I have no idea about the veracity of the claims made here about the Ten Commandments. But it sounds right to me, based on my reading of biblical commentary. A fascinating story.
DC School Choice
What’s this? Both the WaPo and the Chicago Tribune are blasting the Democrats for trying to quietly kill the DC school voucher program.
My thoughts are here. I think it’s disgraceful that the Democrats are scuttling one of the few bright spots in the DC school system to cater to Big Education. So much for standing up to special interests.
Tuesday Linkorama
Yawn.
As for flood control, the TVA has flooded an estimated 730,000 acres—more land than the entire state of Rhode Island. Most directly affected by TVA flooding were the thousands of people forced out of their homes. And while farm owners received cash settlements for their condemned property, black tenant farmers received nothing.
The TVA is $26 billion in debt, despite not having to pay taxes. Ralph Nader, noted right wing fascist, has condemned it as one of the worst polluters in the nation. Oh, and it slowed economic growth.
Seriously. Read the whole thing.
Quote of the Day
Found while perusing Cracked’s archives:
And as any scientist can tell you, when confronted with two possible theories, the scientific method dictates that we must go with the one that is awesome.
Yes.
Nerd Girls
Are hot. Don’t take my word for it. A great little video, tipped to me by the wonderful Orac. Always listen to a man who takes his internet nom de plume from the world’s greatest unknown sci-fi show.
(Those of you reading from England and Australia can watch said show on DVD. Those of us in America are screwed unless we buy a region-free DVD player.)
I was often drawn to nerdy girls when I was single. Granted, I can always appreciate the draw of the more superficial aspects of the female of our species. But more often than not it was the girl with glasses, a cute smile and a higher SAT score than mine.
Of course, going to college at a small liberal arts college and doing the grad school thing somewhat restricted the subset of women to which I was exposed. I actually wrote an equation about it.
It’s Not the Faith, It’s the Collectivism
Ed Yong with something close to my heart.
Together, these four studies – three survey analyses and one experiment – contradict the idea that religious belief and devotion in themselves are the driving force behind the suicide bombing mindset. Nor is this mindset exclusive to Islam, as the third and fourth experiments show. Instead, it seems that the link between religion and suicide attacks is more to do with collective rituals. Ginges’s theory is that these rituals strengthen an individual’s loyalty to a community, but risk hardening their hearts against outsiders. That’s certainly a reasonable interpretation but it’s worth noting that religious services are complicated affairs, which have many sides to them besides group behaviour. People who worship en masse may get very different perspectives on their faiths that those who pray alone don’t, and this study doesn’t really take that into account.
What I’d be interested in seeing — and I suspect it would be borne out — is if the suicidal mindset also exists among those in collectivist secular societies. Communism and fascism had plenty of people willing to kill or die on its behalf. And race has been as powerful a motivator for bloodshed as religion, if not more so. After all, to go the Godwin route, the Third Reich’s persecution of Jews was far more racial than it was religious. Hitler’s writings were far more focused on how the Jews physically repulsed him than on any aspect of the faith.
I have long believed the religion is primarily the excuse for evil behavior, be it wars, genocide, suicide bombing or oppression. Nice to see at least a little bit of support from the sociologists.
No Kids For You
Lileks fisks the latest “don’t have kids” screed from the environmentalists. I never really understood that aspect of the environmental movement — or the radicals who think we should get rid of 5/6 of the human population (themselves exempted, of course).
Healthcare Myths: I. The Cost Shift
This is part of a series of posts I’m writing, partially here and partially at Right-Thinking, busting Left wing myths about healthcare reform.
Before we start, a caveat. I am not a professional policy wonk nor a consumer advocate. Doubtless there are aspects of these issues about which I am, at best, ignorant. I’m coming from the point of view of someone from a family of medical workers who was in medical management for 13 years.
I also come at it as a libertarian who is fundamentally suspicious of grand government plans for running the Universe. I believe that markets will always trump central planning, although I believe we can and should help those who can’t help themselves.
Those are my biases and faults. But I still feel more qualified to talk about this subject than Michael Moore.
I was going to put up a post addressing the “our system stinks” myth. But an announcement today made this subject more urgent.
The Myth: Medicare does a better job than the private sector in controlling healthcare costs. Over the last 35 years, Medicare costs have grown 1-2% more slowly than private care costs.
Bad Policy Based On The Myth: Barack Obama wants to expand Medicare coverage to millions more Americans, including making it optional for anyone over 55 (which means, in the contest between private and “free” health insurance, it will be effectively mandatory). Obama is further proposing a “down payment” on health care reform financed by reducing provider fees that Medicare provides.
The Reality: It’s notable that no one who promulgates this myth can tell you precisely how Medicare controls costs. It’s not managed care and it’s not cost-benefit analysis. So what is it?
First off, the very idea that the government is better than the private sector at controlling costs should fail the smell test. In addition to the known and demonstrated inefficiency of government, there’s the demographic reality. Medicare covers the old and the disabled, who incur a huge fraction of medical care costs and are the most rapidly growing demographic in the nation. It would make little sense for those costs to be rising more slowly than the general population.
So how do I explain the above figures?
Imagine, if you will, that Obama gave a speech on the spiraling cost of education (federal spending doubled in the last Administration and the stimulus doubles it again). But, he claims, he has a solution. We will freeze teacher salaries … for the next 30 years.
You can imagine the uproar. And you can imagine the effect. All the good people would leave teaching and, eventually, your math teacher would be the guy who couldn’t get a job at 7/11.
