Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
(NSFW, obviously)
I’m not part of her market demographic, but bless Ms. Silverman for…. stepping up in support of the National Women’s Law Center.
(If only for driving the MRAs a little further out of their tiny minds.)
Late Night Naughty Talk Open Thread: The Ladyparts TariffPost + Comments (20)
Dave Weigel, now at Bloomberg Politics, reports Orange John Boehner’s latest self-defending “argument”:
… Reformers and Boehner, having failed (by choice) to push for an immigration bill that could have been conferenced with the Senate’s bill, are now positing a 2015 grand bargain. The theory: After Republicans take the Senate, they’ll be facing a presidential election and the challenge of winning 270-plus electoral votes in a country that is becoming more Hispanic.
The party’s core is enough this year, but won’t be in 2016, so it’d be a big help if a Republican Congress cuts an immigration deal with the lame duck president. The “establishment” is of one mind about this. In the Wall Street Journal, a beachhead of conservative immigration reform, Gerald Seib argues that a reform deal might be a “silver lining for Obama” after a Republican Senate takeover…
… “When I first heard that [Boehner] quote,” said Iowa Representative Steve King, “I tried to figure this out: Why would anybody figure that amnesty was easier to pass? There’s no mathematical rationale that would indicate that it would be more likely to pass under Republican control of the Senate. If there’s no rationale, it has to be a ploy.”…
Which reminded me, I hadn’t yet front-paged Sahil Kapur’s article in TPM on “The Method To Steve King’s Madness“:
…[T]he Iowa Republican gave an interview to the conservative outlet Newsmax in July 2013, declaring, “For every [young undocumented immigrant] who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
The quote went viral, unleashing a firestorm from immigrant-rights activists. House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, publicly denounced King’s “hateful” remarks and called him an “asshole” behind closed doors.
King concedes that the one hundred-to-one claim was an “estimate,” but with a mischievous smile, he points out that he succeeded at shifting the immigration debate. He fueled the conservative antagonism that killed the Senate bill in the House. “I’d suggest that we have now more objectively characterized Dreamers,” he snarks, “and [Durbin] hasn’t yet said thank you.”
Brent Siegrist, former Republican Iowa House Speaker who served with King in the legislature, is familiar with these tactics. “I’ll say this about Steve: Most of his controversial comments are the kind that you might say are off the cuff. They’re not. He’s a bright guy,” he says. “He knows what he’s doing when he’s stirring the pot. And he likes that.”…
Sorry for the lack of posts- Homecoming is this weekend and it is the 25 year one for a bunch of my brothers, so we have been racing around cleaning, cooking, and making sure there are ample places to crash. Figure I have room for about ten people, and then my friend Walt is taking couples in at his house.
Don’t forget, your chance to win Omaha Steaks is dwindling. Each ticket purchased goes to help defray the costs of insurance and mandated nationals travel. The drawing is less than 48 hours away!
I’ll check in tomorrow. GO PENGUINS!
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Chris Cillizza, horse-race tout, is deeply impressed that “Leon Panetta boiled down Democrats’ criticism of Barack Obama to one sentence“:
… Panetta told [Andrea] Mitchell about his disagreement with Obama’s approach to politics. “Too often in my view the President relies on the logic of the law professor rather than the passion of a leader,” said Panetta….
Peter Baker, in the NYTimes, is quick to remind us that Both Sides!…:
Leon E. Panetta’s new memoir was out, and the president was livid. The president, it asserted, was “blind” to major problems and presided over a White House with a “lack of principles.” The president told aides the book was a “case study on how to screw the White House.”
The year was 1971, the president was Richard M. Nixon and the author, Mr. Panetta, had written his original memoir after serving as Nixon’s civil rights chief.
So if President Obama feels a little raw about Mr. Panetta’s latest memoir, “Worthy Fights,” published Tuesday amid a flurry of news media appearances, at least he has some company…
Well, this is just hilariously appropriate. Conservatives recently released the above ad to show that Republicans come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and interests and colors. Only problem is that all the people they used in the ads aren’t actual Republicans but stock photos. So apparently there actually aren’t any black women, white fellas who read the Times, tattooed gentleman, or Prius drivers in the whole of the GOP.
Well, at least you have Ben Carson.
Team Blackness also discussed a man carrying his firearm who was robbed at gunpoint, a New York appeals court that wants personhood for chimps, and a North Carolina black teen who was pepper sprayed by cops in the home of his white foster family because they thought he was a burglar.
