Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Second rate reporter says what?

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

No one could have predicted…

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

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

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Bark louder, little dog.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Infrastructure week. at last.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

He really is that stupid.

This Is Who They Are – Wisconsin Extremists on the Ballot on April 4 (Open Thread)

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We have talked about the two most important races coming up in the Spring Elections in Wisconsin on April 4.

The Republicans on the ballot are extremists. The Republican extremist who is running for State Senate (SD-8) suggests that he will impeach Judge Janet Protasiewicz if she wins the state-wide race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

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In Wisconsin, please vote for:  Judge Janet Protasiewicz (state-wide race) and Jodi Habush Sinykin (SD-8).

Vote against these Wisconsin extremists:   Dan Kelly (state-wide) and Dan Knodl (SD-8)

Former Attorney General Eric Holder calls this the most important election of 2023.

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Supreme Court Race:  Electing Janet Protasiewicz would shift the balance of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from Republican to Democrat.

I don’t have to tell you all the great things that could potentially move in the right direction – and all the horrible things that could potentially be stopped – if Judge Janet Protasiewicz is elected on April 4.

State Senate Race (SD-8): Electing Jodi Habush Sinykin will keep Senate Republicans from the 2/3 majority that allow them to remove state officials who are impeached by the State Assembly.

Wisconsin Republicans are defending a two-thirds majority in the state Senate that they achieved in November but quickly lost after the retirement of longtime GOP state Sen. Alberta Darling of River Hills. If Knodl replaces Darling, Senate Republicans will have enough members to be able to remove state officials who are impeached by the state Assembly.

But wait, it’s worse than that!

The republican running against Jodi Habush Sinykin says that if he wins – which would mean that Senate Republicans would have the 2/3 majority – he will consider impeaching Judge Janet Protasiewicz if she is elected on April 4.

And here he is, the day after another school shooting.

MADISON – Republican state Senate candidate Dan Knodl says if his election gives Senate Republicans a two-thirds majority, he would “certainly consider” support launching impeachment proceedings against Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz.

Wisconsin Republicans are defending a two-thirds majority in the state Senate that they achieved in November but quickly lost after the retirement of longtime GOP state Sen. Alberta Darling of River Hills. If Knodl replaces Darling, Senate Republicans will have enough members to be able to remove state officials who are impeached by the state Assembly.

The Wisconsin Constitution allows lawmakers to remove state officials “for corrupt conduct in office, or for crimes and misdemeanors,” but Knodl said Sunday he would consider launching impeachment proceedings for criminal justice officials “who have failed” at their jobs.

Republican state Rep. Dan Knodl of Germantown and Democrat Jodi Habush Sinykin of Whitefish Bay will square off in an April 4 special election for the 8th Senate District.

In an appearance on WISN-TV’s political talk show “UpFront,” Knodl said the “Milwaukee County justice system is failing” and said he believes its prosecutors and circuit court judges “need to be looked at” including Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and Protasiewicz.

“She has failed,” Knodl said. When asked directly if he would support impeaching Protasiewicz, Knodl said “I certainly would consider it.”

Knodl did not immediately say whether his comments meant he would consider voting in favor of impeaching Protasiewicz if she is elected to the state Supreme Court on Tuesday.

I think it’s fair to say at this point that all Republicans are authoritarians now.  Whether they are active authoritarians or just supporting those who are, the Republican party has become the party of authoritarians.  Appalling.

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Three Eras of the ACA

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Over the past eighteen months, my role as an academic has changed in a few ways beyond going back for my doctorate.

I’ve been teaching a poli-sci heavy health policy class, I’m advising masters students on a variety of projects, and I’ve taken the senior author role on a couple of papers.  The senior author role is more guidance and direction rather than writing and analysis. I’ve been co-authoring as a senior author with several awesome people on a couple of really cool ACA related questions.

One of the questions that every project generates is how to think about time in the ACA individual markets.  How long should we look back for a particular question and is there a reason to exclude the current years or the early years or 2018 or something else?  There are justifications for including everything, including only recent or excluding the recent years for each of these questions.

As part of this conversation and a lot of walks to get coffee where these decisions marinated in my head… there are three basic eras of the ACA individual market analytically speaking with one fuzzy boundary.

