I also got 10/10, though I actually expected not to.
If "Don't Know" can be wrong, I don't want to be right.
I think one could get 10/10 without knowing a thing. "The ACA will provide free health care to moochers. True or false?"
Only 9/10 (although there is something to comment 6). I missed 9 about which I seem to be confused. Isn't there some sort of goverment option?
It's definitely true that if you have a basic sense of American prejudices and possibilities, you can guess pretty well. Oh, a public option might be a good idea and lead the way to real universal health care? Nope. Would any bill like this get by any Congress of the last decade or more without explicitly denying coverage to undocumented immigrants? No.
Isn't there some sort of goverment option?
What, are you some kind of socialist?
9/10 here, didn't realise it was expanding Medicaid as such (the nutjobs seem to be a bit quiet about that, for some unfathomable reason). Still, apparently better than 90% of the people in the country actually affected by the legislation. The founding honchos must be revolving in their graves fast enough to solve the energy crisis.
I also got 10/10, but as noted above, with the help of reading the questions against prejudices. "This law will drive small businesses into the ground by forcing them to buy Cadillac plans for all employees, true or false?"
Would any bill like this get by any Congress of the last decade or more without explicitly denying coverage to undocumented immigrants? No.
Also 10 for 10, and yes, this is the only way I knew the answer to this one.
James, there was a big fight over the "public option," and the good guys lost. There are some kind of "exchanges" or something built into the law, but they aren't government-run.
I forgot that the cuts were to Medicare Advantage administered plans. Oops.
13: Same here. Thought they maybe threw one ringer in. I would have.
10 out of 10! I'm an ACA expert!
On the very first question I thought "I thought the penalties didn't kick in until 2015..." and decided at that point that they were not trying to trick me.
10/10. 'kin A! The statistic that most amazed me was that a majority still think that Obamacare will involve death panels.
10/10. I find the claim that my score is better than 99.6% of Americans to be dubious.
I think one could get 10/10 without knowing a thing. "The ACA will provide free health care to moochers. True or false?"
I appreciate the purpose of such a quiz, but I could easily write a version designed to trip up vaguely informed liberals.
True or false:
The ACA allows unelected bureaucrats to withdraw Medicare coverage for lifesaving drugs. (True--the Independent Payment Advisory Commission will be empowered to do so under certain conditions, if it survives that long.)
The ACA prohibits all health insurance plans from imposing annual dollar limits? (False--some exceptions are permitted for grandfathered group plans)
The ACA allows insurers to quote you a low premium on the exchange, then come back a year later and say you owe $5,000 more. (true, if your income changes and you lose subsidy eligibility.)
The ACA requires insurers to justify all premium increases. (False -- HHS can review rate increases over 10%; otherwise, only state law applies)
The ACA requires all insurance plans to cover preventive services without cost sharing. (False--grandfathered plans are exempted.)
The ACA creates permanent tax credits for small businesses who contribute to employee coverage. (False -- the tax credits expire after two years.)
The ACA sets a minimum standard of 60% of the actuarial value of essential benefits ("bronze level"). Low value catastrophic plans for healthy people are prohibited. (False -- under 30's and certain people with economic hardship can still purchase catastrophic-only coverage.)
The ACA imposes a 40% excise tax on the best employer-sponsored plans. (True.)
The ACA allow employers to impose a higher deductible on employees who refuse to participate in daily workplace calisthenics. (True -- participation in workplace wellness programs can be rewarded with benefits up to 50% of the value of the standard package.)
***
On the whole, the ACA is a good thing. But it has many quirks.
10/10 myself. Also surprised. Yeah, a test shouldn't be designed to be so easy to answer based on prejudices and knowledge of America's general political climate.
In fairness to James, the public option was the second-most-common question to get wrong, apparently.
17: I'd guess the score is based on a comparison to an offline poll or something, rather than this quiz itself. It would be a bit unrigorous to talk about the percent of Americans answering without even making sure that the people doing the online quiz are Americans. Who knows, though. (And "unrigorous" shouldn't be surprising if we're all getting 9/10 or better anyways...)
12
James, there was a big fight over the "public option," and the good guys lost. There are some kind of "exchanges" or something built into the law, but they aren't government-run.
Yes I was confusing the two.
21
... if we're all getting 9/10 or better anyways...)
They may be a tiny bit of selective reporting going on. At least that's my excuse.
There are some kind of "exchanges" or something built into the law, but they aren't government-run.
Actually, some of them will be. But they don't have to be. States can choose whether to make them a government agency or a QUANGO, subject to some rules intended to keep them from being dominated by the insurers.
I got 10 out of 10! And, it feels like I've been doing my best to avoid reading anything about it for years!
I would have gotten about half of Kermit Roosevelt's questions wrong, but I don't think it has anything to do with me being a liberal. Those questions are detailed and hard!
9/10, and I agree with 8 and 10 (I think we got the same question wrong).
I am better than 99.6% of Americans. The Internet said so. Woohoo.
I just read an article that had the thesis, "This Supreme Court thing only matters to us Massachusetts residents if we care about people in the other 49 states. And maybe a teeny bit for hospitals near the border who get ER patients from NH."
26: The thesis of that article is wrong. The insurance market reforms get all the attention, but they are the smaller part of the statute. It's the delivery system reforms that will ultimately have more impact. Remember that Obama's team was more concerned about bending the long term cost trend than they were about universal coverage (which was the spoonful of sugar to get liberals to swallow the cost controls). Sarah Kliff had a good piece on this the other day.
26: Did it include,"Thanks to Mitt Romney!" (I know, I know.)
10/10.
Did someone put up the Kermit Roosevelt signal? Is there a Kermit Roosevelt signal?
27: I figured as much; the article was pretty flip. "Fuck y'all, we've got our shit figured out."
10/10. Took it yesterday, so no help from the thread either.
It seems to me that Mass could be effected, if the court concludes that the mandate violates the commerce clause because governments at any level simply can't require people to buy insurance. [There's a mandate in Mass, right?] I mean isn't it true that if a state can do it, the feds can if it's an integral part of a comprehensive scheme that affects interstate commerce? And that it's only a commerce clause violation if it's so crazy that no government could ever require someone to buy something?
I got 7/10.
I note with some amazement that 73% of Americans think there is a public option. Wishful thinking!
The comparison data seem to be from a December 2010 poll. So, 15-month-old data, fwiw.
In general I admit to a high level of exasperation with quizzes like this that solidify people's existing wrong beliefs. It's like the advocates who design them are entirely ignorant of decades of psychological and social research.
I got 9/10, and I've never lived in the U.S. nor have I read an awful lot about the law.
10/10, but I led a student course on the law, so I'm not surprised.
Probably the right is silent on Medicaid expansion because it's a more sympathetic group getting covered (I think it's rather obscene that Medicaid still exempts childless adults no matter how poor they are) and because it's continuous with existing systems, so it's hard to raise constitutional or this-is-an-imposition objections in the court of public opinion. (They are hammering at it at the policy and judicial level - the push to turn it into block-grants, which is to say deliberately shrink it to a shadow of its former self, and the doomed Supreme Court challenge; and if Republicans got all three branches and cleanly repealed health reform, I doubt Medicaid expansion would be let live.)
Speaking of the Supreme Court challenge, is it odd or unprecedented that the SC took up the Medicaid issue even though all the lower courts agreed it was bogus? A co-worker asserted this to me yesterday; I disagreed, thinking they might want to clarify the apparently extremely murky "coercion" doctrine, or give the many suing states more satisfaction by taking it to the highest level.
The ACA requires all insurance plans to cover preventive services without cost sharing. (False--grandfathered plans are exempted.)
Also self-insured plans, I believe (i.e. most large employer's plans).
So what's the general feeling of the educated left? Will the crazies pull off a repeal?
Also, counting chickens and all that, but if health reform works perfectly, one of the foreseeable problems is that most of the remaining uninsured will be undocumented immigrants, and that will make it much harder than before to keep federal money coming to partially backfill their uncompensated care.
Repeal, no - Republicans seem unlikely to win the Senate, and even if they do there's the filibuster. Harry mercilessly on all fronts through defunding and non-implementation, highly likely if they win the presidency.
In MA childless audits can get MassHealth and not just Commonwealth Care even if they're poor. In fact, that's what they put you on if you've been unemployed more than 2 years.
They have different levels of benefits for different populations. We have a waiver though.
Yes, it varies by state of course, since states can choose higher coverage levels. 21 states have some kind of coverage for the childless - usually sub-Medicaid benefits, in some cases it's only thanks to new health reform money, and in some cases enrollment is closed.
36 -- An obvious solution would be to mandate that employers of undocumented persons -- and they are pretty much all employed, right? -- are responsible for those costs. (I wouldn't mandate that they buy insurance, but would make them legally liable for the reasonable medical costs incurred. They'd end up buying insurance, I suppose.)
I didn't know the rules on small businesses, but I got that right using the same reasoning that Blume did.
41: 9/10, missing the small business tax credit. I decided it didn't make sense to include that. Silly me.
