Quotulatiousness

January 5, 2014

Polarized America, not

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

In Time, Nick Gillespie goes through the polling numbers and finds that despite frequent claims that the United States is more polarized than ever before, it’s certainly not over the issues you’d expect:

The apparently massive and unbridgeable gulfs between Republicans and Democrats, men and women, gays and straights, secularists and believers, rich and poor, and coastal elites and heartland Americans are belied by data that substantial and growing majorities of folks actually agree on a wide variety of important social and policy issues and attitudes.

Here’s a sampling:

  • Pot legalization. As Colorado and Washington state begin selling legal weed, fully 58 percent of Americans believe the drug should be legal. That’s up from just 12 percent in 1969, says Gallup.
  • Abortion. Few issues are as hotly contested and few issues have generated such consistent support, with 78 percent of us thinking abortion should be legal under either all or some circumstances, and just 20 percent thinking it should be illegal in all circumstances. Those numbers basically haven’t changed since 1975.
  • Homosexuality. In 2001, just 40 percent of Americans thought that that “gay or lesbian relations” were morally acceptable. Last year, 59 percent had no problem with them. And 53 percent now think same-sex marriage should be given equal status to conventional couplings. That’s up almost 20 points from the start of the century.
  • Health Insurance. As Obamacare cranks up, 56 percent believe that it is not “the responsibility of the federal goverment to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage.” That’s up from 28 percent in 2006. Only 42 percent — down from 69 percent in 2006 — think providing health insurance is the government’s responsibility.
  • Trust in Government. Just 19 percent of Americans “trust the government in Washington to do what’s right” all or most of the time. That’s down from 60 percent in 2002. Meanwhile, 81 percent of us don’t expect the government to do what’s right all or most of the time, up more than 40 points in the last decade. And a record-high 72 percent believe government “will be the biggest threat to the country in the future.” During the Obama presidency, 55 percent say that the government “is doing too much.”

Of course, all of these issues — and many others — contain nuances and contexts that need to be taken into account. And most issues show partisan differences too, with Republicans pulling in one direction, Democrats in another, and Independents (who are, at 44 percent, the single-largest bloc of voters by far) somewhere in between. But it’s striking that Americans seem to be becoming more socially liberal and fiscally conservative with every passing year. That just isn’t reflected in the platforms of the major parties, with the GOP only getting more conservative and the Democrats only more liberal.

December 21, 2013

I’m starting to think that Megan McArdle is a bit jaundiced about Obamacare

Filed under: Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:27

Otherwise, how can you account for running a column titled like this?

Obamacare Initiates Self-Destruction Sequence

On Wednesday, Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown reported that the administration was saying fewer than 500,000 people had actually lost insurance due to Obamacare-induced cancellations. This struck me as a strange leak: Half a million is a lot less than many people (including me) have been estimating, but it is still not a small number, and the administration has tended to sit on negative information until the last possible moment.

Yesterday, we had a more official announcement from the administration: Anyone who has had their policies cancelled will be exempt from the individual mandate next year. The administration is also allowing those people to buy catastrophic plans, even if they’re over 30.

What to make of these two statements? On the one hand, the administration is trying to minimize the number of people who have been affected by cancellations, and on the other hand, it is unveiling a fix to the problem of cancellations. And these are not minor changes.

[…]

The White House is focused on winning the news cycle, day by day, not the kind of detached technocratic policymaking that they, and the law’s other supporters, hoped this law would embody. Does your fix create problems later, cause costs to spiral or people to drop out of the insurance market, or lead to political pressure to expand the fixes in ways that critically undermine the law? Well, that’s preferable to sudden death right now.

However incoherent these fixes may seem, they send two messages, loud and clear. The first is that although liberal pundits may think that the law is a done deal, impossible to repeal, the administration does not believe that. The willingness to take large risks with the program’s stability indicates that the administration thinks it has a huge amount to lose — that the White House is in a battle for the program’s very existence, not a few marginal House and Senate seats.

And the second is that enrollment probably isn’t what the administration was hoping. I don’t know that we’ll start Jan. 1 with fewer people insured than we had a year ago, but this certainly shouldn’t make us optimistic. It’s not like people who lost their insurance due to Obamacare, and now can’t afford to replace their policy, are going to be happy that they’re exempted from the mandate; they’re still going to be pretty mad. This is at best, damage control. Which suggests that the administration is expecting a fair amount of damage.

