Taking Stock

I've been reporting on stock market activity on my FaceBook page every business day.  I thought yesterday's events warranted a more permanent record, so I'm copying it here.  Today is Good Friday, and the markets are closed.

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Green arrow up
DJI30 Index at the close —- 23,719.37 +285.80 (+1.22%)

The Index opened at 23691, 251 points above yesterday’s close. The high was 24009, and it was approached at 10:00, 1:00 and 1:30. Round number resistance bent, but did not break. The next move was a drop of 500 points to 23504 just before 3:00, followed by a choppy ride into the close. The last move of the day was a gyrating drop of 90 points in the last 25 minutes.

This is a clearly up day, with the hi, lo and close all higher than yesterday’s.

Today’s good news and bad news:

Good - Fed to provide $2.3 trillion to prop up the economy - just what a liquidity fueled, significantly over-valued market needs. 

Covid-19 cases reported to be slowing. We’ll see how well that holds up given, frex - Arkansas and Trump’s great desire to reopen the economy.

Bad - Horrible unemployment numbers, exceeding expectations with over 6 million new claims on top of the over 10 million from the last 2 weeks.
Teenagers spending is off 13% YoY.
Nearly 1/3 of tenants didn’t pay rent this month.

All of this is from the Yahoo Finance news items listed below the stock chart.

 Today’s lo to hi span was 505 points, the lowest since 409 on 2/20. That looked like an outlier at the time, but got swamped from the 24th on. For context, the ten day average then was 207 points. On April Fool’s Day it was 1039. Now it’s 778.

Today’s moves would have looked wildly disjoint as recently as the middle of February. But now it’s the tamest day we’ve seen in 6 weeks. Is this some sort of new complacency? This market is remarkably resilient. And I find that to be frightening.

The breaking news is that with the markets closed tomorrow for Good Friday, the SP500 had it’s best week in 46 years. The Nasdaq had it’s best week since 2008. Hmmm - what happened after that? For the DJI30, it was the best week in 2 weeks! Go figure.



While we’re at it, let’s have a look back 46 years ago to 1974. Context matters. I can’t quickly find S&P data for 1974, but DJI30 should be good enough. The index averaged 4764 in Dec.1973 and 3071 in December 1974, a 46% loss. So that big gain happened in the midst of a brutal bear market and clearly didn’t last long.

But wait - there’s more. The DJI topped at 7785 in Dec ’65 and bottomed at 2145 in July ’82 - a bone crushing 73% decline that took 17 years to play out. So the ’74 bear market was just an episode in a much longer devastating trend that nobody seems to remember today. Here's a link to the chart, and you can play around with the dates, if you’re so inclined.


Historically, most of the largest short term gains - covering a day or a week - have occurred during bear market rallies. These things treacherously offer false hope. I believe this financial exuberance is irrational and the pandemic optimism will backfire horribly. I would love to be wrong.


Stay safe out there. Or, better yet, just stay home.

NYSE Internals
A/D = 2584/422 = 6.12
A/D Vol = 3.52
New Hi/Lo = 12/2 = 6.00

Notes on the graph --

The fine green, blue and red lines indicate daily hi, close and lo values, respectively.
The heavy green line at the top is a projection of the all-time high of Feb12.
The down-slanting channel contains the drop from the all-time high.  It was violated this week, but i kept it for reference.
The horizontal channel indicates sideways motion.  It looked like it was in effect since the bottom on Mar 23. Possibly obsolete now.
The falling blue line is the 233 day EMA.

ACA Withstands SCOTUS Review

[Note:  This brief post, as of now only 2 hours old, has already endured numerous updates, (probably with more to follow) only one of which is identified as such.  The others are [mostly] links added after the fact.  Like this one: It's not just me!]

Here's an initial report.

I'm somewhere between surprised and shocked.

This court has shown no reluctance about engaging in partisan hackery. 

As I commented here on Sunday:

The Republicans have 1) a clear agenda of making Obama fail in every way possible, and 2) a clear majority on this court. Constitutionality and legal nuance are utterly beside the point. Bush v Gore and C U proved that.

They will strike down the mandate. Little else matters, since without it, the program fails.

The tortured logic of the majority opinion will be agonizingly painful for anyone with the stomach to read it.

Alas,
JzB

Fortunately, I was wrong.   Chief Justice Roberts sided with the Dem appointees, while Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Kennedy dissented, of course.   

[UPDATE:  Their dissenting opinion is not only incoherent on its own, it is legally inconsistent with prior opinions issued by Kennedy and Scalia.]

I can't get past my cynicism of this court, though.  Roberts wrote the majority opinion, but passed the mandate as a tax, explicitly rejecting any commerce clause justification.  Why he would go with it at all is mysterious.   My suspicion is that somehow the regressives couldn't muster whatever it takes to strike this down.  I imagine extensive back room wrangling to see who would be the fall guy.  Either Roberts drew the short straw or he decided it was his leadership responsibility to take one for the team.

