via liberal japonicus
Well, that was fun. And I enjoyed this video, which I put below the fold.
170 thoughts on “Your post-election thread”
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"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
via liberal japonicus
Well, that was fun. And I enjoyed this video, which I put below the fold.
Comments are closed.
Loved this comment from the Guardian
He sounded, as he always has, like a nice guy from the 1950s who, when he hears a woman speaks about anything beyond dinner, sees in the corner of his eye a dog on its hind legs.
In contrast, the Romney campaign famously cancelled campaign workers’ credit cards immediately, in the middle of the night. Staffers heading home from the election night party had to pay for their own cabs.
I don’t really want to hear any more about what a nice guy Romney is. I’m glad he lost.
italiexo!
hey, check it out: in person voter fraud is real.
nobody could ever predict, not even Nate Silver with a sample size of 110 million, the party affiliation of the criminals. so don’t even try guessing. you’ll just have to read the article.
russell, that is just too awesome!
Am I the only one who sometimes feels like these folks are trying to behave like a charactrature of themselves?
russell: The more people saw of Romney, the less they liked him. He’s the most unlikable presidential candidate I can remember. Less likable than Nixon? Yeesh!
Likeability is important for a politician — GW Bush, remember, was “the guy you’d like to have a beer with”, despite the fact that he’s a recovering alcoholic.
Romney has the attitude that there are His People and The Help. Not good.
i do wish all the people crowing about the GOP’s imminent dissolution would take heed of what lightning bug points out: Romney was a pretty flawed candidate. he was not a great communicator, he was hard to like, and he seemed to alienate huge numbers of people every week or so.
a slightly more likable person, championing the same set of policies, might have been able to sway enough people to the GOP to beat Obama.
not that i know who that person could have been, this time around. but next time…
Romney was a pretty flawed candidate. he was not a great communicator, he was hard to like, and he seemed to alienate huge numbers of people every week or so.
That’s a very good point, but what are the alternatives? What kind of better person could have made it through the primary process? Would someone like Huckabee or Perry or Cain or Newt!!! have done any better? Huntsman might very well have, but Huntsman couldn’t possibly get the nomination.
I mean, Romney actually seemed pretty likeable if you didn’t look too close. And in some ways he was a great communicator: he obviously couldn’t tell the truth about his policy preferences, so he just constantly made up stuff and changed his mind, but what else could he have done given that he had to survive the primary process?
cleek, I think Jon Huntsman would have been extremly dangerous.
I actually disagree that Romney is, personally, significantly more or less likeable than other politicians, whether Democrat or Republican. He strikes me as a bog standard public figure.
He doesn’t have Huckabee’s folksy vibe, but then again he doesn’t make you feel like he’d rip your heart out and have it on toast, the way a guy like Cheney does.
He’s a generic upstanding individual.
IMO what makes him unlikeable, or at least unappealing, to many folks is the way in which he is palpably unable to imagine what other people’s lives are like. IMO that is what became evident during the course of the campaign.
He’s very polite, doesn’t seem to get angry much, no evident nastiness, doesn’t demonstrate the instinct for the vindictive kill shot that is not at all uncommon in political people.
He just doesn’t seem to have any freaking idea what it’s like to live life without millions of dollars on tap.
Frankly, given his background, I think it would take a very special person to have that understanding. He’s just not that special person.
The discouraging thing about this election is that the 47 percent video seemed to have been forgotten by the people who were swayed by the Denver debate. I mean you already had a clear notion of what Romney really thought or else you had a clear demonstration of what he was willing to say to rich people in private, and yet the debate seemed to cancel that out. It was also strange that people thought Romney would be better on the economy, based solely (AFAIK) on his record at Bain. Why? His policies, as best one could tell, were just more of what Bush had given us–cut taxes and deregulate and the infallible market will bring prosperity to all.
So it was closer than it should have been. I’m sort of enjoying the Republican meltdown, but the part of me that isn’t shallow isn’t enjoying it at all. You want the Republican Party to be sane. These people seem delusional on multiple levels. To take the example others have given, it’s all well and good to harbor the not irrational hope that the polls were biased–that’s why Nate Silver gave Romney a 9 percent chance at the end. But these folks didn’t just cling to nonzero chance that the polls were statistically biased–they actually convinced themselves that Romney was the favorite, based on about as much evidence as the Bush people had for Iraqi WMD’s. It’s not good that such a party can get 48 percent of the vote, which is why I’m not overjoyed by the election. (Well, along with my lesser of two evils motivation for voting Obama in the first place.)
Would someone like Huckabee or Perry or Cain or Newt!!! have done any better?
god no. none of them. and no, Huntsman couldn’t have made it either.
but next time they might just come up with someone who’s conservative enough to get through the primaries but who’s also personally likable and charming enough to sell those policies to the general public in a way that Mr Roboto couldn’t.
in other words: i think the candidate counts for a lot. and there would be no discussion about the GOP’s needing to change its policies if Romney had the smooth talkin’ skills of Clinton, or the affable charm of Reagan, or the inspirational hook of Obama 08.
The discouraging thing about this election is that the 47 percent video seemed to have been forgotten by the people who were swayed by the Denver debate.
I gagged at the idea of a Romney presidency before the 47% video. Then there were people who agreed with what he said in that video who didn’t need to be swayed by the debate. I think it was a relatively small percentage of people who were actually in play for either of those things, and they were and still are some strange people. I can’t say if they’re stranger than the people who agreed with the 47% video in the first place, particularly the ones who were part of the 47% without actually knowing it, but the late “undecideds” are, well …something.
Even if the Republicans will never again nominate a presidential candidate as personally unlikable as Romney, it’s also very likely that their candidate will never run in an atmosphere that’s as positive for Republicans (both demographically and economically) as 2012. The nation is only going to get less white, less Christian, less racist, and less homophobic; and the economy is unlikely to be this terrible again any time soon.
think the candidate counts for a lot. and there would be no discussion about the GOP’s needing to change its policies if Romney had the smooth talkin’ skills of Clinton, or the affable charm of Reagan, or the inspirational hook of Obama 08.
That’s a good point.
But things are different now…there’s been some democratization of the primary process (fewer decisions coming from smoke filled back rooms) and there’s been an increase in highly focused ideological media. It seems like the net effect is to empower the extremist factions of the Republican base at primary time. Clinton & Reagan didn’t have to contend with that. I’m not sure they could have done well if they had to. Everything you say to reassure/appease the crazies at primary time becomes a liability in the general. And now there will be lots of small cameras following your ever move in the primary, building up a video library for attack ads in the general.
Another view. If immigration reform passes and more states approve gay marriage, perhaps even DOMA gets rescinded, then how does the Democratic party cobble together a 51% majority?
At the heart of the party today is a bunch of people that the Democrats used to paint Romney as a scary character. I suspect another candidate, white or black, for the Democrats probably attracts some percentage less than 90% of the Black vote also.
I would suggest that the Republicans stay the course on economic issues and tone down the rhetoric on abortion, and wait four years. The Latino and womens vote will not forever be based on social issues, they care about the economy also. And it is likely that in four years the economy will only be marginally better based on the current Democratic policy focus.
If immigration reform passes and more states approve gay marriage, perhaps even DOMA gets rescinded, then how does the Democratic party cobble together a 51% majority?
I think the way you framed the question indicates a disconnect. LGBT voters don’t vote Democratic just because DOMA is the law of the land. And if DOMA went away tomorrow, LGBT voters would not switch their allegiance to Republicans. LGBT voters believe that Republicans hate them. Once you’ve convinced someone that you despise them, changing laws isn’t really enough. You have to convince them that (1) you don’t hate them and (2), in fact, you welcome them. Ditto for Latinos.
How can you convince millions of Americans that Republicans don’t despise them? Are you going to transform millions of Republicans so that they no longer believe that LGBT folk are evil monsters who must never be allowed to marry or adopt children? How would that work exactly?
When you can answer that question, we can talk about your hypothetical.
At the heart of the party today is a bunch of people that the Democrats used to paint Romney as a scary character.
It was an easy pitch, because Romney spent the entire primary period pandering to that “bunch of people” at every opportunity.
He would not have been the nominee otherwise.
Republicans won’t win Latino voters until their nominee for President stops talking about “self-deportation”, and until they stop giving a home to every xenophobic nutcase that wants to have open season on brown people at the border.
They won’t win blacks until they stop walking around with posters of the first black President in the history of the US with a bone in his nose, and until they lose the “what blacks need to do is quit looking for handouts” rhetoric.
They won’t win women until they stop showing up on TV talking about legitimate rape, and speculating at length on public broadcast media about Sandra Fluke’s sex life.
They won’t make any headway at all with people who work for a living and yet are not rich until they get rid of the Randian “moochers and takers” horsecrap.
I hate to break it to you, but there are a lot of straight-up nasty MF’ers in the (R) constituency. And a lot of people who straight up do not know what they are talking about, at a simple factual level.
I would applaud the (R)’s if they decided to cut the haters loose. I just don’t think they have that much of a constituency without them.
Romney got about half the popular vote, at a national level. Take away the haters and the folks who have no freaking idea what they are talking about, and I think you end up with, not just not a majority, but not even a significant plurality.
Lie down with dogs, etc. It’ll take them much more than 4 years to unwind the last 40 years of (R) political strategy.
As long as they keep losing, I don’t care either way. It’s not my problem, I’m not a Republican.
Don’t take my word for it, listen to David Frum.
Personally, I think he fails to note that the folks being “fleeced” are only too happy to feast on lies, but IMO his overall point is sound.
The view from the peak is always different from that of the valley. When the dust settles, there are still trillion dollar deficits and promises to be kept. The Republican Party is a dead man walking if it can’t vet it’s senatorial candidates better and limit the damage done during primaries.
Immigration reform isn’t just about the next election, it’s about the next wave of folks moving north because their particular hellhole gives them no choice.
Maybe the split is to give current undocumented residents legal resident status, but not citizenship. Their children, born in the US, would be citizens. And then cap immigration of unskilled workers and enforce the border going forward.
Raising taxes on those who earn more than 250K isn’t going to materially stall the economy, at least not noticeably, nor will it make a noticeable dent in the deficit. This is primarily so because ACA will mask any retrograde movement with its ’50 full time employee’ coverage mandate.
I didn’t tumble to it until just recently, but apparently ACA has this brilliant mandate applying to ‘large’ employers, those with 50 full time employees–insurance coverage is mandatory for full time employees only. Not a problem–X number of employees have their hours and pay cut and the remainder work harder.
What company is going to add that 50th employee, going forward?
Sure Akin was an idiot, sure the country’s demographics are changing, but other things aren’t: the deficit, the economy, ACA. They are all here and, unlike the last four years when pro-Obama supporters could forecast all the good things to come, the next four years won’t be crystal ball-reading, it will be the actual impact of past spending indiscipline and the added weight of that 2500 page piece of legislation that no one had even a clue what it contained.
As so many here have said in the past, elections have consequences. One of those, one would hope, is accountability.
“The discouraging thing about this election is that the 47 percent video seemed to have been forgotten by the people who were swayed by the Denver debate”
The thing you seem to have missed is that the 47% remark didn’t offend the 53%, while the 47% were already a lost cause. So there was not reason to think it was ever going to be a factor, aside from giving some people who already loathed Romney an occasion to scream a bit.
Yeah, Canada is looking better all the time.
The Republican Party is a dead man walking if it can’t vet it’s senatorial candidates better and limit the damage done during primaries.
One could wonder why those kind of candidates just keep bubbling up in their selection process. When they surface in the Dems, the Dems usually disavow them
Also, iirc, that 50 employee proviso was added precisely because of the hue and cry about small business owners being bankrupted by providing health care coverage. You have to admit, you can’t treat Amazon and HP like the mom and pop grocery. So you have to draw a line somewhere. If it were at 100 employees would it be better? How about 200? Hell, make it 1,000 to define large employers, cause we just lurve us small business folks. As the only OECD country that doesn’t have some sort of national health coverage, the US is pissing its wealth away by not figuring out some way. If the Republicans had not said they were going to stop Obama from doing anything meaningful in office, I’m sure that a better plan could have been obtained.
“Raising taxes on those who earn more than 250K isn’t going to materially stall the economy, at least not noticeably, nor will it make a noticeable dent in the deficit.”
Straw man. Did anyone anywhere say that raising taxes on those who earn more than 250k is the ONLY thing we need to do? Please take a position on the more important question, namely whether raising taxes on those who earn more than 250k would hurt or help.
Are you deliberately omitting capital gains, or do you consider that part of “earning more than 250k?”
“What company is going to add that 50th employee, going forward?”
To the extent that this is a problem, it’s a problem regardless of what employee count cutoff they use.