40: Sounds even less feasible than adequately comprehensive immigration reform, especially since there's no other employer mandate. This would be far enough in the future that there could be sea changes, I suppose; but I can't imagine a political environment where that's possible but, say, letting them into the exchanges with subsidies isn't.
My arch-nemesis is teaching a class. His students keep coming to me for help. Should I mention this to him? Or do I just want to rub his nose in it?
That sounds like an annoying time suck. Is there a way that you can refuse to help them? "I'd love to help you, but [Nemesis] teaches things his own way, and I wouldn't want you to learn things my awesomely easy and better way and have you do poorly in his class. You should probably ask him."
It is a REALLY annoying time suck. The worst was one Friday I gave lots of tests, and no homework, and was hoping to use my office hours to grade the tests, (since I hadn't assigned any homework.) I got deluged by his students. They sprung on the fact that I wasn't helping anyone else. Since it was technically office hours, I felt like I had to be available.
It's not terrible when I've got students from my own classes in my office, too. It doesn't take up more time to multi-task among many students. It's just when my office would possibly be empty that it's aggravating.
Frankly I want to rub his nose in it.
So rub. In a "being warmly helpful and supportive" kind of way. "Your students have been coming to me for help; I think maybe they don't know that you're available and willing to help them at your own office hours. Also, they can't do [basic arithmetic] -- perhaps you should consider [reviewing addition] for the whole class."
Awesome. That's exactly the answer I was hoping for. This guy is so fucking condescending to me.
Also his pedagogical methods are appalling.
Yeah, don't help them with work for his class! You don't even have to make things up to tell them: they need to take their problems to him, because it's important for him, as the teacher of the class, to get a better idea of what the students are having trouble with. This can be phrased in a better-for-everyone-involved way.
Here's a quiz we'd have likely done much worse on: Android or condom?
I am better than 99.6% of Americans.
BAH! OBAMACARE IS A COMMUNIST PLOT!
44, 45 -- It'd be a pro-hospital thing. If they treat someone, who stiffs them and is undocumented, they can go after the employer. Pipe dream, I guess. Although getting the 1% to fight amongst themselves seems useful.
I don't think it would cause much intraclass warfare - employers as a class would be against it and the crazy right would be against it. Hospitals, okay, but from this it looks like maybe at most 9% of the households in the top 1% work at hospitals. And then there's all the conservatives therein.
60:It's already a mess with worker's comp cases now, so I'm not optimistic that it would get any better. Too much plausible deniability, and way too little time for a hospital to spend tens of hours tracking down and fighting with an employer over a single patient.
Plus, a lot of undocumented people are day laborers, independent contractors, or self-employed in their own businesses.
I am shy and retiring.
Shy and retiring, or just emo?
I'm sure there are a lot of people who got things wrong, saw the correct answer, and think that the liberal internets are lying to them. As Charlie Pierce pointed out, a technocratic health reform law has been transformed into the next religious battle, so that no amount of reality can change the minds of the true believers. If you tell me there are no death panels, you're just part of the conspiracy to hide the real facts.
I also liked this one, Rep. Louie Goober-
"...if this president has the authority under ObamaCare... to trample on religious rights, then some redneck president's got the right to say, 'you know what, there's some practices that go on in your house that cause people too much money and healthcare, so we're going to have the right to rule over those as well.'"
so that no amount of reality can change the minds of the true believers
On both, or all, sides.
FDL tore Ezra Klein apart this week, who has gone from
"Obamacare is our last chance for thirty years! We can improve it later, it's guaranteed, but this must be passed or we are doomed."
to
"It would be great if SCOTUS overturned Obamacare. Congress would instantly enact single-payer for all. Republicans are so dumb."
Wake me for the lame-duck.
I knew my head was going to explode. Let's hope Toobin is all wet:
"This was a train wreck for the Obama administration," he said. "This law looks like it's going to be struck down. I'm telling you, all of the predictions including mine that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong... if I had to bet today I would bet that this court is going to strike down the individual mandate."
46: Wow, things are different in Texas. I can barely imagine the blisteringly furious response I would have gotten from many of my profs if I'd gone to them for help with another teacher's class. I didn't even really bug my adviser about that kind of stuff, unless there was some administrative problem she could help with.
67: Some of us told you so while your very serious smart friends, like Lemieux, were ROTFL.
Look, in this case I don't want to get bogged down in details. There is a lot of ideology buried in the details, but the more controlling ideology is in the fact there are a lot of fricking details. Technocrats must rule!
Singlepayer, with healthcare educators, providers and suppliers on straight salary and not-for-profit. Socialize the fucker.
70 Rather the opposite. I have seen him argue that if Obamacare gets killed it will increase pressure and support for single payer over the long term, but he's also said that there is absolutely zero chance of passing a substitute of any sort in the short term.
Wow, things are different in Texas. I can barely imagine the blisteringly furious response I would have gotten from many of my profs if I'd gone to them for help with another teacher's class.
These students would possibly be in tears if I responded like that. Gently steer them elsewhere, sure. But lighting into them is reserved for circumstances of severe infractions.
Lyle isn't giving up on it just yet: http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/03/argument-recap-it-is-kennedys-call/
69.3 is fine with me. Wouldn't get 10 votes in the Senate right now, much less 60, and neither you nor I has any plan that can get it to 60 in our lifetimes. Your 'well lets get rid of the Senate [along with all the other structure]' plan doesn't seem any more likely to work in any reasonable timeframe.
67: there seems to be some difference of opinion as to whether Kennedy is a "lost cause" as Toobin puts it, but what I've heard from a couple people who were there is that it definitely was uglier than expected for the administration.
Why yesterday's arguments, so indifferent that SCOTUS itself had to appoint someone to argue one side? A set-up.
Anyway, we'll see how this plays out today. But to the layman's ears (even to a layman well-versed in health policy), it seems absurd for the government to argue that the mandate isn't a tax for the purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act but it is a tax under the Congress' taxing power. And the Supreme Court made sure to highlight that absurdity.
Whatever. Obamacare is going to get partially or wholly overturned, then we are going to get one long maddening bullshit election season, possibly with another economic crash and bombing of Iran, and then we get the Chinese fire drill Mack Sennett/Spike Jones fire drill of a lameduck to drown all lameducks.
And this has been the plan since Obama dissed Pelosi on the Bush tax cuts in January 2009.
And this has been the plan
will there be mustache twirling?
73 I'd say the odds are better than even that the filibuster goes if Romney wins. And I could see the combination of the gradual death of employer provided insurance (down from around seventy percent of under 65's to about fifty percent over the past decade), ruling out of the mandate, and an evisceration of Medicaid leading to enough pressure to get to fifty in a decade or so.
69: Christ, bob, don't attribute Lemieux' opinions to the rest of us. He's good on some topics, but on anything involving the Obama administration he's completely infuriating.
I was just thinking today how instructive Obamacare was on how the American political system really works, in terms of how much you can get done with a given amount of political capital, who will oppose you when try to do X, how they will oppose you, how well these tactics will work, etc.
I've been close to John Emerson territory since then, i.e. everything's fucked and there's no solution. But if the SC strikes the ACA down...well I guess I better take whatever necessary steps to make sure I can stay in Germany indefinitely.
70,71:Hell
Ezra Klein pasted at FDL:
As a result, Republicans' long-term interests are probably best served by Democratic success. If the Affordable Care Act is repealed by the next president or rejected by the Supreme Court, Democrats will probably retrench, pursuing a strategy to expand Medicare and Medicaid on the way toward a single-payer system. That approach has, for them, two advantages that will loom quite large after the experience of the Affordable Care Act: It can be passed with 51 votes in the Senate through the budget reconciliation process, and it's indisputably constitutional.
73: Unless it's a personal problem, I suspect it the surge in traffic is why cannot get to Scotusblog at the moment.
Ummh, bob, you realize that that's what I said, right? As for the stuff about Ryan, Ezra is pointing out that if SCOTUS kills ACA based on the mandate, it is also killing Ryan's Medicare proposal.
Downforeveryone says it's not a personal problem.
Scalia in his glory.
"Are there any limits," asked Justice Anthony Kennedy, one of three conservative justices who are seen as critical to the fate of the unprecedented insurance mandate.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.suggested the government might require Americans to buy cell phones to be ready for emergencies. And Justice Antonin Scalia asked if the government might require Americans to buy broccoli or automobiles.
"If the government can do this, what else can it do," Scalia asked?
Your 'well lets get rid of the Senate [along with all the other structure]' plan doesn't seem any more likely to work in any reasonable timeframe.
Remember, I was talking Napoleon Bonaparte in 2009. Dictatorship. Mostly because if Obama didn't do it, the next Republican would. We are in Revolution, it is not a choice.
The Republic is fucking broken. You're trying to drive an old truck with no tires and no engine. It's over. Which kind of tyrant would you prefer? Or if you prefer to play Cicero, I hear there is an isolated island with some room left.
81, 84 et al.: The transcript is up for those who want to play at reading tea leaves. Audio as well.
83: Right, upon re-reading my personal problem is clearly incoherence.
Always heartening when SCOTUS justices repeat arguments from right wing blogs.