[Alternatively, he might now be thinking about redeeming his legacy - I read that somewhere this morning.  (See - I said there might be more.)]

My impression from writing put out by people who think of the Constitution as something more than a goddamned piece of paper is that the commerce clause justification was pretty clear cut.

Still, I don't think this is the end of the story.  In fact, it might be only the beginning.

Quote and/or Q and A of the Day

From an "insanely long view" perspective, by Char Weise at Creative Destruction.

 Q: Fifty million people don't have health insurance in this country. What can we do to give them better health care?
A: Humans are merely collections of cells through which life flows in many forms, sometimes as a happy child and sometimes as a flesh-eating virus. Who is to say that a human child has a stronger claim to life and health than a flesh-eating virus? What you call "health care" is merely the rearrangement of morbidity across life forms.

In all honesty, it never occurred to me to look at it this way.  The opinion seems to be uninformed by the concept of Homo Sapiens as god's chosen species.

H/T (somewhat indirectly) to Art

Insurance and Birth Control

In this Forbes article, Tim Worstall says he agrees with generally available birth control, but questions why health insurance should pay for it.    Specifically he says:  "But I really cannot see the point of trying to have health care insurance which then covers a multitude of treatments that aren’t really insurable matters, contraception being just one of these (regular shots, ‘flu vaccines, general everyday low level treatments in fact)."  This is after he points out that, per Wikipedia, "Insurance is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss."

The first question this prompts in my mind regarding insuring against (unwanted) pregnancy is what loss does that pregnancy entail?  The answer is large measures of personal freedom, hundreds of thousands of dollars in unplanned child-rearing expenses, and quality of life for the potential child resulting from the pregnancy.  These are significant risks, with ramifications for society at large, involving the employability and  productivity (in a purely economic sense) of the involved woman, and her uses of discretionary income.  Furthermore, unwanted children, particularly if the mother is single, are more liable to live in poverty and neglect, suffer from illness and abuse, become delinquent, and develop into adults that are psychologically disturbed, draw welfare, and commit crimes.

So, there are significant personal hardships and costly negative externalities that result form unwanted pregnancies. 

Is it ironic that in the past right-wingers have proposed the forced sterilization of welfare mothers? 

Also, the hormone therapy we call "birth control" has many other preventive medial uses, including controlling endometriosis.  So a focus in the merely contraceptive attributes is misplaced.

Currently, more than half the states mandate that hormonal birth control be included in prescription coverage, and since 1998, this coverage has been included for all federal employees.  There is ample precedent for this coverage, and insurance companies are well equipped to handle it.

Worstall conducts this thought experiment.

 Just to make up some numbers, say that the preferred method costs $30 a month. But that having the contraception covered by insurance will raise the premium by $50 a month. The insurance company does, after all, have certain costs associated with taking the premium then paying it straight back out again to buy the pill. Why would anyone do this? Why not purchase the pill for $30, stiff the insurance company bureaucrats the $20 and spend it on a couple of cocktails at a place where you might meet someone who thinks that your being a contraceptive user is a good idea?

Of course, when you're just making up numbers, its easy to have them suit whatever fell purpose you have in mind.  Suppose a much more realistic $16 per month, and the whole make-believe argument  collapses.

Besides, in terms of brute economics, the insurance company is better off paying for decades of contraception in $30 increments than one avoidable pregnancy at many thousands of dollars, if everything goes smoothly.   Let's just say you can't count on that. 

So far, this has been a basically economic argument.  Now let's look at an issue of fairness and parity.  More than half of the prescription programs cover Viagra.   Need I say more?

Worstall's argument has some logical consistency - he seems opposed to insurance coverage of other types of preventive care.  But this is ignorant and short-sighted.  A flu-shot is less than $25.  An office call is $90 and up.  Prevention, in general,  is cheap, and treatment is expensive.  If cost minimization is your goal, then the clear focus should be on prevention.

Worstall's problem, I think, is in relating contraception to a free-market business model, though, as I have indicated, he isn't even understanding that properly.  The proper focus also includes the high costs of the externalities that he conveniently ignores.

The real root problem though, is in trying to force-fit any health insurance system into a for-profit model.  There is simply no way to reconcile the conflicting goals of profit maximization and providing the needed services.  In fact, there are only three avenues to profit maximization: raise premiums, deny coverage, or emphasize prevention.

Whether this leads to the conclusion that a single payer, government mandated program is the best overall approach is left as an exercise for the interested reader.

 UPDATE: I forgot the great positive externality of contraception - it prevents hundreds of thousands of abortions every year.

Cross posted at Angry Bear.

Of Health Care and Insurance Redux

Just a year ago today I spelled out why for-profit health care insurance is an inferior model compared to single payer or socialized medicine.  Today, Krugman revisits the issue.  He links to yesterday's article by Ezra Klein, where Ezra naively says: "But the CBO is in the right here: No matter how much sense competition makes in theory, no matter how obvious it is that it will drive down the price of health care, the fact is that it keeps failing when we put it into practice."