The thing you seem to have missed is that the 47% remark didn’t offend the 53%
My household income puts me well, well within the 53%. Well within. I found Romney’s comments offensive, extraordinarily so.
I don’t care if they were sincerely meant, or if he was just flattering his audience. Either way, they were offensive.
Were you going to vote for him before the remark?
Obviously the numbers aren’t really 47 and 53 percent, and there’s some fuzz around the edges. The point is simply that the 47% remark was inconsequential, because it mainly just offended people who were never going to vote for Romney anyway.
And I’d still like to know what was in that “inadvertent” gap in the tape. Complete recording my flabby ass.
What company is going to add that 50th employee, going forward?
You know, I hear this a lot.
First, for this to even matter at all, some company has to be in a position where, health care costs aside, adding employee #50 would be a good idea.
In other words, there is sufficient demand for whatever good or service they provide that there is a market for them to scale up by that extra person.
Assuming that is so, one of two things will happen:
They will hire the extra person, and take on the added expense / bureaucratic hassle of doing so as part of the cost of moving from a small mom & pop to a somewhat larger business. There are many, many examples where scaling up incurs new costs in, more or less, giant steps. If you want to get to the next level, you take the jump.
If they don’t do that, somebody else will step up and satisfy that unmet demand.
One possible outcome of all of this is that it will be more smaller businesses, and fewer large businesses. I don’t see a problem with that.
Well, yeah, even with this there are still going to be SOME companies adding a 50th employee. It does matter, however, if there are a lot fewer of them, doesn’t it?
Problem is, there are going to be companies at 51 employees, who will see the relevant choice being, “Do we comply with this, or fire several people?.
And those several people aren’t going to have insurance OR a job…
A number of large service industry employers — including retail stores, restaurants, and hotel chains — have either begun limiting hourly worker schedules to 30 hours a week or say they are about to do so.
Sorry, the schadenfreude is like Thanksgiving Turkey. Schadenfreude sandwiches, schadenfreude soup stock…
here
A source within the Romney campaign agreed to share his reflections on Project Orca with Breitbart News:
It’s easy to point fingers after a loss and I wouldn’t normally do it, but consider what happened.
Project Orca was supposed to enable poll watchers to record voter names on their smartphones, by listening for names as voters checked in. This would give the campaign real-time turnout data, so they could redirect GOTV resources throughout the day where it was most needed. They recruited 37,000 swing state volunteers for this.
I worked on the Colorado team, and we were called by hundreds (or more) volunteers who couldn’t use the app or the backup phone system. The usernames and passwords were wrong, but the reset password tool didn’t work, and we couldn’t change phone PINs. We were told the problems were limited and asked to project confidence, have people use pencil and paper, and try to submit again later.
Then at 6PM they admitted they had issued the wrong PINs to every volunteer in Colorado, and reissued new PINs (which also didn’t work). Meanwhile, counties where we had hundreds of volunteers, such as Denver Colorado, showed zero volunteers in the system all day, but we weren’t allowed to add them. In one area, the head of the Republican Party plus 10 volunteers were all locked out. The system went down for a half hour during peak voting, but for hundreds or more, it never worked all day. Many of the poll watchers I spoke with were very discouraged. Many members of our phone bank got up and left.
The thing you seem to have missed is that the 47% remark didn’t offend the 53%, while the 47% were already a lost cause.
Not really. There are an awful lot of lower middle class folks (and even poor folks) who normally vote Republican. But who are smart enough to figure out that they count in the 47% Romney was talking about. It’s irritating enough when you get dissed by the other side; when your own guy does it, it’s really irritating.
And I say this as someone who has been a Republican for decades. And who definitely counts in the 47% for the last few years. (Working for a start-up will do that. But no “start-up exception” in Romney’s remarks that I noticed. Guess that makes me a “taker” for these purposes….)
Gone are the days when you could segment your media, and nobody outside your target audience would know what you had said to the other guys. Gone are the days when you could simply draw a line based on income, and be confident that most of “your people” were on one side, and “the other guys” were on the other. In parts of the country (but only some parts) you can draw a line based on race and ethnic group. But even that’s getting very fuzzy very fast.
So if your party doesn’t stand for things that are popular (or at least accdeptable) across the board, you are in trouble. If you can’t explain what you stand for, so that people across the board can relate to it, you are in trouble. On both counts, my party has serious difficulties.
AND, if you cannot adjust and adapt when the world changes around you,you are in big trouble. And that may be where the GOP has the worst trouble — because if you combine a faith-based base with an information cocoon, making the internal case for change is going to be nigh impossible.
there are going to be companies at 51 employees, who will see the relevant choice being, “Do we comply with this, or fire several people?.
Brett, I’m trying to imagine a real businessman doing this. I can believe that a few would talk about doing it. Just as there was one guy on a blog I read whowas insisting the he was closing down his business if Obama won this time.
But in reality, nobody is going to go that way who would not have done so anyway. I can imagine someone hesitating to hire that 51st employee; but let people go to get under the limit? Not going to happen.
Actually, I bet there will be a number of folks who don’t hire that 50th person, and I’m sure there will people who will lay folks off to get below the 50-person mark, and I’m sure there will be people who will cut everyone’s hours back to less than full time to work around the new regulation.
Some of those folks will do so because they are jerks and it will satisfy them to screw over their employees in a fit of pique. And some folks will do so because they just can’t make it work if they don’t.
To some degree things will sort themselves out and the folks who get canned will find other jobs. Some of them will start their own companies and eat their former bosses’ lunch.
And some of them will be sh*t out of luck.
There will also be employers who will gladly step up and comply with the new regulations, even if it costs them something personally.
It’ll be a mix.
What all of that gets weighed against is the some-number-of-millions of people who will able to go to the doctor.
Remember them?
Nothing’s perfect.
Raising taxes on those who earn more than 250K isn’t going to materially stall the economy..
Well, great. Tax the crap out of them. There is more to this than the economic effects. Nothing to lose it would seem, eh?
And I’d still like to know what was in that “inadvertent” gap in the tape.
In the missing part of the presentation, Romney inadvertently gave out some remarkable clues that he is really the Manchurian Candidate for the Chinese Communist Party….some sort of babbling about a “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “sealed bacillus”. Best you not know.
Complete recording my flabby ass.
I suggest more exercise.
What company is going to add that 50th employee, going forward?
A company that has, with a clear head, evaluated its past and expected future performance, reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of its balance sheet, realistically estimated demand for its product and its place in the market, and figured out a reasonable business plan based upon that information. In sum, the ACA impacts will be a negligible to nil part of the decision because its all about making money. Most successful companies will make this decision on business, not ideological criteria.
And you know this how? You repeatedly claim that “nobody” knows what is in all the mysterious 2,500 pages of the ACA, and then you pull little (and unsourced) nuggets of “well, I heard this” wisdom out of one of your bodily orifices. Earwax for the soul?
“I would suggest that the Republicans stay the course on economic issues and tone down the rhetoric on abortion, and wait four years. The Latino and womens vote will not forever be based on social issues, they care about the economy also.”
The problem for all of us is that Repubican ideas don’t work in the real world they way they say they will. It’s snake oil. People who vote for Republicans expecting to get more jobs and a bablance budget are going to be disappointed. the Republicans will have a handy scapegoat there to blame everything on, but the fact remains their policies will neither create jobs nor balance the budget.
The problem for the Repubicans is that they canot tell the truth about what they want to do. Even their own base doens’t want Medicare to be a “premium support system”, the red staters don’t really want an end to the massive amounts of federal tza dollars that support their state economies, and no one wants to drown the government in debt if it means a cut in whatever federal mooney or federal programs support them.
So, if Repubicans stay the course on their economic policies, we will be treated to more lies, more deficts, and more attacks on the middle class.
The thing you seem to have missed is that the 47% remark didn’t offend the 53%, while the 47% were already a lost cause.
Ah, so you did drink the koolaid.
The “47%” includes a shitton of Republican voters, Brett. They were not a “lost cause” before or after the remarks.
You are suffering from the exact same delusion Romney suffered from (or at least pandered to). The 47% includes a bunch of hard-working people. Some of them are even Republicans 😉
FYI, I’m in the top 5% by household income. And yet, despite absolutely being in the “53%” AND being an employer (granted, of 1), I’m a solid Dem. Go figure.
Sure Akin was an idiot, sure the country’s demographics are changing, but other things aren’t: the deficit, the economy, ACA. They are all here and, unlike the last four years when pro-Obama supporters could forecast all the good things to come, the next four years won’t be crystal ball-reading, it will be the actual impact of past spending indiscipline and the added weight of that 2500 page piece of legislation that no one had even a clue what it contained.
Let’s take this piece by piece:
Sure Akin was an idiot, Yep, he sure was, and is. But he was embraced by the Republican party, and the Vice Presidential candidate was pretty much with him all the way!
sure the country’s demographics are changing Yes they are, and “middle class values” won’t be determined by a bunch of constipated white men who vote against their own interests because they’re lured by racial and tribal dogwhistles. People will vote in favor of their interests now!
but other things aren’t [changing]: the deficit, the economy, ACA
Actually they are! Obama has reduced the deficit during his term. The economy has added jobs (and recovered from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression). And the ACA hasn’t been fully implemented. But already, a lot of people are benefitting (including children with pre-existing conditions, and young adults who can stay on their parents’ plan until they’re 26.) But more importantly, we can all have affordable health insurance even if we lose (or leave) our jobs, beginning in 2014. We won’t be denied it just because we have preexisting conditions. We won’t be slaves to our employer. I am so grateful! And Republicans are so pissed, because they know that no one will ever want to go back!!!!! (And, by the way, we even will have a public option!)
Thank you, Barack Obama!
Sorry for your sour grapes, McKinney!
I have never understood what people have against sour grapes. In moderation they are delicious.
Just to be clear:
I do not believe that just because I’m well off and I vote Dem this means something in particular. No more than a relatively poor guy voting GOP.
We all make choices, and most of us try to aim at enlightened self interest.
My point is that the 47% stuff is divorced from reality
Seriously. Really. You need to understand this. You’ve been fed a lie.
The folks who don’t earn enough taxable income to owe federal income tax are not all “takers” or looters or whatever and they’re certainly not automatic Dem voters. The Dems do win the low-income group. But it’s nothing like a landslide.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/does-your-wage-predict-your-vote/264541/
Poor folks go Dem something like 70-30, and it rises from there. It evens out around $70k/yr, and climbs to something like 55/45 at the upper end.
The “47%” are not, at all, a lock for the Dems. Especially once you consider how people can bounce in and out of that category (people can be in “the 47%” for 1 year of their lives, and never be there again. Or be there 5 years. Or 50. It rather depends).
I haven’t been in the “47%” since I graduated from college, at the age of 21. Despite this, the bog-standard GOP beliefs on this disgust me. You’re damn right I wasn’t gonna vote for Romney even before the video came out. I’d been hearing that argument FOR YEARS. From family. I was very, very familiar with it. And I’d already decided it was for shit. But some people apparently hadn’t heard it in all its glory. 🙂
I have never understood what people have against sour grapes. In moderation they are delicious.
Fermented, yes. Sour, not so much.
In order to decide not to hire that 50th full-time employee because of the insurance requirement, you have to have 49 you’re not already insuring. I don’t know what percentage of companies with that many full-timers don’t insure them, but I’d hazard a guess that it’s a bit greater than zero (even if it’s less than a hundred).
What the business owners of companies with 45-55 employees would do re: ACA would likely vary depending on what the business does. Small companies trying to attract skilled/creative workers are usually already providing benefits well before they hit the 50 mark. Large theme/sports bars or small agricultural processing facilities probably not so much. So if you’re 1 of 53 workers at a chicken house you’ll likely lose hours, or possibly your job. If you’re at a law firm, probably not.
why would i vote for Rmoney when i knew he would blow the budget/more tax cuts for the 1%, and destroy/privatize Medicare/Social Security aka the Ryan Plan. and still keep the taxes on the working poor going up higher and higher. who else would pay?
i have seen no proof of job makers creating jobs here. i see lots of jobs moving to China. Sensata in Illinois aka/Bain Capital for example during the election is proof of Rmoney investment strategy. good for the 1%, bad for American workers.
gosh, i have wondered how long before the wonders? of the Republican Trickle Down would trickle down to enough Americans. apparently this is the beginning of this Trickle down “reality”.
plus. women being told they have no right to get birth control, no right to have sex unless they give birth. and then the ultrasound for violating women in the laws by the Right wing state Governments.
just amazing to think the Republicans thought this would fly. that all the “losers/takers” would accept the word of their “Lords and Masters” who decreed the new laws we would all be following.
Republicans now need to use some form of “reward” to entice the “others” votes from now on. the Obey Authority plan didn’t go over too well this time. if Obama screws us over again, the Republicans can try again. i just think the present Republican methods of dissing the rest of the American populace is not a winning electoral plan.
