Obam-over-it

Flipping through my cell phone, deleting old--very old--text messages, I came across the texts from Election Day last November. Although I was not an Obama supporter at the level of many of my friends, among whom there was a lot of Hoping and Believing and Can-Doing, I was rather proud that the U.S. had pulled it together and voted for a black man with a funny name. The Republicans made it easier, of course, by nominating McGrumpy and the Wasillabilly (so, thanks!).

I knew that Obama was not going to be the second coming of FDR, and that if we were lucky, he would land one-cigar's-width to the left of Clinton and hang out. But--and here's where I was standing in my own puddle of lukewarm hope--I did think that maybe he would be assertive in his leadership. Okay, okay, actually, of course what I wanted was for him to kick the Republicans in the teeth, a la Preznit "I just won 50.9% of the vote? That's a mandate, dammit! Let's invade another country! Whatsay, Dick?" [Cheney: "Sure, George. Here's your little wooden horsey. Giddyap."]

Instead, it's all "We definitely will have universal health care...or maybe that's a little strong...maybe we'll just have a public plan people can pay for themselves, on the market...maybe we'll just give children doctor's visits every other Thursday in November...well, perhaps we can just mail out coupons for free thermometers, and some band-aids"* or "Stockbrokers should definitely not do this!...or, okay, well, so they shouldn't have done that, but we will talk very sternly to them about it and ask them to count to at least ten the next time they decide to tank our economy. Okay, count to three. Can we just count to three?"

I saw Strobe Talbott, of the Brookings Institution, give a talk last week. He said that it was crucial that Obama win the vote on health care, so that he can claim it as a victory and then move on to other pieces of legislation that are pressing--climate change and arms control. These two issues--global warming and the proliferation of nuclear weapons--were, he felt, the two threats that endanger the future of humanity. I certainly agree with the second assertion; I'm less convinced about the first. Is something better than nothing? If the bill is bloated, and costly, and doesn't give many people a tangible benefit, I fear we will lose not only 2010 but possibly the White House in 2012. Not only will the Obama administration be tagged with all of the failures of the bill, but they will also be painted as wishy-washy, the party, once again, that can't seem to engage all of its gears at once. Or even any of its gears at all. If Obama does pass a weak bill, something like the Baucus bill, then he better hope that he can get through cap-and-trade in a hurry, before the midterm punishment happens.

*Cf.: ""I favor a public option. We're going to do our very best to have a public option. But remember, a public option is a relative term," Reid, D-Nev., said Thursday."

The Obama Blitz

Probably not the best word to use when referring to this particular President, but away we go anyway. Over the weekend, President Obama made the Stations of the Cross, going around to talk shows to try to 'splain 'splain 'splain about this here socialistic whatchamagummit. The Times reports that "Obama Insists that Insurance Will Be Affordable". Apparently, middle class families in the $66,000 to $88,000 range--essentially two parents working, with average jobs--will "only" be asked to pay up to 11 to 13% of their income for insurance. I mean, what the hell, that's only tuition at a relatively good state school for little Johnny or Suzy, am I right? And, by the way, is this 11-to-13% of pre-tax income? Even better. It's like tithing! Only to the insurance industry.

Again there was some talk of "subsidies" for people who couldn't afford to pay the premium, but not a peep about price controls other than "expanding competition." Perhaps we will all buy our insurance through ebay! Or the drug market. I can just see the black market of health insurance right now: "You want your low co-pays? I got your $10 office visits right here..."

The whole thing about subsidies without price controls is weird--it seems to me like the government will then be on the hook for a whole lot more than they're bargaining for, and more than it would cost to just give people insurance. If we have to subsidize the amount that the insurance companies will charge parents of children with special needs, for instance, then we're going to be into it for something like $5000 a month, when we could have, you know, just allowed them to buy into Medicare. Oh, AND the subsidies are in the form of tax credits, which I somehow hadn't caught before, so you'll still have to pay your tithe up front, and then you'll get a store credit for it. With which you can buy an F-22. I hear they're cheap these days.

But the fun part, for me, was reading this quote, from the same article: “Right now, everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance,” Mr. Obama said on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC. “Nobody considers that a tax increase.” Here, Mr. President, is one disgruntled citizen who does realize that that is a tax increase, a particularly regressive tax, a massive transfer of wealth (let's say it again) to private, for-profit companies. I have to pay GEICO so that I can pay the state to register my car. It's a great system.

I remember when they made car insurance mandatory, my mom thought it was ridiculous. She thought, why not just charge everyone a penny more per gallon, and provide basic insurance coverage for everyone with a license? If people wanted more insurance, they could of course buy more. This would take largely take care of the problem of uninsured drivers as well (which, in my part of California, meant another $10-$20 a month for people with insurance, because there were so many uninsured people driving). And, fairly enough, the people who consumed more gas, and who were therefore on the road more and more likely to be in an accident, paid more. Mom's current idea is that we tax toilet paper to pay for health care--an extra 5 cents a roll, and health care for everybody.

