Two versions went down to defeat. The Rockefeller government-option plan, which would have consisted of Medicare-like unilateral prices, went down defeat to 15-8. All GOP Senators voted against it, as well as Democrats Lincoln (AR), Nelson (FL), Carper (DE), Conrad (ND), and Baucus (MT). The Schumer version would have involved negotiated fee structures. This vote was closer, with Nelson and Carper switching their votes.
As much as we conservatives are somewhat amused by a food fight among Democrats, the question of the federal government expanding its footprint in the health care arena is very troubling. Rockefeller's bashing of the private-sector health insurance industry is sheer demagoguery and politically unwise, given the fact that most private-sector policyholders like their plans; where you run into some issues is in dealing with catastrophic health costs, e.g., where a household with a $12,000 annual policy has a member whom is running up against a $2M limit. There may be ways of dealing with that, e.g., with some fee mechanism for government-guaranteed reinsurance. In terms of dealing with guaranteed issue, there are a variety of approaches, but one way is to build on state/regional assigned risk pools, where hard-to-insure people (with preexisting conditions and the like) are able to obtain to coverage for above-average (but more feasible) prices, in part subsidized by taxes on insurance premiums, a fairer way of sharing the cost burden of high-risk policyholders.
The last thing we classical economic liberals need from progressives is a lecture on the value of market competition. Who better than the government to judge costs and run an insurance exchange? Remember when, back in 1985, Lockheed billed the government $640 per each of 54 toilet covers for Navy planes, insisting they were making only nominal profits at that price? (The Lockheed CEO later revised the Pentagon invoiced price to $100 each, worried that this revelation would undermine more lucrative government contract proposals.) Even monopolies run up against the supply/demand curve; even OPEC realizes if oil prices get ahead of themselves--which is to their benefit--the result can be a severe global recession, which in turn means much lower oil prices. The point is, who is going to regulate the government regulators? I recently discussed the issue of regulatory capture, i.e., the very type of thing Thomas Jefferson was worried about with respect to a collusion between moneyed interests and the government.
Al Sharpton Makes an Appearance on WWE Raw: The Education Equality Project
There was method in his madness. Al Sharpton made a guest host appearance on the highly rated cable show, World Wrestling Entertainment's flagship show WWE Raw. The largely scripted show seems like an odd show for the long-term civil rights activist and former Presidential candidate to headline, but it draws a very high young adult audience. Al Sharpton promoted his website and his ongoing tour with conservative Newt Gingrich and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. As a conservative and as a former professor, I am passionate about education. And I know that young blacks and Latinos fall behind by the end of elementary school and barely half graduate high school. One thing is certain: the status quo doesn't deliver real change. Incompetent teachers and administrators give up on their students, refusing to challenge them to their real potential. Progressives have a number of "solutions" to resolve the problem--e.g., fight meaningful educational choices for parents and their children, reduce the failing local monopoly class sizes and raise the pay of tenured teachers and administrators whom aren't change, but more of the same status quo.
I know what it means to the Latinos with whom I went to college, many whom were the first in their families to go to college. I know what it means to African Americans; one of the interesting aspects of my campus visit to Grambling State, a historic black university, in 1994 was the fact that the college scheduled a session for me to converse with a group of students (this was unique in my academic job experience). But for each young man and woman who made it to college, there is at least another whom never made it and faces a bleak future, where he or she faces a future where a smaller number of factory jobs require functional literacy, higher-order cognitive and technical skills; it might involving changing jobs and careers in response to more rigorous global competition. We cannot afford another generation of teachers and administrators whom are simply at school to punch a ticket.
Why should a conservative care? A variety of reasons: domestic economic growth, global competitiveness, moral imperative, and social stability, to mention a few. We can't afford the luxury of another generation of students lost to progressive ideological groupthink. I admire Al Sharpton for being a progressive whom realizes meaningful reforms that work in the private sector, e.g., merit-based pay and managerial flexibility in personnel decisions and resource scheduling and promoting quality teachers, may be relevant, as well as meaningful educational choice, including independently run charter schools. I heartily recommend that the reader learn more about the Education Equality Project.
Pay No Attention to the Man (and Data) Behind the (Global Warming) Curtain
It seems that the fog clouding the global warming "hockey stick" hypothesis is finally burning off under scientific scrutiny. For a long time, skeptics have been trying to get access on study data behind the "hockey stick" hypothesis; it turns out that the research collaborators published in a prestigious journal that requires access to study data. The recent Watts Up With That blog post is a fascinating summary of scientific sleuth work (I recommend that the reader read the entire post at the link below the reproduced image, which is the original work of cited scientists, not myself). The familiar 12-tree sample red-line "hockey stick" below, presented as evidence of unprecedented "global warming", seems to diverge significantly from a related, larger pool of sampling data (black line below). What this seems to suggest is that the 12 trees were cherry-picked specifically (not randomly selected) to support the "hockey stick" hypothesis; under merger of the sample sets, we see a modestly higher result, but even Wayne "The Great One" Gretzky couldn't score a goal using that stick...
Image Courtesy of Watts Up With That, 9/27/2009
BOMC2 in the Tank for Obama
A few years back I was intrigued by a distinctive new spin on the concept of monthly book clubs, a variation on the business model from the Internet DVD rental market leader Netflix Netflix provides a vast library of movies and other DVD's products for a low fixed-price (including postage-paid delivery and return). Netflix works by shipping in chronological sequence available items in your preestablished, modifiable selection list up to your plan's quota (e.g., three DVD's at a time). Zooba applied a similar concept, with an all-inclusive flat price of $10/month for one selection shipped monthly from your preestablished book list. Several months ago, Zooba went through a name change, being rebranded BOMC2.
My personal tastes primarily run towards nonfiction books (especially history and health topics), but every once in a way I would check out their selections in politics and current affairs. I don't recall them carrying pop conservative titles (e.g., Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Dick Morris, et al.) [There are other book clubs willing to accommodate your tastes for these titles.] But I do recall their once carrying a more ideologically balanced book selection, including Ronald Kessler's sympathetic first-term biography of George W. Bush, A Matter of Character. However, even I was surprised by BOMC2's decidedly ideological bent. If you go through their section of current event titles, you'll find Bernard Goldberg's observation of the media's slobbering love affair with all things Barack Obama in full force, along with the usual progressive critics of the Bush Administration, including the progressive's favorite economist, New York Times columnist Paul "Enron Consultant" Krugman. [Well, if you try, you can find CHRISTMAS BOOKS by Mike Huckabee and Glenn Beck and an economics textbook by black conservative economist Thomas Sowell. But nothing remotely critical of President
Musical Interlude
My favorite new single is the extraordinarily gifted pop vocalist Mariah Carey's remarkable cover and interpretation of the best song from the 1980's: Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is":