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Bob Town: 83% of people in MSAs are in concentrated hospital markets (HHI above 2500) and that’s increasing. FTC oversight up. #HealthReform
— Janet Weiner (@weinerja) October 9, 2014
The HHI index for non-wonks is the sum of the squares of marketshare of the top 50 providers in a given market multiplied by 10,000. This is a more sophisticated measure of market power than just counting the number of providers as the same number of providers can lead to very different outcomes in pricing as the example below shows:
| Concentrated | Marketshare | HHI Value | Dispersed | Marketshare | HHI Value | |
| A | 90% | 8100 | A | 20% | 400 | |
| B | 2% | 4 | B | 25% | 625 | |
| C | 3% | 9 | C | 15% | 225 | |
| D | 3% | 9 | D | 27% | 729 | |
| E | 2% | 4 | E | 13% | 169 | |
| Total | 100% | 8126 | 100% | 2148 |
The dispersed market with five providers where the biggest provider has no more than 27% of the market is a reasonably competitive market where Econ 101 logic can come into play to a certain extent. The concentrated market where a single dominant provider controls 90% of the market means almost all of the surplus value that could be present in a truly competitive market is captured by monopolistic profits as well as management capture for better hookers and more blow.
My mental model of health care finance is heavily reliant on market power in two seperate markets; payers (insurers) and providers.
If the ratio of ratios is close to one, the providers and payers are evenly matched. If the ratio is significantly above one, providers have a market power advantage as the largest provider groups control a significant chunk of sub-markets that the payers need access to. If the ratio is significantly below one, the payers have market power. They can pressure providers to take low rates.
The above is a simple first step to understanding how prices are negotiated. The second step is an extension of the case where both providers and payers are evenly matched. There are two scenarios where payers and providers are evenly matched.
The first scenario is when the payers and provider are both highly concentrated. This means there is a dominant payer and a dominant provider. The policy impact is that these two groups will butt heads and usually find ways to grab almost all of the potential consumer surplus because individuals buying insurance and groups buying insurance have no other good options and the insurance company has no other option but to contract with the dominant provider group.
The other scenario is that the providers and payers are matched but both are fairly fragmented. In this case, the basic econ 101 analysis actually is useful. Everyone has options and everyone has the ability to shop around for a better deal, so prices are fairly low for both insurance and actual reimbursed medical services.
Obamacare/PPACA is mostly an insurance expansion piece with some provider reform. The insurance expansion piece has several major components that are relevant. The first is that more people can now afford insurance, and insurance has to be offered to everyone. Secondly, the cost of entering the individual insurance market for a carrier has been lowered as the markets are far more predictable now and there is a shared language and platform to seel based on price, network and customer service quality. This is a big deal. And it has led to more insurers on the Exchanges. Competition there is working.
However healthcare reform instead of just health insurance access reform is incomplete. And this leads to a major problem and reform opportunity for the future.
Well, kinda. This is a long read first thing in the morning, but I figured I’d link it so you can enjoy it when you get a minute. Professor Krugman, for Rolling Stone, “In Defense of Obama“:
When it comes to Barack Obama, I’ve always been out of sync. Back in 2008, when many liberals were wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy and his press was strongly favorable, I was skeptical. I worried that he was naive, that his talk about transcending the political divide was a dangerous illusion given the unyielding extremism of the modern American right. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that, far from being the transformational figure his supporters imagined, he was rather conventional-minded: Even before taking office, he showed signs of paying far too much attention to what some of us would later take to calling Very Serious People, people who regarded cutting budget deficits and a willingness to slash Social Security as the very essence of political virtue.
And I wasn’t wrong. Obama was indeed naive: He faced scorched-earth Republican opposition from Day One, and it took him years to start dealing with that opposition realistically. Furthermore, he came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain; we were saved from significant cuts to Social Security and a rise in the Medicare age only by Republican greed, the GOP’s unwillingness to make even token concessions.
But now the shoe is on the other foot: Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn’t deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it’s working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it’s much more effective than you’d think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy…
Yes, Obama has a low approval rating compared with earlier presidents. But there are a number of reasons to believe that presidential approval doesn’t mean the same thing that it used to: There is much more party-sorting (in which Republicans never, ever have a good word for a Democratic president, and vice versa), the public is negative on politicians in general, and so on. Obviously the midterm election hasn’t happened yet, but in a year when Republicans have a huge structural advantage – Democrats are defending a disproportionate number of Senate seats in deep-red states – most analyses suggest that control of the Senate is in doubt, with Democrats doing considerably better than they were supposed to. This isn’t what you’d expect to see if a failing president were dragging his party down.
More important, however, polls – or even elections – are not the measure of a president. High office shouldn’t be about putting points on the electoral scoreboard, it should be about changing the country for the better. Has Obama done that? Do his achievements look likely to endure? The answer to both questions is yes…
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Apart from keeping the faith, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Krugman Recants!Post + Comments (244)