Ezra totally misses the main point: competition makes no sense at all in theory, and can only drive costs up.  The failure in practice is the result that should have been expected by anyone who had devoted as much as 5 minutes objective thought to the issue.   He goes on to show specifically how it hasn't worked in the real world.

Krugman continues:

Why doesn’t the market work here? Ken Arrow explained it all half a century ago. Patients by and large don’t have the information to evaluate medical treatments; in any case, they mainly buy insurance rather than medical care directly; and insurers profit not by providing the most cost-effective care, but by trying to insure people who won’t need care.

The red highlighted section briefly summarizes part of my argument.  The Arrow link is to a 33 page PDF file.

Clearly, the brute economics of heath care refute models proposed by right wing ideologues.  There is another aspect to this, though - health care is not merely "a commercial transaction."   Decisions are literally life and death, frequently made under emotionally trying circumstances, the Dr. - patient knowledge disparity is wildly assymetric, and opportunities for over-care and conflict of interest abound.

As PK put it:

The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just “providers” selling services to health care “consumers” — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values.

And for this wrongitude we can specifically and directly thank the lizard people.

Deep Stupid # 20.1 - Senator Ron Johnson on Obamacare

As a follow-up to this post, I urge you to go read the source.  The comment stream there is quite fascinating, and illuminating.

Also, Krugman weighs in, with a somewhat different slant.
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Deep Stupid # 20 - Senator Ron Johnson on Obamacare

Not by me, by Aaron Carroll, via Mark Thoma.

This takedown of Johnson's moronic WSJ op-ed is far, far less disrespectful than anything I would have done, but it's what you have to settle for when you outsource.

Here's a good quote:

So much wrong here. First of all, maybe you can make an argument that the free market system of drugs or devices helped here. But the “free market” insurance system? Name me a single procedure developed by an insurance system. We’ve had a single payer system covering everyone over 65 for decades and there have been plenty of improvements in care for the elderly.

Another:

Senator Johnson has this completely backwards.

And another:

Yes, we do better than a lot of countries in preventing mortality from those cancers. But we’re not the best, and the differences don’t appear to be nearly as large as Senator Johnson says. Moreover, he’s cherry-picking. 

Here's my favorite (at least there is the suggestion of some mild, understated snark):

Senator Johnson makes a classic mistake here.  Who needs the most hip replacements and cataract surgeries in the US? The elderly. How do the elderly get their care financed? Medicare. What is Medicare? A single-payer system. Surely Senator Johnson is not advocating that we should give everyone Medicare because it outperforms Canada and the UK, is he?

So - is Sen. Johnson a god-damned liar, of just a typical butt-ignorant, talking-point-bullshit-spouting right-wing idiot?

The question is imponderable.
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That Constitutionality Thang

I had the devil's own time tracking down the text of section 1501 of the Affordable Health Care Act - the basis for rulings of unconstitionality in Virginia and Florida.

Finally, though, I got part of it here.

http://aca-litigation.wikispaces.com/Litigation+Blog+7-4

Quote from link:
 

Section 1501 of the ACA reads as follows:  
 
(a) REQUIREMENT TO MAINTAIN MINIMUM ESSENTIAL COVERAGE.— An applicable individual shall for each month beginning after 2013 ensure that the individual, and any dependent of the individual who is an applicable individual, is covered under minimum essential coverage for such month.  
(b) SHARED RESPONSIBILITY PAYMENT.—  
(1) IN GENERAL.—If an applicable individual fails to meet the requirement of subsection (a) for 1 or more months during any calendar year beginning after 2013, then, except as provided in subsection (d), there is hereby imposed a penalty with respect to the individual in the amount determined under subsection (c).  
(2) INCLUSION WITH RETURN.—Any penalty imposed by this section with respect to any month shall be included with a taxpayer’s return under chapter 1 for the taxable year which includes such month.  
 
The remainder of the provision spells out, in great detail, (a) a series of exemptions from the requirement, (b) the means by which the charge (whether we call it a “penalty” or a “tax”) is calculated, and (c) what qualifies as “minimum essential coverage.”  

At AB, Beverly Mann dismisses some of Florida Judge Vinson's reasoning as sophistry.  At first, I agreed.  But sophistry, like hypocrisy, requires a certain level of self-awareness that Regressives seem to lack. 

OTOH, the judges comment, re: tea (which I take as a wink to his peeps) whether sophist or not, is fatuous. 
 

". . . a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place. If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain. . ."  

Despite his word game, the government isn't forcing anyone to do anything.  You have a choice: participate, or pay a tax penalty.  Look at it the other way around and participation is a tax break.  Congress certainly has the power to levy taxes, and tax breaks to encourage targeted investments or expenditures are endemic to the U.S. tax system.  

