Heritage on Health Care

Understanding the Uninsured Numbers

Moffit told the Des Moines Register: “The number of people who are persistently or chronically uninsured is relatively small.”

Moffit said many people lose insurance temporarily while they change jobs, but quickly regain it. That pattern has increased over time, as people began switching employers more frequently, he said.

The solution to this issue is to make the health insurance market more stable by changing tax laws to encourage Americans to buy their own insurance. Moffit explains in MedCity News:

Let’s tie health insurance to the person rather than the job … Rather than push for a nationalized health system or even a public health insurance plan that could crowd out the private insurance market, Americans should have the opportunity to own and control their health insurance.

Qua? Via the Famlies USA March Report

One in Three Uninsured: 2007-2008

• 86.7 million people under the age of 65 went without health insurance for some or all of the two-year period from 2007 to 2008.
• One out of three people (33.1 percent) under the age of 65 were uninsured for some or all of 2007-2008.

Number of Months Uninsured

• Of the 86.7 million uninsured individuals, three in five (60.2 percent) were uninsured for nine months or more. Nearly three-quarters (74.5 percent) were uninsured for six months or more.
• Among all people under the age of 65 who were uninsured in 2007-2008, one quarter (25.3 percent) were uninsured for the full 24 months during 2007-2008; 19.5 percent were uninsured for 13 to 23 months; 15.4 percent were uninsured for nine to 12 months; 14.3 percent were uninsured for six to eight months; and 20.1 percent were uninsured for three to five months. Only 5.4 percent were uninsured for two months or less.

Nine months or more is persistent enough...

Plus, here's a question.  Doesn't one want to

a) cover as many people as one can

yet at the same time

b) do it for as cheap as possible

Why would I want to spend more money buying insurance on the open market for individuals, when I can group together with others to get a cheaper deal, with better coverage, and more bells and whistles?

How does one own and control ones own health insurance?  If I buy from a private insurance company... someone is making cost cutting decisions that impact me.  I don't get a direct line to the CEO. 

What does it mean to control ones own health insurance, seriously... I'm wondering what that would look like, and can anyone show me a real life example of that?

I get it, Heritage supports spending lots of our nations wealth in the health care sector... but why do the rest of us care about proping up the health care industry?

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

Reaction mixed on airport gun ruling

Reaction mixed on airport gun ruling:

"Bearden has introduced a sweeping gun proposal, House Bill 615, that he expects could come to a vote for next year's legislative session. The measure, among other things, would ban the seizure of firearms during official states of emergency. But Bearden said it could eventually specifically allow firearms in parts of the airport.

'We're looking at all our options at this time,' said Bearden."

Aside from a very small group of rightwing folks I know and/or read online nobody cares about bringing their gun to the airport. Then again, they don't own guns... if they do... they are hunting guns... not ones you shove down your pants so that your woman knows you can defend her from a band of chineses tourist gone amuck.

This is a very small group of folks... they just all live in GA? Okay not really its quite large and seems to say something more about the insecurity and lack of meaning in peoples lives. When you feel powerless you grab onto anything that will give you power.(And so it is true with bloggers and their words... no?)

Thats not dangerous per say. It just seems sad that so many have such a fixation/fear. Or maybe i'm the sad one because I lack it? What do I know...

Brad Delong nails it....

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Appeal to "Undecidability" as Last Gasp

Friedman's argument against social democracy was that it would not do the job--that you would lose a lot of economic efficiency and some political liberty and in return get no equalization of economic power because the government would redistribute income and wealth the wrong way, and the beneficiaries would be the strong political claimants to governmental largess who would not be those with strong claims to more opportunity.