A long-dead, 19th century British naturalist received nearly 4,000 votes against incumbent Georgia congressman Rep. Paul Broun (R) after the House member’s controversial comments at a Christian fundraiser were made public earlier this year. According to the Athens, Georgia’s alt weekly, Flagpole magazine, the list of names written in against Broun’s stretched to an impressive 371 pages and is available for download as a .pdf here.
[…]
Charles Darwin gets 4,000 votes against ‘lies from the pit of Hell’ congressman
“In order to decide not to hire that 50th full-time employee because of the insurance requirement, you have to have 49 you’re not already insuring.”
Not true: The mandate isn’t that there BE insurance, but that it meet quite exacting (And expensive!) standards. My own quite good insurance, which got me through cancer treatment costing as much as a nice house without the slightest complaint, doesn’t cut it, and we have already been informed by HR that our share of the cost of our insurance is going up perhaps 50% next year, as the requirements kick in.
Which is, of course, why they were set to kick in next year, not this year… Wouldn’t have done to have the people voting in full knowledge of what Obamacare was really going to do.
“Again it’s on display: The conviction that your political opponents agree with you about the relative merits and dis-merits of various policies, and adopt policies different from yours’ because they have evil motives.”
Andrew Sullivan link
I know some here think Sullivan is an idiot and sometimes he is. But the link above is worth reading–he’s collected a bunch of comments about the Romney campaign’s utter incompetence and what that might say about the alleged managerial expertise of Romney. Part of being a great leader is picking people who aren’t morons. Another part is not fooling yourself about reality. I can’t get over the fact that they were actually convinced they were going to win. I thought that was just a necessary political bluff–they had to fake confidence in order to have any chance of winning. But no, it was the real thing.
The link was broken. I think my cut and paste job missed a letter at the end. Here’s another attempt.
link
The thing you seem to have missed is that the 47% remark didn’t offend the 53%, while the 47% were already a lost cause.
so… the 47% are 100% Democratic? and Obama won all them?
WTF?
Even with the incompetence, he would have won under normal circumstances. This should have been the mother of all vote suppression elections and I am still very surprised that the combined efforts of Republican officials in the states did not suffice. My guess is that it was their impatience. Had they waited with their anti-Roe crusade (or just still followed the until then highly successful salami tactics) until their guy had won the WH, they might not have awoken the sleeping enthusiasm of the non-GOP voters. Had they held their fire, we could now be in the situation of both chambers of Congress and the WH in GOP hands plus many state legislatures and governorships. Then they could have driven the steamroller virtually unopposed over all the stuff they wanted to kill for decades. But they wanted instant gratification on the union and choice front and blew it. And now there is even a remote chance that the election system will get overhauled and at least partially immunized from the disenfranchisement virus. Now their hope must rest with SCOTUS and that the robed ones will kill the Voting Rights Act before a Dem president can replace one of the ‘reliable’ ones.
The point is simply that the 47% remark was inconsequential, because it mainly just offended people who were never going to vote for Romney anyway.
No. The point is that, as Rob says, the 47% remark was divorced from reality. So here’s Romney, who likes to talk about how the people at Bain were absolutely obsessed with getting accurate numbers and running spreadsheets and analyzing and so on, spouting total BS, and seemingly believing it.
And this characterized his campaign, of course. It was one lie after the other, from start to finish, and when it was caught red-handed it kept right on going.
Fortunately for the country, the fact that Romney and his campaign inhabited an alternate reality did finally bite him in the butt.
“so… the 47% are 100% Democratic? and Obama won all them?”
That was kind of the substance of the 47% remark, wasn’t it?
I’m pointing out the mistake of thinking a Republican necessarily hurts himself by saying things Democrats find objectionable. The people that remark tended to upset were not in play anyway.
Lots of Republican voters don’t pay income tax: active duty soldiers, low income retired people, blue collar unemployed males.
I think that you are assuming that those people who need government programs of some sort or who are employed by the government will recdognize that it is in theri interests to vote for Democrats. Alas, it’s not so. Republican voters are the ones with the sense of entitlement since they think that the government should serve THEM, but no one else and should do so on someone e;se’s dime. Thus it is not uncommon at all for a person to be low income, on disability, unemployed, retired or in the military and think that Republicans politicians who complain of people depending on the government are talking about someone else. Not them. To its all those other people…
That was kind of the substance of the 47% remark, wasn’t it?
Yes, it was the substance of his remark. And amazingly enough, he was freaking wrong. About that, and a lot of other things.
For a smart guy, he’s done a great job of playing a blooming idiot for the last year or so.
Well, people have areas where they’re smart, and areas where they’re stupid; Nobody’s smart about everything.
Romney was somewhat handicapped by the fact that political reality required him to run as a conservative to get the nomination, something he isn’t. Takes a freaking genius to do a good job of being something they’re not, and Romney wasn’t that genius.
Doesn’t mean he’s not a smart guy. Just means he’s not the smart guy he needed to be, to run effectively as the Republican nominee. This was a job for somebody who didn’t have to use half their brain remembering what they were supposed to be pretending to be.
Obama has his own limitations, being a perfect example of the fact that skill at campaigning doesn’t translate into skill at governing.
I’m pointing out the mistake of thinking a Republican necessarily hurts himself by saying things Democrats find objectionable.
do you actually believe that “the 47%” are all Democrats? and that Obama won them all?
Romney was somewhat handicapped by the fact that political reality required him to run as a conservative to get the nomination
Tru dat.
His choice, however.
One could wonder why those kind of candidates just keep bubbling up in their selection process. When they surface in the Dems, the Dems usually disavow them
Akin was roundly and immediately disavowed.
But he was embraced by the Republican party, and the Vice Presidential candidate was pretty much with him all the way!
Seriously? This is such a gross distortion of what actually happened, it makes having a conversation difficult if not impossible.
“middle class values” won’t be determined by a bunch of constipated white men who vote against their own interests because they’re lured by racial and tribal dogwhistles. People will vote in favor of their interests now!
I’m guessing the irony here eludes you.
plus. women being told they have no right to get birth control, no right to have sex unless they give birth. and then the ultrasound for violating women in the laws by the Right wing state Governments.
Yeah, I heard this a lot too. Good Lord.
One possible outcome of all of this is that it will be more smaller businesses, and fewer large businesses. I don’t see a problem with that.
So, the size of a given enterprise is driven by gov’t fiat and that is not a problem?
Also, iirc, that 50 employee proviso was added precisely because of the hue and cry about small business owners being bankrupted by providing health care coverage. You have to admit, you can’t treat Amazon and HP like the mom and pop grocery. So you have to draw a line somewhere. If it were at 100 employees would it be better? How about 200? Hell, make it 1,000 to define large employers, cause we just lurve us small business folks.
First, there was no ‘hue and cry’ because this, and so much else contained in ACA, was never publicized in the 3 day period the bill was made available for “debate”. Second, people who work for small businesses and like to eat, pay rent etc would probably like to remain employed. Third, as nice as health insurance is, it doesn’t pay the rent or buy food.
The reality based community doesn’t seem to grasp the arithmetic of compelling a small margin, small business to incur a substantial, mandatory addition to the bottom line. If the business folds or cuts back significantly, not only do people remain uninsured, many are then unemployed.
My point is that, having won the election, the deficits and the fallout from ACA are now the Left’s. Good luck growing the economy.
Akin was roundly and immediately disavowed.
And then let back in thru the side door.
The rest wasn’t what I said, until the last part, (and it helps to clarify things if you attribute what people said to the actual people who said those things) so I’ll let other folks defend it.
However, the ‘hue and cry’ that I was mentioning was not after the ACA, it was before the ACA, when lots of people were claiming that the ACA was going to sink small businesses because of the health insurance requirements. It also ignores my implicit question, which is, if you want to separate out small business from the onerous burden of providing health care, how to you define small business? Not drawing a line and then complaining about how badly the line is drawn seems more like someone who wants to prevent health care from ever happening than someone who thinks that this might be putting the US at a comparative disadvantage with other OECD nations.
I’m guessing the irony here eludes you.
I’m guessing you don’t have a substantive reply to the statement. As Hartmut pointed out, the red states are where the people who receive most of the services live. And many of the people who receive them (white folks) are the ones who’ve been brainwashed to think that government is bad. I guess the irony there eludes you.
So, the size of a given enterprise is driven by gov’t fiat and that is not a problem?
I would say that the distance between “a given regulation may have a certain result” and “government fiat” is correctly measured in light years.
Favorable capital gains rates arguably encourage people to invest. Do we say that Uncle Sam puts a gun to their head and requires them to do so?
Amazing as it may sound to you, I would be perfectly happy on principle for the government – any government – to have no involvement in health insurance at all.
Unfortunately, the result of that would be that a lot of people would have none, and would therefore be unable to get medical care in anything like a reliable way, or at a reasonable cost.
My evidence for saying this is because that is the reality now. And, that in a context where the old, the poor, folks with some very expensive specific diseases, and anyone in the active military are not even in the private insurance market.
So, I’m fine with the ACA, and in fact, if it was politically feasible, I’d love a government run single payer program for basic health insurance. As far as I can tell, the feds are damned good at running insurance programs, I’m sure they’d do a perfectly good job.
As a practical matter, government regulations often exempt small operators, and they do so in this case as well.
One consequence of that is that it adds one more to the very long list of giant steps that private operations have to take to scale up. Most, by far, of those giant steps are not due to regulation at all, they’re just inherent in the process of growing a business.
In My Personal Opinion, that’s a reasonable trade-off for making health insurance accessible to several millions – millions – of people who find it really hard to get now.
YMMV. Fine with me.
But none of this amounts to a “government fiat” on the size of private companies.
Some time when I have an unusual number of hours to burn I’ll fire up the great gizoogle and make a list of all the things the feds do to HELP small businesses grow. We’ll see how many folks put their hands up to complain about government interference in the free market via those initiatives.
Nothing’s perfect, and one of the roles of government is to provide a way for a society to negotiate the demands of different, competing interests.
You can’t win ’em all.
Third, as nice as health insurance is, it doesn’t pay the rent or buy food.
Haha, this is about the baldest statement of privilege as I have ever seen from you. Kudos!
You know what else doesn’t pay the rent? Being sick or dead because you can’t afford to see a doctor.
“The thing you seem to have missed is that the 47% remark didn’t offend the 53%, while the 47% were already a lost cause. So there was not reason to think it was ever going to be a factor, aside from giving some people who already loathed Romney an occasion to scream a bit.”
Posted by: Brett Bellmore
This is simply not true, and has been covered. I’ll leave the Google search to you.
Third, as nice as health insurance is, it doesn’t pay the rent or buy food.
Seriously, what phil said.
In my area and market, buying health insurance for a family is more or less like having a second mortgage.
Not having health insurance means you pay out of pocket for any service you receive, or you don’t pay at all and go the ER. Either way, it’s time and/or money, which then doesn’t go toward paying the rent or buying food.
Little known fact: it’s very expensive to be poor. You wouldn’t believe the efficiencies that come from having even a small amount of surplus cash.
And it’s not “nice to have”, it means you and your kids don’t live with illness and physical damage from completely preventable and treatable conditions.
It means you don’t go personally bankrupt if someone in your family gets sick in any sort of serious way.
It means you don’t live in freaking fear every time something weird happens with your body.
If you have to minimize or dismiss stuff like going to the damned doctor to make your point, maybe you need to revisit your point.
If you have to minimize or dismiss stuff like going to the damned doctor to make your point, maybe you need to revisit your point.
If you don’t have a job, or just got laid off, because employers can’t afford to hire, it is some consolation perhaps, that you can go to the doctor and not have to pay for that. Still, a lot of other stuff is left that isn’t being paid for.
My point, which has nothing to do with ‘privilege’ (whatever that is), is that we have (a) huge deficits, (b) a huge new entitlement and (c) an economy in recession with attendant high unemployment. We need the economy to grow, we need people to get work and we need broad based tax revenues to address the deficit. Imposing added ‘cost of doing business’ requirements on low-margin businesses and penalizing low-margin businesses by limiting growth may be effective in isolation if expanding insurance coverage is the sole goal. However, it isn’t. Getting people back to work, addressing the deficit and dealing with current, out of control entitlement spending are also pressing issues. ACA doesn’t mitigate any of these other issues. If anything, it exacerbates.
Gay marriage (which would be nice), immigration reform (which will have to depend on what is proposed) and ACA may all, in and of themselves, be awesome. But what about the rest of the stuff, stuff that will matter very much to everyone if not addressed.
Put differently, how are we going to pay for all of this and grow the economy?