The problem is, when this goes to the Supreme Court, it will be a court known for right wing judicial over-reach, so they will probably confirm the Va and/or Fla rulings.  


What this really highlights is that the right way to go at it is single-payer:  every citizen is enrolled, and there is no premium.  It's payed with taxes, and Congress has the power to tax.  I'm pretty sure it's in the Constitution, somewhere.

The problem is that there is too much vested interest and power in for-profit companies to allow the rational thing to happen.

Health care coverage is one area where there can be no free market solution.  The goals of health insurance companies and their customers are 180 degrees out of phase.  Profit comes from raising premiums and denying coverage - both detrimental to the customer.  And there is virtually no opportunity for competitive advantage in a business that is essentially a bookkeeping exercise.

It's so simple, yet impossible.  
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Quote of the day - (I hate it When Ezra Klein is Right)

Ezra Klein, discussing an idiotic, plainly illegal action before the Wyoming State Legislature, said this (emphasis added):

Given the extremism of the rhetoric at the top {of the Republican Party - JzB}, is it any wonder that there is incredible fear trickling down to the grass roots? If those are the stakes, then of course criminalizing any implementation of the bill makes sense. Frankly, if those are the stakes, then violent resistance might be required. 

Those aren't the stakes, of course. They're just the words. And words slip sometimes. Things come out too angry, or too quickly, or too sharply. I've had my share of experience with this. But words matter. And the Republican Party hasn't been slipping up: It's been engaged in a concerted campaign to scare the population into opposing health-care reform. That may be good politics, but it can have bad consequences.

Ezra posted this on Friday morning.

The very next morning, 6 innocent people died, and 11 others were seriously injured in an attempt to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a blue dog Democrat from Arizona who was placed in the cross hairs by Sarah Palin because she voted for Obamacare - a plan that is essentially Romneycare -- a plan that sensible Republicans would support.

Of course, there are no sensible Republicans.  Click through the link in Ezra's quote, above.

Which is a big part of why we are so screwed.

H/T to Krugman:

Just yesterday, Ezra Klein remarked that opposition to health reform was getting scary. Actually, it’s been scary for quite a while, in a way that already reminded many of us of the climate that preceded the Oklahoma City bombing.

You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.

Nice thought Paul.. Don't hold your breath.

Update:

Predictably, the Palin camp and other right wingers are running from responsibility and making lame excuses.  Lame, lame, lame.

But SarahPAC staffer Rebecca Mansour, who has been tweeting in defense of her boss since the tragedy took place, is stating that the crosshairs were never intended to be gun sights. 

"We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights," she said in an interview with talk radio host Tammy Bruce Saturday. "It was simply crosshairs like you'd see on maps." Bruce suggested that they could, in fact, be seen as "surveyor's symbols." Mansour added that "it never occurred to us that anybody would consider it violent" and called any attempts to politicize the Arizona tragedy "repulsive."

The suggestion that the symbols were related to guns seemed to come, however, from Palin herself. On March 23, Palin tweeted to her supporters a note about the aforementioned Facebook message, writing, "Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: 'Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!' Pls see my Facebook page." And as Politico's Jonathan Martin points out, in November Palin boasted about defeating 18 of the 20 members on her "bullseye" list.

Of the 20 districts targeted by Palin, Giffords and Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.V.) were the only two candidates to win over her PAC's chosen Republicans.

Update:   Surveyor's symbols.   Like the ones used by the Zodiac Killer.  H/T to Doc Amazing, commenting at LGM.

Not only lame, but a (Updated with a link:) flat-assed lie!

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Six Word Saturday 1/08

Things seem bad - and they are. 

(The longest Six Word Saturday EVER)

Things didn't actually get worse today. We just got a powerful indication of exactly how bad it is out there, and how much insanity is being promoted by the genuinely evil individuals and organizations who have co-opted American conservatism.   Evidently, Sarah Palin has taken down this graphic from her Sarahpac web site.   I was able to find it here, after seeing it on TV news today.  

The fourth name in the first column is Gabrielle Giffords, who was gunned down and seriously wounded today while attempting to address her constituents in broad daylight, in an incident that left, as of this writing, six other people dead, including Federal Judge John Roll and nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, along with several others wounded.

You might think it hyperbolic of me to lay this event directly at the feet of Sarah Palin, and others in the far right who have used the symbols and rhetoric of armed violence to sway the opinions of the ignorant, stupid, and unstable.

You would be wrong.

That is from a campaign event promotion, which I found here via LGM.

Here are the words of Sharon Angle, who came close to defeating Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, in an interview with Right Wing radio host Lars Larson, as reported by Larson to Greg Sargent.

I'm not kidding. In an interview she gave to a right-wing talk show host, Angle approvingly quoted Thomas Jefferson saying it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years -- and said that if Congress keeps it up, people may find themselves resorting to "Second Amendment remedies."
What's more, the talk show host she spoke to tells me he doesn't have any doubt that she was floating the possibility of armed insurrection as a valid response if Congress continues along its current course.
Asked by the host, Lars Larson of Portland, Oregon, where she stands on Second Amendment issues, Angle replied:

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.
I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.