What on earth is Kennedy talking about when he says "Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?" The transcript does not illuminate.
89: Presumably the creation of commerce is all the new people buying health insurance under the mandate.
But it's the reverse - mandating people to buy insurance means you have the regulatory power whether or not such transactions already occur, which is exactly what the government is arguing.
I skimmed the rest of Kennedy's questions - he looks sadly mired in conservative talking points too (activity, limitations), but he did bring up the issue of how ridiculous it would be if the government could tax everyone to create a single-payer system, but not require people to get health insurance on their own. Maybe his wanting to make the Constitution safe for (actual) conservatism will win out.
91: It's a dumb point to be sure, but the Supreme Court is beyond reason. It's like a 90 foot tall 4 year old. You just have to hope it's having one of its good days.
This is why it's frustrating that an argument a 5 year old could understand answers their complaint. You can go your whole life without eating broccoli or driving a car. You can't live in the US without buying health care at some point. You'd think that these same people are simultaneously arguing that a photo ID is a part of life everyone must have would cause some cognitive dissonance, but four year olds are not very logical.
92: Or, to be more accurate, and avoid being banned, it's a legislature in which conservatives have the majority.
If they strike down the mandate it's going to be interesting to see the insurance industry go into a panic.
If they strike down the mandate they'll almost certainly strike down guaranteed issue with it, so the insurance industry won't make the gains it would have under health reform, but it won't be in serious trouble (any more than it was in before).
Combining bashing on young blog stars and silly arguments, two in the past couple days from Yggy. One silly since it is underinformed about Romney hiring a 'lobbyist' to get the permits for his California estate expansion. The permitting regs may well be overly restrictive or complicated, but there is no evidence provided that they are. The second, batshit insane one, was bemoaning the fact that San Francisco has shut down a market with people selling food they made at home since their kitchen's hadn't been certified as safe for commercial food preparation. Yggy argues that since people can eat food they make, there is no reason the government should impose any regulatory safety requirements on them selling food to others.
96: On what grounds would they do that? Oh, right.
Can I assume this will be another one-off decision, like Bush v. Gore, where they write that the reasoning shouldn't be applied to any other situations?
95 -- Which ought to be what saves the mandate. It's not like they were sitting around saying, hey not enough people are buying health insurance, let's make them. Or people are having too many heart attacks, let's make them buy broccolli. No, the problems were insurers are over pricing and denying people, and the solution was to make them stop. To which they said fine, but only if everyone is in the system. If Kennedy can't see that enacting a necessary condition to the success of a complex plan that is otherwise clearly within the commerce power has inherent limitations, it's only because he isn't looking.
On what grounds would they do that? Oh, right.
No, that wouldn't be a bad decision, I think - there's no severability clause in the ACA, and guaranteed issue and community rating really are nearly-inextricably tied to the individual mandate. The administration's also argued for them all to go together if they go.
For the benefit of future historians and/or oppo researchers, I wish to clarify that I am not the real life Kermit Roosevelt III, who is a law professor. My pseud is taken from one of his deceased antecedents.
If Kennedy can't see that enacting a necessary condition to the success of a complex plan that is otherwise clearly within the commerce power has inherent limitations, it's only because he isn't looking.
Isn't this textbook "necessary and proper" clause stuff?
If Kennedy can't see that enacting a necessary condition to the success of a complex plan that is otherwise clearly within the commerce power has inherent limitations, it's only because he isn't looking.
Yes. And this is so obvious that even my cynical core has been shocked with how far this frankly ludicrous legal argument has gotten. Oh well, I probably couldn't get up in the morning to do my job if I thought that every big case gets decided like Bush v. Gore but the reality is that the Supreme Court has been pretty far down that road for a while and lower courts often are too.
Can we at least please stop pretending that Antonin Scalia is a strict (but heartless) judge who sticks to the law as written instead of just a hack with a flair for rhetoric? I mean this should have been obvious to every lawyer in America by now but I still hear it repeated sometimes, and it even occasionally crops up on this blog.
97 -- why Slate thought it would be an awesome idea to give a business and land use blog to someone with no knowledge of either outside of basic economics textbooks is a total mystery to me. Writing on zoning on the California Coast without learning what the Coastal Commission is, I dunno, as dumb as you can get? Yglesias should have just been forced to stick to the one thing he was good at, pithy demolitions of terrible right wing arguments.
If Kennedy can't see that enacting a necessary condition to the success of a complex plan that is otherwise clearly within the commerce power has inherent limitations, it's only because he isn't looking.
These people generally only see and hear what their clerks show them, right?
Somebody should tell the right wing that the Western European country whose legal system is most hostile to judicial activism is ... France! Might make their heads hurt.
103 -- I don't recall anyone on this blog having said such a thing about Justice Scalia. Or anyone worth paying any heed to having said it, in the last 20 years at least, anywhere.
That Republican presidential aspirants routinely say such things is proof that they should never be given the nominating power.
103 -- On the other hand if they want to reverse Raich, that would at least be interesting.
105 There's a whole bunch of things about France that would make their heads hurt. I used to like provoking a very francophobic neocon friend of mine with France's pre 9/11 history of being very aggressive against Islamic extremists, at home and abroad, willingness to use armed force abroad, and their strikingly neocon views on multiculturalism, national identity, assimilation, and affirmative action. On the latter stuff I've occasionally done the same to standard issue French lefties.
108: Also, as hostile to people not speaking their language as any wingnut.
Can we at least please stop pretending that Antonin Scalia is a strict (but heartless) judge who sticks to the law as written instead of just a hack with a flair for rhetoric?
I thought the contrarian position de jour* was to praise Clarence Thomas as a "strict (but heartless) judge who sticks to . . ."
* I've seen this argument at least three times, for these purposes I claim that's enough to call it a trend.
I would almost kind of agree with the Thomas claim. Not that he's always honest -- there wasn't any principled way to get to Bush v. Gore. And I think he's a nutcase. But a lot of his opinions seem to be the application of sincere nuttery rather than result-driven dishonesty. Scalia is, I think, a bright guy and a good judge if he's not interested enough in the outcome of the case to cheat. But on anything where he's politically interested in the outcome, he's a dishonest hack.
I have no comment on the quality of the underlying pieces, but Yggles' editors seem to dislike him enough to write headlines that are only marginally less infuriating to the casual reader than those assigned to the highly punchable F/arh/ad M/anj/oo. Surely I cannot be the only person whose internal monologue, when glancing at Slate, is "No. No. Christ, no. Maybe. Fuck you. Hell no. Oh, fuck you to death."
Yggles also just said that because J.K. Rowling has enough personal branding power to run her own ebook store, nobody should worry about publishers colluding to keep the price of ebooks jacked up far above what they would be in a just world.
97: The post on food safety was so stupid that it might have ruined MY for me forever.
113: F. M. may be the purest essence of Slate.
116.1: Yeah, that. He seems weirdly stupider since going to Slate -- as if he's actively trying for the stupid. I had assumed he was going to have a lifelong career as a pundit, and now I'm kind of expecting him to drop off the face of the earth in a couple of years.
117: Wait, you're thinking stupidity is a disadvantage???
I had assumed he was going to have a lifelong career as a pundit, and now I'm kind of expecting him to drop off the face of the earth in a couple of years.
He is the next Michael Kinsley.
D'oh, not Kinsley, Mickey Kaus. I always mix those guys up.
118: The 'what do we need health inspections for' was pretty low-grade stupidity -- not the kind you need for a career in punditry.
My brother-in-law's brother-in-law would have poisoned an entire customer base if the health inspectors checking out his kitchen had not said "uh, don't put that in your barbecue sauce."
What was he putting in the barbecue sauce?
If I knew it was going to be *that* kind of party...
I wish I remembered. I was some innocuous ingredient that apparently turns to poison after a couple months on the shelf.
We've spiked his barbecue sauce with Spike. Let's see if he lives to tell the difference.
117 Partly because it's all on this topic - no foreign policy, no politics, no general whatever stuff. Partly he just keeps going further and further into CATO-cuckoo land where regulations are all bad, long live economic freedom. He started out mildly suspicious of regulating small business and strongly opposed to existing urban and inner suburban land use regulation as counterproductive to liberal aims of lower carbon emissions, cheaper housing, and leaving more land undeveloped. Now he's worrying about the regulatory costs imposed on zillionaires building beach estates and implying that the primary reason housing costs more in downtown Brooklyn than in exurban Houston is height restrictions and parking requirements.
I think it's the missing politics that's making him seem dumber -- that was most of what he was good at, was picking apart someone else being stupid. When that's outside his purview, he loses most of his chances to look clever.
Scalia is, I think, a bright guy and a good judge if he's not interested enough in the outcome of the case to cheat.
I don't agree that Scalia a good judge in boring cases, though this is a popular view, including among many smart liberal lawyers who watch the Court more closely than I do. For me personally the desire to have the rhetorical zinger trump careful opinion writing is one of the worst qualities you can have as an appellate judge, and it's led to a lot of confusion generated by Scalia opinions -- you often just can't tell how seriously to take the rhetoric or whether it reflects an actual legal holding, and it can extend or restrict holdings in bizarre ways.
