Posted by rosshunter on June 24, 2009
President Obama Holds Press Conference – washingtonpost.com
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Economics | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on June 17, 2009
Ezra Klein – Health Insurance Exchanges: The Most Important, Undernoticed Part of Health Reform
The Health Insurance Exchange, combines the benefits of choice that are theoretically available on the individual market with the bargaining power and scale that’s generally accessible only in large employers (and the exchange will, in theory, have more bargaining power than even the largest employers, as it will have a much larger base of customers). You also have a space to test out innovative ideas that might make the market better, like Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s (D-W.Va.) insurance rating agency, or the public insurance option. You can standardize billing and payment methods and force the adoption of electronic medical records.
And what happens when you introduce productive competition, efficiencies of scale, more innovation and increased consumer power into a market as dysfunctional as the current situation for health insurance? In theory, you get lower prices and higher quality. And if the Health Insurance Exchange has lower prices and higher quality, more individuals will use it and more companies will buy into it. And if that happens, then the efficiencies of scale should increase, and so should the pace of innovation (as the rewards will be greater with more customers), and so the Health Insurance Exchange should further outpace the other markets, thereby attracting yet more customers, thereby further accelerating the virtuous cycle. Eventually, it could become the country’s primary insurance market.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Economics | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on June 12, 2009
Ezra Klein – Hardball on Health Care?
thank you drjones, for reminding us what doctors actually care about.
It makes sense that at the heart of our health care system are a vast number of highly trained working professionals who are simply decent people, wanting to take care of others. It shouldn’t be so hard for us to enable this to happen
Ezra Klein – Listen to Atul Gawande: Insurers Aren’t the Problem in Health Care
I agree with your commenters here. Let’s not misunderstand Gawande’s article (which I loved, and agree with completely). He’s talking about specialist physicians divorced from whole-cost views of the patient, and recommending procedures partly because they know they’ll be paid for.
There are protocols of medical method that take such whole costs, and lifetime care management, into account – and this is why Mayo is way cheaper.
The McAllen model is dysfunctional, and the Mayo model needs to replace it – but still too many people in this country can’t buy into either model because they can’t afford the coverage it takes, regardless of model.
We fix the insurance because we can. We get government weight (and thus public morality) involved in a more transparent system. Then we might stand a chance of helping the Mayo model prevail.
The insurers themselves are happy wioth the status quo, so while they may not particularly care one way or another, they’re in the way because they lobby against any change. They are still the enemy, still the target.
Let’s love Gawande, take the time to understand the nuances of his article, and still push very firmly to reform the insurance industry. Stay on target Ezra.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Policy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on June 10, 2009
nadezhda04 I think that’s an excellent analysis, and I completely agree.
Lots of Obama supporters WISH he would do this or that, but the fact is the man has a wonderful feel for the realities of where he can spend his power and where he will only fritter it away. I think many of his supporters don’t appreciate this very well.
For this administration to take on the task of reforming the entire financial system in a real way would use up a lot of its power, irreplaceably. To tackle it on the scale that nadezhda04 summarizes would be a huge ambition, the size of an entire administration’s tenure. Not an unworthy ambition, but not Obama’s, not today. Someone else, some other time.
Obama has said all along that this is not his crisis, not his fight. I think we have to respect this reality. There’s only so much he can do, and that’s not a phrase, it’s a cold calculation.
After all, the U.S. President wields a very conditional and circumstantial kind of power, and it’s limited in quantity, as befits one of three branches of government.
Obama strikes me as one of the master politicians of this century. I think he has his capital calculated at all times to a fine degree, and always spends well within his budget, saving his full power for the killing blows – which we will see rarely, if at all. His power grows as he DOESN’T use it.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Policy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on June 8, 2009
Ezra Klein – When Senators Stop Tweeting Polite and Start Tweeting Real
It almost sounds like a staffer is tasked with tweeting routinely, and the staffer misunderstands the nature of contemporary hip, and Grassley misunderstands how real this stuff is. They’re treating it as token – as being in some cyber realm, and addressed to some youth underclass – and not really getting that it can actually have consequences.
