This run brought to you by CBC Radio 3

Thank you Grant Lawrence and the CBC Radio 3 Podcast Road Trip Special!  It’s getting late and getting dark on a lonely unlit country road, I don’t have my reflective bands on and my knee is hurting, hurting, hurting but I’ve got two and a half to go and if I don’t pick it up I’ll be coming around blind curves in the dark.  The news show podcast I was listening to (On The Media) ends and I check the CBC Radio 3 Podcast bin on the old iPod and there is the Road Trip Special.  Man, those Canadian drummers can lay down some beats and my feet start to churn and pretty soon I’m mentally drumming along with them (I’m at least as good as Kieth Moon at his best.  Mentally, that is.) and then I’m flying down the road and home.  Note: I use “flying” here in the 48 year old man with a few extra pounds sense, and not the more popular sense of the word.

Oh, and by the way.  Congratulations Grant.  I wish you as much happiness in your upcoming marriage as I have had in mine.

Dana Milbank and the bottled water

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank has a column up today making fun of congress for investigating bottled water. The second thought that struck me was the irony of Milbank making fun of congress for wasting time on such trivialities when he had just devoted a whole column to it himself.  But the first thought that struck me was about how much Milbank sounded like a lobbyist for the bottled water industry, and then I wondered if he had recently run into such a lobbyist at one of those “Salon’s” the WaPo was selling to lobbyists.  You know, the one where you got direct, non-confrontational access to reporters and opinion leaders?

Now, I have no real reason to believe Milbank was acting the stenographer for moneyed interests, so normally I would keep my speculations to myself.  But the thought itself is worthy of comment, because I wouldn’t have had it before I found out about those Salons (or whatever they were called before they got caught).  That’s what the corrosivity of money is all about.  It causes people to suspect everything.

Healtcare Coverage statistics

There are a lot of statistics bandied about in the health care debate.  We hear that 17% of  US citizens are not covered.  But the reality is that 13% of the population is 65 or older, and all of them are covered by Medicare.  So the real number is 20%.  One out of five.

Healthcare and Heritage

There was a recent free-for-all over which is cheaper to administer, public or private health plans. It started with a Heritage Foundation paper by Robert Book, to which Paul Krugman responded with some facts and an attack.  Book then retaliated with a defense and an attack of his own.  I’ve read the orginal paper as well as the responses, and I think it boils down to this:

• Book believes that it is better to measure per patient administrative costs, rather than per service administrative costs per healthcare.  Let’s take two patients, Harry Healthy and Betsy Deathwatch.  Ol’ Harry is doing pretty well and goes in for some routine visits and maybe a couple of tests.  Let’s say he generates 5 separate billings and $100 in administration costs to pay the providers $1000.  Betsy on the other hand, is grossly obese, has Type 2 diabetes and has bad knees, a bad heart and failing kidneys.  She generates 100 separate billings per year (not at all unlikely – I went in for a kidney stone procedure in the early nineties and there were well over ten billings for that one procedure, hospital, nurse-anesthetist, technicians, X-Ray, Lithotripsy machine provider, and I can’t remember who else).  Let’s say there are $500  in administrative costs for Betsy, in order to pay $50,000 worth of bills.  In Robert Book’s analysis, Healthy Harry’s $100 (10% of total billings) administrative fee should be considered to be much more efficient than Betsy’s $500 (1% of total billings).
• His key analogy in all this is the credit card.  It doesn’t cost any more to administer $1000 worth of charges than it does for $50,000, and he thinks we should consider health care along the same model.  This is a strong claim.  After all, the vast majority of credit card claims are completely handled by computer.  There is no intervention by a human being whatsoever.  But as anyone who has ever dealt with the health care system knows there are certainly salaries being paid to deal with claims.  Now,  Harry’s routine doctor visit might go off without a hitch (“might” being overly generous here) and get processed with minimal intervention, but a truly sick individual inevitably ends up with hours and hours and hours of phone calls, faxes, arguments between the insurance company and the doctors, billing mistakes, corrections, climbs up the ladder for permissions, revocation of permission, disagreement about what was agreed to.  It is, simply put, an incredible nightmare for all involved.  Not to mention the behind the scenes effort on the part of the insurer to revoke coverage.  So if Book is going to claim that all of these extra costs aren’t significant, he needs to marshal some pretty strong evidence.  I didn’t see it in his paper.
• Krugman responded with the attack, but then offers what he feels is an apples to apples comparison.  It turns out that Medicare and Medicare Plus have the same pool of insured, but one (Medicare) is public, while the other is private.  and when measured in percentage terms, Medicare Plus is many times more expensive to administer.  Ergo, private is much more expensive than public.
• Book then attempts to refute this and offers some reasons why this discrepancy may be mitigated by circumstances.  However, there are no numbers tied to his refutations and it is not clear to me that they should be considered persuasive.  Perhaps they could reduce the gap by a quarter or even half, or maybe completely, or maybe not at all. Without numbers they are just speculation.

