Van Jones and the Media

I'd describe Byron York as a conservative reporter. His opinions are very well researched, and he rarely uses stereotyping or anger. Here is an excellent take on the media and Van Jones -- and the media and conservatives in general.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Why-did-the-press-ignore-the-Van-Jones-scandal_-8210602-57658222.html

This idea he notes -- that it's really about denying the "bad guys" a victory -- resonates. When the right-wing echo machine actually finds something of weight -- and I think they did with Jones -- the editors of these papers probably can see the news value of what's been found, but they are reluctant to aid an abet sources that they feel on balance do harm to the debate.

From a pure journalistic standpoint, that's crap. They are obligated to report the story and let us decide. That's their role in a democracy. But even getting past that, what rankles me most is that it's not consistent. Example: There's a Republican candidate for governor of Virginia who (From the Washington Post): "submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples."

Yucky, right? But this guy has been in politics for many years now, and there's no evidence that this set of views has had any effect on his policymaking. Yet it has been on the front page of the Washington Post several times now.

The pattern is consistent:

Conservative says yucky social conservative stuff in 1989: Big news!! Must be defeated!!

Obama says in 2003 (for example) that he favors "single payer" health insurance: Old news!! Not worth reporting!!

Each man has the right to his opinions. In both cases, those opinions should be aired and discussed. Yet one gets a series of page 1 stories and the other gets a quick "Pshaw!"

White House Drops Public Option

Cool. Democracy in action. People who need insurance will get it, and I really will get to keep my plan.

I'm happy about this.

Are Insurance Company Profits the Real Problem?

There's been a lot of argumentation from the left decrying both insurance company profits and insurance company CEO pay. I concede the point. The profits are very high, and CEOs make an obnoxious amount of money.

I just don't think it matters.

Here's why:

http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

This is the sort of information liberals use to bolster their case. The problem statement they point to here is correct, and most people seem to know this. We have a provably inefficient system.

Then there's this:

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/08/05/are-health-insurers-making-too-much-money/

This one is kinda funny. In trying to prove their point, Think Progress inadvertently makes the case for the other side. They say that the industry is "hiding" their profits by comparing them to the overall size of the market instead of to their own revenue. Maybe so. But in pointing this out, the Think Progress folks are conceding that profits by these companies, however obnoxious, are only 1% of the overall heathcare problem. That means that you can take all of the numbers in the NCHC piece above and simply subtract 0.5% (I assume we're not saying they can't make any profit) to get the net effect of "solving" both the outrageous profit problem and the outrageous compensation problem.

Doing the math, if "outrageous" profits are cut in half, that $12,700 per family cited in the NCHC report would drop by $63. If the profits were eliminated entirely, the cost would drop by $127. Is this really the piece we need to fix?

I think people with other agendas use these profit and compensation numbers to get people riled up so that they will ignore the other, more important issues.

On Healthcare Reform

Let's jump right in, k?

I'm okay with a public option, I guess, but that option can't be "good" insurance that competes with and possibly bankrupts the Tufts HMO that I'm happy with. It should look like any other properly designed public assistance program -- good enough to avert catastrophe, but not so good as to undermine a system that, while flawed, provides care that 75-85% of Americans are happy with (Rasmussen, Gallup, Pew). A public option should be a social safety net that people are both grateful to have and eager to get off.

If you look at it that way, you can bring on all of the "death panels" and "euthanasia counseling" talk if you'd like and it won't matter (tongue planted in cheek). Those things would actually help get people off of the public option and back to private insurance ASAP -- where I don't have to pay for them. In the end, I don't care about the public option or how it works, as I'm among the vast majority of folks who don't intend to be on it.

And yes, let's reform private health insurance. Let's eliminate the ability by insurance companies to price sick people out of the pool or simply cancel them. And let's tweak other parts of the system as well. Let's build clinics so people don't have to go to emergency rooms for little things.

Sounds conservative, right? That's just funny to me. The liberals I know talk and think pretty much like me -- until they are arguing politics. To a person, they work hard and take responsibility for their own lives. They just have a strange reluctance to demand others do the same. In their mind's eye they imagine this nondescript underprivileged victim who needs their saving, and who would have been saved already were it not for the evil and selfish Republicans.

I don't think encouraging people to take responsibility for their own lives is inherently conservative. I believe that the end goal of every program we put in place should be to give people the tools they need to get off of that program -- not because I don't want to pay for it, but because independent people have better, happier, and more productive lives. Right?

And more puzzling to me is that when you strip away the politics and just talk about the right way to live in this world, pretty much everybody tends to advocate a life of independence. I'm still working through why this is controversial in the public arena. Creating more opportunities for government dependence feels tragic to me, and very condescending toward the people the programs are purporting to "help". And yet so many on the left seem to think that big government is the right way to solve problems, even though most would agree that government doesn't solve problems very well.

I don't get it.

And so here we go again on healthcare. The familiar post-modern pattern has quickly emerged. Each side has put on their white hats and assigned the black hats to the other side. We're even having an oh-so-fun game of "Who's the Nazi?" instead of having a serious conversation.

Sigh.

The health care debate, for me, is the greatest failure yet in the Internet-driven, post-listening-or-even-trying-to-understand, surround-yourself-only-with-people-you-agree-with world we've decided to live in during the first full decade of the Information Age. Each side is convinced, to the point of distraction, that the other side is driven by lies and impure motives, and they are each spending an extraordinary number of bits and bytes trying to "prove" this.

What's a center-right moderate and social libertarian to do?

What I always try to do: Sort through the mess and listen for things that make sense -- to me anyway.

Simply put, health care reform as presently proposed makes no sense to me. It's too expenseive and not targeted directly at the root problem of helping the uninsured get insurance.