And you’re right, jkaren, this is totally undignified. Grassley is a fool.
Ezra Klein – What It Means to Be Pro-Choice
es … how compelling to read a serious, personal view formed from reason and compassion, made by a future physician.
Thanks for the link Ezra. I think her feelings and reasoning must reflect a lot of people’s actually, because there are many nuances to this subject, but we’ve lived in times in recent decades where debate has narrowed and shallowed, to the exclusion of nuance. I hope that debate is now broadening, and I look at the current administration as a sign that reason can return to discussion.
Rozalyn Farmer Love has a long road to travel, and I wish her all the strength and good heart that she can find. She will help our society enormously, and relieve much suffering (and surely also earn a place in a just heaven?), by continuing on this difficult and compassionate path.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Policy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on June 6, 2009
Roundtable Interview of the President by Regional Reporters, Cairo, Egypt, 6-4-09
This is a quintessential example of how Obama thinks. He believes in negotiation, not as a way of weakening your position, but as a way of getting more accomplished than seems possible given the limits of your own power, and yet in fact by conserving that power, actually using it very sparingly.
A brilliant player.
I have one question: How is your administration going to deal with the current Israeli government and with Hamas as a part and parcel of the Palestinian portfolio? And I think so many believe that Hamas is a difficult question that the previous administration did not deal with. What is your vision and your view in dealing with Hamas and dealing with the hawks in the current Israeli government?
The other issue is your clarity and your vision makes me want to ask you, who are your partners in the region that you can rely on to achieve your objectives — either on the Palestinian issue or the Iraqi issue or the Afghanistan issue? Thank you, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I tried to make clear in my speech that when it comes to Hamas, there is no doubt that Hamas has some support among Palestinians — that was shown in the last election; that cannot be denied. What I also said is that Hamas has responsibilities to those people it represents to have a responsible approach to actually delivering a Palestinian state.
I have one question: How is your administration going to deal with the current Israeli government and with Hamas as a part and parcel of the Palestinian portfolio? And I think so many believe that Hamas is a difficult question that the previous administration did not deal with. What is your vision and your view in dealing with Hamas and dealing with the hawks in the current Israeli government?
The other issue is your clarity and your vision makes me want to ask you, who are your partners in the region that you can rely on to achieve your objectives — either on the Palestinian issue or the Iraqi issue or the Afghanistan issue? Thank you, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I tried to make clear in my speech that when it comes to Hamas, there is no doubt that Hamas has some support among Palestinians — that was shown in the last election; that cannot be denied. What I also said is that Hamas has responsibilities to those people it represents to have a responsible approach to actually delivering a Palestinian state.
If Hamas’s approach is based on the idea that Israel will cease to exist, that’s an illusion. And what that means is that they are more interested in talk than in results. If they are serious about delivering a Palestinian state, then they should renounce violence, accept the framework provided by the previous agreements, recognize Israel’s right to exist. That still leaves enormous room for them to negotiate on a whole host of issues.
But at minimum they can’t provide the results for the people they claim to represent if they’re not acknowledging reality. So, you know, this is really a decision for Hamas to make.
Now, with respect to the Israeli government, I’ve had three meetings with Prime Minister Netanyahu. The first two was while I was a United States senator, and one in the White House just recently. In each case I found him to be a very intelligent, very engaging person, a excellent communicator. And I think because this is the second time that he’s serving as Prime Minister, I think he feels a very real historic sense about the task before him.
Obviously it was a very close election in Israel. It took some time to put that coalition together. That means that politics are complicated. And I think that just as so many Palestinians have lost confidence and faith that the process can move forward, I think there are a lot of Israelis who have lost confidence and faith that they will ever be recognized by Arab states, or that there will be security that is meaningful — where rockets aren’t fired into Israel.
And so I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu will recognize the strategic need to deal with this issue. And that in some ways he may have an opportunity that a labor or more left leader might not have. There’s the famous example of Richard Nixon going to China. A Democrat couldn’t have gone to China. A liberal couldn’t have gone to China. But a big, anti-communist like Richard Nixon could open that door.
