If people have objections to current health care reform proposals, they ought to raise them in these town hall meetings. Major adjustments have already been made in the legislation based on criticisms of the original proposals. More adjustments can be made.
It is especially easy to remove parts of the bill that exist only as figments of the imagination of people who have been stirred up by the likes of Sarah Palin.
Follow this link to see the House of Representatives version of the bill. The link points to a pdf file. You must have a pdf reader such as one from Adobe to read it.
In comments on an article in the Worcester T & G, I read some pretty severe criticisms of the bill.
I asked one complainer to be specific about the complaint. The complaint referred to “Beginning on page 16 of the bill it discusses ‘Grandfathered’ Health Insurance. AKA Private or Job acquired Health Insurance”, in the complainer’s words.
Among many other things the complainant believed that, “It goes on to say that no one not already enrolled can enroll in private insurance.” He thought this spelled the end of private insurance for people not already enrolled.
I looked it up. In my mind the complainer has completely misread this section of the bill.
The bill is giving a definition of what kind of policy will be grand fathered in and not covered by the bill. The voluminous restrictions in this part of the bill were only trying to explain what is required of a policy to be grand-fathered. This section was not restricting policies that were not trying to be grand-fathered.
To be grand fathered, the policy must not change after it has been grand fathered. If the policy does not meet the grand fathering criteria spelled out in this section of the bill, then it will be a regular private policy that comes under the terms of the bill.
Here is an example of the difference between being grand-fathered and not grand-fathered. A grand-fathered insurance policy could exclude pre-existing condition coverage. One that is not grand-fathered would not be able to exclude pre-existing conditions because this bill forbids that practice.
If people at the Worcester town hall meeting had been able to explain in a civilized manner what it is that bothered them about the bill, then the presenters could either note their valid complaint or they could explain the misunderstanding.
For the fomenters of the protests, I would bet the purpose is to prevent such rational discussions.
If you don’t believe my explanation, go look it up and decide for yourself.
If you are reading this on Facebook, click the link to view the original post to see the video. I cannot put into words anything that will match watching the video.
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Readers of the Worcester T & G favor a health care overhaul plan providing insurance coverage for abortion procedures by a 65% to 35% majority even though this would be a change in long-standing federal policy.
Just out of curiosity, I wonder what my readers think of the propriety of manipulating the results of an unscientific poll whose stated options are presented in a biased manner.
What if the Worcester T & G had to stop publishing these unscientific and poorly worded polls because they finally realized that the results were being manipulated and they could not prevent it? Would the public be better or worse for the loss of these poll results?
Apparently Senator Ben Nelson is going to take it out on his constituents because one of them dared to ask him to stop delaying health care reform. I can’t imagine that this is the sort of behavior that got him elected in the first place. Perhaps this is his indication that he is going to retire on the money he collected from the health insurance industry.
They prey on our weaknesses…trying to separate the healthy from the sick
If you are reading this on facebook, you will have to click the link to view the original post to see the video.
I have received some recent email that tells me some people still don’t get it. Unfortunately, I don’t think this video will speak to anybody who doesn’t already understand that our very souls are at stake here.
If you are reading this on Facebook, you will have to click the link to view the original post to see the video.
I was listening to the lecture by Paul Krugman as mentioned in my previous post, Krugman Lectures on the Depression. He described how he was convinced by another Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman. to abandon what he learned from John Maynard Keynes’s analysis of the great depression. He now realizes how Friedman looked at the wrong data to come up with his erroneously convincing theory.
I have recently been reading the book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This is a perfect example of what Taleb thinks is wrong about the way we study history.
Taleb is all in favor of histories that tell you what happened in the past. He is very suspicious when historians try to provide a narrative that explains why they happened.
I’ll try to recall one of Taleb’s thought experiments from his book that describes the problem.
Suppose you see an ice cube on the floor. If you have sufficient knowledge of physics, you will be able to predict the resulting puddle that will be there when the ice cube melts.
Now consider the case, where you walk into a room and see a puddle on the floor. It does not make any difference how much physics you know, you will not be able to say for sure what the ice cube looked like before it melted. There are many possible ice cubes and non-ice cubes that could be responsible for that puddle.
Likewise, in history, there are many plausible explanations that would explain how events unfolded as they did. It is not very likely with our limited knowledge of all the details that we will be able to know with any certainty which explanation, if any, is true. More likely, none of the explanations are true, because we each have our own biases and knowledge limitations in choosing what we think are the major factors that caused the events. Taleb has explanations, that I won’t descibe here, of why we don’t attribute what happened more to luck than we ought to.
Taleb talks about using common-sense. Although common-sense is not always so common. In the case of the Keynesian explanation of the causes of the prolonged depression, they make a lot of sense. There is a lot in what Keynes’ said to show that Friedman’s alternate explanation is not likely to be the right one. If people like Krugman had not forgotten what they had learned, they would have delved deeper into how Friedman misled them. They would not have waited until 2008 to figure it out.
Why do I have to be the one that responds to Krugman, “Well, duh?”, when Krugman finally comes to his senses and realizes that the explanation that Keynes’ gave is much more reasonable than the one Friedman gave when applied to the conditions that prevailed during the depression.
RichardH sent out an email with some links to Paul Krugman’s delivery of a London School of Economics lecture series.
Part I--The Sum of All Fears Audio: http://tinyurl.com/kj43gf Slides (pdf): http://tinyurl.com/n6gevo Part II--The Eschatology of Lost Decades Audio: http://tinyurl.com/mjvq65 Slides (pdf): http://tinyurl.com/lcavs7 Part III--The Night They Reread Minsky Audio: http://tinyurl.com/m4hww2 Slides (pdf): http://tinyurl.com/m92wpj
I was able to open the audio in one browser window and look at the slides in another browser window. After hearing Part I, this was my feedback to RichardH.
I am beginning to think that Taleb was right about Nobel Prize winning economists, but not only for the reason he talks about.
I am surprised that I seem to know more about what is going on than Krugman does in some respects.
Apparently he, along with Samuelson, lost faith in Keynes with the rise of Milton Friedman. Only now is he realizing what I knew all along. Keynes analysis was applicable at the time to the conditions at the time. When those conditions are far from what you need to apply his reasoning, then you are in a different regime where different forces dominate. The famous caveat to all simplified economics – “everything else remaining the same”.
Well everything else did not remain the same. Why is it such a surprise that when the conditions did go back to the ones during Keynes’ time that the prevailing balance of forces would return to what he analyzed?
I am listening to the first question asked of Krugman about the falling world trade. Both he and the questioner agree that there is no tightening of free trade and other explanations are also missing. Krugman appears to be lost for any explanation until he finally gets around to the fact that people are buying less stuff because we are near a depression. Well, duh?
Do the succeeding lectures get beyond the obvious? Maybe Krugman should sit in the audience and let me explain the facts of life to him.
Unlike the black swan of Taleb, these extreme happenings that surprise Krugman so much have happened before during the lifetime of a few people who are still alive. We have books, for goodness sakes, that record history. This history surely can’t have been forgotten so easily by Nobel prize winning economists. Apparently, I believe in the scholarship of major thinkers too much.
Krugman had the brilliant insight during the lecture that when the economy has a lot of slack and you can’t keep your factories and stores busy, you are unlikely to want to invest in more of these items. To this I also say, well, duh? Do I really need a Princeton professor to tell me this?
Follow this link to the article by Frank Rich. I bet you can guess the topic of this piece.
Up to now, I have not read much if anything of Frank Rich’s writings. I think he had a particularly good take on his subject in this piece. He also pointed to a few ideas that I had not considered before.