From Spring to Winter
I left Atlanta on a beautiful spring-ish day – I almost considered driving to the airport with the top down – and arrive in a very cold Chicago. I’m only here for two days, so there’s not really time to so anything. Also, I don’t have a rental car.
Our client, in an attempt to save money, is having me take the hotel shuttle. Only problem? They don’t go to O’Hare. It’s a $29 fixed cab ride to get me to the hotel and probably a bit more to get me back to the airport when I’m finished.
I practically could have gotten a car for that. It seems like the least they could do for having me stay in a hotel that’s 20 minutes from their site.
Ugh.
Thursday night I head to Ann Arbor for a one-day. I’ll be back in Atlanta late on Friday with about enough time to wash my laundry before heading to Pittsburgh on Sunday.
Testing iPhone Photoblogging
How We Built the Healthcare Reform Bill
Well, first things first, we want to force the insurers to insure everybody. This whole “pre-existing conditions” thing needs to stop. Along with that, we need to ensure that insurers aren’t trying to charge significantly more based on factors like age, sex, race, or medical history. (These two things are in the House and Senate bills.)
Now, because we’re going to force insurers to insure sicker people at a comparable rate to the less-sick, we’re creating a problem: the cost of insurance is likely to go up for the relatively healthy (as they’re paying more to help insure the sick.) The problem is that the relatively healthy could decide to stop buying insurance… which would cause the price to rise even more… leading the relatively healthy-ish to leave… and so on. This is called the “health insurance death spiral.” We need to ensure the healthy people stay in the system, so we need an individual mandate. We need to require people to buy insurance. (It’s in both the bills).
Now that we’ve required folks to buy insurance, we’ve caused another problem: some folks might not be able to afford it. So we’re going to have to subsidize insurance based on income. We can do this a few ways: expanding Medicaid (in both bills) and by providing credits to folks who qualify and buy insurance through a health insurance exchange – amazon.com for insurance, basically. This, of course, costs a bunch of money, but we need to do it to make the system work. But, since the president wants this to be deficit-neutral, we need to raise money some other way.
Well, we could make some cuts. Medicare Advantage patients get about 14% more money for coverage than regular Medicare patients. That hardly seems fair. If we reimburse private insurers for the same amount the government pays, we could save tens of billions of dollars every year. It’s not enough, though. (But it is in the current bills.)
We’re also going to have to levy some taxes.
There’s two ways we can tax: we can tax medical benefits or we can tax income. Taxing medical benefits makes sense because the tax grows along with the growth in medical spending. This helps to control costs in the long run. The problem is that folks who sacrificed wages for benefits (primarily union members) are hit unfairly hard by this tax. (This tax is what the Senate is doing – the excise tax.) We could also just tax high-earners, say folks making more that $500,000/year. (This is what the House is doing.) The problem is that it won’t do anything to control cost growth in the health care system… but at least it won’t hit middle-class workers.
This is how we got all the major pieces of the bills in the House and Senate.
Football is Great.
Kiefer Sutherland In a Dress
$300 gas bill? Yikes.
Apparently my new house could use some energy efficiency improvements. It’s not like I’m cranking the heat: I’ve got it at 67, which I believe to be a very reasonable temperature for winter in the south.
I bought some insulating stuff, but I didn’t get very far. Of course, it’s warming up a bit now… but I suppose we’ll get that February freeze again this year.
Oh, not to mention my 15+-year old water heater and God-only-knows-how-old furnace. Too many things to replace. Ugh.
The magic powers of the word ‘tax’
From the article:
Test subjects were broken up into two groups, and each group was allowed to pick between pricier and cheaper versions of various items like airline tickets. Group A was told that the more expensive items included the price of a “carbon tax,” whose proceeds would go toward clean-energy development. Group B was told that the costlier items included the price of a “carbon offset,” whose proceeds would go toward clean-energy development. Exact same policy, just different names for each.
You can guess what happened next. In the “offset” group, Democrats, Republicans, and independents all flocked toward the pricier item. They were perfectly happy to pay an extra surcharge to fund CO2 reduction — even Republicans gushed about the benefits of doing so. Not only that, but most of the group supported making the surcharge mandatory. In the “tax” group, however, Democrats were the only ones willing to pay for the costlier item. Republicans in this group were much more inclined to grumble about how much more expensive the tax made things. Labels really do matter.
Read more: Ezra Klein – The magic powers of the word ‘tax’.
This is, of course, the whole idea behind climate change deniers using the phrase “cap and tax,” which isn’t entirely truthful about describing the pending legislation. It’s a pretty obvious study, and I’m surprised this is the first time it’s been done.
Ezra Klein – America spends way, way, way more on health care
timmyf.com… now with Facebook Connect
Elderly Walmart greeter fired after customer punches him
Elderly Walmart greeter fired after customer punches him.
This is pretty amazing. The video:
