God bless Texas:
These guys shouldn’t have jobs anymore and most certainly should not have guns. Period.
This post is in: Shitty Cops, Meth Laboratories of Democracy
God bless Texas:
These guys shouldn’t have jobs anymore and most certainly should not have guns. Period.
This post is in: Meetups and social events
Commentor Abo Gato and her husband are visiting NYC from Albuquerque, and area resident Diana volunteered Ballaro, in the East Village, as a good place for a meet-up.
Confirmed so far, after yesterday’s post: PurpleGirl, NHOJ, MattR (work permitting), RedDirtGirl, Katie5, Gary Malone, and Brooklyn Lurker (after 7:30pm).
From Diana:
Ballaro’s long and narrow; I’ll be at the back, where there is typically more space. Excellent coffee, excellent wine, excellent prosciutto (the awning identifies it as “Cafe Prosciutteria” which in Italian means a place that sells coffee and prosciutto, but which in American English means a restaurant named Prosciutteria, which, however, has not led them to alter the awning) usually quiet (some nights they have live music; I’ll check) and generally a good place.
Questions or suggestions, leave a comment here. Lurkers and spouses/ companions welcome, and don’t worry too much about showing up precisely at 7pm…
Reminder: NYC Meet-Up, TOMORROW (Tuesday, 7pm)Post + Comments (25)
This post is in: Foreign Affairs
Fred Hiatt is really pining for war, and the WaPo editorial board has decided, in a lengthy piece, that Obama is living in a fantasy world. Nowhere in the piece, of course, are any specific suggestions for what he should do.
Here is a nice antidote to that nonsense:
In the days since Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into the Crimea, it has been amateur hour back in Washington.
I don’t mean Barack Obama. He’s doing pretty much everything he can, with what are a very limited set of policy options at his disposal. No, I’m talking about the people who won’t stop weighing in on Obama’s lack of “action” in the Ukraine. Indeed, the sea of foreign policy punditry – already shark-infested – has reached new lows in fear-mongering, exaggerated doom-saying and a stunning inability to place global events in any rational historical context.
***Personality-driven Analysis
Let’s start here with Julia Ioffe of the New Republic, a popular former reporter in Moscow who now tells us that Putin has sent troops into Crimea “because he can. That’s it, that’s all you need to know”. It’s as if things like regional interests, spheres of influence, geopolitics, coercive diplomacy and the potential loss of a key ally in Kiev (as well as miscalculation) are alien concepts for Russian leaders.
Overstated Rhetoric Shorn of Political Context
David Kramer, president of Freedom House, hit the ball out of the park on this front when he hyperbolically declared that Obama’s response to Putin’s actions “will define his two terms in office” and “the future of U.S. standing in the world”.
Honorable mention goes to Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group for calling this crisis “the most seismic geopolitical events since 9/11”. Putting aside the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Arab Spring, Syria’s civil war and tensions in the South China Sea, Bremmer might have a point.
Unhelpful Policy Recommendations
Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Commander of Nato, deserves a shout-out for calling on Nato to send maritime forces into the Black Sea, among other inflammatory steps. No danger of miscalculation or unnecessary provocation there. No, none at all.
Inappropriate Historical Analogies
So many to choose from here, but when you compare seizing Crimea to the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, as Leonid Bershidsky did at Bloomberg View, you pretty much blow away the competition.
Making It All About Us
As in practically every international crisis, the pundit class seems able to view events solely through the prism of US actions, which best explains Edward Luce in the Financial Times writing that Obama needs to convince Putin “he will not be outfoxed”, or Scott Wilson at the Washington Post intimating that this is all a result of America pulling back from military adventurism. Shocking as it may seem, sometimes countries take actions based on how they view their interests, irrespective of who the US did or did not bomb.
Missing from this “analysis” about how Obama should respond is why Obama should respond. After all, the US has few strategic interests in the former Soviet Union and little ability to affect Russian decision-making.
Read the whole thing.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 111 Comments
This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights
Here’s a picture from a story on the Trail Scouts, the organization replacing the Boy Scouts for parents who want their kids to hold the same beliefs about LGBTQ people as the Westboro Baptist Church or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
The Scouts are still sticking to their stupid compromise of admitting gay kids while prohibiting openly gay leaders. They lost the haters as soon as they allowed gay kids to enter their ranks. They are losing corporate sponsors, like Disney, because they’re still discriminating against gays, especially by advancing the toxic notion that homosexuals are more prone to pedophilia. (And why, by the way, can there be den mothers?). One of these days, they’ll wise up and realize that the Mormons and Christianists are going to stick with the Hitler Scouts, because half-hearted hate just isn’t their style. Hopefully the Boy Scouts will figure that out some time before they go broke.