Larson says Angle was floating the possibility of armed insurrection if Congress keeps it up under Reid et al.
"If it continues to do the things it's doing, I think she's leaving open that possibility," Larson said. "And I think the founders believed that the public should be able to do that when the government becomes out of control. It just matters what you define as going too far."
The most charitable interpretation here was that Angle was floating armed insurrection -- or "Second Amendment remedies" -- as a defensible response if electoral politics fails to change where things are headed under the current regime.

Click through for an audio clip of the quote.  Or here.

This is not an isolated incident.  Angle made a similar pronouncement to radio host Bill Manders.  This link also has an audio clip of Engel touting the possibility of  "2nd Amendment Remedies."

Do you know what had Engel prepared to support an armed revolution?  This, which Giffords voted for.

A brief rundown of the benefits of “Obamacare”:

• Children and adults with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied insurance
• Your insurance can’t drop you unless they can prove you committed fraud (before HCR, insurers would mysteriously cancel coverage for people who were diagnosed with illnesses like cancer)
• No lifetime limits or caps on health coverage
• Young adults will be allowed to stay on their parents’ insurance until they turn 26 (post-college grads under 26 represented one of the highest rates of uninsured people)
• Reviews on unreasonable insurance premium hikes
• Closed “donut hole” in Medicare, which will lift millions of elderly Americans out of poverty

The violent and  inflammatory rhetoric of Radio and TV host Glen Beck has already been implicated in a specific act of violence perpetrated by one of his listeners.

Here's "Armed and Dangerous" from Michelle Bachman.

If you want to get some background on today's shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, you can find it here.

This is what the blind hatred of the right has brought us to.  Evil, lying right wingers plant ideas of violence in the fevered brains of unstable individuals, and murder is what we reap.

More thoughts, from

Southern Beale

Asymptosis

Tom Tomorrow, via P6

Updates:

Tux

In comments at Naked Capitalism, C.C. from Tucson says this (quoted in full):

As a resident of Tucson with mutual friends of someone killed, this hits very close to home.
I hold complicit the justices of the Supreme Court who voted in favor of corporate power and special interests in overturning settled law by allowing unlimited monies from anonymous sources to promote their special interests via hysteria and misinformation.

Many citizens in Tucson remarked that the Arizona mid term elections had hit a new low of unintelligent discourse and degenerate tabloid absurdity funded with something like half a billion dollars flooding in from unknown domestic and international origins. Congresswoman Giffords was a frequent target.

And while I’m venting…our bankrupt state legislature spent their time on nonsense like enacting new gun laws where by anyone can carry a concealed weapon without any licensing or handling training into a bar or restaraunt or public area. I am sick of gun worshipping politicians who use inflammitory rhetoric like Sarah Palin to pander for sound bites like ‘don’t retreat, reload’ and with crosshair graphics over the photos of opposing politicians…..including Ms. Giffords!!

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A Comedian Succeeds When Government Fails

I have two three thoughts on THIS.

What an amazing story about Jon Stewart shaming congress into passing health care for the surviving heroes of 9/11.

What a shame that a comedian has to speak out to get the government to do what is so obviously right and proper.

God damn the Republicans to hell forever!

H/T to the LW
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Of Health Care and Insurance

Earlier this week, Thom Hartman had somebody named Joseph from World Nut Daily on his radio program. I think it might have been Joseph Farah, who seems to run the whole show there.

One of Joseph's points was that what he calls "ObamaCare," if it included a public option, would put health insurance companies out of business.  To this, I say, "Hooray!"

He also attempted to make a point about competition, suggesting that a "free market" approach to health care coverage would yield optimum results for everyone.  While I do no doubt Joseph's sincerity,* his argument is pure bull shit.

Consider the business model of health insurance; it's really pretty simple.  Income is from insurance premiums.   Expenses are payment for the health care services used by customers of the insurance company.  In this scenario, there are two ways to effect profitability.  On the income side, you raise rates.  On the expense side, you refuse to pay for services, and/or eliminate high-cost clients from your cost structure by terminating their coverage.

That's it.  There are no other possibilities. Opportunities for competitive advantage by improving efficiencies are severely limited, and would not be proprietary.  Opportunities for competitive advantage by taking better care of your customers would result in increased outlays and thus reduce the bottom line.  The clear, simple, and obvious message is that for-profit health insurance does not fit a rational business model.  The profit opportunities and the customer-care needs are in an absolute and irreconcilable conflict.

So, what's the answer?   It seems obvious.  A single-payer system run on a not-for-profit model suits the needs of customers.  Since there is no profit, there is no need to try to maximize it by cutting off high-cost users - those in greatest need of coverage - nor to raise premiums above whatever the total cost of the population risk pool drives.