December 4, 2013

Prescription contraceptives

Filed under: Business, Law, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:31

Shikha Dalmia argues that the fight over forcing companies to cover contraceptive prescriptions is based on a mistaken view of women’s rights:

The administration argues that acquiescing to such arguments would mean allowing bosses or corporate CEOs to restrict women’s choices to promote their own religious beliefs. “Our policy is designed to ensure that health care decisions are made between a woman and her doctor,” noted White House spokesman Jay Carney. But it’s not bosses who pose the bigger barrier to birth control but doctors themselves.

The only reason American women need insurance coverage for contraception is because they can’t buy birth control pills without a prescription — which doctors won’t hand them without an annual exam. Few dispute anymore — not even the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — that the pills are perfectly safe requiring neither a medical diagnosis nor supervision. They have side effects like every other medicine but none so serious that can’t be effectively communicated through the usual warning labels. Requiring a medical exam assumes that women can’t be completely trusted with their own health. But such paternalism is counterproductive: Most women who stop taking pills don’t do so because they can’t afford them without insurance. (A one-month generic supply from Costco costs $25.) They do so because they can’t always make the time for a doctor’s visit when their prescription runs out. This problem is especially acute for working women — professional or others.

The birth control issue shouldn’t be cast in terms women’s rights versus religious rights. That’ll turn it into a lose-lose proposition. Medical paternalism is a far bigger threat to women’s reproductive choices than religious zealotry. Focusing on the first will do more to give women control over their bodies — including the female employees of Hobby Lobby — than a pitched battle against the second.

November 28, 2013

Colby Cosh on Obamacare’s international ripples

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

You’ll have guessed from the tone of my Obamacare links and comments that I didn’t think it was a good idea from the start and it’s been a great example of how not to implement a major government initiative. That said, it’s a sure bet that Obamacare will have influence on other countries as they consider their own health programs. Colby Cosh is surprised that the scandal-addled Canadian media hasn’t been paying more attention to the Obamacare train wreck as the wheels fall off in all directions:

Obamacare isn’t going to make major systemic change in either direction look more appetizing to Canadians. That’s an important Canadian angle right there. Not long ago it looked as though national pharmacare was likely to become an election issue here, quarterbacked by the NDP and perhaps the Liberals, too. The concept has plenty of support among economists and other health policy experts—the same class of kindly boffins that, in the U.S., lined up almost unanimously behind the Affordable Care Act.

For better or worse, nationalizing prescription-drug insurance seems likely to be a much tougher sell here in the immediate future. Any large, complex health care experiment will be. The more wise heads support it, the easier it will be for supporters of the status quo to shout, “Unintended consequences! Ivory-tower tomfoolery!” Indeed, political strategists may already be saying it to themselves.

American commentators are already starting to wonder if Obamacare’s difficult start and increasingly troubled prospects may end up as a victory for small-government conservatism. The problems for the program do not end with the calamitous state of the federal insurance-exchange website, or even with the nasty surprises handed to the self-employed and freelancers in the “individual market” who were falsely promised: “If you like your plan you can keep your plan.” Some Obamacare buyers are finding themselves shut out from their preferred doctors and hospitals; employers are junking non-compliant health plans; and many in the middle class who liked the Obamacare concept are facing sticker shock.

[…]

The redistributive aspects of Obamacare were undersold, and possible pitfalls obviously not foreseen. The neoliberal Democrat Walter Russell Mead put it neatly the other day: “President Obama may be the Democrat who ends up convincing millions of American millennials that Ronald Reagan was right, and that the progressive administrative state is neither honest nor competent enough to solve the problems of the American people.” If that is the case, the effects cannot be confined to the U.S.

November 24, 2013

A life reconstructed

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

In the New York Times, Mary Lou Jepson talks about the near-total loss and recovery of her life:

In my early 30s, for a few months, I altered my body chemistry and hormones so that I was closer to a man in his early 20s. I was blown away by how dramatically my thoughts changed. I was angry almost all the time, thought about sex constantly, and assumed I was the smartest person in the entire world. Over the years I had met guys rather like this.

I was not experimenting with hormone levels out of idle curiosity or in some kind of quirky science experiment. I was on hormone treatments because I’d had a tumor removed along with part of my pituitary gland, which makes key hormones the body needs to function.

[…]

In my experience it can be difficult to find a doctor to help a patient do this. I believe it is only partly because of the shortage of endocrinologists, doctors who specialize in the hormonal systems. Some doctors seemed not to believe that every hormone mattered. How many other patients like me have failed to find their ideal balance of medications?