Thomas is, I think, internally consistent and non-corrupt, but very deeply crazy.
I think it's the missing politics that's making him seem dumber -- that was most of what he was good at, was picking apart someone else being stupid. When that's outside his purview, he loses most of his chances to look clever.
Agree 100%. MY was one of, if not the, best "liberal bloggers" when that meant routinely demolishing terrible arguments quickly, pithily, and decisively. You would read something really stupid that Dick Cheney said, think, gosh, that's awfully stupid, and MY would already have a post up explaining why the really stupid thing was so stupid. But it turns out that this particular skill set was extremely bad for more detailed journalism, particularly journalism that actually requires learning details about how the world works and not just reiterating the thesis of whatever academic article he's read in the past year.*
*I exempt his macroeconomics blogging from this, mostly because (a) I don't understand macro and (b) it seems like a subject you actually can learn about sufficiently by reading a few academic articles and (c) most of what he does is responding to really terrible right-wing arguments, see the preceding paragraph.
Or do I just want to rub his nose in it?
I saw my arch-nemesis in the hall and mentioned to him (in a whisper) that a lot of his students seem to need help with section 2.6. He thanked me for letting him know, and I think any nose-rubbing was completely missed.
117 Partly because it's all on this topic - no foreign policy, no politics, no general whatever stuff. Partly he just keeps going further and further into CATO-cuckoo land where regulations are all bad, long live economic freedom.
Also the whole "Well, obviously every government benefit should just be a cash handout instead of these tragically inefficient food stamps and housing subsidies and school lunches" thing. Any day now he's going to break down and say Medicaid should be turned into a $3000 insurance voucher for everyone or something.
121: Are there any examples of people who were too dumb to be pundits? Or maybe it's just that once a pundit has a reputation for being smart, there's nothing he can do to lose that reputation in the punditocracy.
And then there's Jonah Goldberg -- did anyone ever think he was smart? His mother, maybe?
I see very few people citing Keith Olbermann as an authority on anything these days. He may not be too dumb to be a pundit, but he's too dumb to wear those glasses and speak in that tone of voice.
135: No, he'd be doing fine, if he just wasn't such a prima donna.
||
More drama in the saga of aging parents.
The hospital wants to discharge my Dad to a rehab facility, because he no longer meets acute care standards. There is one in their town that my Mom can walk to, but they did not have a male bed.
They are checking with the other places which are 20-30 minutes away by car, and my Mom doesn't drive. We've all expressed how important it is that he go to the one facility, but they say that they are obligated by law to ask at all facilities within a 50-mile radius.
The rehab facilities don't really want to take him, because they're worried that they won't be able to discharge him once they can no longer bill, because my Mom can't look after him.
The good social worker at the hospital was out sick, and they only ever have one, so I can't get any answers on that end. They can send nurses out for skilled care, but Medicare doesn't pay for what my parents need in the short term.
I found out from the nursing people to whom the PCP referred me that you can get an assessment (which I think takes time) to get MaineCaire to come when the issues are more cognitive than physical, i.e. early dementia. Not one person has done a referral for this. They just expect me to show up and take care of them. I am going up this weekend, but I said, "You need to do your discharge planning as though there were no family involvement at all.
I'm trying to get them down here which is complicated.
I'm kind of boggled that they only have one social worker in the whole place.
|>
Last unfogged comment by MY appears to have been 1-29-08. Clearly there's a correlation between that and his increased stupidity.
137: Man, that all sounds awful. How badly off is your mother, competence-wise? If she needs a guardian, and your father can't take care of her consistently because of health problems, is there some program under which a social worker or someone local (I have no idea) could be made responsible for her care?
OMG, I just surfed over to Yglesias and found this, which even among stiff competition has to be the stupidest post. Here is the argument, literally: "Liberals say they want to bring back good manufacturing jobs, but you know what's manufactured? Processed food. HAW HAW."
That's seriously Jonah Goldberg level stuff.
Ugh, my sympathies, BG. That does sound awful.
if he just wasn't such a prima donna
Yeah, this. Much furious retucking of his shirt.
Isn't this textbook "necessary and proper" clause stuff?
Question for the lawyers in the audience, I'm curious about this bit from an Ezra Klein interview:
EK: And how does that fall on something like the Ryan plan, where the government says, look, we'll lower your tax liability by $2,500 if you purchase insurance from private insurers? That seems like the same penalty, the same power, just one step removed.
RB: Most of the justices did not seem all that sympathetic to that argument. Just because the government does have the power to do x, doesn't mean they have the power to do y, even if y has the same effect as x. There's no constitutional principle like that. ...
Is that correct?
I don't know how I feel about that. On one hand, fine, I accept that there is a great deal of path dependency in the law and that it is often the case that something may be treated very differently from something else which is very similar.
On the other hand it isn't good when that happens. I would naively hope that, all else being equal, one of the functions of a constitutional court would be to try to reduce the number of cases in which that is true. All else is never true, of course. It makes sense for a court to say, "phrase this as X rather than Y and it would be okay, and here's why the distinction matters." But I feel like they should have to make the argument for why the distinction matters.
140: This is not so much a sentence as a nonsensetence: But once consumers don't like to see the sausage getting made so now plants are shutting down.
I surely would like to see Yggles try to diagram that one.
122: What he thought was aitch-two-oh was aitch-two-ess-oh-four?
122- Yeah, I'm kind of curious what that is so I don't do the same thing since I don't rotate my ingredients as often as I should. I heard about the mispublished recipe in some UK magazine that said use 1 cup of nutmeg instead of 1 tsp (or whatever metric equivalents, where it would be easier to make such a mistake by leaving out an SI prefix) resulting in many hospital visits.
145: That's always been my favorite lab-safety poster.
I'm guessing that the people who ended up in the hospital weren't used to cooking with nutmeg. And that's a lot of grating.
139: she doesn't need a guardian yet, and I'd like to get a power of attorney before she loses her competency. There are outreach wrap around programs down here if I can get them into the right housing.
But it's so infuriating that there's no goddam social worker there. She was on a psych unit, and their discharge plan was to send her to the state hospital which discharged her to my Dad's care, and she was never connected to services which would happen here right away if you made it to a state hospital.
Her mental illness is actually okay now. It turns out that even nursing homes don't like to take psychiatric patients with dementia.
139: she doesn't need a guardian yet, and I'd like to get a power of attorney before she loses her competency. There are outreach wrap around programs down here if I can get them into the right housing.
But it's so infuriating that there's no goddam social worker there. She was on a psych unit, and their discharge plan was to send her to the state hospital which discharged her to my Dad's care, and she was never connected to services which would happen here right away if you made it to a state hospital.
Her mental illness is actually okay now. It turns out that even nursing homes don't like to take psychiatric patients with dementia.
Anyone putting a cup of nutmeg in something bought it pre-ground. I'm surprised people choked down enough to get sick -- that would have tasted bizarre.
And some day I may have to see her homeless.
"There was a mistake in a recipe for apple cake. Instead of calling for two pinches of nutmeg it said 20 nutmeg nuts were needed," Matmagasinet's chief editor Ulla Cocke told AFP.
People grated their way through twenty nutmegs? Man, that's persistence.
||
It's awfully funny how this sort of outcome never happens in this sort of case.
||>
She's in a masters program. My boyfriend is. She was actually accepting help with grad school even when it was really obvious that they were quite broke. She actually had a brief psychotic episode last year. Well 2 times and is refusing to try low dose antipsychotics and is generally a pain on the neck.
My one aunt who has plenty of money wouldn't even be willing to help with a few thousand dollars to help cover the cost of a cheap market rate apartment in my town for a year. She believes in leaving money to good causes but not in helping out family. Ever. And yet she did not decline the money my great grandparents left her or give it all to charity straight away. So.
156: The second link is redirecting me to a mobile site which doesn't exist.
Hilary reminded me of this: http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_lawandpolitics_archive.html#113756175348882886
Is Donald Verrilli down in his basement right now kicking an inflatable puppy?
but he did bring up the issue of how ridiculous it would be if the government could tax everyone to create a single-payer system, but not require people to get health insurance on their own.
That actually sounds perfectly reasonable. If the govt. wants to mandate something then the majority can vote for the govt. to provide that service and collect the appropriate taxes.
I hope I'm wrong but I think liberals cheering on the govt. forcing citizens to buy a product from private companies is taking us down a bad path.
I exempt his macroeconomics blogging from this
no, generally terrible too.
Nutmeg is mildly hallucinogenic. The Autobiography Of Malcolm X talks about how they used to get high on it when he was in jail.
Works -- not too different from pot for entertainment value, but it fucks you up for much longer. A couple of tablespoons turned into an hour or two of being stoned, and maybe 12-15 hours of being not particularly impaired, but completely sapped of any initiative, just sitting and staring unless someone else asked a question or something.
We were very bored. It seemed worth a try.
I hope I'm wrong but I think liberals cheering on the govt. forcing citizens to buy a product from private companies is taking us down a bad path.
Look how badly the auto insurance mandate turned out.