Update 12/18:  I forgot to mention that with the Federal Government as the single-payer, premiums would then be in the form of taxes.  Thus, Joseph's objection that people would be (unconstitutionally) forced by law to buy a service from a commercial entity simply evaporates.  Congress has the power to levy taxes on all citizens.   In addition, for health insurance to make any kind of economic sense, even as not-for-profit endeavor, and for premiums to be affordable for all, you have to have the healthy members in the population as subscribers and in the risk pool.  Hence, UNIVERSAL single-payer coverage.

As an additional advantage, the lack of a profit element eliminates the need for premium mark-ups to guarantee profitability.   The only losers in this scenario are the multi-millionaire CEO's, who add no value to the system while skimming lots of value in the form of huge salaries and bonuses.  What we currently have is a system run by leeches, for leeches, to the detriment of society.  But, since they control a bought and paid-for congress, there is no hope that it will improve, unless there is a revolution.

Once again, we're doomed.
_____________________________
*A later caller accused him of being a shill for the insurance industry.  Hartman didn't think so, and I don't either.  He's just a smart, but naive guy who's drunk on free market kool-aid.

Haiku Wednesday - Crabby

CRABBY!  
(Three very different and unrelated takes on the theme)

I

Today* I am one

Year away from Medicare

So - why be crabby?

II

The least happy dwarf

Living up to his name. Why 

So crabby, Grumpy?

III

Obama lets down

His base - AGAIN! - but can't get

Why we're so CRABBY!


* P.S. -- Jean Sebelius is now 145!

Some Thoughts on Fascism

Over at G&T, Ed said:

I try not to think about 2002 and 2003. America was a truly awful thing to see while it was pregaming the Iraq War. Watching the American public, desperate as it was to lash out incoherently in post-9/11 rage, swallow one tablespoon of horseshit after another as the previous administration engaged in the greatest marketing campaign in history was not pleasant. It was a real reminder – not a Teabagger's "Obama = Hitler" reminder – of how thin the line between American-style democracy and fascism really is.

In comments, bb asked:

I know Dave likes to do the Top 10 thing, but owing to the fact that we have a wide spectrum of Leftist thought here, can a few of y'all give a Top 5 things that we should do/be that would move us a few notches away from "fascism" (We have had discussions before on exactly what is meant by that term – so a working definition from you might be attached)

 ladiesbane responded

And when we discuss Democracy versus Facism, I agree that we should define our terms. I can easily see a Democratically elected leader who espouses a Facistic philosophy: authoritarian control of social behavior rather than liberty of person; ultra-nationalism rather than patriotism; State attitude of division rather than unity, discriminating against a designated set of Other among the populace; definition of dissent as treason; utter negation of anything that questions authority; and so forth. Economic principles and class divisions are no longer relevant to a definition of Fascism — Classism is a separate problem. But if we have (crypto-)Fascists in office, we elected them, right?

My response:

@ bb

OK. I'll take the bait. But first, I'll remind you that there is essentially NO leftist thought in the U.S. these days. For decades, the political debate has been between the right and the far right. Only thus can a centrist conservative like B. Hoover Obama be described as some sort of raving leftist commie socialist.

It sometimes amuses me to see the world in cartoon images. As such, Fascism is the devil sitting on democracies right shoulder, always tempting her down the road to serfdom. Imagine a demonic Donald Duck perched on the statue of Liberty.

Fascism is fundamentally control of the government by business interests – essentially the inverse of socialism – along with control of people's minds by a combination of religious and patriotic – no, make that NATIONALISTIC – jingoistic drum beating. Ladiesbane, above, has a pretty good sad litany of characteristics.

Since corporations have no soul, they are totally immune to any feelings of conscience or sympathy as the population becomes impoverished, and the corporate overlords grow ever richer. Since government is the only entity large and powerful enough to provide a counterbalance to big business, when business controls government, the people get {expletive deleted} hard.

The top five things to move away from fascism, obviously have to do with getting business out of government, and un-brainwashing the population. (as they occur to me – not rank ordered)

a) Reverse the appalling Citizens United decision: corporations – and most especially trans-nationals who are loyal to nobody – are not people, and we give them quasi-human rights at our peril.

b) Real election reform. I don't have a formula, but multi-million dollar elections are a distortion of democracy that invites corporate control.

c) The right almost exclusively owns the airwaves. There are enormous stretches of countryside where the only a.m. talk you can get is Rush, Sean, and the idiot Beck. Somehow restore parity in the exposure to ideas.

d) Education: Americans are staggeringly ignorant of history, and knowledge of how government works, and methods of rational discourse and critical thinking. Fascists, conservatives, and religionists hate education. They want a population trained only well enough to operate machinery and follow orders – not well enough to engage in free thought.

e) Big business loves monopolies and hates free enterprise. Bring back real entrepreneurial capitalism. This means prohibiting mergers that eliminate competition, and breaking up any too-big-too-fail organization.