There is evidence that careful tuning of these hormones can lead to dramatic personal and professional outcomes. Doctors and patients should consider replacement of every known hormone that is missing. New neurochemicals are identified by researchers every few years and should be studied as possible additions to the mix.

And access to these medications should not be hindered. As it stands today, some of the hormones I need daily to stay alive and to thrive can be, and frequently have been, blocked at the whim or neglect of a doctor’s office, insurance company or pharmacy. And still, 18 years after my surgery and despite great advances in endocrinal science, I need to fight to get them.

Disputes between organizations on whether prescriptions, test results or proper forms were transmitted or not. Communication breakdowns. A Kafka-esque nightmare of constantly needing another approval. It can take weeks to be notified of a rejection.

H/T to Tim O’Reilly for the link:

November 16, 2013

US apparently trying out new quasi-monarchical form of government

Filed under: Government, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

As a British-born Canadian I’m used to the occasional ill-informed jab from American commentators about our form of government being a barbaric remnant of the dark ages, what with still having a monarch and all. If I respond at all, it’s usually to point out that we owe a lot for the longevity of our slowly evolving political system to the “Baronial brute squad of 1215” and the fact that we’ve (for the most part) steadily moved the monarch away from the levers of power. 798 years of political evolution is not to be sneered at. In the United States, the evolution has apparently gone in the other direction: moving those levers of power toward the monarch and away from the soi-disant “legislative branch” of government.

I haven’t seen as much fun-poking about the monarchy from my American friends lately, as they seem to have introduced a new form of non-crown-wearing, non-ermine-trimmed monarchy:

It is a condition of my admission to this great land that I am not allowed to foment the overthrow of the United States government. Oh, I signed it airily enough, but you’d be surprised, as the years go by, how often the urge to foment starts to rise in one’s gullet. Fortunately, at least as far as constitutional government goes, the president of the United States is doing a grand job of overthrowing it all by himself.

On Thursday, he passed a new law at a press conference. George III never did that. But, having ordered America’s insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, the president announced that he is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. The legislative branch (as it’s still quaintly known) passed a law purporting to grandfather your existing health plan. The regulatory bureaucracy then interpreted the law so as to un-grandfather your health plan. So His Most Excellent Majesty has commanded that your health plan be de-un-grandfathered. That seems likely to work. The insurance industry had three years to prepare for the introduction of Obamacare. Now the King has given them six weeks to de-introduce Obamacare.

“I wonder if he has the legal authority to do this,” mused former Vermont governor Howard Dean. But he’s obviously some kind of right-wing wacko. Later that day, anxious to help him out, Congress offered to “pass” a “law” allowing people to keep their health plans. The same president who had unilaterally commanded that people be allowed to keep their health plans indignantly threatened to veto any such law to that effect: It only counts if he does it — geddit? As his court eunuchs at the Associated Press obligingly put it: “Obama Will Allow Old Plans.” It’s Barry’s world; we just live in it.

The reason for the benign Sovereign’s exercise of the Royal Prerogative is that millions of his subjects — or “folks,” as he prefers to call us, no fewer than 27 times during his press conference — have had their lives upended by Obamacare. Your traditional hard-core statist, surveying the mountain of human wreckage he has wrought, usually says, “Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” But Obama is the first to order that his omelet be unscrambled and the eggs put back in their original shells. Is this even doable? No. That’s the point. When it doesn’t work, he’ll be able to give another press conference blaming the insurance companies, or the state commissioners, or George W. Bush . . .

November 15, 2013

Misunderstanding the purpose of health insurance

Filed under: Business, Economics, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

One of the big problems facing everyone in the US is the cost of healthcare: it’s expensive and getting more so. Obamacare is supposed to be an attempt to lower the overall cost of healthcare, but by approaching it from the “insurance” angle, it’s likely to make the situation worse rather than better. The Anti-Gnostic reposted an extended comment from Steve Sailer’s blog explaining why misunderstanding the purpose of insurance is a big problem:

1) Most people lose money on insurance, because most of the time insurance doesn’t pay out more than it takes in.

2) Thus, a “good” policy is a catastrophic-coverage-only, high-deductible policy, where most payments are out of pocket. This is a policy that protects you against the downside risk, but where you lose a lot less on average.

3) This is because the purpose of insurance is to protect yourself from *catastrophe*, not to make routine purchases.

