[Today’s run: 3.4 miles]
We are in the political season again. And once again I find myself spending too much time thinking about politics, reading editorials and news items about the upcoming presidential election.
Last time this happened I was a member of a mailing list called DRM (Dead Runner’s Mind) which was an offshoot of the DRS (Dead Runners Society) list just for talking about politics and philosophy and other non-running stuff. I spent way, way too much time discussing the various political happenings of the day.
I found myself frequently being a minority voice. There were a lot of folks who were very outspoken in their dislike for George W. Bush, US President at the time. And there were very few who held any views like mine. Well, I should say that others may have been out there but they were wiser than me and kept their heads down.
The thing that finally broke the habit for me was when a lady in Maryland (of all places) said that all Republicans were racists and proceeded to make a racist joke of which she seemed to think I would approve.
My political leanings are generally conservative, with sometimes a romantic libertarian streak showing up here and there. I participated in caucus-level activities with the Republican Party while we lived in Colorado. But I definitely didn’t find myself smiling and nodding at everything that came along.
When I woke up this morning the NPR station was airing a report about some new “feature” of the Obamacare law. I guess there is some provision of the law that requires medical insurance companies to spend 80% of their premium funds on medical expenses and a max of 20% on overhead. You know, that sound pretty sensible… until you remember that insurance is a statistical game. Maybe a smaller insurance company that specializes in professional athletes (for example) would be smart to build up a buffer of assets for use when it’s aging policyholders all come looking for joint transplants. Nope, can’t do that.
It is a prime example of my attitude: laws usually have one or two good ideas wrapped up in a whole lot of unintended consequences.
I think it would have been much better to just require a reporting of where premium money goes. Then the insurance customer would have been able to figure it out, like they do with high-overhead charities and mutual funds.
Well anyway, the NPR report was telling about how some states were trying to get a waiver from the federal law so that they would not have to live by the 80/20 provision. (Again… a law that you can ask permission to break. That seems backwards to me, and belittling of what laws are about.)
Yeah. Maybe I can do a better job of being disciplined and not get so involved with political “discussion” this time around.
2 replies on “DRM and wasted time”
I never considered George Bush a Republican in the way we hear Republicans talk of their party in this political season: the party of fiscal prudence. Going from memory, when his dad fought a war in Kuwait he sent James Baker to the area to get neighboring countries to help pay for it. With George Bush we have a large unfunded tax cut, two unfunded wars, and an unfunded drug benefit for seniors. The cost of these items easily reaches into the trillions of dollars. In the best of times under Bush we never had a deficit under a half trillion dollars.
Health insurance is a complex issue but can be broken down into two components, spreading risk and lowering costs. Concerning spreading risk, in practical terms the problem is people do not think about it until they need it. So you do not get the benefit of having all paying in. (An analog is mandatory Social Security. Without it, would people not opt to enroll until they were older?) If an insurance company opts to specialize then the money is made by covering people under 30 with no record of cancer or health disease in their family. What insurance company would specialize in people who suffer, statistically, from chronic illness? If there were such companies, how high would their rates be? And then we have the objective of lowering costs – and this one is truly complex. Administrative overhead is an easy target. When I was in the business 15 years ago, I believe federal grants for basic research capped administration expense at 26%.
Me, personally, I wish insurance was federal. I work in the “back office” finance department for Corp HR with 280,000 employees, 260,000 having health insurance through us. We have (1) huge pool to spread risk and (2) market leverage to get better rates from vendors/providers. In contrast, small business has neither of these. I am a big fan of small business and wish this imbalance didn’t exist.
And I do not know why folks are against federal government doing things. We have a federal government that invades countries and kills people to keep us safe, here at home. Republicans are generally known to support the military. Yet all this fuss about the same government managing health care?
Hi Jon,
It is really great to hear from you again.
I lean toward agreement with you about George Bush. I think he, with the advise of his economics experts, spent most of their time trying to pump up the economy and really didn’t trim anything back. On the other hand, I don’t think it is likely he could have trimmed much since the economy was booming.
As for the unfunded tax cut and wars etc. The tax cut, in theory, was paid for by increased economic growth, so that is going to always look as if it were “unfunded” because there isn’t anything on any ledger that can be ticked off against it. I think it would have been better to have left the war expenses in the budget. And I think Bush missed an opportunity for promoting unity by not asking for a bit of sacrifice on the home front in support of the war expenses.
Both parties are so weaselly when in power. This trick of the Senate now to operate only under “continuing resolution” is a weasel trick. Keeping the war expense off the books was a weasel trick.
I sympathize a bit with those in power now. If they had the boom years they could be smoking the fat cigars and passing big legislation and few would care. But that’s not what they have to work with, and they don’t seem to be able to get a grip on the fact.
So, having established that the Republicans stink at fiscal restraint and the Democrats stink at fiscal restraint, I’ll let that stand as my defense of federalism also.
One question regarding health care and small business. If a doctor’s office were to give free service to employees would that count as a health care plan? Would that then have to be regulated as such under the new law?