Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

Let me file that under fuck it.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

Too little, too late, ftfnyt. fuck all the way off.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Innocent people do not delay justice.

Stand up, dammit!

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

In after Baud. Damn.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

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How To Vamp

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I’ve felt like I was vamping on the piano since before the election, and never more than this week. Vamping is what you do when you’re waiting for the next thing to start. It has other uses too.

Speculation on the lack of “calling” the election ranges from network fear of Trump, through the desire of coastal elites not to allow flyover states like Arizona and Nevada to decide the election, to wanting not to make a mistake on this one.

But I’ve been clear since before the election: It’s Biden and Harris. I just wish the noise would be over.

Open Thread!

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Heads Up On Soonergrunt

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Our own Soonergrunt had some sort of medical event this morning, possibly cardiac, and is in the hospital. According to his twitter feed he is in good hands and they are figuring out what if anything happened, and we’ll no more when he charges his phone and gets his tests done.

Just thought you all would want to know.

Fuck Donald Trump.

UPDATE by Dave

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Because I Am Not A Nice Person Anymore*

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Time for more thread, I think.

In the continuing celebration, here’s a little nugget that is giving me an unreasonable satisfaction.

With Mark Kelly’s victory in the AZ senate race, Martha McSally has a truly distinctive achievement to call her own.

She is a sitting senator who has lost two consecutive election.

Because I Am Not A Nice Person Anymore*

Let us savor.

Open thread.

*It’s not clear that I was ever very nice…but the last 20 years (at least) of the Republican Party have taken their toll.

PS: It is not out of the question that this post was conceived as a vehicle for that image, which so warms the cockles of my embittered heart.

Image:  Paulus Moreelse, The Laughing Philosopher,  before 1639.

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Smorgasbord of Schadenfreude

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From Jonathan Swan at Axios:

Senior White House and Trump campaign officials are complaining bitterly about poor internal communication, blaming colleagues, pondering what jobs they might try to get next year, and lashing out at their new enemy: Fox News.

The state of play: Aides told Axios they’re dreading the prospect of Fox calling Pennsylvania for Joe Biden, which could make the conservative network the first to give Biden 270 electoral votes.

A Trump campaign official said the internal view was that it’s essential to keep the race “optically” alive, and that if Fox were to call it, it would severely harm their efforts to support President Trump’s (false) claims that he’d already won.

Kay is right — it’s outrageous that media outlets are operating under different rules to accommodate the the whiny-ass Trump family. It’s not like they can expect anything resembling gratitude in return from that pack of ravening grift-mavens.

The Trumps are tacky, loud, demanding wannabe mobsters, and power is slipping out of their hands, thank dog. There’s no reason for Fox News or any other outlet to keep kissing their asses.

Trump advisers are also venting at what they describe as a grossly incompetent post-Election Day operation. “I don’t know what the message is,” said one prominent surrogate who regularly appears on cable to defend Trump: “There’s no organization or coordination. If I was to go on TV right now, I wouldn’t know what the [blank] to say.”

A senior administration official said: “When Bush had this issue they tapped arguably the pre-eminent statesman of his generation, James Baker, to spearhead their legal and PR efforts, to great effect. … We rolled out Rudy Giuliani, Corey Lewandowski and Pam Bondi. You can draw your own conclusions.”

What a fitting coda to this absurd nightmare: it ends with a scrum of thuggish clowns.

I don’t know if y’all saw Trump’s insane speech last night. MSNBC cut away, and for the first time ever, I switched channels to continue watching because it was so nuts. Anderson Cooper summed it up:

COOPER: “That is the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, and we see him like an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun…”

It’s going to get worse, of course. And it will be glorious!

Open thread!

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And There It Is

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The Secret Service is on the way to Delaware and it’s all over except for months of Trump whining.

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Choice overload on Healthcare.gov

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The Affordable Care Act’s individual markets are predicated on choice as a means of discipline. Individuals are assumed to be able to sort through complex insurance contracts, networks and estimates of their likely future healthcare needs and choose optimal or near optimal plans. Individual choice, thus aggregated, is supposed to provide a very strong signal to the markets to provide more of a desirable set of characteristics and less of undesirable attributes. It assumes a high degree of rationality.

Yet at the same time, we know that humans do a decent job of faking being rational over a fairly limited choice environment. We are hopped up East African Plains apes whose brains are overclocked. We, as a social animal, have built up tremendously complex social structures to help us make mostly rational choices more often than not, but we are not particularly good at it. We have flaws that are known, predictable and exploitable. We are prone to inertia in choice. We are prone to not being able to effectively evaluate time varying and competing attributes well. We are prone to anchoring. We are prone to latching onto a shiny object. We are also prone to being overloaded.

Insurers in the ACA have very few rules that govern what they need or could offer on any county’s market. If an insurer is an on-exchange insurer, they must offer to everyone at least one silver plan. They also must offer in a rating area at least one gold plan but that offering does not need to apply to everyone in the rating area. Plans are bounded by fairly wide actuarial value bands. Beyond that, there are few restrictions. Insurers are supposed to offer plans that are “meaningfully different” but those differences are defined by regulation to be nearly meaningless. An insurer in a county can offer one plan (a silver)(Holmes County, Ohio 2019) or it can offer forty four plans in Rock County, Wisconsin in 2021.

When there are more insurers in a county, the county is more likely to have more plans on the choice menu.

The Eastern Aleutians in Alaska have 5 on-Exchange choices this year. There is a single insurer offering plans in this market which is offering a below benchmark Gold and dirt cheap Bronze plans but is not aggressively offering a discounted silver plan.

The other extreme is Seminole County,Florida (just northeast of Orlando). Ten insurers offer plans in this county. There are 174 subsidy eligible plans being offered on Healthcare.gov. The least expensive bronze plan is only modestly discounted relative to benchmark and the cheapest gold plan is well over benchmark.

174 plans is a lot of choice to sort through.

Research from the Medicare Advantage space found that choice quality went downhill fairly quickly when there were more than thirty choices on the choice menu. Medicare Advantage has a simpler choice environment as there is less variance in actuarial value while the out of network calculations are easier to make as Medicare has strong caps on OON charges unlike private insurance. The popuations are different but this is suggestive evidence that leads to a hypothesis that choice overload in the ACA marketplaces is plausible and could be significant in the quality of choice that people make.

Below the fold is a Tableau on the number of plans per county over time.

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