4) For example, if you went to Best Buy and whipped out your home insurance card to get a new flat screen TV, everyone would look at you as a crazy man. “Don’t you know that home insurance is only for fires and floods, and not for routine purchases?”

5) And so it should be with health insurance, because you’ll actually — *provably* — pay less with a high deductible plan for all but catastrophic conditions.

6) Indeed, the most innovative and technologically advanced areas of medicine are ambulatory areas in which people feel that markets are “ok”. These are paradoxically the most trivial areas: lasik, plastic surgery, dermatology, dentistry, even veterinary medicine.

7) Why are these areas so advanced? Because people pay cash money, because they choose based on quality, and because they are *able* to choose — i.e. they aren’t being wheeled up to the hospital in a gurney in a no choice scenario.

8) Moreover, with every technology ever, from cars to cell phones to air travel to computers, things that start out expensive become cheaper when enough people demand them. With medicine it seems to bite more that money means differences in care. But at the end of the day doctors, patients, nurses, drugs, ambulances…all that stuff means real resources, and a refusal to do explicit computations just results in massive waste as costs are shunted to a place where no one looks at them.

At the Independent Institute blog, John Graham points out that — in the few places that government allows free markets to operate — prices tend to drop over time even while services or features improve:

It has taken a long time, but the price of hearing aids is in the process of falling dramatically. How has this happened? Technological innovation, of course, but there is more. There’s no shortage of technological innovation in U.S. health care. However, because third-party payers, that is, health insurers and governments, determine prices, there is no mechanism for customers to signal value to providers.

This is not the case for hearing aids: Although some states have mandated insurance coverage for hearing aids, this is usually limited to disabled children. The big market for hearing aids is seniors, and Medicare does not cover hearing aids.

This is another case of a phenomenon observed elsewhere by Devon Herrick of the National Center for Policy Analysis [PDF]: Where patients pay directly for medical care, prices fall like they do in every other market.

Seniors who want highly personalized service from an audiologist in his own practice can get it, and they will pay for it. Those who want to order online can save money by doing that. Those who want to get their old hearing aids repaired can make that choice. And the most adventurous seniors, who don’t mind running an earpiece into an iPhone, can get a functional hearing aid almost for free.

We are on the verge of enjoying universal access to hearing aids — but only because the government restrained itself from interfering, and let the market operate.

November 9, 2013

Barack Obama on the difference between private enterprise and government

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:43

Ann Althouse finds it amazing that President Obama clearly understands why his campaign website was so effective and why the Obamacare website fails on so many levels, but can’t generalize that knowledge to the whole public/private sphere:

In yesterday’s interview with Chuck Todd, Obama said:

    You know, one of the lessons — learned from this whole process on the website — is that probably the biggest gap between the private sector and the federal government is when it comes to I.T. …

    Well, the reason is is that when it comes to my campaign, I’m not constrained by a bunch of federal procurement rules, right?

That is, many have pointed out that his campaign website was really good, so why didn’t that mean that he’d be good at setting up a health insurance website? The answer is that the government is bad because the government is hampered by… government!

    And how we write — specifications and — and how the — the whole things gets built out. So part of what I’m gonna be looking at is how do we across the board, across the federal government, leap into the 21st century.

I love the combination of: 1. Barely able to articulate what the hell happens inside these computer systems, and 2. Wanting to leap!

    Because when it comes to medical records for veterans, it’s still done in paper. Medicaid is still largely done on paper.

    When we buy I.T. services generally, it is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn’t work or it ends up being way over cost.

This should have made him sympathetic to the way government burdens private enterprise, but he’s focused on liberating government to take over more of what has been done privately. And yet there’s no plan, no idea about what would suddenly enable government to displace private businesses competing to offer a product people want to buy.

November 1, 2013

The Obamacare moment of clarity

Filed under: Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer on the moment of understanding:

Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”

The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.

(a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.

So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.

October 29, 2013

Obamacare’s technical issues

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:48

A comment at Marginal Revolution deservedly has been promoted to being a guest post, discussing the scale of the problems with the Obamacare software:

The real problems are with the back end of the software. When you try to get a quote for health insurance, the system has to connect to computers at the IRS, the VA, Medicaid/CHIP, various state agencies, Treasury, and HHS. They also have to connect to all the health plan carriers to get pre-subsidy pricing. All of these queries receive data that is then fed into the online calculator to give you a price. If any of these queries fails, the whole transaction fails.