Getting Started with Training Wheels: 2014-2016

The ACA individual market was just getting going.  There were substantial temporary supports with federal reinsurance and risk corridors.  Reinsurance paid a substantial chunk of high cost claims for the first three years with non-premium revenues.  Risk Corridors were intended to correct for actuarial oopsies in either direction where insurers that lost a lot of money were expected to get some of that money back and insurers that made a lot of money were expected to pay some of that money to the federal government.  The 2014 CROMNIBUS mandated that the risk corridors were revenue neutral which effectively meant most of the insurers who had big losses were only getting a sliver of what they thought they were entitled to until they sued and won in the Supreme Court several years later.

During this time period, there were a ton of new insurers, including the Co-Ops, and a lot of insurers jumping into a market that they did not understand well.  Lots of insurers lost a lot of money very quickly from either trying to undercut the market and buy marketshare with the expectations that the enrollees would be sticky over the long run as the risk corridors would pay most of the marketing budget and loss leader pricing.  Conversely, some insurers were just wrong about the market and the winner take all subsidy linked pricing system creamed them.

Politically, there was massive resistance to the ACA.  The law was going to court every week it seemed.  States either quickly expanded Medicaid, mostly liberal states, or dragging their feet.

Wobbly riding without outside assistance: 2017

2017 was a transition year.  All of the temporary supports stopped.  Lots of insurers had left the market either because they had been forced out by state regulators who were freaking out about capital and liquidity concerns (most of the co-ops) or because they were losing too much money.  There were concerns for “bare counties” in summer 2016 (really going to be a big thing in July 2017).  Prices had skyrocketed to cover both the loss of supports such as reinsurance and to accurately price for higher risk.  These decisions were made in the summer of 2016.

Firehose of federal subsidy spending: 2018-present

The biggest common thread from 2018 to present is that the premium subsidies got double buffed.  The first substantial increase is “Silverloading” which started in October 2017 when the Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) subsidies were no longer directly paid by the federal government to insurers.  Insurers instead put the expected incremental cost of these mandated benefits into only the silver premiums.  This jacked up the benchmark premium which set subsidies which made the non-silver premiums way cheaper for subsidized buyers.  At the same time, states were starting to file for reinsurance waivers which indirectly subsidized upper income individuals who were facing full price of premiums in the individual market.

These subsidies are odd and inefficient and dumb but they benefit from the political value of inertia.  There primary value is for people who don’t buy silver plans.

In 2021, the passage of the American Rescue plan had an across the board subsidy boost that was not restricted by metal level and it removed the income cap for subsidy eligibility.  Affordability for subsidized individuals is much better today than it was in 2017.  More upper income Americans receive a subsidy that kicks in once they spend more then 8.5% of their income on health insurance so we won’t see stories of a family earning low six figures spending $45,000 a year on insurance.  Instead they might spend $10,000 or $15,000 on insurance.

One can always caveat out that 2018 was fundamentally weird and should be its own era or merged with 2017.  It is fundamentally weird because there was incredible political and policy uncertainty.  No one knew if the ACA market would exist in the long run due to repeal and replace.  No one knew what was going to happen with CSR payments.  Insurers either ran like hell or jacked up their rates.  Structurally, I think the actual experience of 2018 aligns nicely with the increased subsidy era, but I can understand an argument that when the decisions were being made for plan offerings in 2017, no one was sure what the hell was going on.

This is how I’m thinking about the ACA individual market in my emerging role as a senior author.

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Squishable Morning Thread: Free Speech

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Greg Sargent at The Post wrote a column (gift link) about a new bill moving through the Florida statehouse that will supercharge the conservative book-banning spree. As we discussed yesterday, some school district officials (in Pinellas County, for example) are in a defensive crouch and snatch books off school shelves if even a single kook complains. Other district officials take their jobs as educators more seriously and follow a process, leaving books in place until reviews are complete.

As Sargent notes, the bill in question is getting a lot of attention for extending the application of the anti-LGBTQ “don’t say gay” restrictions through 12th grade, but it would also mandate a Pinellas County-style defensive crouch for complaints about books. It would empower random anti-book vigilantes to effect a book’s immediate removal with a complaint and require a review before a title can return to the shelves.

