Scott Paeth

Palestinian Peace Activist on the Daily Show

Leave it to Jon Stewart to have a serious conversation about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that doesn't reduce the Palestinian position to a cartoon.

The interview as it aired truncated a lot of important points, but fortunately the full interview is available. Watch below (sorry about the commercials):

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Anna Baltzer & Mustafa Barghouti Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Anna Baltzer & Mustafa Barghouti Extended Interview Pt. 2
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

The heckler in the audience seems to be pretty indicative of U.S. attitudes toward the issue. If you hear something you don't like, shout loudly and then walk out. It's a pity he wasn't able to hear what they both were saying.

I Owe Rachel Maddow an Apology

After saying just the other day that Rachel has a tendency to be too nice when she goes after her creepier guests, last night I watched her absolutely tear into Tim Philips of Americans for Prosperity.

Part One is relatively staid. She goes after him on the relevant points and tries to hold him accountable for AfP's leaders and funders, sounding the usual notes about astroturf groups that are really fronts for Washington lobbyists:

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But Part Two is about as aggressive as I've ever seen Rachel be. She doesn't let up on the guy, goes after his history of overtly slimy political tactics, and then actually calls him and his group "parasites"! Holy cow!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

What's really amazing to me is that, after all that, she still comes off nicer than anybody else on cable news these days. But after watching it, I'm beginning to regret wanting her to be more aggressive. I think we all benefit from having at least one person on cable news willing to confront right wingers to their faces while at the same time not coming across as a bully. I don't think I'd like to see Rachel become more like those other commentators, or even more like Keith. I like her just the way she is.

Fat Babies Don't Get Insured

From the Annals of Insurance Malfeasance:

Imagine having a perfectly healthy two month old baby and having your insurance company tell you they won't cover him. One [Grand Junction, Colo.] family says that's what's happened to them.

Baby Alex is a happy, adorable, big baby. And now at three months old, the family's insurance company says he's not eligible for coverage.

Alex eats well, is growing fast and has no pre-existing conditions. But his mom Kelli says their insurance company says he's just too big. "Insurance standards say if he's above 95 percent he's uninsurable."

Because of his size, Alex was turned down for health insurance, his height and weight put him in the 99th percentile according to CDC guidelines.

Thankfully, in the face of bad publicity, the insurance company has backed down, but this raises a troubling question: If this is what insurance companies are doing when they're trying to persuade us that we don't need an overhaul of the system, what do you suppose they'll start doing if they win? What will they start doing if the individual mandate requires everyone to buy insurance, but there's no public option to compete with the private market?

This story illustrates well the absurdity of the system as we have it now: It is actually possible for a supposedly fully insured family to be denied coverage for their healthy baby because it is deemed overweight! How can it be legal for a company to do this? Well, who writes the laws?

It continues to amaze me, in the face of stories like this, that it's even necessary to have a debate about whether we should change the current health care system. Hell, it amazes me that consumers aren't showing up at health insurance companies with torches and pitchforks.

Mark my words, if health reform passes with an individual mandate and no public option, this will get worse. Ideally, we ought to required insurance companies to provide a minimum standard of care on a not-for-profit basis, and require them to cover all claims. The system we have now is rife with moral hazard, and it will only get worse from here.

Dead Peasants

Here's an enormously disturbing story:

So when Irma Johnson learned that her husband, Daniel, who died of brain cancer, had been insured for $1.5 million, it should have been at least a small comfort.

But she did not receive the money. His employer did.

It's one of the strangest free-market perversions that Michael Moore highlights in his latest film, "Capitalism: A Love Story."

In the corporate practice dubbed "Dead Peasants" life insurance, companies wager on employees' lives, expecting to make money when they die.

And it's pervasive, said Mike Myers, an attorney who has uncovered many of these cases and helped angry relatives sue.

Under what circumstances, one might wonder, could this possibly be justified? In some cases, the insurance was kept on employees who no longer worked for the companies that insured them at the time of their deaths, but the company still benefited.

The chief attraction of this practice is apparently a tax break that the company gets for holding the insurance policy.

Welcome to capitalism, American style.

How to Be Denied Health Insurance: Donate a Kidney

Via the New York Times' Nick Kristof:

Over the last week I’ve been speaking to David Waddington, a 58-year-old wine retailer in Dallas, along with his wife and two sons. I’d love to know what the opponents of health reform think families like this should do.