As for the attack:  Krugman said that anything coming out of the Heritage Foundation is suspect, that it is just an industry mouthpiece rather than a real think tank. All I can say is I’ve never been surprised by anything, and I mean anything, that ever came out of the Heritage Foundation.  It always seems to match industry talking points.  So I think what Krugman said can be considered sound advice, rather than as an attack.  Others may see it differently.

Finally, it truly is difficult to measure the administrative costs associated with health care.  But although Book volunteered an number of mitigations in one direction, he neglected other, perhaps much more significant ones in the other direction.  One that immediately comes to mind is the adminsitrative costs in the providers office.  He only counts time and expense in administering on the insurer’s part.  He doesn’t make any attempt to include the two, three, four or more people employed by every doctors office, or the time spent by the doctors arguing with providers,  etc.

Piling on Dana

Dana Milbank, op-ed writer for the Washington Post, has gotten a lot of well deserved grief for his dust up with a Huffington Post blogger who was called on at an Obama press conference.  You can read the gritty details here if you are interested, but from my point of view, he came across as clueless and overly sensitive to alterations in the pecking order (Washington Post on the top, blogger peasants to be seen and not heard).  And then, after accusing the blogger of having insufficient journalist standards, Milbank’s own paper gets outed for a “Salon” that was marketed as giving high rolling companies direct access to off the record sessions with reporters, for fees running up to a cool quarter mil.  So it seems like piling on to go after him for today’s column buy, my god, the thing was clueless.  I only read it because a friend had vouched for him and said he was getting a bum rap, that he was a serious person.  Today’s column however, to borrow a phrase from a “Barney Miller” character, had him promoting the stereotype.  Bottom line, he devoted a whole column to quoting a bunch of idiots posting on an open facebook page created around a White House town hall meeting.  Imagine the shock! An open forum on the web with idiot’s posting on it!  Who would have ever thought it?  Good thing we have ol’ Dana Milbank to show us just how silly the internet is.

MJ

Flavium’s post on Michael Jackson below is a perspective I hadn’t really thought about, expecially the comment on gang violence.

There are two things that come to my mind with Michael Jackson.  First, he had passed into that room in my head that won’t allow a view to him as an entertainer anymore.  He joins Woody Allen, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Roman Polanski and a few others whose performance is lost on me, simply because I can’t keep from thinking about their screwy life.  ”Breaking Mimesis” as they used to say in the IF world, that moment when you suddenly realize you’re not following a story but rather watching a film.  When there is a boom mike above that actor sobbing his heart out, and a whole film crew surrounding him.

Second, before the freakiness, he was one of the performers who made me realize that music is completely about what you like, not what you hate. Sure, when I was a kid I blathered on about how “disco sucks!” and how I hated Michael Jackson and country music.  But at some point I realized that the people who liked that music were getting the same good vibe as I did when I listened to Harry Nilsson, or Dave Matthews, or Jimi Hendrix.  I don’t have to like what they like to be glad for them when they get that smile on their face.  And once I stepped back from that childish attitude, I began to appreciate some great musicians in that mix.  I don’t really like country to this day, but I can hear the talent.  I never would have bought a Barry Manilow record growing up, but the guy is incredibly talented and his jazz recordings are great.  Same for Paul Anka.  His standards aren’t really my thing, but two of my favorite pieces are his covers of  Oasis’ “Wonderwall” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.  It didn’t seem to me that he did them as novelties or because someone talked him into it against his better judgement.  He really brought something to his interpretation.  To be honest, I like them much better than the originals.  And when I was 18, I would never have given them the first listen.

Bottom line: “Thriller” may be one of the best albums ever, and MJ made me like it.  But I can’t listen to it any longer.  But that’s my loss, and I’m glad Flavium still feels the same way he did 20 years ago when he first heard it…

The Fall of an Icon

Today we found out that Michael Jackson has passed away.  Looking back on a life riddled with controversy and criticism you can’t help but ignore the negatives to admire the amazing contributions that ‘little Michael’ has made.

This is a man who in his music confronted gang violence with ‘Beat It’ and even included actual gang members.  He stood up against racism with ‘Black or White’.  He even took a shot at world peace with ‘Heal the World’.  He basically created the music video and made ‘Thriller’ into a phenomenon that people still mimic.  The music and entertaining accolades attributed to Michael Jackson are countless and unbelievable.