I find it bizarre that the Supreme Court is going to decide that, according to the Constitution, addition is noncommutative.
163: The one time I tried it I found it a pleasant way to spend an afternoon (I had the distinct sensation that just outside my field of view was a warm sunny day complete with chirping birds), but, uh, not worth choking down that much nutmeg.
164: To be fair, you can choose not to own a car and thereby exempt yourself from the auto insurance mandate. The health insurance is required by law.
When MA was looking at health reform, I was much more comfortable with a payroll tax that would fund a single payer. It wasn't politically feasible, but I think it would be better.
Banana skins, on the other hand, were a complete put on (I knew people who actually tried them.)
I knew people who actually tried them
Ahem. People in eighth grade. Who didn't know any better. And who did plenty of other dumb stuff, too. Or so I'm told.
164
Look how badly the auto insurance mandate turned out.
There is no such mandate on the federal level. Some states don't require it either.
People grated their way through twenty nutmegs? Man, that's persistence.
Maybe they misunderstood "cake or death".
From the point of view of a consumer, the difference between a state and federal mandate is nonexistent. There are legal difference, but "the govt. forcing citizens to buy a product from private companies" is the same. And in practice, I'm pretty sure that there's no statistically perceptible class of people who have decided against car ownership because they don't want to buy insurance.
170. How old is 8th grade? Sounds about right.
173
... And in practice, I'm pretty sure that there's no statistically perceptible class of people who have decided against car ownership because they don't want to buy insurance.
So if car insurance was free there weren't be more car owners? I am pretty sure this is wrong.
Fair enough, I was thinking of people who were opposed to buying insurance for some reason other than cost. Even on cost, though, that's going to be pretty marginal -- the vast majority of car owners own a car because their lifestyle gives them no other choice, making it pretty much like health insurance.
In Manitoba, they have public car insurance for which you pay premiums. I've heard that it works well.
I'd prefer a straight-up tax to a mandate with a complicated system of subsidies. It would be more progressive and wouldn't require estimating your income right.
With regard to car ownership , it's generally possible to move if you're willing to change your lifestyle. Short of suicide, you don't have much of a choice about living in the country where you're a citizen.
I'd prefer a straight-up tax to a mandate with a complicated system of subsidies.
And probably everyone here agrees with you. That doesn't make the mandate worse than no system for universal coverage.
With regard to car ownership , it's generally possible to move if you're willing to change your lifestyle.
My overstated point in 173 is that there doesn't seem to actually be any significant class of people who avails themselves of this opportunity because they don't want to buy insurance: "I'd like to live a car-centric lifestyle, but because I'd have to buy insurance to have a car I'm moving to downtown Chicago." If it's not a choice that any significant number of people avail themselves of, it's not significant for policy reasons.
Short of suicide, you don't have much of a choice about living in the country where you're a citizen.
O RLY?
179
... "I'd like to live a car-centric lifestyle, but because I'd have to buy insurance to have a car I'm moving to downtown Chicago." If it's not a choice that any significant number of people avail themselves of, it's not significant for policy reasons.
There are lots of people who would like to live a car-centric lifestyle but can't afford to.
It should give liberals pause to that forcing everyone to buy private insurance is playing right into things like demolishing SS and making people buy from Goldman and Prudential and the like.
The car insurance requirements are a bit different as they are mostly for the protection of others. And the rates better reflect risk so for example young drivers pay more. But for reasons that have never made any sense to me liberals object to the notion that young people should pay less for health insurance.
for reasons that have never made any sense to me liberals object to the notion that young people should pay less for health insurance.
Eh?
And of course the difference, IIUIC, is that the law is "if you drive a car YOU MUST HAVE INSURANCE" but "you can either have health insurance, or pay this penalty tax". There is a subtle difference.
There is a fairly large class of people for whom the cost of auto insurance is a significant barrier to auto ownership -- and where overcome, only at substantial effect on lifestyle. Teenagers.
Short of suicide, you don't have much of a choice about living in the country where you're a citizen.
Um, what?
Forcing everyone to buy private insurance is indeed a crap system, and I wouldn't mind seeing it shot down, if not for the massive suffering that would continue to be inflicted on the uninsured should the ACA collapse.
178.3 -- I thought you were dating a foreigner.
185
And of course the difference, IIUIC, is that the law is "if you drive a car YOU MUST HAVE INSURANCE" ...
The car insurance rules are actually fairly complicated as they vary by state. Insurance is not always required. And I don't know for example what happens if you drive a car registered (with appropriate insurance) in one state into a different state.
Mineshaft: Please suggest a charming small gift for a lady to mark a two-month-iversary.
Quickly.
It should give liberals pause to that forcing everyone to buy private insurance is playing right into things like demolishing SS and making people buy from Goldman and Prudential and the like.
OK, I follow you on the second part of this, but why should it have any impact on SS, except to the extent that certain ideologists draw a false connection?
191. Flowers, chocolates, dinner and sex. Come on.
193 is good advice. I thought that was against the rules.
All the Yglesias-bashing prompted me to actually read some of his recent Slate stuff, a habit that I had dropped. It's true that Yglesias has abandoned the winning formlula that Halford identifies - "pithy demolitions of terrible right wing arguments" - but as pundits go, he's not that awful.
I mean, okay, Spike's 114 is a completely accurate summary of Yglesias's ludicrous post on Rowling and book publishing. Did Yglesias really say that Rowling's potential success demonstrates that exercising monopoly-like pricing power is impossible in publishing? Yes, he did. He manages to make this argument despite the fact that he's a consistent critic of patent/copyright monopolies.
But, contrary to other comments here, Yglesias was not, actually, arguing against health inspections, just linking to a plausible-sounding argument that a particular piece of legislation could help entrepreneurs without endangering public health. (It's true that Yglesias could have done a better job describing the link.)
I had assumed he was going to have a lifelong career as a pundit, and now I'm kind of expecting him to drop off the face of the earth in a couple of years.
A quick Google shows that Kaus continues to draw a paycheck - from the Daily Caller. Once Slate tires of him, surely Yglesias can get a gig with Reason.
Every time we engage in a bit of Yglesias-bashing, I have the irresistable urge to remind people that he's better than 95% of all punditry, and better than maybe 80% of all center-left punditry. Remember, we live in a world where Richard Cohen, Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman are widely perceived as left-of-center commentators.
I don't intend to read Yglesias, but I'm not really offended that other people do.
190 -- Wiki says that NH is the only state that does not mandate car insurance. [I]nstead of paying monthly premiums, drivers must prove that they are capable of paying in case of an accident. How does this work? If you lose your job, or file bankruptcy, do you have to give up your car?
Fancy chocolates are good. Some of those cool ones with covered in ganache with fancy designs in it!
Forcing everyone to buy private insurance is indeed a crap system.
It's not the system I would have chosen (which puts me in the company of 95% of you), but it has worked reasonably well in other jurisdictions. By that I mean Mass., obviously, but also Germany (where the default insurance is something akin to a public option, but with characteristics of a co-op) and Switzerland.
It beats the hell out of the status quo ante, in any event.
Tell her you're pregnant....with loooooove.
I agree, insurance beats the hell out of a Snickers Bar.
Tell her you've got a special seed you'd like to plant.
Smear feces all over your body and show up on her doorstep and say "Your love makes me crazy!!"
Buy a dvd of the best of little kid pageant shows and wrap it, and put a note that says "This is the future I see with you."
Stick a banana through the hole in a doughnut, and give it to her, with a lot of eyebrow waggling.
It beats the hell out of the status quo ante, in any event.
My argument in 197 has wide application. One can apply it to specific policies like health reform, or broad phenomena like the Obama presidency.
I admit that the argument does have a sort of lazy contrarian feel to it. Maybe I should apply for a job at Slate.
Give her Groucho Marx nose and glasses combos, and a bubble gum cigar, and say "I'm silly for you!"
I hate you all.
Text her a photo of your penis that you took in the mirror of a public restroom.
Frankly, I'm hemorrhaging ideas here, Plaus.
Dress up like Uncle Sam and do a song-and-dance number about pledging allegiance to her.
The best gift you can give is to show you respect and admire her. Cut your hair in her style and start dressing in her clothes.
I am astonished, and terrified, that some of you miscreants have managed to reproduce.
With your fly down and your johnson hanging out.
209.1 -- Including the new Can't Talk Heebie?
Give her a hoodie and some skittles.
Tell her you love spending time with her, and then handcuff yourselves together and swallow the key.
A quick Google shows that Kaus continues to draw a paycheck - from the Daily Caller
And the only reason he isn't still blogging for Slate, is because he decided to run for the Senate (proof that he is sincerely stupid and nutty).
My 118 stands.
217: With your fly down and your johnson hanging out.
Also pockets out--known as The Elephant Surprise.
216: I am astonished, and terrified, that some of you miscreants have managed to reproduce.
Shocking how that works, isn't it?