Mr. Waddington has polycystic kidney disease, or PKD, a genetic disorder that leads to kidney failure. First he lost one kidney, and then the other. A year ago, he was on dialysis and desperately needed a new kidney. Doctors explained that the best match — the one least likely to be rejected — would perhaps come from Travis or Michael, his two sons, then ages 29 and 27.

Travis and Michael each had a 50 percent chance of inheriting PKD. And if pre-donation testing revealed that one of them had the disorder, that brother might never be able to get health insurance. As a result, their doctors had advised not getting tested. After all, new research suggests that lack of insurance increases a working-age person’s risk of dying in any given year by 40 percent.

“At the time David needed a transplant, the people closest to him couldn’t even offer a lifesaving donation — for insurance reasons,” said Mr. Waddington’s wife, Susan.

Economics vs. Morality

Matt Yglesias tackles some influential -- yet pernicious --  views in politics and economics:

Well I’d say one important set of ideas is the perverse notion that it’s wrong or inappropriate to subject people to moral criticism for making selfish decisions as long as the decisions don’t involve breaking the law. I’ve been writing a bit about this lately with respect to greedy financiers, but it’s a more general thing. If a person announced to his friends and family “I’m going to steal $17 billion from aspiring college students and give the money to banks” we would expect a degree of shock and ostracism to follow. Indeed, if a person said “I’m going to pick a student’s pocket at rob him of $17″ we would expect some shock and ostracism.

Such behavior is, socially speaking, considered not okay. But while it’s considered perfectly normal to expect one’s friends, peers, and colleagues to eschew stealing money from people, it’s considered hopeless naive to expect people to eschew the opportunity to go cash in by helping Sallie Mae hold on to money it doesn’t deserve. Along the same lines, I honestly don’t understand how the executives for the big fossil fuel firms sleep at night; but I know that part of the reason they sleep well at night is that in today’s America nobody really points out that their behavior is, on a personal level, more than a little shameful. People don’t discuss this issue by making explicit reference to Milton Friedman’s arguments about the social responsibility of business, but the shift in public discourse around these issues stems back to his work.

Another example is that, as Brad DeLong pointed out yesterday, economists’ protestations that they’re doing value-free social science actually embeds an implicit idea that “that shifts in distribution are of no account–which can be true only if the social welfare function gives everybody a weight inversely proportional to their marginal utility of wealth.” In other words, under guise of eschewing values, economics has adopted a philosophical value system which says that the well-being of rich people is more important than the well-being of poor people. Nobody ever says “social welfare function” when engaging in practical political debate, but the idea that not caring about distribution constitutes some kind of neutral middle ground is an important underlying premise of much practical political debate, and it’s viability stems from the fact that everyone remembers being taught that this is true in their Economics 101 courses.

As a third example, as a society we’ve become accustomed to the idea that when empirical evidence seems to contradict basic economic theory—as when the United States experienced rapid economic growth under conditions of widespread unionization and a high minimum wage—that we ought to accept the theory as true. This, again, is usually a claim you hear being made by economists, but its social prestige ultimately is a kind of idea in epistemology or the philosophy of science. And all this, of course, is to say nothing of the specific influence of particular empirical claims in economics which hold that high levels of taxation and government spending are everywhere and always economically destructive.

The obvious question then is: Given the influence of these pernicious ideas, are we stuck with them, or can we begin to see the world a different way?

Labor Blogging

Barack Obama today:

"I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem. To me, it's part of the solution. You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement."

Amen and amen!

Things Could Be Worser

According to Kevin Drum, we're lucky we're getting off as easy as we are right now:

It's sort of stunning to step back from the daily minutiae once in a while and realize just how bad this economic crisis is. As near as I can tell, the underlying shock really is as intense as the one that kicked off the Great Depression, and the only thing preventing soup lines these days is that we've learned a helluva lot since the 1930s. Retirees all continue to have purchasing power and healthcare thanks to Social Security and Medicare. The unemployed are receiving unemployment insurance. Deposit insurance is preventing bank runs. The Fed has lowered interest rates to zero and is prepared to intervene massively to prop up the money supply. Barack Obama is readying a massive federal spending stimulus package. The Treasury is pumping capital into the banking system to prevent a complete collapse of the credit markets. Aside from tinkering around the edges, most countries have agreed (so far!) not to ratchet up protectionist tariffs and trade barriers. We aren't hobbled by reliance on the gold standard.