Now, it’s conceivable that Prime Minister Netanyahu can play that same role. But it’s going to be difficult — and I don’t want to diminish the difficulties for any of the parties involved in making these decisions because, as I said, there are a lot of passions in the people. But part of leadership is being able to push beyond immediate politics to get to where, ultimately, the people need to go.
And in terms of partners more broadly, my attitude at this point is I want to work with everybody I can to get things done.
Ezra Klein – Department of Corrections: Michael Gerson vs. the Health Industry
Posted by: geoffcgraham | June 5, 2009 11:28 AM
| Report abuse
Op-Ed Columnist – Keeping Them Honest – NYTimes.com
Health reform will fail unless we get serious cost control — and we won’t get that kind of control unless we fundamentally change the way the insurance industry, in particular, behaves. So let me offer Congress two pieces of advice:
1) Don’t trust the insurance industry.
2) Don’t trust the insurance industry.
Now nobody is proposing that Americans be forced to get their insurance from the government. The “public option,” if it materializes, will be just that — an option Americans can choose. And the reason for providing this option was clearly laid out in Mr. Obama’s letter: It will give Americans “a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep the insurance companies honest.”
Those last five words are crucial because history shows that the insurance companies will do nothing to reform themselves unless forced to do so.
Ezra Klein – Why Have Republicans Been So Bumbling on Sotomayor?
Another problem is the binary nature of election results. For all the talk of the Republican glory days of 2000-2005, it was actually really, really close. A few things go differently in Florida in 2000, and suddenly the Democrats have a 12 year, possibly 16-year domination over the executive office. Karl Rove is no longer perceived as a genius. In 2004 and especially 2002, the environment was perfect for the crazy jingoistic rhetoric that conservatives are naturally good at. If 9/11 doesn’t happen, how would the 2002 and 2004 elections have turned out? Impossible to say, but it’s not unreasonable to assume the Democrats would have done better.
I think over the past 15 years or so, the right-wing crazies are great at being loud and driving the inside-the-beltway chatter, but I’m not sure if they were ever as brilliant with political messaging as it seemed.
The conservative glory days were probably 1972-1992. Demographically and because of the nature of our problems, their message worked. That messaging started diminishing in effectiveness from then on, but their dominance was only extended because of Clinton and bin Laden.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Policy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on June 3, 2009
Ezra Klein – My Colleagues Like Gambling Metaphors
An entrepreneur owes the racehorse.
An “investor” bets on the outcome of the race.
A seller of derivatives offers a side bet to someone else as to the chances that the investor will win his bet.
A seller of CDO’s offers a side bet as to whether the derivative seller will honor his bet if he loses.
Question: who is the real person making money in all this?
Answer: the track, they don’t care whether the horse wins or loses, they gets their commission either way. The only way they can lose is if they accepts unbalanced bets. Pari-mutual odds are designed so that this can’t happen.
In my analogy the track owner’s and bookies’ roles used to be taken by brokers and investment bankers, but they got greedy and started to take bets themselves instead of just collecting transaction fees (of which there are now many).
Even with subprime mortgages they wouldn’t have been in much trouble since they packaged up the loans and sold them to others, thus reducing the risk. It was the CDO’s and other financially purposeless transactions that brought the system down.
If you want to point the final finger at blame, then ask who was demanding that banks and other financial firms keep generating ever higher returns? The answer is us. As mutual fund holders and investors in IRA’s and the like we kept demanding 8-15% return per year. Any fund that didn’t meet this level quickly found its investors going elsewhere. The result was everyone got trapped in a cycle of increasing risk.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Economics | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on June 1, 2009
The Dutch strive to make their country ‘climate proof’ – NYTimes.com
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Gerson also fails to mention the Veterans Health Administration, where the patient load increased by 70% between 1999 and 2003, but costs increased by only 41%. The VHA has been successful not only in controlling costs, but also in improving quality, so that it demonstrably delivers some of the best, if not the best, health care in the United States. (h/t Ezra and the excellent article on the VHA by Phillip Longman in the Washington Monthly cited by Ezra yesterday)