Switzerland is an interesting case. What it has now is not Obamacare since basic mandatory health insurance has been hived off from the for profit insurance companies into special non-profit affiliates - i.e. the system is closer to the German model than the ACA. However, before 1996 what you had was a crappier version of Obamacare, introduced in the mid sixties. There were numerous attempts to improve it, ranging from modest ones to full on single payer, all rejected by popular referendum (pretty much any law which anyone or any wealthy interest group cares about is subject to a referendum in Switzerland). In 1994 a proposal finally passed by a very narrow margin (51% voting yes). Other than providing universal health care, the old system sucked. Both individuals and the governments were stuck with crazy high bills and you had all the fun of dealing with insurance companies that Americans are familiar with. To an extent the latter is still true.
Everbody loves a man with flowers. Get her a man and some flowers.
225: Give your next class an over-the-top version of the Aristocrats joke. Or us.
I think you should make up a fancy card listing all of Heebie's suggestions and ask her which one she wants first.
Now I feel doubly bad. Look at this unbelievably horrible Trayvon Martin cartoon that ran in the student newspaper at the U of Texas.
"Great act, what do you call yourselves?"
"The Supreme Court Sanford Police Department Aristocrats."
216 THe logical corollary being that you should follow Heebie's advice. I am sure her showing up at Jammies' door two months into the relationship with her johnson hanging out of her fly is what made him realize she was the one for him.
a charming small gift for a lady to mark a two-month-iversary
Antibiotics.
LB in 179: And probably everyone here agrees with you. That doesn't make the mandate worse than no system for universal coverage.
I never said it was, and I'm record as supporting the ACA, very strongly. It's just that as a purely conceptual, theoretical matter I prefer the elegance of straight taxation.
180: Not everyone has a choice to leave their country. It's easy, as a legal matter, to move from state lines, but I can't just decide I want to move to the UK.
Fancy chocolates are good. Some of those cool ones with covered in ganache with fancy designs in it!
You're in NY, correct? Burdick is quite good.
238. Don't. Not now. The UK currently has a government that's as spiteful as Harper, as ignorant as Bush and as open to nutjob pressure as any of the current Republican crop. If you feel the need to emigrate try Brazil.
189: I am, but I don't want to move to Canada. I think we could actually get in to the UK if we were married, because his grandfather was born there, and he's a Commonwealth citizen, but he'd have to have a job offer first.
Who gets a two-month present? I am, maybe, undersentimental, but that seems weird to me. Presumably you'll be on a date at some time in the near future -- mentioning that your first date was two months ago exactly might be sweet, but the bimensiversary is not a present-giving occasion.
(If you're that kind of person, "I saw this little thing and thought you'd like it, so I got you a present for it being Tuesday" is also nice, but that did not, in fact, happen, or you wouldn't be asking us for advice.)
As an experience, 193 beats the crap out of 242, imo.
On the 'unaffordability of car insurance keeps people from driving' point, that's what subsidies are for under the ACA; in theory (yes, I know) health insurance should be affordable for everyone after the subsidies. If that doesn't work, that's a problem, but for anyone for whom insurance is affordable, requiring auto insurance doesn't keep them from driving, and seems unlikely to have any particularly differently oppressive effects in the health insurance market.
I'm sure Fanta Plaus will be pleased to know that he has many fellow seekers on the internet.
Not everyone has a choice to leave their country. It's easy, as a legal matter, to move from state lines, but I can't just decide I want to move to the UK.
Well, no, but plenty of people do emigrate nonetheless. More than commit suicide. And, within the EU, you can in theory just decide to move to the UK.
the bimensiversary is not a present-giving occasion
Right, you're in the clear for another four weeks. The traditional trimensiversary gift is a threesome.
I have no plans to commit suicide. I just think that most Americans can't just pick up and move.
I think that the car insurance health insurance analogy is flawed, but I still support the ACA and watched every minute of the House vote.
Hey, go click on the comic in 231 and be outraged. It's just that horrible.
Go to Jared's!
Good advice. A six-inch BMT can make any occasion special.
"I saw this little thing and thought you'd like it, so I got you a present for it being Tuesday"
This is an especially good line if the gift is your dick in a box.
Heh. When I see "BMT", I think bone marrow transplant. Seriously, don't get her one of those.
243: My perspective is, admittedly, from the point of view of someone who there's no chance would have thought to buy a bimensiversary present, and so would be looking at a thoughtful little package and thinking "Shit, shit, what do I do? Was I supposed to have something? Maybe if I feign a fainting fit I can sneak over to a newsstand and buy him some gum."
You know, unless she has leukemia. I'm not sure whether that would be considered rushing things, though.
255: "My girlfriend said I should get her something expensive and unnecessary for her birthday...so I signed her up for chemotherapy." --Emo Phillips
Is it oldfashioned to have clearcut enough starting points that anniversaries can be pinpointed like that? I thought that "evening that wasn't really a date but then we kissed but that can't count because of X" or "that night we went home together but that wasn't really serious yet so that doesn't count" was more the norm in our fallen generation.
Also, 206 cracked me up.
238: So how hard would it be for me, an educated, middle-class white guy, to get along in society if I illegally immigrated to Norway or something? I mean, obviously I would take some Norwegian lessons and stuff. Everybody in Europe is unemployed right now, right? Would I have to be a drug dealer or something to make money?
Well, you can pick an event. Buck and I have a clear "the night we met" and a clear "the night I sat on his couch and refused to go home until he kissed me" date, three months or so apart. Somewhere in between there was a first-date-like-event, but I've lost track of what day that was in the ensuing seventeen (Jesus Christ) years.
The Norwegians would force you to eat herring and listen to Bjork.
You'd have to read all the archives of this thing.
263. Why? She's Icelandic. Norwegians are more likely to make you listen to death metal.
Norwegians are more likely to make you kill you after they listen to death metal.
264: read all the archives
Yeah, lots of good lutefisk discussion in there. (I get 54 hits!)
Glad to see my Bjork is Norwegian troll was highly successful!
The black metal guys mostly kill themselves and people trapped inside burning churches that they've burned to protest Norway's greatest mistake, abandoning paganism. So Natlios prob fine there. I heard you can make an illicit living smuggling in butter from Sweden.
Personally, I would have much preferred single-payer health care than the mandate, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the cards in the 2009-2010 Congressional term, and probably wouldn't have been in the cards in the current term even if the 2010 election had shown slight gains for Democrats rather than the huge losses they actually got. I guess if Obama had doubled down on economic stimulus and recovery and entirely put health-care reform off until later, we might have got something better, but that relies on so many counterfactuals the discussion of it seems uninteresting to me. I mean, what if everything else was different as well?
So given the choice between Obamacare and the pre-Obamacare status quo, I'd much prefer the former. It could maybe potentially set a bad precedent, but that's beside the point. Our Supreme Court system is so insane, especially these days, that that would be hard to anticipate. Single-payer could be interpreted as setting a precedent for death panels about as plausibly as Obamacare sets a precedent for privatizing Social Security.
260: sounds old-fashioned to me, yeah. Or maybe not "old-fashioned" but simply not applicable to anyone. My girlfriend keeps track of the anniversary of our first date, but it was just a casual meal and we had known each other for months before then. If I forget the anniversary of our wedding or whatever, fair enough, that would be really rude of me, but forgetting the very first date doesn't seem that bad.
Previously-undisclosed datum: She is marking the date by taking me to lunch, so it matters (in, I am sure, a light-hearted way) to her. I have an idea or two for little gifts that would suit, but will fall back on flowers/chocoearly if necessary.
She is marking the date by taking me to lunch
Typecast already.
260: Our thing started on Compu$erve so it was easy to go back and retrocreate anniversaries of "Email Day" and "Epoxy Day" (for sticking together no matter how difficult life was being at the time).
With those as precedents, we added "Body Mod Day" for the tattoos, and then all sorts of others. PDAs and smartphones made that sort of thing easy to keep track of. Not all of those warranted more than a hug and kiss but they did serve as conscious reminders of the links between us.
Now, they still pop up on my calendars and I can't bring myself to delete them even when they trigger a bout of sadness. IMX the pros of remembering outweigh the cons.
273: Two roses or other flowers of your choice. Two Godiva truffles. Two of anything that lends itself to escalation to a dozen and then a reset. So, kittens and puppies are not good, goldfish might be okay. You get the idea.
She is marking the date by taking me to lunch
Typecast already.
So much for plausible deniability.
So, kittens and puppies are not good, goldfish might be okay.
Two rabbits. The escalation will take care of itself!
276: Two spikes implanted under the skin.
I, too, would prefer single-payer to mandate-and-subsidy, but that doesn't mean I want the Supreme Court to strike down the latter (and, not accidentally, usher in a new era of Commerce Clause constriction).
For fuck's sake, Anthony, if the Commerce Clause was the basis of the Civil Rights Act...
276: I like this, and if you're not springing the date as an occasion on her out of the blue, the present is unweird. A vote for non-rose flowers, if that's how you're going.
281: You know he has the whole language of flowers memorized, so thank goodness we don't have to go through that again. But we can, of course.
Final thought: If there were a plausible rationale for it (even just facially), I don't see why Congress couldn't mandate broccoli-purchase. The Constitution isn't there to protect us from any stupid law we could conceive of: we can criminalize almost anything, tax anything, and go to war with anyone. That gives tremendous leeway for misgovernment that can only be averted politically.