But this precisely what Medicare has done. They have essentially frozen provider fees. The fee schedule has been frozen, slashed and reconfigured so dramatically that many procedures pay no more than they did a generation ago. In essence, every time a doctor or hospital treats a Medicare patient, they lose money.
Providers have only been able to make ends meet by (1) increasing volume; i.e. providing more healthcare than strictly necessary; (2) cost-shifting; i.e, charging non-Medicare patients more (which is why private insurance spending outpaces Medicare); (3) gaming the system.
The last is particularly noteworthy. By discharging patients before they are fully healed, then re-admitting them for later procedures, doctors and hospitals can make up the revenue loss. Obama’s proposal is supposed to crack down on this practice. But providers wouldn’t be engaging in the practice in the first place if they didn’t have to. Contrary to popular belief, health care providers are not, generally speaking, unethical.
Concrete example? Breast cancer. It is possible, in this country and this country alone, to biopsy a lump in a woman’s breast, have it evaluated the lab and, if necessary, do a mastectomy in one surgical setting. For years, Medicare refused to pay for the biopsy, arguing that since you removed the entire breast, they shouldn’t pay you for removing a small part of it. This encouraged doctors to do the biopsy, send the patient home and then later do the mastectomy, with concordant increased risk to the patient. I fought a battle against Medicare for years on this subject. They changed it after I left medical management.
If (and it’s a big if) Medicare closes off the system gaming, that will leave volume. But providers are near their limit and Congress restricts volume.
So that leaves us with cost-shifting. Doctors simply raise the fees on non-Medicare patients to keep their practices going. So if it costs $100 to do a procedure and Medicare only reimburse $75, you bill your non-Medicare patients $125.
This is Medicare as a pyramid scheme — even beyond the payroll tax pyramid. Providers raise medical fees on young people so the government can finance the care of old people.
But like all pyramid schemes, it collapses if you run out of suckers. And the current proposals dramatically increase the pressure on the sucker pool. Every patient going into the Medicare system increases the costs of those not in the system.
And of course, if, as many Democrats want, we shift the entire population to something like Medicare, there’s no one left to cost-shift to. All the options for making up Medicare fees are lost. Doctors will make dramatically less money and, pretty soon, your doctor will be, at best, a medical student hoping to get his education in the United States before practing somewhere — like wherever our politicans get their care — that pays a decent wage.
Medicare is not the model we want to build a healthcare system on. I can outline numerous problems but this is the biggest and the most relevant. The proposals to expand Medicare — and shrink payments to providers — are merely going to hasten the toppling of the pyramid.
And we’re all in the shadow of this one.
Crime As Art
Buybacks
One of the stupidest ideas to emerge in the public mind is the idea of gun buybacks. NYC is happily announcing the collection of 919 guns at a price of $200 per gun.
To put this in perspective:
There are some 250 million guns in this country, according to most estimates.
According to the Department of Justice, about half a million gun crimes are committed each year. Assuming no gun is used twice, that means about one in 500 guns will be used to commit a crime. NYC’s buyback has therefore prevented, perhaps, two crimes at a cost of $159,000. If, instead, they had hired a couple of cops, they might have prevented more than two crimes.
The CDC estimates about 90,000 people are injured or killed by guns. So NYC’s buyback would prevent deaths at a rate of half a million dollars per life. If half a million dollars were used to train and hire emergency room physicians, they could prevent a lot more than one injury or death.
Of course, only about a third of those casualties are fatal. And half of those are suicides. So NYC’s buyback may have prevent 1/20th of a murder at a cost of $3 million per life. You can see where this is going.
Now I’ll grant you that my simplistic analysis uses national averages and guns are more dangerous in cities. But you’ll have to grant me that gun buybacks produce an incentive to steal guns and a method to dump guns used in the commission of crimes.
No matter how you slice it, gun buybacks are a waste of time and money. But they do make officials feel better about themselves. That’s the point, I guess.
Fisking the NSOTU
I didn’t watch it last night. This was partially because my daughter decided that last night’s dinner would look better, in semi-digested form, on the bedroom floor. But the other reason I skipped it was because my tolerance for Presidential addresses to Congress is at a low ebb.
These speeches are boring the crap out of me, no matter how skilled or unskilled the speaker may be. There are too many “killer” lines; too much standing and applauding. I tried flipping over a few times last night and every single time, Congress was applauding. Seriously, we could shorten these speeches to 90 seconds if Congress sat on their hands.
I don’t have time for a full fisking or a coherent response. But I thought I’d put up a few random thoughts as I read through the thing.
Facbook Baaad
Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users, an eminent scientist has warned.
Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centred.
The claims from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield will make disturbing reading for the millions whose social lives depend on logging on to their favourite websites each day.
Is there any evidence supporting this conjecture? Nope. What is it with people? Do we have to freak out over every technology that comes down the pipe?
Steel
All together now. Awwwww.
Monday Linkorama
An essential characteristic is the possession of a reasonable amount of discretionary income. Middle-class people do not live from hand to mouth, job to job, season to season, as the poor do. Diana Farrell, who is now a member of America’s National Economic Council but until recently worked for McKinsey, a consultancy that has spent a lot of time studying the middle classes, reckons they begin at roughly the point where people have a third of their income left for discretionary spending after providing for basic food and shelter. This allows them not just to buy things like fridges or cars but to improve their health care or plan for their children’s education.
In the last depression, most of the world was dirt poor. The west was on its own. But it may just be that the rising tides in Indian, China and South America keep us afloat.
I hope.