Most of these systems are old legacy systems with their own unique data formats. Some have been around since the 1960′s, and the people who wrote the code that runs on them are long gone. If one of these old crappy systems takes too long to respond, the transaction times out.

[…]

When you even contemplate bringing an old legacy system into a large-scale web project, you should do load testing on that system as part of the feasibility process before you ever write a line of production code, because if those old servers can’t handle the load, your whole project is dead in the water if you are forced to rely on them. There are no easy fixes for the fact that a 30 year old mainframe can not handle thousands of simultaneous queries. And upgrading all the back-end systems is a bigger job than the web site itself. Some of those systems are still there because attempts to upgrade them failed in the past. Too much legacy software, too many other co-reliant systems, etc. So if they aren’t going to handle the job, you need a completely different design for your public portal.

A lot of focus has been on the front-end code, because that’s the code that we can inspect, and it’s the code that lots of amateur web programmers are familiar with, so everyone’s got an opinion. And sure, it’s horribly written in many places. But in systems like this the problems that keep you up at night are almost always in the back-end integration.

The root problem was horrific management. The end result is a system built incorrectly and shipped without doing the kind of testing that sound engineering practices call for. These aren’t ‘mistakes’, they are the result of gross negligence, ignorance, and the violation of engineering best practices at just about every step of the way.

October 25, 2013

The glamour of big IT projects

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Virginia Postrel on the hubris of the Obamacare project team:

The HealthCare.gov website is a disaster — symbolic to Obamacare opponents, disheartening to supporters, and incredibly frustrating to people who just need to buy insurance. Some computer experts are saying the only way to save the system is to scrap the current bloated code and start over.

Looking back, it seems crazy that neither the Barack Obama administration nor the public was prepared for the startup difficulties. There’s no shortage of database experts willing to opine on the complexities of the problem. Plenty of companies have nightmarish stories to tell about much simpler software projects. And reporting by the New York Times finds that the people involved with the system knew months ago that it was in serious trouble. “We foresee a train wreck,” one said back in February.

So why didn’t the administration realize that integrating a bunch of incompatible government databases into a seamless system with an interface just about anyone could understand was a really, really hard problem? Why was even the president seemingly taken by surprise when the system didn’t work like it might in the movies?

We have become seduced by computer glamour.

Whether it’s a television detective instantly checking a database of fingerprints or the ease of Amazon.com’s “1-Click” button, we imagine that software is a kind of magic — all the more so if it’s software we’ve never actually experienced. We expect it to be effortless. We don’t think about how it got there or what its limitations might be. Instead of imagining future technologies as works in progress, improving over time, we picture them as perfect from day one.

October 21, 2013

All those boats have been burned

Filed under: Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

Megan McArdle on the problem with emulating the Conquistator model of operational planning and burning your boats:

There’s a legend that after Hernan Cortes and his crew landed on the shores of the New World, Cortes ordered that their boats be burned. The only way they would be able to get back to Spain would be to conquer the land, giving them the resources to build new boats. With necessity at their backs, his band of adventurers managed to conquer all of Mexico.

It’s not clear if this story is actually true, but it’s nonetheless beloved by motivational speakers. The last two weeks of political paralysis have been an excellent illustration of why you shouldn’t model your negotiation strategy on a guy who’s mostly famous for slaughtering strangers.

[…]

The state insurance exchanges aren’t working, Obamacare is in jeopardy, and Democrats are casting around for a way to blame this on Republicans. The answer they have settled on: It’s their fault because Republican governors did not set up exchanges.

Think about what they are actually saying: “We passed a law that was so incredibly fragile that it was destined to fail unless all the state governments controlled by the party that opposed this law worked hard to make the system a success.”

And why did they expect this to happen? The answer boils down to this: “After we burn the boats, everyone’s supposed to band together to fight the Aztecs!”

I’ve long criticized the health-care law for being a Rube Goldberg Policy Machine: There are dozens of pieces that all have to work perfectly. If one of them fails, the whole apparatus breaks down and the individual insurance market spirals toward death. That seemed risky to me, especially when the law was passed over fervent opposition — a fervent opposition that was smugly told that “elections have consequences,” without anyone apparently considering that future elections might have different consequences.

But in this view, the Rube Goldberg quality is actually a plus, because after all, if we do something that might break the insurance market unless Republicans enthusiastically cooperate, they’ll have to enthusiastically cooperate.

This is … what’s the technical term? Right, insane.