(Chrome doesn't underline "misgovernment"!)
Any theories for how the conservatives would strike down this law while still allowing privatization of Social Security? I suppose the simplest thing to do is just explicitly require certain "magic words" be put in bills to make mandates legal (that is, you may not require people to buy X, but you can tax them and spend the money buying X and then giving it to them). This strikes down the ACA but allows easy privatization of SS or Medicare, which are already tax funded so don't require new taxes.
No one thinks that Kennedy, Roberts, or Scalia is actually opposed to the mandate, right? So it's just a question of how best to strike down this law while changing as little as possible so that republicans can pass virtually identical laws.
Since I linked to the aggravating interview yesterday, I'll mention that the interview Ezra Klein posted today is great.
CF:...The other thing is I think it's Justice Kennedy who said this fundamentally changes the relationship of the citizen to the government. That's an appalling piece of phony rhetoric. There is an important change between the government and the system. It was put in place in 1935, with Social Security. And it said everyone has to pay into a retirement fund, and an unemployment fund. It was done when Medicare came in in the '60s. That's a fundamental change. But this? This is simply a rounding out in a particular area of a relation between the citizen and the government that's been around for 70 years.
...
CF: I've never understood why regulating by making people go buy something is somehow more intrusive than regulating by making them pay taxes and then giving it to them. I don't get it. It was comical to read the Heritage Foundation's brief attempting to explain why they were changing their position on this. Something needed to be done about this problem. Everyone understood that. So, the Heritage Foundation said let's do an individual mandate because it keeps it within free enterprise. The alternative was single payer. And they didn't want that, and I'm in sympathy with that. So now all of a sudden the free-market alternative becomes unconstitutional and terribly intrusive where a government imposition and government-run project would not be? I don't get it. Well, I do get it. It's politics.
"the night I sat on his couch and refused to go home until he kissed me" date
oooh, I had one of them. Not that there'd been anything going on before then. I outlasted everyone else and we ended up watching gaelic football or something before he got the message that I was only there for one thing.
Any theories for how the conservatives would strike down this law while still allowing privatization of Social Security?
Easy-peasy. You leave the option to stay in traditional Medicare / Social Security ("It's a mandate with a public option. You liberals are supposed to like that."). Then you gut them or put them into an adverse selection death spiral ("wither on the vine", in Professor Gingrich's memorable phrase). The newest version of the Ryan plan takes that very approach.
He got the message that I was only there for one thing.
Discussion of health care reform?
Not that there'd been anything going on before then. I outlasted everyone else and we ended up watching gaelic football or something before he got the message that I was only there for one thing.
Gaelic football?
I find this most compelling from the link in 286:
CF: There's all this stuff that got in there about creating commerce in order to regulate it. ... But quite apart from that, what is the commerce? The commerce is not the health insurance market. The commerce is the health-care market, as [current solicitor general Donald] Verrilli said a million times. And it's very hard to deny that.
There is a market for health care. It's a coordinated market. A heavily regulated market. Is Congress creating the market in order to regulate it? It's not creating it! The market is there! Is it forcing people into it in order to regulate them? In every five-year period, 95 percent of the population is in the health-care market. Now, it's not 100 percent, but I'd say that's close enough for government work. And in any one year, it's close to 85 percent. Congress isn't forcing people into that market to regulate them. The whole thing is just a canard that's been invented by the tea party and Randy Barnetts of the world, and I was astonished to hear it coming out of the mouths of the people on that bench.
I recently read somebody or other -- let's see, it was Steve M. -- pointing to Randy Barnett, and getting a little shrill about the Court's seeming failure to keep itself apolitical.
So ... basically, certain members of the court are asking themselves whether they seriously need to weigh in on federalism. Apparently individual states can mandate the individual purchase of private health insurance, but the federal government (possibly, pending the SC's decision) cannot, because the federal government is burdened by limits on its power that state governments are not. Right?
I haven't been able to tell whether I'm hand-wringy over this because I dearly wish Obamacare -- for all its faults, failure to be single-payor chief among them -- to go forward, or because of the extent to which this is becoming a referendum of sorts on federalism.
I've said for some time now that the rise in libertarian sentiment in this country is a problem, but people always pooh-pooh me. Fucking libertarians.
Gaelic football?
The winning team has to have done a goal.
So ... basically, certain members of the court are asking themselves whether they seriously need to weigh in on federalism. Apparently individual states can mandate the individual purchase of private health insurance, but the federal government (possibly, pending the SC's decision) cannot, because the federal government is burdened by limits on its power that state governments are not. Right?
Right.
I've said for some time now that the rise in libertarian sentiment in this country is a problem, but people always pooh-pooh me. Fucking libertarians.
Pooh-pooh. The spread of the arguments against the mandate, from ridiculous-and-fringe to at least all four rightmost Justices, has nothing to do with the spread of libertarian sentiment. It's the GOP machine pulling arguments out its ass.
199
190 -- Wiki says that NH is the only state that does not mandate car insurance. [I]nstead of paying monthly premiums, drivers must prove that they are capable of paying in case of an accident. How does this work? If you lose your job, or file bankruptcy, do you have to give up your car?
I believe Wiki is wrong. New Hampshire does not appear to require insurance or other proof of financial responsibility (unless you have demonstrated that you are irresponsible as for example by a DWI conviction). See here :
•The state of New Hampshire is like no other when it comes to auto insurance. While the state of New Hampshire recommends that all motorists carry at least the minimum liability insurance coverage, New Hampshire law, in most cases, does not require it.
Some other states don't require you to buy insurance if you provide some other evidence of financial resposibility such as a surety bond.
See here for California:
In the state of California, there are four ways to accomplish financial responsibility. These include: Coverage by a motor vehicle or automobile liability insurance policy; a cash deposit of $35,000 with the DMV; a certificate of self-insurance issued by DMV to owners of fleets of more than 25 vehicles; or a surety bond for $35,000 obtained from an insurance company licensed to do business in California.
and here for Wisconsin.
•In order to comply with Wisconsin financial responsibility laws, all drivers must show that they have the ability to pay for damages if he or she is found to be at fault in an accident. Driver's can purchase liability insurance or place a cash deposit of $60,000 with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. In some cases, you may even post a bond from an auto insurance company that's licensed to sell insurance in Wisconsin.
If you lose you job or file for bankruptcy you are likely to have to give up your car whether or not you have traditional auto insurance as cars are expensive.
245
... but for anyone for whom insurance is affordable, requiring auto insurance doesn't keep them from driving, and seems unlikely to have any particularly differently oppressive effects in the health insurance market.
The different oppressive effect is that you can pay the tax and be out the money but receive nothing in return. There is no equivalent in the auto insurance market.
293: Pooh-pooh. The spread of the arguments against the mandate, from ridiculous-and-fringe to at least all four rightmost Justices, has nothing to do with the spread of libertarian sentiment. It's the GOP machine pulling arguments out its ass.
They sure as hell sound like severe states-rights arguments, at a minimum, though.
I'm not sure how we cannot notice the increase in rhetoric to do with liberty, coming from both the GOP and (certain members of) the Court.
I'm not sure how we cannot notice that the GOP machine is, okay, making use of libertarian arguments in order to achieve whatever the hell its real goals are.
The different oppressive effect is that you can pay the tax and be out the money but receive nothing in return.
Why is it oppressive to pay for a system that takes care of your neighbor, even if you yourself stay healthy and die without medical care?
Because you hate your neighbor.
I agree that the wiki article I was looking at is mistaken. I don't agree that there is any meaningful difference between requiring insurance of minimal amount, and requiring a bond or cash deposit of that same minimal amount.
I've been involved in a whole lot of bankruptcy cases, and cannot think of any in which the debtor didn't keep the car. None in NYC, however. Living without one in a place like NH would be quite a hardship. Not that people don't, obviously.
So ... basically, certain members of the court are asking themselves whether they seriously need to weigh in on federalism. Apparently individual states can mandate the individual purchase of private health insurance, but the federal government (possibly, pending the SC's decision) cannot, because the federal government is burdened by limits on its power that state governments are not. Right?
Right.
I think this will be a tough decision to write. If a state can mandate, then surely the feds can under N&P. It's only the truly outrageous nature of the mandate that takes it out of all consideration -- at least that's how the logic works for me.
The different oppressive effect is that you can pay the tax and be out the money but receive nothing in return. There is no equivalent in the auto insurance market.
Please tell me that this doesn't mean what it sounds like. Shearer, you realise that, if you drive safely, you can also pay your auto insurance and be out the money but receive nothing in return?
If you're driving a car you can get into an accident that is SOMEONE ELSE'S FAULT. IF YOU GET SICK IT IS NOBODY ELSE'S FAULT but yours
CHIMPEACH THE CHIMPEROR
NO HOMO
300: If a state can mandate, then surely the feds can under N&P.