By the time you have resorted to arguing that "human existence in the shadow of a nanny state doesn't conduce to 'Aristotelian happiness'... because it strips human beings of the deeper sorts of agency and responsibility that ought to be involved in a life well lived..." you have lost the argument completely. And I have not even raised the point that Aristotle thought that Aristotelian happiness was possible only if you yourself owned lots of slaves:

Aristotle:

There is in some cases a marked distinction between the two classes, rendering it expedient and right for the one to be slaves and the others to be masters.... The master is not called a master because he has science, but because he is of a certain character.... [T]here may be a science for the master and science for the slave. The science of the slave would be such as the man of Syracuse taught who made money by instructing slaves in their ordinary duties.... But all such branches of knowledge are servile. There is likewise a science of the master... not anything great or wonderful; for the master need only know how to order that which the slave must know how to execute. Hence those who are in a position which places them above toil have stewars who attend to their households while they occupy themselves with philosophy or with politics...

Ah shucks, democracy shemockracy...

District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2009 - Vote Passed (61-37, 1 Not Voting)

Ah yes, the citizens of D.C. want to be able to, you know, represent(yo!). And my Senators vote no.

Just a shout out to Chambliss and Isackson--I'm sure you had great reasons to vote against people having a voice in their government. Just not sure what those reasons might be.

new movie... on torture

Libertarianism

Modern Liberalism and Libertarianism: An Economist's View
By Brad DeLong

Let me give you what I take to be an American card-carrying modern liberal economist’s take on classical liberalism--which I think is broadly an updated version of Adam Smith's take. It is, in short, that modern liberal economists are wanderers who have been expelled from the garden of classical liberalism by the angel of history and reality with his flaming sword...

It starts with an observation that we are all somewhat more interdependent than classical liberalism allows. It is not completely true that it is from the self-interest and not the benevolence of the butcher that we expect our meat. Self-interest, yes, but benevolence too: a truly self-interested butcher would not trade you his meat for your money but instead slaughter you and sell you as long pig. So this opens up a gap between the libertarian view and the world.

That said, and modulus this basic human--well, call it "sympathy" as Adam Smith did--modern liberal economists were very happy for a long time with classical liberalism. Yes, there were externalities, and increasing returns over a range, and market power--but the presumption was that market failures were tolerable and in a sense optimal because of the magnitudes of government failures that would attend any attempt to compensate for them. The near-consensus of economists was at least crypto-classical liberalism, along the lines of Colbert's exchange with Legendre in the reign of Louis XIV:

"What do you need to help you?" asked Colbert. "Leave us alone" answered Legendre. ("Que faut-il faire pour vous aider?" asked Colbert. "Nous laisser faire" answered Legendre).

Then starting in the late nineteenth century liberal economists were mugged by reality:

--on issues of income distribution--the Gilded Age--and how laissez-faire did not appear to be producing the reasonable distribution of the fruits of the social division of labor that economists had all expected...

--on issues of macroeconomic stability--the Great Depression was a big shock--and the argument that the Great Depression arose because markets were not free enough never acquired legs or force outside the theological...

--on issues of the persistence of "unfree" labor--Adam Smith expected the imminent collapse of slavery, but ending slavery took a war, and the market economy in America did not appear to be doing very much at all to undermine Jim Crow...
last and most recently, the fear of the increasing importance of "market failure"--the coming of the "information economy"--caused economists to worry that we were moving from a Smithian to a Schumpeterian world, and even if the presumption of laissez faire works for a Smithian world it is not at all clear that it works for a Schumpeterian world...

The upshot is what Keynes said eighty-four years ago:

It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities. There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately. We cannot therefore settle on abstract grounds, but must handle on its merits in detail what Burke termed “one of the finest problems in legislation, namely, to determine what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion”...

One way to understand Keynes's General Theory is that Say's Law is false in theory but that we can build the running code for limited, strategic interventions that will make Say's Law roughly true in practice. The modern Ametican liberal economist's view of libertarianism is much the same: libertarianism is false in theory, but it is very much worth figuring out a set of limited, strategic interventions that will make the libertarian promises roughly true in practice.

democracy in action?