McKinney, I believe that the number of people who have been unwilling to start small businesses because they were afraid that health care costs would be unaffordable (therefore they remained stuck working for somebody else) is probably larger than the number of small businesses that are going to lay off employees because they have to provide some health care coverage. (And, by the way, the small enterprise for which I work got a refund from our health care company this year since, under the ACA, there is a cap on its profits.)
The good that the ACA will do the economy will probably outweigh the bad, but we’ll see. My guess is that, in any case, Republicans will make up their own reality about the effects of the ACA, just as they have about the “job-creating” effect of tax cuts, the deficit under Obama, and employment numbers.
It is really bizarre how this whole discussion is taking place as if the ACA wasn’t scored as being deficit reducing. Now, maybe you disagree with the CBO about that (in which case you should argue that point explicitly), but to just act like the ACA balloons the deficit seems…out of touch with reality.
but to just act like the ACA balloons the deficit seems…out of touch with reality.
Projections and reality are two different things. Even if direct federal outlays for ACA are revenue neutral–if they aren’t and if it was a BS effort to gain support, that’s another conversation and one, quite frankly, that I expect we WILL have in the out years–not all costs are direct. If X company’s revenue falls and if X company lays people off because of ACA, the shortfall in revenue produces a shortfall in taxes as does the contracted payroll. You can’t shrink revenues on the private side and increase tax revenues. If the compliance costs of ACA–and these will be significant–that will be yet another drag on private sector revenues producing further reduction in federal revenues and private payroll.
As for deficits, Sapient, I don’t know what reality you are talking about. They are currently running a trillion plus and have done so for the last four years. What concrete measures has Obama proposed to *materially* affect this? Slarti has, in recent discussions, pointed out that going to a 39.5% marginal rate on relatively high earners won’t accomplish much of anything, so what will Obama and his reality based community do to address this reality?
not all costs are direct
The CBO accounts for indirect costs (and benefits) in its modelling.
Look, if you want to critique the CBO’s scoring assumptions, then do that. But I’m really not interested in reading a critique written by someone who doesn’t know anything about econometric modelling. And based on what you’ve written here, I don’t think you know enough to even tell of a critique is totally nuts, let alone enough to make one yourself.
McTex, I get that you’re a conservative, but, believe it or not, there was a year long period where leftists got down into the weeds arguing about CBO scoring assumptions and the limits of their methodology. Some of the claims made in those discussions are just wrong, but all of them were made at a far more sophisticated level than any conservative critiques I’ve seen.
Eventually, you start losing points with the court for submitting briefs scrawled in crayon.
The CBO accounts for indirect costs (and benefits) in its modelling.
Really? Perhaps you can direct me to the pre-vote, public CBO scoring of the precise 50 employee break point currently under discussion, because I don’t remember either the modeling or the break point being anywhere in the public domain when ACA was being worked out, in secret, by the Democratic leadership.
You assert that this scoring was done. I’d like to see it. Similar to briefs in crayola is citing to evidence that turns out not to be in the record.
Perhaps you can direct me to the pre-vote, public CBO scoring of the precise 50 employee break point currently under discussion
You can start by looking at some CBO work around page 336. From there, I’m sure you can use the CBO search engine to find all you need to find.
The main driver of ACA’s effect on the labor market though is going to be fewer people working because they no longer need to cling to their jobs for dear life in order to keep their health insurance. That seems like a win to me.
McKinney, perhaps you should quit relying on Fox News. Obama has cut the deficit: “The federal government’s fiscal year 2012 has come to a close, and CBO estimates, in the Monthly Budget Review, that the federal budget deficit for the year was about $1.1 trillion, approximately $200 billion lower than the shortfall recorded in 2011.”
Sometimes reality is a nice place to live.
By the way, thank you Turbulence for reminding people that the ACA was designed not only to pay for itself but to reduce the deficit.
I have to do some reminding too though: Republicans only care about the deficit when Democrats are in power.
You can start by looking at some CBO work around page 336. From there, I’m sure you can use the CBO search engine to find all you need to find.
I looked–not a word having anything to do with scoring the likely or projected indirect cost to the economy of the 50 employee break point. Not there. Anything else you want to call to my attention?
McKinney, perhaps you should quit relying on Fox News. Obama has cut the deficit:
In court, the answer to this is: “objection, non-responsive.”
The deficit declined in one year out of four, but still remained above a trillion for that year. My question remains: what does Obama and the reality based community plan to do to address this? Telling me not to watch Fox News is a non-substantive answer and not worthy of the reality based community.
By the way, thank you Turbulence for reminding people that the ACA was designed not only to pay for itself but to reduce the deficit.
Agreed. It was sold on this basis. The points now being raised are: was this an honest, realistic selling point? Did anyone even discuss the 50 employee break point at the time? Did the discussion extend to analyzing and scoring potential adverse impacts?
If you want to carry on about how fact-based, objective and generally wise you and these policies are, then answer the questions directly with actual evidence. It’s called the burden of proof, to extend our legal analogies a step further. The left/Obama ran a campaign assuring us that it/he could lead us out of these problems. Which is to say, you and he have assumed the burden of proof. So, carry your burden–what’s the damn plan? Hint: Riffing on Republicans isn’t a plan and it isn’t an answer.
McTex, the claim of yours that I addressed was that the CBO only considered direct costs. See the very first line of my comment to verify that. Now, you seemed to believe that the CBO only considered direct costs in its analysis. That is completely wrong; it is the sort of thing one can only believe if they are completely ignorant about how the ACA was scored and about the many public discussions on these issues that happened years ago.
My point was to show that the CBO considered more than just direct costs. Did they consider every imaginable indirect cost? I don’t know. You can go do the research for that yourself.
McKinneyTexas: ACA doesn’t mitigate any of these other issues. If anything, it exacerbates.
Do we have to figure out which of you kids “started it” to decide where the burden of proof lies?
My question remains: what does Obama and the reality based community plan to do to address this?
The Obama party line on long term deficit reduction.
A little more detail.
Even more detail.
I can’t tell you how well or badly all of the above holds up. I feel fairly confident that it is, at a minimum, no larger a pile of dung than what Romney and Ryan were selling.
Long story short, if you want to know what the plan is, there’s the plan.
I feel fairly confident that it is, at a minimum, no larger a pile of dung than what Romney and Ryan were selling.
Long story short, if you want to know what the plan is, there’s the plan.
This answers the question and answers it fairly.
My concluding statement in my initial comment was this: “As so many here have said in the past, elections have consequences. One of those, one would hope, is accountability.”
Consequences are a two way street. The losers lose and their program is off the table. The winners win, but they have to deliver. Obama promised a lot in ’08, including a much rosier economic picture than what we have–higher growth, deficits cut by half, etc. His deficit reduction plan promises a lot too, most of it postponed until after he is out of office.
He’s made his promises and won his election. He and his supporters must now deliver. And be held accountable. This is also a consequence of election.
“And be held accountable. This is also a consequence of election.”
Strictly speaking, isn’t this wrong, given that Obama can’t run again? Of course, Dems as a whole will be held accountable.
Is there no symmetrical cry for accountability on the part of the Republicans in the House?
Strictly speaking, isn’t this wrong, given that Obama can’t run again?
Mid-terms, 2016.
Is there no symmetrical cry for accountability on the part of the Republicans in the House?
Not a *symmetrical* outcry, but, yes, accountable to the extent they act or fail to act. And, their supporters as well.
I think it’s hilarious that McKinney asks for evidence when he’s the only commenter here who consistently makes statements of “fact” without any support whatsoever. It’s called being full of %&$^.
For yet another chunk of evidence from the reality-based community to those who talk out of their ass, there’s this. Again, whose policies cost more money? The “job-creator” tax reduction squad? Hardly.
McKinney, where’s your evidence?
And so, brother McKinney, what are you planning to do about health care? Rationing it by people’s ability to pay? You don’t even need to use the google to answer that. Or you could – and maybe I’ll help you out!
Strictly speaking, “rationing by ability to pay” is a misuse of the word “ration”. If you’re going to use the term that way, essentially everything is “rationed”, and the word is stripped of it’s meaning.
“Rationing” is generally understood to mean a third party deciding who can have how much of a thing, even if you’re willing to pay to get more of it. The fact that I can’t, for instance, afford to eat steak every day, doesn’t mean steak is being “rationed”.
Now, if I could afford it, and somebody decided that the butcher wouldn’t be permitted to sell it to me, THAT would be “rationing”.
Obama promised a lot in ’08, including a much rosier economic picture than what we have–higher growth, deficits cut by half, etc.
IMO this is a fair criticism. Obama is certainly not the only actor involved, and responsibility for current circumstances can be assigned pretty broadly, IMO.
But the nature of the job is that “the buck stops here”, and anyone who wants the job knows that full well on day 1.
Now, if I could afford it, and somebody decided that the butcher wouldn’t be permitted to sell it to me, THAT would be “rationing”.
Fortunately, THAT kind of rationing is not a part of any plan currently on the table as regards health care.
If you are willing to pay, and are able to pay, to get more of it, nobody will stand in your way. Not under Obamacare, not under Ryancare, not under no federal program at all.
If you have the cash in hand, you can have anything you want.
Now, if I’m willing to pay less to get less, THAT somebody will stand in the way of. Under Obamacare my quite decent insurance is due to go up a lot in price over the next couple of years, because somebody decided the policy I was happy with wasn’t good enough to be legal to offer.
But you can’t really call it “rationing” if the government decides you have to buy steak instead of hamburger, and never mind that you were satisfied with hamburger, and your budget won’t support steak. This might be bad, and next year I might be moving into a mobile home park because of what it’s doing to do to my take home pay, but it’s not “rationing”.
So, I agree, nobody is suggesting rationing. It’s not even on the table.
Let’s just not pretend that the normal operation of the free market is “rationing”. It’s not.
McKinney: Obama promised a lot in ’08, including a much rosier economic picture than what we have–higher growth, deficits cut by half, etc.
russell: IMO this is a fair criticism. Obama is certainly not the only actor involved, and responsibility for current circumstances can be assigned pretty broadly, IMO.
IMO this is all bullshit. In 2008, people were predicting what effect the unprecedented (in ANYONE’s lifetime) economic crisis would be. Obama had a slightly rosier picture than what was actually the case. As compared to McCain’s promise to balance the budget by the end of his first term. Pleeeeez.
McKinney, tell me, how would he have done that? Hahahahahah!
russell, tell me, who was being the most honest?
You both have lost all credibility. Time to look at things in context.
By the way, McKinney, still think that Romney won?
I don’t know that the 2008 predictions by the Administration, and others, demonstrate that it wasn’t honest, but I think they do demonstrate that a great deal of skepticism is in order when economists claim they can predict things.
The problem is that most of our economic policy is based on the belief that they CAN make accurate predictions.
Brett Bellmore: Let’s just not pretend that the normal operation of the free market is “rationing”. It’s not.
I just had a long talk with a dear, fairly libertarian, friend of mine. One topic we discussed was health care. Perhaps you will find it odd that he and I agree on quite a few points.
“Rationing” is a loaded term; the truth is that when resources are limited someone has to decide where to draw the line — above the line things happen, below the line they don’t. Whether a private “faceless bureaucrat” or a public one makes that decision is the question. Let’s not pretend that this doesn’t happen.
The concern my friend had about the ACA is the fact that when a Medicaid patient gets notification that some procedure isn’t covered there’s no real pressure for the patient to pay. Ignoring the notice has no consequences — the doctor might not be paid but the patient doesn’t care.
So I said, “ah, there might have to be more policing and we have to allow for the cost of that. But, should policing this be handled publicly or privately? That is a no-brainer.” He agreed.
Policing is strictly a public function. Private policing is a bad idea.
Let’s just not pretend that the normal operation of the free market is “rationing”. It’s not.
No, it’s letting people die if they’re too poor. That’s the way an absolutely free market works. If you can’t afford food an absolutely free market says you’re free to die of starvation. Happened all the time back in the nineteenth century in the UK and the US. Happens today in Third World countries.
Food rationing was introduced in wartime in the UK to *prevent* the poor starving. So when there was a shortage of food, the rich couldn’t buy it all up. Rationing is intended to ensure that everyone gets a fair share of vital goods. Judging by Romney’s comments on the 47%, Republicans think that other Americans have no right to food. So of course they don’t think that other people have any right to healthcare. All they have is the freedom to die.
There is no overall rationing of healthcare in the UK. If you want to have private medical insurance and private hospital care you can have it. My husband’s firm offers this and he’s used it to get private treatment sometimes.
Not all companies offer health insurance – they don’t need to, because of the NHS. It’s never been the deciding factor in any job either of us have taken. I’ve also had private treatment myself for some services where the NHS waiting lists are longer than ideal. But for the bigger things we’ve always used the NHS (and so have our friends) and it’s worked pretty well.