And, at no extra charge:

f) Instituting tax policies that are genuinely progressive and loophole resistant to reverse and impede the flow of wealth into the hands of the mega-rich.

Then I added:

I got it from Mussolini himself:

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
-  Benito Mussolini

Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.
- Benito Mussolini

Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.
- Benito Mussolini

This highlights the other characteristic of fascism – that it degenerates nationalism into an excessively warlike stance. Comparing W to fascists was not so over-the-top as his supporters would have the rest of us believe. It's no coincidence that his grandfather made a fortune bankrolling the Nazis.

And BTW – American industrialists in the 30's were in LOVE with the Nazis, and fervently hoped for an American version of fascism.

And now they're getting it.

Characteristics of fascism can be found here and here.

Of course, none of my proscriptive solutions is even remotely possible.  We're screwed.
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Republicans: All Wrong, All the Time, Pt. 14 - Medicaid Costs

The Daily Caller reports on Obama's latest attempt at that hopey-changey thingy.

One week from Tuesday, 18 men and women will begin an attempt to fix, in eight months, what is possibly the country’s greatest problem: the federal budget deficit, national debt and runaway entitlement spending.
Many think they’re doomed to failure.

.  .  .
 Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, said he is going to make “waste, abuse, fraud and inefficiencies” in Medicaid a priority issue and will make sure it gets attention in commission meetings.
“Nobody else is going to focus on that,” Coburn said. “Nobody else thinks the $300 billion that we waste every year is important. Over 10 years that’s $3 trillion. So we’re going to look at that aspect of it.”

Delong retorts:

Total Medicaid spending this year is currently pegged at $280 billion. How Coburn can think that all $280 billion that will be spent this year on Medicaid is waste--plus an extra $20 billion in waste even though we do not spend it--is beyond me.

I don't have a good feeling about this fiscal commission--not at all.

The puzzling question remains unanswered:  are Repugnicants so stupid, ignorant and lazy that can't look at public records and/or do simple math, or are they so cynical, callous, and dishonest that facts and truth mean nothing to them?

Either way, we are so screwed.

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Why Health Care Reform is so Bad

This, From the House Democrats Web Site.

The Top Ten Immediate Benefits You’ll Get When Health Care Reform Passes

As soon as health care passes, the American people will see immediate benefits. The legislation will:

• Prohibit pre-existing condition exclusions for children in all new plans;
• Provide immediate access to insurance for uninsured Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition through a temporary high-risk pool;
• Prohibit dropping people from coverage when they get sick in all individual plans;
• Lower seniors prescription drug prices by beginning to close the donut hole;
• Offer tax credits to small businesses to purchase coverage;
• Eliminate lifetime limits and restrictive annual limits on benefits in all plans;
• Require plans to cover an enrollee’s dependent children until age 26;
• Require new plans to cover preventive services and immunizations without cost-sharing;
• Ensure consumers have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to appeal new insurance plan decisions;
• Require premium rebates to enrollees from insurers with high administrative expenditures and require public disclosure of the percent of premiums applied to overhead costs.

By enacting these provisions right away, and others over time, we will be able to lower costs for everyone and give all Americans and small businesses more control over their health care choices.

Health Care

  

Clearly, these horrible things are unconstitutional, and rob us of our freedoms.  But what can you expect when the invalidly elected president is a foreign-born Dark-Skinned Muslim socialist?

Why, yes, I would very much like a cup of tea.  Oh, no! Wait.  What are you doing?!?  Not THAT bag . . .Eeeewwww!

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The Facts About Facts

There are things that are ambiguous, things that are uncertain, and things that are open to various kinds of interpretations.

Then, there are cold hard facts:

The law of gravity.

In the long run, we are all dead.

Newton's laws of motion.

David Brooks is an utter buffoon.


Here is his latest Op-Ed piece.

Here is well-placed, pointed ridicule of that piece by Jonathan  Chait.

Here is Ezra Klein calling him out on his errors and/or lies.

To recap, Brooks argued that reconciliation is being used more frequently, and that past reconciliation bills, like Bush's tax cuts and prescription drug benefit, were significantly bipartisan. Reconciliation is, in fact, being used less frequently, past reconciliation bills like the tax cuts were not significantly bipartisan by any stretch of the imagination, and the prescription drug benefit did not go through reconciliation. Brooks isn't wrong in the sense that "I disagree with him." He's wrong in the sense that the column requires a correction.

Can it be that liars, fools and tools - exclusively right wingers and their fellow-travelers - have gotten away with misleading non-information, misrepresentation, chicanery and outright lies for so long that they think they can simply make stuff up that is easily refuted by a little fact-checking, and still get away with it?


The alternatives are that Brooks is either too lazy to make the effort required to get it right, or too stupid and/or ignorant to present an opinion worthy of consideration.