No matter what the tabloids have said about him or how odd of a person he may have been, he gave us music and dancing that will remain timeless long after he is gone.  Sure no one understood some of the things he did or why he was so softspoken, but they new that when he stepped up on that stage and the lights dimmed that THAT Michael Jackson could never die.

Patriotism vs. Jingoism

Ta-Nehisi Coates nails the difference between patriotism and jingoism with this analogy:

What you have, in both cases, is a hustle, a bait and switch, in which one claims to be hawking patriotism, but in fact, is selling jingoism. If patriotism is love of country, then much of the unquestioning GOP rhetoric fails on the rudiments. Is love of kin, love of siblings, love of spouse, telling your beloved, that they are the best person that’s ever existed in history? Or is that  sycophancy, fast talk proffered by loose friends, who in your darkest hours, appeal to your worst self.

Read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

Mark Sanford has made a mess…

Mark Sanford has made a mess of things, and I don’t want to pile on. The guy’s personal life should be personal, and there are really only two reasons to discuss it. One, of course, is his hypocrisy. After all, he was all for impeaching Clinton when he was a Senator, and used it to talk about the immorality of “liberals’, yadda, yadda, yadda. Others have done a very adequate job in pointing out that if you want to compile a list of philanderers in politics you couldn’t do much better than simply simply writing down those who wanted to impeach Clinton for philandering. (Gingrich takes the prize though. While leading the impeachment charge and telling his fellow Republicans that they literally shouldn’t let a day go by without bringing up Clinton’s infidelity with a staff member in his government office, we found out later that, you guessed it, he was cheating on his wife with a staff member in his…wait for it…government office.  Gingrich was literally zipping his pants up after boinking her on his desk then going out and talking about how immoral Clinton was for boinking Lewinksi on the sofa.  And the Rupulicans and press ate it up.)

But there is one thing about Sanford’s apology I found very odd, something that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere and something that made me reconsider the amount of sympathy I naturally have for someone who gets up in public and admits that he’s made a mess of his life. He apologized to a bunch of specific people and then apologized to “people of faith”. I don’t want to make too much of this, but it really sticks in my craw when “people of faith” go on and on about how immoral everyone else is, about how “libruls” are debauched libertines, about how gays are nothing but weak sinners, about how better they are then everyone else because they have faith and are Christian and that’s the only one and true right way to live their life. And perhaps he is right to apologize to such people because he let them down, but I wish to god he had enough self awareness and humility to realize that everyone deals with personal failings and demons. All too often these so-called Christians think that when a liberal or a Democrat screws up their lives it is because they are a liberal or a Democrat. But when a “christian” screws up their lives it is because they fell off the wagon.

Recently, the very racist Buchanan family (Pat and Baye) got some bad press when it turned out that a member of their staff, still employed, had pleaded guilty to basically getting drunk and walking down the street in Washington DC shouting racial slurs at people and finally hitting a black woman. And Baye Buchanan gets up and talks about how cruel the press is and how no one knows the troubles this poor aide had gone through, and how if we only had heard him over the years we would see with how hard he had tried to fight his demons. And I have some sympathy for that. But I also have to remember that Pat and Baye would never give such sympathy to a black or latino. After all, they have failings because they are corrupted, inferior people.  Trivia: what is Pat Buchanans latest euphemism for non-whites? “Scrub Stock”.  To get a better understanding of the type of people Buchanan associates with, follow this link to TPM’s research on where this little used term comes from.

Why you should never, ever use electronic bill pay

From  LA Times reporter David Lazarus’ ongoing nightmare in which Verizon tried to withdraw nearly $10,000 dollars from his Bank of America checking account:

Elliot woke up Tuesday morning to another notice from BofA saying something was amiss with his account. Turns out Verizon had once again billed his account for the entire $9,993.88 — and this time BofA paid the bill.

This resulted in Elliot losing the $781 he had in his checking account and then owing more than $9,200 to the bank.

So I contacted BofA. Tara Burke, a bank spokeswoman, said the way the online bill-pay system works is that if insufficient funds exist in an account, the first two attempts by a business to withdraw funds will be rejected.

But if the business tries a third time, the transaction will be processed.

It appears that for now anyway, he got the money back.  But that only occurred after he informed both the bank and the telephone company that he was writing a story about it that would appear in a major metropolitan newspaper.  Unless you’ve got the same leverage, and a perverse desire for aggravation, pay your bills by check.