Is there rationing in the NHS? Some, yes. The NHS only funds treatments it considers are cost-effective. But as I said, there’s private health care as well, so if you don’t like NHS hamburger, you can get private steak. The thing is, though, that it turns out if everyone can get hamburger, there aren’t too many people who want to spend vast sums of extra money having steak.
And, in terms of government spending on healthcare, the UK spends less as a percentage than the US, as Dr Science showed back in September. I’m sure the response now will be “socialism!”, “death panels!”, but I still often wonder why a system that is less effective and costs more is preferred by so many Americans.
You know what, magistra? Everybody dies. So the fact that, under some policy, people die really isn’t much of a point, though it sounds bad when you yell about it in an aggrieved voice. It’s not much of a point because they’re going to die under EVERY policy.
Medical care isn’t very much like food. Food, there’s an identifiable minimum you get, and you’re set. Spending more might get you tastier food, but you’ll be just as healthy, maybe healthier in many cases, eating beans and rice at a couple dollars a day. Not only is there an identifiable minimum, it’s pretty darned cheap.
Health care is very unlike this, as there’s no real point where spending more stops providing real benefits. People are capable of consuming, and benefiting from, an amount of health care it would bankrupt the world to provide in just one country. (I don’t think this is always going to be the case, but it’s going to be the case for decades to come.)
You’re either letting people die because THEY can’t afford any more medical care, or you’re taking the money from somebody else, and somebody who COULD have afforded the medical care gets to die instead, to make you happy.
Wasn’t allowed to spend the money, you taxed it away from them so they couldn’t spend it, what’s the dif?
But, please, stop screaming about people dying under free markets, unless you can point to some socialist country somewhere, where people aren’t dying.
russell, tell me, who was being the most honest?
Honesty wasn’t what was being discussed. What was being discussed was performance.
There are a million reasons why Obama wasn’t able to make all the things he campaigned on in ’08 happen. 999,000 of them were beyond his control.
All of that being said, it’s reasonable IMO to hold public figures to account for what they say.
Frankly, I think Obama himself would acknowledge that he hasn’t been able to make all of the things he ran on come to pass. I would expect him to do so, and would personally think of less of him if he did not.
It doesn’t mean he isn’t doing a good job, it doesn’t mean he isn’t the best available person for that role, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have your support.
People are accountable for their performance. It’s just a basic reality of life. It’s one we all live with, not just the President.
Under Obamacare my quite decent insurance is due to go up a lot in price over the next couple of years, because somebody decided the policy I was happy with wasn’t good enough to be legal to offer.
This seems, to me, like a reasonable objection to the ACA.
Without meaning to be a jerk, it also seems to me that anything done at the public level ends up being less than ideal for some people.
The alternative is to do nothing, which has enormous drawbacks of its own.
Long story short, I can see why you would prefer to not have the ACA be the law of the land.
You know what, magistra? Everybody dies.
Hard to argue against that point.
What isn’t hard to argue against is that there is value in addressing situations that cause large numbers of people to suffer and, yes, die, from causes that readily preventible.
Ultimately, we could roll it all back – no standards or regulations for anything concerning public health or safety. Perhaps you would find that congenial, but you’ll find it hard to sell to the rest of us.
And as a point of fact, health care is more like food than I think you acknowledge.
You both have lost all credibility. Time to look at things in context.
If I’ve lost all credibility along with Russell, I’m in good company and happy to be there.
For yet another chunk of evidence from the reality-based community to those who talk out of their ass, there’s this. Again, whose policies cost more money? The “job-creator” tax reduction squad? Hardly.
McKinney, where’s your evidence?
Sapient, you’re off topic, but briefly: on the tax cuts, you can’t have it both ways–either you reinstate them across the board, or just for the top earners. Obama is going with the top earners. That is a fraction of the 1.5 billion attributed to those cuts. The two wars, voted for by both parties, certainly add to the deficit. The key distinction is that neither is a structural, permanent spending program (and if you don’t recall my many comments saying get out of both, going back several years, that’s your issue, not mine).
More generally, when I raise questions about Obama’s policies, it isn’t incumbent on me to defend McCain or Romney (can someone find McKinney’s “why I’m voting for Romney” comment? Good luck with that) or the Republican party. Finally, on this discrete point, over the years, I’ve routinely been taken to task for generalizing about ‘liberals’ or ‘the left’ or ‘Democrats’. In fairness, let’s hold everyone to the same standard.
And so, brother McKinney, what are you planning to do about health care?
Perhaps inadvertently, a fair question enters the picture. First, I don’t think health care is a right. A ‘right’ is something one can go to court and enforce. It is defined and, in practice, involves minimal-to-no intrusion on the lives/property of others. A ‘right’ isn’t measured or metered over time and isn’t subject to budgets or resources, except minimally, e.g. the cost of a court system.
So, rather than being a right, health care is a ‘conferred benefit’. We can agree among ourselves, as a country, to confer this benefit, but only if we have the means to pay for it without undue imposition on those who are writing the checks. What we lack are the means. We have over-conferred on the benefit side.
As imperfect as the status quo ante was, it had the virtue of relative affordability in the near term with long term sustainability still being in doubt.
Many years ago, here at ObWi, I suggested forming a ‘high risk/catastrophic loss’ pool for those whose health care needs were beyond anyone’s budget and various tweaks to current insurance law as specific near term moves that would let us, as a country, assess efficacy in an incremental, step-by-step approach, that would have the virtue of not creating a third enormous entitlement in one fell swoop.
the truth is that when resources are limited someone has to decide where to draw the line
Correct. No matter what, benefits (which is exactly what they are) will be limited. The “Advisory Board”, which is anything but *advisory* will ration health care by determining what is covered. Protocols will be put in place that will make most current private plans look lavish in hindsight (my prediction, feel free to bash away).
but I still often wonder why a system that is less effective and costs more is preferred by so many Americans.
Less effective in what way? What are wait times for elective surgery in the UK vs the US? Cancer survival rates?
Every major European country, all with populations of less than a third of the US, are financially underwater except for Germany. They are not underwater because of defense spending or two wars. They managed to get their on precisely the kind of spending we are talking about here.
If sustainability is a huge problem for much smaller countries, why does anyone think a country as large as the US will fare any better? Economies of scale don’t work when delivering personal services like medicine. If, by enacting ACA, we have bitten off way more than we can chew, people will have whatever health care the system produces for a time but not forever. Eventually, we will run out of money. If we haven’t already.
Sapient, you’re off topic
Off topic? I thought this was the post-election thread.
Every major European country, all with populations of less than a third of the US, are financially underwater except for Germany. They are not underwater because of defense spending or two wars. They managed to get their on precisely the kind of spending we are talking about here.
No. Actually, they’re underwater because of the financial crisis, because it the government took the private debt on with bank bailouts. The crisis was then handled with austerity measures. And it doesn’t help that Europe doesn’t have a strong central bank. It isn’t because they can’t afford health care.
For example, Iceland has recovered from the financial crisis. Iceland has universal health care. Health care does not mean financial crisis.
Iceland has universal health care. Health care does not mean financial crisis.
Iceland, population 319,000. Impressive.
“But, please, stop screaming about people dying under free markets, unless you can point to some socialist country somewhere, where people aren’t dying.”
Brett, I have repeatedly read that there are many EU countries (and maybe others) that have lower per-capita healthcare expenditures with better outcomes across the board.
I am not going to bother to read what the person you’re castigating said, but I think it’s important to note that I (and most liberals) do not claim that people die in free markets but do not die in socialist economies.
Instead, what I (and maybe Paul Krugman, I don’t know) claim is that our healthcare system saves fewer people, and costs more money, than some European ones.
Do you disagree with that?
Well, there are fewer of these inbred Vikings (that are forbidden by law to have family names) than would qualify for city status in a major US state. 😉
And do you know how expensiveit it is there ($10 for a bottle of beer in a restaurant can be considered a bargain)?
Ísland er dyrt og undarlegt land á meðan Bandaríkin eru orðinn vitlaus veð Þingi sem er læpsamlegt geðvikrahæli.
Sorry, misspelled. It is of course geðveikrahæli.
And its glæpsamlegt for Píturs sake.
Economies of scale don’t work when delivering personal services like medicine.
Iceland, population 319,000. Impressive.
Well, which is it, Mck?
Instead, what I (and maybe Paul Krugman, I don’t know) claim is that our healthcare system saves fewer people, and costs more money, than some European ones.
Do you disagree with that?
I’m not sure which of the “some” countries you are referring to, but I’m fairly sure that outcomes are the opposite: the US does better pretty much across the board on outcomes, particularly on cancer survival rates. A lot of the comparatives depend on the metric–how many docs in a given specialty, wait times, number of MRI machines and other diagnostic/treatment modalities available in a given community, etc? Intuitively, I view any countries’ numbers as suspect. No country, particularly one in which the quality of healthcare is tied to the governing party, advertises bad results.
And its glæpsamlegt for Píturs sake.
Glad you caught that.
Well, which is it, Mck?
It’s the smaller number in both instances. It’s easier to treat a smaller number of people, and to order priorities among a smaller group. That a much smaller country can rebound faster than one that is a thousand times larger seems unsurprising.
It’s the smaller number in both instances.
Quite right. I got my head turned backwards on that. (Not that I’m now agreeing with you on the facts, necessarily, but I’ll concede to the logic on that particular point.)
Source 1
Source 2
Mck, where did you read that US does better than other countries?
Also, “viewing other countries’ numbers as suspect” is sort of an ad hominem (ad patria?), and there’s no way to debate you if you take that position, unless you can specifically point to indications that the numbers are wrong.
Julian, for cancer survival rates, go to this link, Table 5: http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@epidemiologysurveilance/documents/document/acspc-027766.pdf
For elective surgery wait times, go to this link: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/06/08/index.html;jsessionid=as008die826bn.delta?contentType=&itemId=/content/chapter/health_glance-2011-59-en&co
Your two cites used life expectancy and infant mortality rates. Both are dependent in part on life style choices and decisions. Unfortunately, both are also demographically sensitive. Europe does not have the US’ population homogeneity. Unfortunately, if you break down life expectancy and infant mortality along ethnic lines, you get different sets of numbers that produce a lower average result. Comparing like populations to like produces a more comparable result. Feel free to check this out and fix any error.
My preferred metrics are outcomes and wait times. I haven’t been able to find any reliable data on efficacy of surgical outcomes. Intuitively, because our surgeons operate more, I suspect our outcomes are better, but there are good reasons for believing the opposite, e.g. I am anecdotally aware of several surgeons who cut automatically just to get paid. I doubt that is a big issue in Europe.
As for viewing numbers as suspect, no I don’t think that is ad hominem. Countries with national health care are motivated to put themselves in the best light. Advocates for private insurance put their numbers in the best light. Put differently, people with vested interests lie and governments are made up of people.
Eventually, we will run out of money. If we haven’t already.
Isn’t the real question a matter of real resources, not money, which is an artifical tool we use to facilitate the allocation of real resources – a unit of measure in some sense, like inches or feet?
Certainly, there may be competition for the resources required to deliver a given level of healthcare among other potential uses for those same resource, but I never hear anyone discussing that. Instead, everyone talks about money, which can be created out of thin air if necessary.
Why would that be necessary? Maybe there’s a lot of fat in our economy that would be cut in favor of healthcare. Why shouldn’t healthcare be a high priority? Doesn’t healthcare provide jobs, many of which are highly rewarding and challenging? Doesn’t it yield value in improving and prolonging life? What’s more important than that?
Or, if everyone has access to healthcare, might we end up using less of it (per year, per capita), since people won’t be waiting until they’re critical before getting treatment?
Anyway, you don’t worry about running out of feet when you’re building something out of lumber. You worry about running out of wood. No one says, “Well, we have plenty of wood, but we’ve run out of feet by which to measure it. We’ll have to halt construction until we can get some more feet.”
McTex, we’ve discussed this before but cancer survival rates aren’t necessarily meaningful. For example, in the US, we screen for prostate cancer very aggressively using tests that have a high false positive rate. As a result, we perform lots surgeries and then pat ourselves on the back for our very high prostate cancer survival rates. But the truth is a large fraction of those “cancers” were never going to cause significant health problems, at least not until long after heart disease killed the patient anyway. But hey, we’ve got a fee-for-service medical system so and the urologist and surgical oncologist made bank, so I guess it is all good.
“As for viewing numbers as suspect, no I don’t think that is ad hominem. Countries with national health care are motivated to put themselves in the best light. Advocates for private insurance put their numbers in the best light. Put differently, people with vested interests lie and governments are made up of people.”
it is an ad hominem. You are impugning the truth value of a statement based on the source of the statement.
