comment:

Obviously it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time). But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI [Ministry of Information] or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.

That people were willing to live in a state of denial—ignoring war, ignoring injustice, ignoring tremendous threats to themselves and even the planet—continually amazed Orwell, and he struggled with the cartography of complacency. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “In the face of terrifying dangers and golden political opportunities, people just keep on keeping on, in a sort of twilight sleep in which they are conscious of nothing except the daily round of work, family life, darts at the pub, exercising the dog, mowing the lawn, bringing home the beer, etc.” In “Notes on Nationalism,” Orwell marveled at “the lunatic habit of identifying oneself with large power units.”

And therein lies the answer to our twenty-first century state of denial. Our identities are under siege: advertising, education, the arts. We are built up and destroyed by lifestyles and categories (of race, of class, of culture) that exist primarily to contain, delimit, divide and exploit the human experience. If there’s anything you think you need to buy to be who you are—whether it’s curtains from Ikea or a CD or a book or liposuction or take-your-pick—you don’t own yourself.

Recent Dish on Orwell here, here, here and here. Recent Bukowski on censorship here.

A discussion of student loan debt from a couple weeks back:

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Without action from Congress, interest rates on federal Stafford loans will double (from 3.4% to 6.8%) on July 1st. Ned Resnikoff reviews the political playing field:

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because Washington had a similar fight last year. That was when Congress first extended the law which keeps student loan rates fixed at 3.4%, after President Obama made an issue of it during the 2012 campaign. Though that law did lighten students’ debt burden a bit, it did little to slow the years-long explosion in student debt. This year, total student debt passed the $1 trillion milestone.

Nancy Folbre worries about the implications of the increase in student indebtedness:

As Robert Kuttner explains… bailouts and bankruptcy proceedings both provide a means for businesses to get out from under bad debt. The obligations of a college loan, by contrast, “follow a borrower to the grave.” The rolling thunder of accumulating student debt sounds a lot like the perfect storm of mortgage liabilities that threatened major financial institutions and precipitated the Great Recession in 2007.

… Whether or not you call it a bubble, evidence shows something is likely to pop. Both delinquency and default rates have increased substantially since 2005. According to the Institute for Higher Education Policy, only a little more than a third of 1.8 million borrowers who entered repayment in 2005 repaid their student loans successfully without delay or delinquency for the first five years.

Meanwhile, Mandi Woodruff talks to Nicole Jackson, a Florida lawyer who has lost hope of ever repaying the debt she accumulated during law school:

She graduated in 1994 with more than $100,000 of debt. Within three years, she had one daughter, a surprise set of twins, and was earning less than $50,000 per year. “It’s always been a struggle,” she said. “I worked for the state of Florida most of my [career] and the most I was making was $50,000/year. With three kids, it wasn’t enough money.” …

“[My debt] is not going anywhere because I do not make enough money, not because I have just ignored it,” she said. Her private loans took top priority. The payments were only $130/month, but since private lenders don’t offer the same deferment options as federal, it was either pay or roll out the welcome mat for debt collectors. Meanwhile, her federal loans ballooned. With an 8% interest rate, they appreciated even after she consolidated, growing from a principal balance of about $80,000 in 1994 to $186,000 today. Other than her home and a car payment, it’s the only debt she carries to this day.

Steve Coll argues that legislation that aims to protect journalists from “indiscriminate government subpoenas” is important, but only if done right:

[Current guidelines for federal prosecutors seeking evidence from journalists] are far from ideal—they have loopholes that give an Attorney General wide discretion. Yet they have often discouraged Justice from overreaching. The guidelines require that the Attorney General sign off on all media subpoenas, that any demands “be as narrowly drawn as possible,” and that, in all but the most exceptional cases, news organizations be notified of a subpoena, giving them time to appeal it in court. …

In the long run, to rebalance the national-security state and to otherwise revitalize American democracy, the United States requires a Supreme Court willing to deepen protections for investigative reporters, as the majority in Branzburg would not. In response to criticism about the A.P. case, Obama has reintroduced federal legislation that would clarify journalists’ rights. Such a federal “shield law” might be constructive, but new legislation with overly broad national-security exceptions would be even worse than the status quo.

Peter Sterne talks to the Society of Professional Journalists:

The proposed federal shield law before the Senate is even weaker than Colorado’s. It simply allows journalists to petition a judge, who weighs the story’s public interest value and decides whether the journalist should be forced to reveal his or her sources. The Society of Professional Journalists, which has been pushing for shield laws, said that something is better than nothing, but it nonetheless called for stronger protections.

Meanwhile, Dick Durbin equivocates on who should be protected by a federal shield law:

[H]ere is the bottom line – the media shield law, which I am prepared to support, and I know Sen. Graham supports, still leaves an unanswered question, which I have raised many times: What is a journalist today in 2013?

We know it’s someone that works for Fox or AP, but does it include a blogger? Does it include someone who is tweeting? Are these people journalists and entitled to constitutional protection. We need to ask 21st century questions about a provision that was written over 200 years ago.