On Craigslist

Ah, Craigslist. Like the proverbial little girl-with-the-curl, when it's good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad, it's horrid. Idly scanning through housing listings, I have discovered a few things. In our area, most of the postings are by apartment complex managers, who seem to post multiple times a day with slightly varying descriptions ("Fantastic Carrboro apartments!! Only one left!" and then a few postings down, the same apartment complex: "Multiple floorplans available! Convenient to everything!"). I believe I have discovered a Craigslist law, to wit: the more exclamation points in the description/title, the less likely it is you want whatever it is that is being titled. The amount of exclamation points in listings for housing, for example, seems directly proportional to how depressing the apartment complex actually is. If it's in ALL CAPS and with EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! then there has probably been a murder/suicide in the complex in the last month--but your drug dealer will be CONVENIANTLEY [sic] NEARBY!

No Public Option, Then Just...No.

I listened very carefully to the President's speech last week. Here's the thing that I find really unnerving, and no one seems to be asking questions about it: what about price controls? The whole rhetoric of "no one will be denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition" [applause applause] "because we're going to outlaw it" [applause applause]...well, here's the thing. Really, no one is denied insurance right now because of a pre-existing condition. I bet that if you're willing to pay $25,000 a month, you could probably get insurance no matter what kind of chronic illness you have. Of course, it would then probably cost more than you would pay out-of-pocket for your treatments, but whatever. It's meaningless to say that insurance companies won't be able to do this, that, or the other thing, when they can easily say, "Oh, no, we offered Parents-of-Child-With-Leukemia coverage, and they didn't take it" when the Parents-of-Child-With-Leukemia were offered a totally unaffordable premium. Not one person in the Obama administration has said word one about capping what the insurance companies can charge people who are now required to purchase health insurance.

This makes me deeply suspicious. After all, I have had to pay auto insurance for the last 15 years--required to do so in order to get a license and register my car--and I therefore consider this a tax that I pay for which I have yet to receive anything. Now, I'm sure that as I type this a tree branch is swinging threateningly over my car and I'll have to come back and xxxx this sentence out, because of the karma. But the point is, I, and a hundred million other people, have been forced by the government to support private, for-profit companies. It's fucking lame, is what it is, and now we're seeing the lamery repeated on a much, much larger scale. I don't care about paying taxes to a democratically elected government who I can (theoretically) hold accountable for services which I, or my loved ones, will receive. I am a big fan of the post office, public schools, public libraries, municipal water and sewage treatment facilities, public immunization programs, and so on, and so forth. I am much much less a fan of being forced to essentially tithe my income so that a C.E.O. of some insurance company (who is totally unaccountable to me or any of his customers) can buy that vacation home in St. Bart's for his third trophy wife.

Is anyone else at all concerned about this? Does no one else hear the insurance companies fappity-fapping away at the thought of the tens of millions of people who will now be their unwilling dupes--er, "clients"--at whatever rates they choose to charge? And that this is why they've been so surprisingly docile during this whole carnival?

Oh, Obama did say that if one couldn't afford this new mandatory help-the-rich-get-richer charity donation, then one could get a waiver. Not, my fellow Americans, a waiver of payment, or a voucher for insurance. No, you could just get a waiver so that you wouldn't get in trouble for not purchasing your overpriced bullshit SupraEcono(trademark!) Insurance Plan. Which, it seems to me, does not actually solve any problems for anyone at all--those who most need health insurance will still not get it. They will just have to fill out paperwork now, showing why they cannot afford the thing the government requires them to have, but for which the government will not pay.

So, fuck it. No public option (p.s. still pretty lame--it will start happening in fucking four years, on some insurance exchange whatever? By which time who knows how many people will have actually died because they didn't say that they once had a blister this one time, during band camp?) no fucking dice.

Irrationality

The reluctance of the American public to accept even the option of a public health care system (which, after all, should only increase competition and make the market more efficient: if government run programs are as inefficient as critics claim, then the more efficient private insurers should easily win out, right? There is little evidence, it seems to me, for the idea that private industries are less wasteful than public utilities, but whatever) seems so odd. After all, ultimately, they are being offered something, which they may take or leave, but why does it seem so threatening?

This highlights an essential fact which neither economists nor political scientists have fully assimilated: people are not particularly rational most of the time. I'm reading Kahneman's paper/lecture on "Bounded Rationality" and in it, he says: “The value of a good to an individual appears to be higher when the good is viewed as something that could be lost or given up than when the same good is evaluated as a potential gain” (Kahneman et al., 1990, 1991; Tversky and Kahneman 1991). This explains, in part, the resistance to the change. The good that people have--in this case, half-assed insurance provided through employment by companies which have a monopoly on a particular market--suddenly seems much more valuable because people believe they will lose it. Whereas previously, anyone who had any experience with filing a claim with their health insurance company should be aware that the private insurance offered is just, simply, not very good.

Of course, this leaves unexplained the people who do not have any kind of insurance who are opposing this reform. Perhaps they think that the good they might one day have will be taken away from them even before they have it?

The Los Angeles Times had an interesting piece up today about the way firefighting serviced used to be privately provided. People in a certain neighborhood would pay a subscription for the support of a firefighting company. Soon it became apparent that this was a public good (fires not being great respecters of imaginary lines) and that if your neighbor's house caught on fire, your own was at risk. We all pay for the lack of public health care in this country, which creates a system of perverse incentives for everyone involved.