What’s more, if you truly think that vested interests lie and governments are made up of people, why is there any less reason to distrust/discount the sources that you cite?
“Your two cites used life expectancy and infant mortality rates. Both are dependent in part on life style choices and decisions.”
You cite cancer rates and elective surgery wait times. Are those less dependent on lifestyle choices and decisions? You say “[m]y preferred metrics are outcomes and wait times,” but why should outcomes exclude infant mortality and life expectancy?
“Unfortunately, both are also demographically sensitive. Europe does not have the US’ population homogeneity.”
Europe is not a country, it’s a continent, and I have no idea why Europe’s heterogeneity should matter. See the JAMA source:
Countries in order of their average ranking on the health indicators (with the first being the best) are Japan, Sweden, Canada, France, Australia, Spain, Finland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Belgium, the United States, and Germany.
So you’re telling me that those countries ranked higher than the US don’t have the ethnic homogeneity of the US? And that’s why they do better on indicators like infant mortality and life expectancy?
“Unfortunately, if you break down life expectancy and infant mortality along ethnic lines, you get different sets of numbers that produce a lower average result. Comparing like populations to like produces a more comparable result. Feel free to check this out and fix any error.”
Here, what I think you’re saying is that the U.S.’s infant mortality and life expectancy numbers are being dragged down by minorities (black and hispanic people, probably), and that we should be comparing the outcomes for white people in the US with white people in Europe.
I hope that upon reflection you will understand why this is a deeply repellent argument. You’re saying we shouldn’t factor in how ethnicities who are disproportionately poor are faring under our healthcare system.
Why not?
When the Federal Reserve (government) does it, it’s call monetary easing. When a private entity does it, it’s called counterfeiting.
“When the Federal Reserve (government) does it, it’s call monetary easing. When a private entity does it, it’s called counterfeiting.”
When I carry my TV to my dad’s house, it’s called moving, when you carry my TV to your dad’s house, it’s called theft.
Did I just blow your mind?
When the Federal Reserve (government) does it, it’s call monetary easing. When a private entity does it, it’s called counterfeiting.
I’m not sure what your point is. This is as it should be.
Regardless of who creates money out of thin air, it’s still theft.
“Regardless of who creates money out of thin air, it’s still theft.”
Let me guess: because it reduces the value of units of that currency for everyone else.
If I build a hot dog shack next to your hot dog shack and you lose customers to me, is that theft?
No. Not all conduct that reduces value is theft. Printing more money is not theft. We live in a democracy that elects politicians who are ostensibly accountable to us, and they appoint people who set monetary policy. You may not like monetary policy, but the fact that it goes on without your personal approval does not make it theft.
Regardless of who creates money out of thin air, it’s still theft.
I guess that settles it. Thanks!
Money is stuff of low to no intrinsic value (yes, that includes gold) that only lives by the trust put into it.
Then I should be able to issue my own currency and let people pick the currency they think holds the best value.
Tell that to the Chinese and others holding US dollars. At some point, they may get tired of having their pockets picked.
My preferred metrics are outcomes and wait times.
Great! Then you can perhaps answer some questions
1) What is the ideal mean wait time for all elective, non-life-saving surgeries, and how are you arriving at this figure? Can you then break it down by surgery type, and explain how you arrived at those figures as well?
2) Outcomes for what? Measured by what? Just cancer, or other stuff, too? How many years of life after remission is acceptable? Is “infant mortality” not an outcome?
I think I get it: The government’s stealing all the stuff that wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t created money out of thin air when it creates money out of thin air.
We should prefer much higher taxation and much lower spending, with all the attendant economic calamity. People like to say we’ll become Greece if we don’t fix our deficits. The truth is, the fastest way to become Greece is to try to fix our deficits when economic conditions won’t allow it.
To each his own.
Why does CharlesWT hate Article 1, Section 8? Whence the disrespect for the wishes of our Founders?
Gold, at least, has a verifiable physical existence. Unlike the promises of politicians and governments.
Tell that to the Chinese and others holding US dollars.
Highlighting the Chinese, who peg their currency to ours so they can sell us stuff, is an interesting choice. I can’t wait for the new regime of economic-isolationist exporters to arise. It should be quite the trick.
Then I should be able to issue my own currency and let people pick the currency they think holds the best value.
Umm, can’t you do that right now? Bitcoin is hardly the only digital currency around. What exactly is stopping you?
Gold, at least, has a verifiable physical existence. Unlike the promises of politicians and governments.
Barter to your heart’s content, or, better yet, live off the land. The rest of us have organized ourselves in another fashion. It does have its problems, but it’s generally worked out quite well in terms of standard of living and quality of life – not that I wouldn’t strive for improvement in many areas where improvement seems sorely needed. But I’d work within the system rather than replacing it, in spite of politicians and government being part of it.
So, rather than being a right, health care is a ‘conferred benefit’. We can agree among ourselves, as a country, to confer this benefit, but only if we have the means to pay for it without undue imposition on those who are writing the checks. What we lack are the means. We have over-conferred on the benefit side.
This is, IMO, a sensible analysis.
I agree that neither health care, nor health insurance, are rights. I would go even a little further and argue that talking about them as if they were rights confuses the issue, quite a bit.
Publicly provided health insurance is a benefit that we may, or may not, agree to confer, to whatever degree we choose to confer it.
All of that said, I would add the following.
The consequences of not having access to health care are generally larger than for lots of other goods and services. And, those consequences in many cases impinge on public life. There is, IMO, a public interest in basic health care being broadly accessible.
The cost of health care has for many years increased at a rate greater than inflation and/or the growth of the economy as a whole. As a sector of the economy, it threatens to starve other crucial things of resources. So, there is also IMO a public motivation for intervening in the health care industry.
The US spends more in public money on health care than many equivalent countries, AND IN ADDITION spends more in private money. We spend MUCH MUCH more on health care, and if you broaden your metrics beyond the somewhat narrow focus of outcomes for specific cancers and wait times for elective surgery, we DO NOT have a much much better result. Again, IMO this argues for public intervention in the health care industry.
Private markets are great when they work, and the general preference – the default option – should normally be to leave them alone.
When they function in ways that impinge negatively on the public well being, IMO public intervention makes sense.
I think ACA is a less-than-optimal Rube-Goldenberg frankenstein’s monster version of health care reform, but for better or worse it’s the best we could do. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing, and it’s a step, again IMVHO, in the right direction.
I expect a large number of the regulations and provisions to be changed over time, and I think that’s both fine and appropriate.
But the cost of health care, period, no matter who pays for it, is going to be one of a very small handful of make-or-break problems for the nation over the next 20 or 30 years.
I don’t think it’s something that can left purely to private markets to sort out.
“Regardless of who creates money out of thin air, it’s still theft.”
Well, it turned out, according to Teddy Roosevelt, that having a second-story man of last resort was the only way to counteract the ability of your every day second-story men, like J.P. Morgan, to make everyone else’s money disappear into thin air by other means.
I’m trying to think after Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and company in 2007-2008 reduced the money stock of the entire f*cking world, how it is that someone who, absent the Federal Reserve, had gold to pay for the last can of tuna fish thought they were NOT going to be set upon fatally by the rest of us.
I’d like to know too the provenance of the many more frequent financial panics experienced prior to the Federal Reserve Act.
Hey, you know what? That the entire system is a bullsh*t confidence game is granted. That we should leave the bullsh*t confidence game to Jaime Diamond and company is itself Bullsh*t.
Jaime Diamond and company need a bigger bullsh*tter, for the time being Ben Bernacke and fellow Governors of the Federal Reserve, to watch them and print the money the former destroy from time to time.
Since Phil Gramm and Robert Rubin convinced Congress and the White House that Jaime Diamond (the biggest name and thus symbolically mentioned here) didn’t need to be watched by anyone else.
By the way, don’t let it get out that our entire way of life and standard of living depends on credit way beyond the world’s gold reserves depends on this fragile lens of bullsh*t we rest on.
Let’s keep it our secret here at OBWI.
Lest everyone else panic and Ron Paul is left holding the last can of tuna fish.
Then I should be able to issue my own currency and let people pick the currency they think holds the best value.
Nope, sorry, that’s a designated power of the US Congress. Amend the Constitution if you don’t like it.
Edited to add upon seeing Turb’s post: Do whatever you want, just don’t expect to, you know, buy anything anywhere.
Dimon, darnit. Not Diamond.
Not Selma Diamond. Not Jared Diamond.
Diamond Jaime Dimon.
Turbulence, making your own currency (not forging an existing one, that’s something else) is illegal in many countries, including the US iirc. It’s not just that the state hates rivals but using a currency not officially sanctioned is seen and treated as tax evasion (since it skips sales tax/value added tax/equivalent tax for transactions). That also means that pure barter is not strictly legal (although on a small scale it rarely gets prosecuted). Paying taxes in kind has been outlawed long ago.
There’s a growing movement to use cell phones to transfer value bypassing middlemen including banks and governments.
making your own currency (not forging an existing one, that’s something else) is illegal in many countries, including the US iirc.
Are you certain? Years ago I worked at a startup with a few guys who were interested in alternative digital currencies. The impression I got from them was that this sort of thing was legal as long as you were careful to ensure that conversions between your currency and US dollars were not anonymous.
There’s a growing movement to use cell phones to transfer value bypassing middlemen including banks and governments.
No one could possibly be so ignorant as to find this plausible. I yearn to learn more about this “movement”. Please, do tell.
There’s a growing movement to use cell phones to transfer value bypassing middlemen including banks and governments.
“Hey Eddy, izzat you?”
“Yeah, russell, it’s me”
“Can I borrow your car?”
CharlesWT:
I must be missing something.
You mean I can pay a merchant by bypassing banks and governments?
From whence do these payments originate? From thin air? From my BANK account, insured by the government?
From some other account/entity containing what currency? Earned and paid by whom? An electronic blip? Backed up by the full faith and credit (see previous rant on the thin lens of .. etc) of whom? Ebay?
To be received by the merchant and used to replenish inventory from suppliers using what currency?
Wasn’t there a candidate in 2010 who suggested purchasing medical care with an alternative currency denominated in chickens?
How were the chickens procured in the first place?
Yeah, I know about eggs, but where did the chicken producer get the eggs in the first place?
From the doctor who received too many chickens that laid too many eggs?
That sounds suspiciously like inflation most fowl.
I almost referred to the chicken lady in my last post. If payment in kind was still legal (it isn’t) the doctor would have to pay the first eggs from the chicken from the patient to the state or he would have failed his tax obligations (income tax in this case).
Tax evasion is illegal. If someone pays you in non-US-currency, you have to figure out the fair market value of the transaction and make sure you pay the appropriate taxes. But the issue here is that tax evasion is a crime, not that paying in non-US-currency is illegal.
A foreign currency would be a sanctioned currency (all that full faith and credit stuff that states command). But if you would come up with a new currency (1 Turb = 144 Lences) and use it for anything else but board games, the state would come down on you first for violating its coinage privilege and secondly for the tax evasion.
I guess defunct currencies* are treated like made-up ones.
*the European currencies replaced by the Euro are a special case since some states still accept them as legal tender
That also means that pure barter is not strictly legal
This is not true in the US.
But if you would come up with a new currency (1 Turb = 144 Lences) and use it for anything else but board games, the state would come down on you first for violating its coinage privilege and secondly for the tax evasion.
I don’t believe that’s true in the US. There are a bunch of businesses that accept bitcoin that don’t seem to have suffered any legal sanction. What’s more, there are online virtual game currencies with very large dollar value amounts; these also have not seen any sanction from US governments except regarding tax evasion and money laundering concerns.
Well: not quite. I winced every time Mitt talked about how much of our debt China owns; that was actually a great deal more true last year than it is right now. Here’s the latest miserable debt doughnut.
Who owns most of our debt is us. China owns less than 10% of our debt.
Ok, now that I look into that “a great deal more true last year than it is right now”, that only applies to short-term T-bills and not to overall debt holdings.
Still, Japan is kind of a close second to China, in terms of individual countries that hold US debt.
Although obopay is tied to official currencies and banking systems, it allows you to make instant funds transfers outside of traditional bank and credit card systems using your mobile phone. Amazon, Google and others are getting into the non-traditional funds transfer business.
While I can’t find support for my previous comment, it may only be a matter of time before someone uses cloud computing and other technologies to set up a virtual banking system that would be hard for governments to corner. Maybe they already have. After all, there’s a huge demand to be able to move money under the radar of governments.
In the mean time, carrots are the ticket.
Although obopay is tied to official currencies and banking systems,
obopay is a company that sells stuff to banks.
it allows you to make instant funds transfers outside of traditional bank and credit card systems using your mobile phone.
No, it doesn’t.
Amazon, Google and others are getting into the non-traditional funds transfer business.