(via Belafon in the comments)
by David Anderson| 35 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Wall Street Cheat Sheet has a very good summary of all Republican ‘proposals’ to replace Obamacare with something:
The Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility, and Empowerment Act is strongly reliant on market competition, with notable differences from Obamacare; it would likely cover fewer uninsured Americans, increase premiums for many older adults, shrink Medicaid, decrease subsidies for middle class Americans, scale back protections for people with preexisting conditions, and allow private insurers to escape many of the consumer-friendly requirements imposed on them by Obamacare.
Oh boy, that sounds soooooo popular!!!
Status quo bias now works in our favor.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 203 Comments
This post is in: War
There was a fascinating meeting earlier today in Sevastopol. The current head of the Ukranian Navy, Serhiy Haiduk, and the former head, Denis Berezovsky, who defected to Crimea/Russia, both addressed naval officers:
The officers broke into applause as Haiduk read them an order from Kiev removing Berezovsky from his position, and told them that Berezovsky was facing treason charges. When Haiduk had finished his dry but compelling address, the officers spontaneously broke into the national anthem, and some were seen to cry. Berezovsky showed no visible sign of emotion.
[…] When Berezovsky requested questions from the officers, a chorus of criticism broke from the ranks. “In what way exactly did foreign powers intervene in Kiev, compared to the way they are intervening now in Crimea?” asked an officer to applause from those assembled. “Don’t ask provocative questions,” Berezovsky barked back.
Berezovsky was accompanied by a couple of Russian special forces bodyguards, which is presumably the reason he wasn’t arrested on the spot.
by David Anderson| 33 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, Excellent Links
Right now I’m stuck. I have five or six good posts either half written or at least competently outlined, and I can’t figure out how to finish any of them. So here are some good links instead:
The impact of patient cost-sharing on low-income populations: Evidence from Massachusetts
Overall, we find price elasticities of about −0.16 for this low-income population, which is similar to, but somewhat lower than, elasticities calculated for higher-income populations in other settings.
We also find lower price elasticities among individuals with chronic illness and with higher levels of prior spending, suggesting that copayments are less important in these subsamples. In addition, we find no evidence of offsetting increases in hospitalizations in response to the higher copayments, although there are some statistically insignificant impacts among the chronically ill population.
Plan designs matter, and at the margin, incentives matter a lot for most people. Individuals with chronic conditions are simply being made to pay more to manage their conditions in a higher co-pay world.
Uwe Reinhardt on Medicare pricing history:
Under this payment system, Medicare was required to reimburse each individual hospital (and other inpatient facilities) retrospectively for all the money that individual facility reported having spent on treating Medicare patients. These pro rata costs included operating costs, annual depreciation of the capital investments in the facility, interest of debt incurred to finance that capacity and, for investor-owned hospitals, a guaranteed rate of return to equity capital invested in the hospital…
For their part, organized medicine struck a deal under which each physician (and certain other professionals) was to be paid his or her “customary, prevailing and reasonable (C.P.R.)” fee for each service…
One need not have a Ph.D. in economics, of course, to appreciate that the deal was inherently inflationary.
Rob Cullen at What-if Post on paying for the Doc Fix:
The solution that really caught our eye is one you might remember from when Congress was working on passage of the Affordable Care Act. The public option is simply an insurance plan run by the government that would be sold on the Obamacare marketplaces, and unlike almost all the other options it saves money without simply passing the cost onto individuals. Instead it negotiates for low rates with doctors and hospitals, and it provides other insurers an incentive to keep their rates low in order to stay competitive.
Liberals obviously love the public option and conservatives should love it since it saves the government a bunch of money. Unfortunately, of all the options on the list, the public option is perhaps the least likely to pass… even though it might be the smartest.
If we were operating in a world where deficit concerns had a real constituency, several major medical payment changes that were progressive favorable would be immediately on the table (single payer as a long term goal would be the crown jewel). These include a public option, using competitive bidding for most Medicare supplies, and offering a Medicare Part D drug benefit buy-in to the Veteran’s Administration formulary. Instead, we create rentier interests to provide services after they take their cut.
The net effect of smoking on healthcare and welfare costs; a Cohort Study
Conclusions Smoking was associated with a moderate decrease in healthcare costs, and a marked decrease in pension costs due to increased mortality. However, when a monetary value for life years lost was taken into account, the beneficial net effect of non-smoking to society was about €70 000 per individual.
Prevention is a wonderful thing if the goal is to have people enjoy healthier and longer lives. In narrow accounting senses with very limited scope of cost-benefit accounting applied, prevention can be a net loser. Intangible value of quality added life years is what makes prevention a net social good in most cases, not immediate cost avoidance.