No matter which of these is correct, he should be collecting unemployment.  That's a fact!


H/T to Delong, who is nowhere near harsh enough.
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Quote of the Day

Excerpts of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:

While Republicans were distorting the facts in the health care debate and inflicting delay after needless delay, millions of Americans have continued to suffer as they struggle to afford to stay healthy, stay out of bankruptcy and stay in their homes.  Thousands of Americans lose their health care every day, and tens of thousands of the uninsured have lost their lives since this debate began.

Many Republicans now are demanding that we simply ignore the progress we’ve made, the extensive debate and negotiations we’ve held, the amendments we’ve added (including more than 100 from Republicans) and the votes of a supermajority in favor of a bill whose contents the American people unambiguously support.  We will not.  We will finish the job.

As you know, the vast majority of bills developed through reconciliation were passed by Republican Congresses and signed into law by Republican Presidents – including President Bush’s massive, budget-busting tax breaks for multi-millionaires.  Given this history, one might conclude that Republicans believe a majority vote is sufficient to increase the deficit and benefit the super-rich, but not to reduce the deficit and benefit the middle class.  Alternatively, perhaps Republicans believe a majority vote is appropriate only when Republicans are in the majority.  Either way, we disagree.

At the end of the process, the bill can pass only if it wins a democratic, up-or-down majority vote.  If Republicans want to vote against a bill that reduces health care costs, fills the prescription drug ‘donut hole’ for seniors and reduces the deficit, you will have every right to do so.

Where in the hell did THIS guy come from?!?

(H/T to Krugman)

Republicans: All Wrong, All the Time, Pt. 13 - Health Care Costs

To help put the lies and hypocrisy of the Republicans in perspective, we'll show Rachel Maddow's  BEST GRAPH EVER.

That's right, folks, the 2001 and 2003 budget busting  Bush tax cuts, which were passed through reconciliation, cost the country a huge pile of cash.   In contrast, the Senate Health Care Reform Bill - which might be passed via reconciliation some day (or week) soon is a net money saver.

Who knew?  Not anyone who's listened to any Republican or right winger spew their lies on the subject.   In every political discussion that's taken place in recent years, the right has been totally out of touch with reality.

Are they liars, tools, fools, slaves to ideology, delusionally insane, or just plane stupid?  Alas, there is no sure way to know.

Here is more truth from Rachel.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In Which I Berate an Editor

Nolan Finley is the editorial page editor of the Detroit News.  His column in today's combined News - Free Press, titled Democrats Gorge on Absolute Power is the sort of idiocy one would expect from a right-wing ideologue.   Have a look at the link above.

I sent the following to him in a e-mail, just moments ago.

Dear Mr. Finley -

Evidently you have spent the first decade of this century living on some other planet.  It looks like you don't remember the not-so-distant past when Democrats were excluded from policy discussions, unable to obtain a room to hold a meeting, and literally had the lights turned out on them when they did find an abandoned room in a basement somewhere.  Until you see the Democrats wielding their power along those lines, you owe your readers a retraction and an apology for spewing your misleading dreck onto their Sunday paper.

What those of us who reside on this planet saw was President Obama's futile efforts to bring nay-saying Republicans into the health-care process.  Alas, they were too caught up in lies about death panels and a forged Kenyan birth certificate to participate.  And if you'd stop to think for a minute you'd realize that if there even were a Left in this country, single-payer health care would have been central to the discussion, not something thrown to the curb before the discussion even got going.

Since your mind-set is Democrat = Left, you are blind to the reality that Obama, and most Democrats are Center-Right conservatives.  Similarly, you must believe that Republican = Right, when, in reality, the Republicans have sailed off the rational political map into a territory where they only know hatred and negativity.  And don't give me any hog-wash about fiscal responsibility, either.  I'll let Bruce Bartlett disabuse you of that mistaken notion.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/19/republican-budget-hypocrisy-health-care-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html

Your last paragraph implies that the Democrats are able to act with single-minded unity.  The reality is that only Republicans are sufficiently anti-democratic to place party above principle and country, while the Democrats scatter like dust in the wind.

Your article has some basis in fact, but you twist those facts into something horribly misleading.  What ideology do you adhere to, that contorts truths into falsehood in service of a pre-conceived notion?  Alas, Mr. Finley, you have forced me to conclude that you are either a scoundrel or a fool.  What a pity that you have column space in the Free Press, if only once a week.

Very truly yours,

JazzBumpa

Update:  In a one line response sent at 2:35 P.M., Mr. Finley reminds me that every bill passed during the Bush administration had some democratic support.  Though his point is spectacularly irrelevant, I sent him this reply:

Thank you for an interesting fact that supports my case, not yours.

As I said, dust in the wind.

And, by way of contrast, you will see this Democratic administration come and go with the vast majority of bills passing over unified opposition from the totally unprincipled party of "No!"   Content doesn't matter - only being opposed.

Cheers!
 JzB

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