Israel bans Arab parties from running in upcoming elections

What is going on...

Jason Pye on the legislative session that just started today.

If you aren't reading his blog you do so at your own peril.

One of my academic interests is the question of where theory and reality merge and Jason's pretty staunch philosophy creates a number of intrigues... and quandary's for me. Plus he's up on his p's and q's of current conservative debate/policy

Also you should check out Georgia Legislative Watch where he is blogging on the session.

Rocker on Liberalism and Democracy...

"Liberalism and Democracy were pre-eminently political concepts, and since most of the original adherents of both did scarcely consider the economic conditions of society, the further development of these conditions could not be practically reconciled with the original principles of Democracy, and still less with those of Liberalism. Democracy with its motto of equality of all citizens before the law, and Liberalism with its right of man over his own person, both were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy. As long as millions of human beings in every country have to sell their labour to a small minority of owners, and sink into the most wretched misery if they can find no buyers, the so-called equality before the law remains merely a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can be no talk of a right over one's own person, for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if one does not want to starve" --Rudolf Rocker "The Ideology of Daily Life"

Libertarianism, Proper Politics and "Property" Proper

The Lesson of Rod Blagojevich: We Need Better Government!

But if government just doesn’t work, limited government just doesn’t work either. So either go ahead and come out as an anarchist or swallow your iconoclastic loathing of “good government” pap and admit that you want better government. I want better government!

Generally, we’re more likely to get relatively good government in a cultural climate that encourages good government. Ridiculing as naive norms of anti-corruption and civic responsibility doesn’t undermine belief in the efficacy of government so much as expose the one who ridicules as a defector in a crucial cooperative game, undermining his reputation as a sincere advocate of the public interest. It is valuable and necessary to point out that certain institutional arrangements are unstable and invite corruption, and should therefore be reformed. But people are more likely to listen to you if they believe you believe reform is possible.

lets hope we don't reach this point...

Israel jails Hamas speaker Dweik

An Israeli military court has sentenced the speaker of the Palestinian parliament to three years in prison for belonging to an illegal organisation.

Although i'm sure some people will tell me i'm wrong and that my opinion should fall under the tag liberty as pathology

Negative vs. Positive liberty

Freedom

Freedom: an Experimental Analysis

Consider the following case:

Tanya lives in a small, newly created country in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the most important issue in the region is the treatment of a disenfranchised minority that lives throughout the country. Tanya truly dislikes the minority and wants to further damage them if she can. While public opinion concerning the minority varies greatly, the government has taken the side of the minority. Consequently, a ban has been placed on any action or public speech that is intended to hurt the disenfranchised minority. In other words, the government has made laws against hurting the minority, but Tanya wishes she could hurt them.

Now ask yourself: 'To what extent do these laws diminish Tanya's freedom?'

Once you have decided on the answer to this question, consider a very similar case with one important difference: Tanya wants to help the disenfranchised minority.

Tanya lives in a small, newly created country in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the most important issue in the region is the treatment of a disenfranchised minority that lives throughout the country. Tanya truly cares about the minority and really wants to help them if she can. While public opinion concerning the minority varies greatly, the government has sided against the minority. Consequently, a ban has been placed on any action or public speech that is intended to help the disenfranchised minority. In other words, the government has made laws against helping the minority, but Tanya wishes she could help them.

Now ask yourself the same question again: 'To what extent do these laws diminish Tanya's freedom?'

During an experiment I conducted in which participants were presented with these two cases, I discovered an very interesting result. Participants thought that Tanya's freedom was much more diminished in the second case than in the first. In other words, subjects thought that people's freedom was much more diminished when they were prevented from doing something morally good than when they were prevented from doing something morally bad. After noticing this interesting result, I conducted two other studies which further confirmed the interesting effect found in the first survey.

Anythoughts... in regard to the Positive and Negative Liberty debate?


"A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him." --George Orwell