Start with the fact that the state exchanges — what we would have had if the Republican governors and legislatures had cooperated — aren’t all in such great shape, either. Don’t get me wrong; some of them are doing very well. But some aren’t really working at all, and in others the results are … unclear. And that’s in blue states where the governor and the legislature were hugely enthusiastic about this program and are going all out to make it work. As anyone who has ever implemented a new program (corporate or government) can tell you, one of the biggest hurdles is getting people who don’t care about your program, or who actively oppose it, to make their piece work. Even if they’re trying in good faith, they have neither your enthusiasm nor your deep grasp of the internal logic. In the best-case scenario, it’s not their No. 1 priority; when it competes for resources with stuff they really care about, it tends to get the second-string people and budget. This is one reason that promising pilot projects often fail when they’re rolled out to the larger organization—and one of the most important things that a corporate innovator has to do is to evangelize his program so that other departments get as enthusiastic as he is.

The Obama administration was not in a position to evangelize the president’s health-care program to Republican governors. If the law absolutely required that those governors be as enthusiastic about implementing a state exchange as the folks in the administration, then it was a bad law that should never have been passed, and the Democrats made a grave mistake that could destroy the nation’s insurance market.

After the boat-burning failed the first time, leaving it weeks from its debut without a working computer system, the administration seems to have decided that what was needed was simply a larger bonfire: Launch the nonworking system, because after all, once you’ve gone live, the potential catastrophe would be nearly upon us, which would somehow force those inside and outside the administration to somehow bring order out of the chaos they had created.

But Republicans should make this work! It’s the right thing to do! That is, of course, debatable. But aside from that, this is magical thinking — as magical as the Tea Partiers who responded, when I pointed out that the shutdown was costing them the support they’d need to retake the Senate and the White House and actually get some policy making done, that this was all the fault of the liberal media, which was just repeating administration talking points.

QotD: Obamacare as a special case of The Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters

Filed under: Economics, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

So who is up for some side bets on Obamacare?

I’m sympathetic to the opinion that introducing a huge, complicated, government-run program is just asking for trouble. On the other hand, the Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters says everything will work out.

As a reminder, The Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters says that any disaster we see coming with plenty of advance notice gets fixed. We humans have a consistent tendency to underestimate our own resourcefulness. For example, the Year 2000 bug was a dud because we saw it coming and clever people rose to the challenge. In the seventies, we thought the world would run out of oil but instead the United States is heading toward energy independence thanks to new technology.

Obamacare is a classic slow-moving disaster. Absent any future human resourcefulness, it just might be a nightmare. But my money says that clever humans will figure out how to tame the beast before it triggers the collapse of civilization.

If betting were legal, I’d bet $10,000 that in ten years the consensus of economists will be that Obamacare had a lot of problems but that overall it was neutral or helpful to the economy. I base that hypothetical bet on The Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters, not on the scary first-year state of the law. And I reiterate that I know next-to-nothing about the details of Obamacare. I’m just working off of pattern recognition.

Scott Adams, “Obamacare – Side Bets”, Scott Adams Blog, 2013-10-18

September 26, 2013

Roll back Obamacare? Not with these tactics

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Coyote Blog calls the current approach by the GOP “Republican Fail” and explains why:

Yes, I understand why things are happening as they are. From a re-election strategy, their approach makes total sense. A lot of these House guys come from majority Republic districts where their biggest re-election fear comes from a primary challenge to the right of them. I live in one of these districts, so I see what perhaps coastal media does not. In everyday conversation Republicans are always criticizing their Congressmen for not rolling back Obamacare. Republicans need to be able to say in a primary, “I voted to defund Obamacare”. Otherwise I guarantee every one of them will be facing a primary opponent who will hammer them every day.

But from the perspective of someone who just wants the worst aspects of this thing to go away, this was a terrible approach. Defunding Obamacare entirely was never, ever, ever going to succeed. Obama and Democrats would be happy to have a shutdown last months before they would roll back his one and only signature piece of legislation. They may have caved in the past on other issues but he is not going to cave on this one (and needs to be seen not caving given his recent foreign policy mis-steps that has him perceived as weak even in his own party). And, because all the focus is on Obamacare, we are going to end up with a budget deal that makes no further progress on containing other spending.

May 22, 2013

The controversy over the DSM-V

Filed under: Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

The science writers at The Economist discuss the American Psychiatric Association’s new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (below the fold because it auto-plays when you load the page):

(more…)

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