If the new bill passes, it would become statewide policy that this book (Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye) — or others with similarly peripheral “sexual conduct” — must be banned from a given district’s schools immediately upon the objection of one resident of that county, says Kara Gross, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

“It grants enormous power to a single bigoted individual to dictate and control what books other parents’ kids have access to,” Gross told me.

This, in turn, could make it easier for bad-faith actors to nix books while avoiding a process in which baseless objections might initially get dismissed. As (political scientist Jeffrey) Sachs put it, “the automatic removal provision will be abused and lead to widespread censorship.”

Feature, bug, etc.

Here’s my question as a non-lawyer: Is there anything the Department of Justice can do about Florida’s worsening censorship problem? The issue isn’t confined to K-12 schools and minors’ access to books. Government censors are abridging free speech for private businesses and muzzling professors and college students too.

I’m aware of lawsuits in some of these cases, but it seems like at some point, it would be appropriate for the federal government to step in and protect Floridians’ rights as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. I’m not sure where that line is.

Sargent thinks that if this bill becomes law, it may hurt DeSantis with suburban voters when more randos cause popular titles to be banned and attract backlash. That happened in Martin County when the GOP operatives at Moms for Liberty Censorship got novels by Jodi Picoult removed from high school libraries. Picoult is fighting back, and good for her. But we need help now.

Apologies for being a Debbie Downer so early in the day; please feel free to discuss anything!

Open thread.

PS: This 100-year-old lady who addressed a Martin County schoolboard meeting is awesome! And a quilter!

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: March 29, 2023

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(Boston)

We’ve reached the stage where the big tsunami wave has rolled back, and we’re picking through the rubble looking for survivors and whatever we can scavange. Excellent summary of our current moment:

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On The Road – BillinGlendaleCA – The Winter Sky

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BillinGlendaleCA

As the Milky Way core set into the western horizon here in the northern hemisphere, many landscape astrophotographers hang up their tripods and trackers to await it’s return in March when it is well above the horizon.  I am not one of these photographers, love the “off season”.  There is much to see in the Winter Sky: Orion, the Rosette Nebula and much more.

In late November I purchased at new camera, a Sony A7iv which is a full frame camera(it’s sensor is the same size as a 35mm negative).  The larger sensor enables the collection of much more light than my Samsung’s cropped sensor.

In the last three months, I’ve undertaken a few of my night drives out to some of my favorite dark sites to get some shots.  My work schedule and the weather has prevented me from making more trips than I’d like, but I think I’ve got some pretty good shots.  Though I have a lot of experience with shooting the night sky, in some ways working with the Sony has been like starting anew.

On The Road - BillinGlendaleCA - The Winter Sky 8
Kearsarge, CADecember 19, 2022

Kearsarge is an old station along the railroad that ran though the Owens Valley in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They have a small section of track, a railroad crossing sign and station sign to memorialize the long gone station.  I shot the Milky Way core here about a year and a half ago and thought this would be a good location for some star trails.  The sky was clear of clouds and there was no wind, however it was quite cold(14℉ when I left).  I shot 3 minute segments for about 2 hours, and planned to light paint the foreground once the star trails were finished.  Just before the last few 3 minute exposures were complete, I noticed a bright light to the north that became brighter and brighter.  It was a guy in a truck driving down the old railbed.  As he passed, he stopped and asked if anything was wrong, I told him that I was taking some picture and he drove on.  His timing was quite fortunate in that I was close to completing my shots.  I had to toss the last 3 minute sub since the headlights were producing a lot of glare in the shot, but I decided to incorporate his headlights into the star trails, giving the effect of a train coming down the tracks.  After he left I took a four minute base shot and a few light painting shots of the foreground.

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Late Night Open Thread: Murphy’s Discourse

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War for Ukraine Day 398: Ukrainian Air Defense!

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The Russians are continuing their aerial bombardment campaign of terror against Ukraine. Last night they attacked with 15 Iranian Shaheed drones:

That’s an impressive kill rate, but all it takes is one getting through.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump:

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