No, they’re not. In any event, non-traditional funds transfer is a far cry from currency transfers that bypass banks and governments. And it is a very far cry from a large movement of people doing so right now.
it may only be a matter of time before someone uses cloud computing and other technologies to set up a virtual banking system that would be hard for governments to corner.
No, it won’t be. You clearly don’t know a damn thing about how technology works, let alone how the banking system works.
After all, there’s a huge demand to be able to move money under the radar of governments.
We call that money laundering. It is a serious crime.
So let’s think this out as if we were writing a futuristic movie script regarding a virtual economy of some size existing under the radar of government and avoiding all taxation.
Say, Smeagle, one segment of the futuristic virtual economy existing only in the cloud, is run by, it turns out, some combination of Russian Mafia and an ideology-soaked Paul Ryan/Galt type who, it also turns out, are malevolent grifters by nature, and inevitably and one day, this cloud economy and all of the “currency deposits” it is holding in virtual la-la-land (just like now, except that my bullsh*t currency metaphor bank account down at the local bank at least has someone keeping track of it if things go haywire) from topless car wash owners in Texas and such who have seceded from the regular economy because they don’t like paying taxes to governments, especially those run by black dudes, disappears with a mouse click into cyber outlaw Barbados Rmoney oblivion taking all of the deposits, the virtual currency, the virtual carrots with it, never to be seen or found again.
Who are the victims going to call to get their money back?
The government? Which has fired the Federal Reserve, the FBI, the CIA, the wiretappers, the banking account snoops, the IRS inspectors, etc etc because the tax drain has pretty much put the kabosh on law enforcement as well as any other government function?
“After all, there’s a huge demand to be able to move money under the radar of governments.”
Yeah, I look forward to doing business in the same bazaar with international arms dealers and heroin and cocaine cartels in order to buy my groceries without government snooping around.
Not that the banks aren’t laundering arms merchants and drug dealers money already, but still.
Here, what I think you’re saying is that the U.S.’s infant mortality and life expectancy numbers are being dragged down by minorities (black and hispanic people, probably), and that we should be comparing the outcomes for white people in the US with white people in Europe.
I hope that upon reflection you will understand why this is a deeply repellent argument. You’re saying we shouldn’t factor in how ethnicities who are disproportionately poor are faring under our healthcare system.
Why not?
Anytime race or ethnicity enters a conversation, the tone and tenor change, regardless of intent or, often, context.
If you are going to compare anything among populations, then the valid comparison is comparing like to like. Whether it is income, test scores, admissions,education attainment, what have you and for whatever reason, we often divide along ethnic/racial lines. The question then arises whether there are differences along these lines and what the underlying reasons for those differences might be. If noting those differences–as opposed to conclusions one draws from the differences–is repugnant or repellent or racist or whatever, just tell me now and I’ll put my head in the sand. In the meantime, those differences will persist whether repellent or not. If, on average, Caucasians outlive African Americans, that is a fact, not an opinion and censoring that fact won’t make it go away.
Julian, you mind read when you write, “what I think you’re saying is that the U.S.’s infant mortality and life expectancy numbers are being dragged down by minorities (black and hispanic people, probably).” Your phrase ‘dragging down’ coupled with your subjective judgement ‘repellent’ allows for the reasonable inference that you are imputing racist motives to me.
If we are going to look at life expectancy as an indicator of a given country’s health care delivery, then we have to compare like to like. In this case, European extraction in the US compares favorably with European results. The ‘why?’ of that is a separate issue: access to healthcare, poverty, education, or some combination of the three. But, on the efficacy of US vs Europe on healthcare delivery, it is either a tie or statistically too close to call for Caucasians. So, as to Caucasians, you can’t draw any conclusions based on this metric.
You well might draw conclusions within the US by race and by state and by urban vs rural. All of these, I strongly suspect, will yield different results by ethnicity.
Great! Then you can perhaps answer some questions
I could, but you typically load your questions up in such a way as to make the exercise more work than it’s worth. Short answer: there aren’t a lot of data reliably pulled into one location that doesn’t require a lot of digging through the weeds. I tried to indicate that the choice of metric is subjective and that there isn’t, AFAIK, one that follows surgical results. I picked surgery wait times and cancer survival because both are contingent upon availability of and access to timely medical intervention. Life span can be but isn’t necessarily as directly related.
We spend MUCH MUCH more on health care, and if you broaden your metrics beyond the somewhat narrow focus of outcomes for specific cancers and wait times for elective surgery, we DO NOT have a much much better result.
How do we know this and what is the standard for “better result”? Not being argumentative here, just wondering how one compares a country of 40 million people with one of 300 plus million and reliably concludes that one system is better than another. I am betting that there are things we do in the US ‘better’ that China simply because we don’t have a billion plus people banging around.
Instead, everyone talks about money, which can be created out of thin air if necessary.
Sure it can, at which time it loses all of its value and, lacking some other medium of exchange, we are all penniless. So, either we are proposing screwing the dumbasses who bought our debt by devaluing our currency to the point of being meaningless or we’re blowing smoke–no one is seriously going to devalue in that fashion.
But the cost of health care, period, no matter who pays for it, is going to be one of a very small handful of make-or-break problems for the nation over the next 20 or 30 years.
I don’t think it’s something that can left purely to private markets to sort out.
Maybe. We’re talking about what the future holds, which is inherently unknowable. Where I question your statement is the implicit notion that if the market can’t fix a problem–here, the problem is health care–the government can. That is an unproven premise. The evidence of government successfully discharging, over the long term and sustainably, something as expensive and expansive as health care does not exist. The hope is that government can do this. What if government fails? Or, worse yet, fails utterly? These are also on the range of possible outcomes. If government fails utterly, it leaves a vaccuum far worse than our present problems. Far worse. One of the many angles of ACA that scare me a lot–not for me, but for my children and very-soon-to-be-born grandchild–is that ACA will so suppress innovation and the supply of high skilled docs with attendant high end diagnostic equipment and modalities that the long term quality of medicine will decline precipitously, not to mention bankrupting the country. I am not predicting this will happen, only expressing grave concern that it could happen.
Sure it can, at which time it loses all of its value and, lacking some other medium of exchange, we are all penniless.
Really? Why hasn’t that happened then? When the Treasury issues bond to cover deficit spending and the Fed buys those bonds on the open market a short time later, how is that functionally different from creating money from thin air with a few strokes on a keyboard? I mean, we could certainly overdo it, but we have high levels of unemployment and underutilized capacity for production now, with dreaded deficits and QE1 and 2, all the while with low inflation and really low interest rates.
If people shift from doing nothing (or from making motorcycles and cigarettes, or whatever) to providing healthcare, how is that going to devalue our currency? And you still have no response to the issue of real reasources being expended. Russell touched on it, and I agree we should use as few resources as necessary to achieve the best outcomes as are feasible (something I believe about everything we, as humans, do), but that’s a different issue from “running out of money.”
I did a quick search and life expectancy for white people in the US in 2009 was 78.8 years (from a CDC table pdf file here ) and life expectancy in Great Britain in 2010 was a little over 80 years. link
So a slightly better result and they pay less for health care.
What struck me about the health care debate in the US was that outside of blogs it seemed to be structured as “Can we afford this massive government intervention into the health care system?” At blogs I would read the claims people make here–that other Western industrialized countries get better results than we do with less money spent on their health care system. Now even if that was wrong (and I don’t think it is), comparisons between the US and other countries should have been part of the debate. But I don’t think it was.
I singled out whites because that was brought up. I actually agree with Julian –not that McKT is making a racist argument intentionally or unintentionally, but that the low life expectancy of American minorities is part of the overall picture. Anyway, Great Britain has minorities too, though I don’t know what the percentages are. Even so, comparing American whites to the average in Great Britain, Britain wins.
Whether it is income, test scores, admissions,education attainment, what have you and for whatever reason, we often divide along ethnic/racial lines.
We do that to test how just our various systems are as regards race and ethnicity. We do that to identify problems of discrimination and lack of opportunity for groups we already know aren’t doing so well. But you would need to control for things like education and income to properly test for differences among races and ethnicities as it regards health outcomes. I think the obvious reasons some races and ethnicities, to the extent we’re even capable of defining such meaninfully, do better than others health-wise are the other factors like income and education.
Why do you think race and ethnicity, in and of themselves, would be significant factors in broad-based health outcomes (as opposed to specific things like Tay–Sachs disease or sickle-cell anaemia, which we already know affect certain groups)?
Why do you think race and ethnicity, in and of themselves, would be significant factors in broad-based health outcomes (as opposed to specific things like Tay–Sachs disease or sickle-cell anaemia, which we already know affect certain groups)?
They aren’t if there is no difference across racial lines and I never said ‘in and of themselves’–in fact, people keep adding to what I say. But here’s the point: you control for ethnicity and see if there is a difference. If there is a difference, you note it. I suspect the smaller ethnic demographics in Europe have less of a variance, maybe even no variance, from Caucasians in health care delivery. Let’s say that’s the case: a notable disparity in the US between white and black people, but not in Europe and assume that the European black population is statistically significant. If that were the case, then you’d conclude, at least in part, the US black community is under-served by the health care delivery system.
Now, another note about race: suppose African Americans outlived Caucasians, all things being equal. Would anyone object to that fact being noted? Would anyone object to defending the efficacy of US healthcare delivery by insisting that Caucasians in Europe not be compared with African Americans in the US because of the demonstrated (for the purpose of this discussion) fact that African Americans live longer?
If that is ok, then the reverse out to be ok, if all else is equal. We know things aren’t equal in the US in terms of economics, education etc. What we don’t know is whether, for some obscure and presently unknown reason, different ethnicities live longer, on average. That could well be the case. The average may be months, it may be a couple of years. If so, that disparity becomes a fact of life and relevant to average life expectancy in the US compared to populations that are not ethnically comparable.
McK:
What do you think of the theory that healthcare outcomes like infant mortality and life expectancy divide along racial lines largely because minorities (and especially African Americans) are disproportionately poor?
If that’s the case, then even granting your assumption that the healthcare system we have is as good for our white people as it is for the UK’s white people (which Donald Johnson disputes), then our healthcare system is much much worse for our poor people.
Do you agree or disagree?
What do you think of the theory that healthcare outcomes like infant mortality and life expectancy divide along racial lines largely because minorities (and especially African Americans) are disproportionately poor?
If that’s the case, then even granting your assumption that the healthcare system we have is as good for our white people as it is for the UK’s white people (which Donald Johnson disputes), then our healthcare system is much much worse for our poor people.
Do you agree or disagree?
I agree somewhat and think that you are conflating ‘poor’ and ‘being a minority’. Let’s take four ethnicities: Asian, Caucasian, African American and Hispanic and then further control for education and employment level. My guess is that poorer healthcare outcomes will aggregate in that subset which is defined by lower education and lower skilled/unskilled employment, irrespective of ethnicity. This is a function of education as well as a number of social pathologies that flow from a sub-subset within the low income/low education subset, that being the third and fourth generation of poverty/limited education attainment.
IOW, ignorance is a byproduct of chronic poverty which is all too often self-replicating down through generations. In many cases, my sense is that many people simply don’t know how to take care of themselves in a healthy way (hell, go to McDonalds, which another story, and why our life expectancy is likely to decline in the out years) and this is passed along to their children who grow up never knowing any better. It may be partially access to healthcare, but that is only part of it. Smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, diet, lack of prenatal attention to diet, etc, etc. All of these drive life expectancy. I strongly suspect that the 5% outlive the 80% regardless of ethnicity.
Well, speaking of all those other factors, here’s a piece from the New Yorker in 2004–I didn’t realize how long ago it was until I looked it up. Anyway, the claim is that Europeans are getting steadily taller and Americans aren’t. Perhaps it’s those European nanny state attitudes at work.
link
Perhaps it’s those European nanny state attitudes at work.
No. It’s the gravitational pull of our fat guts hanging over our belts pulling us in the opposite direction.
I picked surgery wait times and cancer survival because both are contingent upon availability of and access to timely medical intervention.
So, again, what do you want them to be? What’s an acceptable value or range? Are those of the previously mentioned nations acceptable or unacceptable vis a vis the US? If unacceptable, why? How much variation is acceptable.
In many cases, my sense is that many people simply don’t know how to take care of themselves in a healthy way (hell, go to McDonalds, which another story, and why our life expectancy is likely to decline in the out years) and this is passed along to their children who grow up never knowing any better.
I would suggest that you look into large-scale packaged food producers’ and chain restaurants’ well-funded contribution to this being the case, or at the typical/aggregate conservative response whenever anyone suggests that maybe school lunches could have more broccoli and fewer tater tots, but I can’t imagine much would be accomplished by my doing so.