Take that stuff away today and unemployment might already be in double digits and still heading up. Put this stuff in place in 1929 and we probably never would have had the original Depression (or World War II). So thanks, FDR! Thanks, modern mixed economy! Thanks, countercyclical policy measures! I sure hope it's enough.

Now, just for fun, let's try to imagine what things would be like right now if the Republicans had had a free hand to implement their policies for the last two decades. Scary!

Health Care Blogging

Andrew Sullivan has been on a multi-day tear about health care reform in the United States, as compared with Great Britain.

One reason I'm a conservative is the British National Health Service. Until you have lived under socialism, it sounds like a great idea. It isn't misery - although watching my parents go through the system lately has been nerve-wracking - but there is a basic assumption. The government collective decides everything. You, the individual patient, and you, the individual doctor, are the least of their concerns. I prefer freedom and the market to rationalism and the collective. That's why I live here.

As a British ex-pat, Sullivan of course has something that many Americans don't have -- direct experience of the British healthcare system (as well as grave health concerns). But his ire toward NHC in Great Britian seems to be based on his own personal experience, rather than any analysis of the issues (and, let's face it, his own conservative ideological pre-disposition against government programs just on general principle).

Fortunately, Sullivan has posted several replies to his posts by those with more knowledge and sense than he has, and also provides a link to Ezra Klein's blog, which provides some much needed objective data:

Then we could ask the question: Do the Brits seems to be in worse health? Do they have a health care system that delivers worse outcomes? The answer to both is no. In the case of ill health, they're actually in much better health than their American counterparts, though that's a function of lifestyle more than hospital choice. And in the case of health outcomes, it sort of depends. You're probably better off getting your breast cancer treated in America and getting your diabetes treated in Britain. In the aggregate, however, the evidence is fairly clear that the British are better off. Health researchers look at a measure called “amenable mortality,” which refers "to deaths from certain causes that should not occur in the presence of timely and effective health care." In other words, deaths that are prevented by contact with the health care system. If Andrew is right that those stoic Brits just grit their teeth and bear their illness, this measure should be much higher in Britain than in the US.

But it's not. In concert with Andrew's thesis, Britain does indeed have a high rate of amenable deaths. Just not higher than ours. in 2002-2003, Britain suffered 102.81 amenable deaths per 100,000 citizens. America suffered 109.65. This doesn't totally eviscerate Andrew's assertion of cultural difference. It may be that Brits believe they should endure that many preventable deaths while Americans don't believe that but have such a bad health care system that they nevertheless beat out the Brits. But either way, the difference between the American and British health care systems is not that we are enjoying timely and lifesaving interventions while they are forgoing them.

It's unclear how Sullivan would respond to this. On the one hand, his conservative ideology presumes that government programs produce worse outcomes than private programs in the aggregate -- a presumption at odds with the data of most national healthcare systems as compared with the U.S. But on the other hand, his ideological commitment to private versus government solutions could lead him to conclude that the American system is preferable regardless of outcomes.

As for me though, ideology is irrelevant. We want a healthcare system that produces better outcomes, and that could be provided by almost any existing national health care system but our own.

Adam Smith and Taxes

Andrew Sullivan (grudgingly), draws our attention to this quote by Adam Smith:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. . . . The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. . . . It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

Though, as The New Yorker (where Sullivan got the quote) goes on to say:

Smith’s notion of reasonableness did not anticipate the Fox News Channel, however. Last Tuesday, Wurzelbacher appeared on that network, where he denounced Obama’s comments as “socialist.” He said that Obama “scared me,” because he “wants to distribute wealth.” Wurzelbacher also granted an interview to the advocacy group Family Security Matters, whose advisory board includes the conservative talk-radio hosts Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley. By means unknown, Joe’s story of ambition and resentment reached the campaign of Senator John McCain.

The point here, of course, is that modern Repubicans, despite their abject slavering worship of the free market, don't actually understand what is and what isn't consistent with capitalism. Smith understood broadly the ways in which capitalism did (and often didn't) comport with social justice. And with Obama, he seems to support the idea of "spreading the wealth."