I take it N&P = necessary and proper. I take it the Interstate Commerce Clause is to provide the rationale for a national mandate being N&P. (I'm not very well acquainted with any technicalities, or case law, regarding the meaning of N&P.) I took it that individual states are not under a burden to show that something is necessary & proper, but can do whatever the fuck they want, provided it's in keeping with the state's constitution.
What am I trying to say? That the US Constitution limits federal government actions in a way that state constitutions don't limit the state's; I don't see why this would be a difficult decision to write. What am I missing?
I don't understand 300.last.
N&P means, or at least people thought up to now it meant, that Congress could include elements in an authorized scheme that might themselves not be authorized if standing alone. The N part was made unmistakeable by the argument on severance. The question is P -- and that's not about whether an individual mandate is itself kosher under the CC (although it is) but whether anyone can do it at all.
I'm now thinking there will be at least 3 opinions on the majority side -- a plurality and two concurrences -- and a damn mess.
I continue to agree with bob that people who think something better will emerge if this is struck down are delusional. I parted company with him on the notion that something better would have emerged if Congress had failed to pass the ACA in the first place. We're basically fucked, on this front at least, until either the Republicans Grow Up or the Revolution. I expect neither in my lifetime.
If there's really no chance of people having health insurance in this country unless they either are elderly, are in the military, or have a good job, I know a lot of people who are going to start thinking they're foolish if they don't try to move somewhere else. I mean, it's not like there's as many good jobs as there used to be. What do people do?
292: The winning team has to have done a goal Gael.
Ezra Klein clarified this morning that while an SC strikedown would turn the Dems long-term toward expanding public insurance programs, it would take a decade at minimum for change in this direction to even start, so highly undesirable.
Thanks to union health insurance, my nominally $55,000 hospital stay only resulted in me being out-of-pocket $693. Those days will be but a dim rememering of a bygone age when man was (somewhat less) wolf to man after the ACA kicks in.
"[U]nion fought-for" I should say.
304.1: Ah, that's helpful, thanks. So, whether anyone (at federal or state level?) can properly do it?
If that's the way of the argument -- that requiring people to pay money for something they will almost inevitably make use of in future is improper -- I don't see how levying taxes doesn't come out improper.
I do understand that the Constitution clearly grants Congress the power to levy taxes in exchange for provision of services (which services may, and indeed often are, outsourced to private companies), but it seems to me that there will be a serious tension between an "improper!" ruling on the mandate and the Constitutionally sanctioned Congressional power to tax.
Taxation is an inherent power of government, even beyond the fact that the Constitution explicitly grants it to Congress. This is part of why this whole argument is so ridiculous; if you view the mandate and penalty as a tax, there's no problem.
I consider my anniversary to be movable--always falling on a Monday. We had been seeing each other for a bit, I stayed over, we met up with a mutual friend to watch the Boston marathon who kind of figured out that we were dating, because he only expected my BF there.
Another well-off friend took a bunch of us out to dinner got a little drunk, complained about her love life, when around the table asking everyone about their love lives, looked at us, and said, "Wait, are you two dating?" We said, "Yes." So, I consider Patriot's Day our anniversary.
311: There is no inherent power of government, beyond, perhaps, a monopoly on the use of force. In a constitutional democracy the rest, including the power to tax, must be spelled out, or at least not ruled out, in the paperwork. But that's a sidebar. We could get x.trapnel in here to discuss it if he wants to.
Anyway, one of the concerns of people who worry in this SCOTUS case about what limits federal government action (that is: what keeps this from being a slippery slope? can the gov't mandate the purchase of broccoli?!) is that public services are usually treated as quite distinct from privately-provided services. The people who worry about being forced to partake of broccoli tend to be conservatives, who also tend to favor privatization of public services. If the government can't regulate private services, there, you're done! The government is increasingly stripped of power to regulate.
I'm ranting a bit, but honestly, some are mumbling that the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional. I blame capitalism.
There is no inherent power of government, beyond, perhaps, a monopoly on the use of force.
No, there are three inherent powers of government (at least in common-law systems): taxation, eminent domain, and the police power. Constitutions can and do set limits on these powers, but they don't create them.
304: The N part was made unmistakeable by the argument on severance.
Do you hold out any hope that Kennedy/Roberts having had to confront that head-on later in the week might bring them in line? Or is it so important to not let black Democratic presidents make you buy broccoli that the mandate must go, and it will be "not our problem" on how to keep the whole thing from unraveling?
Some googling reveals that the phrase "inherent powers" is also used for a bunch of other stuff, and that the powers I was talking about in 314 are also known as the "fundamental powers of the state." I'm not 100% certain that my interpretation of how they relate to constitutional law is correct, but they're certainly not created by the US Constution, which just delegates them to the federal government from the states with certain limitations. This is all remembered from the planning law course I took in grad school.
315 -- Before the argument, I was saying either 6-3 for or 5-4 against, Roberts and Kennedy on the same side. Now I think it's more likely to be a muddled result, maybe with the two of them split on remedy.
310 -- They could have done it as a tax, but I think the Fourth Circuit and Judge Kavanaugh are wrong to say that they did do it as a tax. (And I think the SC will be clear about that, at least). Why not do it as a tax? Ask Grover fucking Norquist and his minions.
I'm pretty sympathetic to the 'it's a tax' argument, just because it could be a tax without changing anything at all other than words on paper (AFAIK). My understanding is that literally nothing would have to be changed about who pays what to whom under what circumstances to make it tax, Congress would just have had to say 'tax' rather than 'penalty'.
At that point, I get all 'a difference that makes no difference is no difference.' But I can certainly see legitimate room for disagreement there.
Charles Pierce on Associate Justice Scalia. (I know, doesn't help one fucking thing other than making me feel marginally better.)
On Tuesday, he pursued the absurd "broccoli" analogy to the point where he sounded like a micro-rated evening-drive talk-show host from a dust-clotted station in southern Oklahoma.
He's really just a heckler at this point.
A heckler with a vote.
316: Well, the Law Real site you link in 314 won't load for me. The notion of "inherent" powers of government is problematic. I really am not fully qualified to speak on political philosophy, though.
321: Try this one. I'm having trouble finding a good link explaining this, but it really is an important point.
322: I understand that, but those powers are granted to the state (fed) in systems like ours I really was just responding in 313.1 to the notion that these are inherent powers of any sort of government at all. They're not.
None of this has anything to do with the case before our Supreme Court.
I'm not 100% certain that my interpretation of how they relate to constitutional law is correct, but they're certainly not created by the US Constution, which just delegates them to the federal government from the states with certain limitations.
This isn't really right.* As a matter of legal doctrine, the power of the US federal government exists only as enumerated powers contained within the US Constitution -- other than those enumerated powers, the federal government has no other power (though it has been clear since McCulloch v. Maryland** that the federal government can do whatever it deems appropriate to implement those powers that have been granted it under the Constitution). The states are inherently sovereign bodies, not the federal government. What Teo is talking about are sometimes known as the inherent powers that are incident to sovereignty; in the US system these are indeed pre-constitutional, but reside with the states or Indian Tribes, not the federal government.
This comes up sometimes as an active legal issue when there is a sovereign Indian tribe that lacks a written constitution. What does the tribe have the power to do? Well, under the US law it would have the power to tax, exercise the right of eminent domain, and exercise the police power.
But the federal government has enumerated powers -- it doesn't have any power to tax or exercise the police power, except for those powers enumerated within the Constitution and measures necessary and proper to exercise those enumerated powers. As it happens, the Constitution expressly grants the federal government the right to raise taxes (within certain limits) but the federal government does not have a general police power.
*None of this matters much for the health care case.
**Which decisively resolves the health care case and has been the law since 1819. Is Congress acting to regulate commerce? Yes, clearly, it is regulating the market for health care. Is the mandate a reasonable means of exercising that regulation? Yes. End of story, it's constitutional.
Insert a period between "ours" and "I" up there in 323.
324 -- United States v. Curtiss Wright Export Corp. has bugged me since I first read it.
297 301
Please tell me that this doesn't mean what it sounds like. Shearer, you realise that, if you drive safely, you can also pay your auto insurance and be out the money but receive nothing in return?
As I understand it if you pay the penalty for not having insurance you still don't have insurance and are just out the money. Is this wrong?
299
I've been involved in a whole lot of bankruptcy cases, and cannot think of any in which the debtor didn't keep the car. None in NYC, however. Living without one in a place like NH would be quite a hardship. Not that people don't, obviously.
Don't cars get repossessed all the time?
Anyway if the debtor gets to keep the car presumably he is also allowed to buy insurance for it so I don't see the problem.
New quiz, practically custom-made for Unfogged: Professor or Hobo?
As I understand it if you pay the penalty for not having insurance you still don't have insurance and are just out the money. Is this wrong?
Yes, and if you drive without auto insurance and get fined then you still don't have auto insurance and are just out the money. And you may well be banned from driving too.
Don't cars get repossessed all the time?
That's when people owe money on the car itself, and are behind on their payments.
330: I contest the premise! Can't a person be both?
333: Nah, the hobos tend to leave The Academy once the lucrative railroad consultant jobs come rolling in.
330: I've had my photo taken in exactly the same spot as one of those! Maybe I should start working on the facial hair.