Also, this: “Life span can be but isn’t necessarily as directly related [to timely access to medical care]” is going to require a lot more than simple assertion.
Isn’t it great that we can quit arguing about it, and that we can test it now. If it weren’t for the ACA, there would be the status quo. The status quo didn’t work for a huge number of people.
So, again, what do you want them to be? What’s an acceptable value or range? Are those of the previously mentioned nations acceptable or unacceptable vis a vis the US? If unacceptable, why? How much variation is acceptable.
What’s a fair wage? How many children should you have? What is a decent standard of living? How far is up? I guess it depends.
If you have a broken hip and can’t ambulate and your muscles are atrophying and you have to wait six months to get a replacement, that’s too much.
If the wait time is 1-2 months, that’s not good either, but it’s better than six months.
There isn’t an objective standard. From personal experience, when my back went out 5 years ago and I couldn’t stand, walk or sit (or use the bathroom for any purpose without what seemed like all the freaking pain in the world), any wait time was too much. My wait time turned out to 2 weeks to get a spinal injection which did the trick. I can tell you for a fact that if you’re lying in bed and can’t move, can’t get to work, after about a week, depression sets in, time stands still and it gets worse everyday. If ACA produces longer lines than we already have, that will not be good for anyone, to say the least.
whenever anyone suggests that maybe school lunches could have more broccoli and fewer tater tots, but I can’t imagine much would be accomplished by my doing so.
Because no one can actually choose their meal on their own responsibly? Because the ignorant masses haven’t been duly and suitably indoctrinated in healthy lifestyles? Understood. Let’s have a federal directive on healthy school lunches. Back when our kids were at home, we had family directives on eating well, backed up by the usual parental coercion tactics. However, I don’t think a school system can tell Johnny or Julie they can’t watch TV or have dessert if they don’t eat all their broccoli or tell them ‘no lunch tomorrow if you don’t eat what you are served today’ and have it stick.
While we’re at it, let’s monitor how much sleep people get, how much TV they watch, let’s mandate an hour a day of exercise and require courses in sensitivity. And dental hygiene–did you brush and floss? No? Ok, no cookie for you.
People know, or should know, what is healthy. Shocker, many people don’t really care. Go figure. It isn’t just another conservative conspiracy to screw people over. Really, it isn’t.
Also, this: “Life span can be but isn’t necessarily as directly related [to timely access to medical care]” is going to require a lot more than simple assertion.
Well, it’s a combination of two things: first, don’t take me out of context and then, when you don’t, it’s a matter of logic.
Here’s what I said:
“I picked surgery wait times and cancer survival because both are contingent upon availability of and access to timely medical intervention. Life span can be but isn’t necessarily as directly related.”
1. Surgery wait times–lesser wait times correlates to having more docs and more surgical suites, i.e. more access to timely medical intervention.
2. Better cancer survival rates–are often a product of earlier diagnosis and shorter time lapse between diagnose and treatment. Again, this is quicker/greater access to timely medical intervention.
3. Why lifespan isn’t as directly related as 1 and 2 above–because you can have virtually unlimited access to the best healthcare in the world but if you are a smoker, an excessive drinker, sedentary and obese, it won’t do you much good. If you have limited access to healthcare, but live a healthy lifestyle, you can fix on that side of the equation what gets lost on the other. If you are genetically predisposed to live long, or not, access to healthcare may not be much of a determinant regardless.
How do we know this and what is the standard for “better result”?
So, two questions:
How do we know this (i.e., the outcomes in the US are not significantly better than in comparable countries)?
We know this because there is a very large body of research dedicated to finding this very thing out.
One commonly cited source is the OECD, there are also many other organizations who do nothing else but crunch these kinds of statistics day in and day out.
It’s what they do, and they’re good at it.
What is the standard for “better result”?
There likely is no single standard for better result. The OECD stuff, for example, focuses on life expectancy. Other research focuses on specific issues like obesity, or prevalence of chronic disease, or any of a number of other issues.
The US has very good results for certain fairly specific things. We’re good at cancer outcomes, we have a very high availability of sophisticated medical technologies like MRIs and other imaging technologies.
We are mediocre at plain vanilla basic preventative health care, and at a fairly wide spectrum of plain vanilla quality-of-life measures.
There is absolutely no question, whatsoever, that our all-in per-capita expenditure on health care is head and shoulders above any and all other nations.
You are correct that no two nations are exactly alike, and in fact no two nations other than US are exactly alike. So, to some degree, any comparison is apples to oranges.
But the preponderance of evidence is that we pay a hell of a lot more, and do not get a hell of a lot better result.
Where I question your statement is the implicit notion that if the market can’t fix a problem–here, the problem is health care–the government can.
The difference between relying on the market to ‘fix a problem’ and the government to ‘fix a problem’ is that the government can actually have an intent, relative to the problem at hand. The market really doesn’t.
So, if there actually is a problem, the market will not provide a solution. It will provide a *result*, which is a different thing altogether. And, that result will be a function of which of all possible outcomes yields the most efficient deployment of resources, especially capital.
In the case of health care, the most efficient deployment of resources might come by making no health care, at all, available to a large swath of the population.
For reasons — very good, legitimate, and compelling reasons, that have nothing to do with economics per se — we might as a polity decide that we don’t want to settle for that outcome.
Basically, to me, saying that we can’t interfere in ‘the market’ when it is producing results that we find unacceptable is like saying that you can’t board up your windows when a hurricane comes, because that would be interfering with the weather.
“The market” is just a description of a complex system. There is no overarching intelligence, it’s just the result of millions and millions of very local decisions made by millions and millions of people, none of whom has a total or even a very large understanding of the dynamics of the system as a whole.
The “market” has no agency, or intelligence, or intent. It’s our description of what happens when millions of people provide and sell goods and services. Relying on it to produce an optimal outcome by any measure other than efficient use of resources is like relying on the weather to never blow your house down.
That is an unproven premise. The evidence of government successfully discharging, over the long term and sustainably, something as expensive and expansive as health care does not exist.
The question on the table is not government providing health *care*. The question on the table is government regulating the terms under which primarily private actors provide health *insurance*.
The US government actually has a pretty good track record of running public health insurance programs, even at fairly large scales. So, if a purely public payer option was politically feasible, IMO that would be a reasonable path.
It remains to be seen how effective government will be at managing the interaction of a mongrel mix of private and public actors. I’m sure the results will be mixed.
But, at a minimum, it allows for the public *intent* — the purposeful goal that health care be available to a broad range of the population — to be a factor in the mess.
“One of the many angles of ACA that scare me a lot–not for me, but for my children and very-soon-to-be-born grandchild–is that ACA will so suppress innovation and the supply of high skilled docs with attendant high end diagnostic equipment and modalities that the long term quality of medicine will decline precipitously, not to mention bankrupting the country”
Then you should be in favor of single-payer healthcare. Since the one example we have of government monopsony is defense/security. Does that service look like it is suffering from lack of innovation, a dearth of high-end equipment, withering R & D, and an undersupply of skilled labor, such as mechanical/aerospace engineers?
Of course the potential *bankrupting of the country* is still a lingering possibility, but if we’re going to bankrupt ourselves (or come uncomfortably close to it), I’d rather it be from ‘overspending’ on making ourselves healthier and happier, and exporting that technology and know-how to the rest of the world (rather than merely subsidizing it for the rest of the world, as we do now). Instead of, you know, exporting death and destruction to the rest of the world. Just my opinion.
As for why we spend so much more than the rest of the developed world on health care, there is good evidence that it has more to do with paying higher prices for medical goods and services, rather than overutilization or an unhealthy population:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/22/3/89.abstract
I also don’t understand why people who want to maintain a market-based healthcare financing and delivery system would be opposed to the PPACA, since it seeks to maintain a largely private financing and delivery system, but addresses several market failures such as free riders (mandate), asymmetric cost/benefit information (IPAB) and excessive pricing power (insurance exchanges).
In fact, it’s markety-ness is probably why the Heritage Foundation came up with it in the first place. And why Mitt Romney instituted it in MA, even going so far as to say that it would be a good model for the nation. Of course that was before he had to do the GOP Auto Da Fe.
All of this is despite the fact that Kenneth Arrow explained almost 50 years ago why people don’t regard health care like any other good or service that can be readily commoditized and so well-provided by an unregulated market:
http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/2/PHCBP.pdf
He still seems to think we have not been able to overcome those human obstactles to make a market-based healthcare system work:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/08/uwe-reinhardt-on-kenneth-arrow-on-health-care.html
True enough. However, something in the direction of what I was thinking about:
Banking In The Cloud
I looked at the OECD statistics for wait time for elective surgery that McKinneyTexas linked to. And what that said was: Only those respondents who had specialist consultations or elective surgery in the last year or two were asked to specify waiting times. So the wait time for people who didn’t have elective surgery because they couldn’t afford it? Not counted. And how do people in the US who don’t have health insurance get elective surgery? Emergency rooms don’t do it. As a measure of efficiency once you’re inside the health care system, elective wait surgery is one possible statistic. As a measure of healthcare for the whole population, it’s hopeless.
As for the rest of McKinneyTexas’ statements: if there is a significant racial component to life expectancy, then why does the Virgin Islands have higher life expectancy than the US? (Much smaller population, but even so, it argues against genetic factors). If you look at the CIA statistics on life expectancy at the top there are countries from a range of ethnicities.
He worries about his children and grandchildren not getting healthcare? Well, the NHS has been going for over 60 years. Bismarck started introducing public health insurance in Germany in 1883. It’s also interesting to note that China is currently trying to extend health insurance to more and more people (coming from a very low base). But then what can the US learn from anyone else?
“As for the rest of McKinneyTexas’ statements: if there is a significant racial component to life expectancy, then why does the Virgin Islands have higher life expectancy than the US?”
Because race, here, is just a proxy for culture.
We will frequently talk about “black” unemployment, or “black” single motherhood, or “black” what have you, but what we’re actually looking at is a rather dysfunctional subculture which just happens to be correlated with race.
But you’re generally screwed if you’re a member of this culture, even if you’re white, and doing ok if you’re not a member, even if you’re black. On employment, education, health, and so forth. It’s the culture, not the race, and we’re too fixated on race to look past it to see that.
There isn’t an objective standard.
Well, I’m glad that we’ve at least gotten to this point. You chose factors which appear support your preferred policy option. Noted.
I can tell you for a fact that if you’re lying in bed and can’t move, can’t get to work, after about a week, depression sets in, time stands still and it gets worse everyday.
Try laying in bed for three weeks, on painkillers, following major orthopedic leg surgery. It’ll make you want to kill yourself. (No joke – after that experience I’ve refused to take Vicodin for anything ever again.)
Because no one can actually choose their meal on their own responsibly? Because the ignorant masses haven’t been duly and suitably indoctrinated in healthy lifestyles? Understood
I hope you aren’t being sarcastic, because surely as an attorney you understand that sometimes one’s choices, or even one’s ability to make choices, are constrained by wholly external factors.
what we’re actually looking at is a rather dysfunctional subculture which just happens to be correlated with race.
This is IMO an extremely apt point. Thanks for this Brett.
I would add, perhaps, two things:
1. the correlation with black skin, specifically, should really be extended, because the cultural phenomena show up in communities of many ethnicities. Which doesn’t contradict anything you’ve said, on the contrary, it’s just something I would like to call out.
2. the subculture in question doesn’t exist apart from the larger American culture, it’s part of it, and is in no small part a product of the larger culture.
To follow up on Russell’s point: ‘the cultural phenomena show up in communities of many ethnicities’. A common right-wing argument about why most European countries’ life expectancy is better than that of the US is that Europe is more racially homogenous. However, as the life expectancy statistics I quoted confirm, race in itself isn’t a determining factor.
Among European Caucasians, there are also subcultures which have noticeably worse health problems than others. (I’ll leave to one side for the moment the question of whether these are more due to individual failings or society’s adverse treatment/neglect of such subcultures).For example in the UK, there’s the Glasgow effect (and Scotland in general has poor health standards). And yet the UK as a whole has better life expectancy than the US. Other European countries have similar subcultures, and yet the EU still has higher life expectancy than the US.
So you’re left with two possible solutions: either the US has a substantially higher number of people in dysfunctional subcultures (and you’d then need to ask why?). Or the US is less good at dealing with the healthcare of society as a whole.
Related: Babies Born in Mississippi Are Less Likely to Reach First Birthday Than Those Born in the Rest of U.S.
Interesting:
A 50% difference is statistically significant, and cannot be chalked up to “culture” alone.
Here’s a cool link on orthopedic surgery. I’ll join in the fray directly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=xMYjfb_M9wM&vq=large
I know all I need to know about orthopedic surgery, and still have the plate and 6 pins to prove it!