Obama's Veto Threat Spikes F-22 Purchases

Question: How hard is it to stop Congress from blowing a couple billion bucks on a weapons system the Secretary of Defense, Air Force brass, President and pretty much the entire defense community agree is a complete waste of money?

Answer: Damned near impossible.

Why Michael Vick Should Never Play Pro Ball Again

The New York Times has a story today about the uncertainty surrounding Michael Vick's returning to the NFL. For those of you who don't recall, Vick was convicted in December of 2007 for running a dog fighting ring based at a property he owned in rural Virginia. The dog fights that Vick sponsored and trained animals for were either fights to the death or "surrender" of one dog, in the case of the latter animals were "euthanized" by such humane measures as shooting, hanging, and drowning.

My first reaction to the possibility of once again being a highly paid athlete, hero, and role model for kids was outrage. Then I stopped to wonder why I was so outraged. After all, professional athletes and entertainers get caught doing all sorts of horrible things and many return to their former careers after a stint in the pokey. Why should it be any different for Michael Vick?

I think that there are two reasons.

First, Vick wasn't caught in a single "oops", but rather was convicted of maintaining a side business whose purpose was to abuse dogs for the fun and profit of his friends in colleagues. This isn't the equivalent of being caught with a hooker, it is getting caught running a whore house. Second, what Vick was doing was in his mind a sport. For a person to engage in this sort of activity in this sort of thing and believe it to be a sport while at the same time earning a living as a professional athlete is perverted.

This man should never see the inside of a professional football stadium again.

A Friend Asks about Health Reform

A conservative friend of mine sent me the following email this morning:

Tell me what’s wrong with this idea:

• Mandate that any employer offering health insurance must also offer the job without the insurance (ie at a higher take home rate) [this would very likely motivate people to go for the dollars and buy their own insurance, insurance that is likely to be true catastrophe insurance not an expensive maintenance contract]
• Mandate that everyone should carry a minimum level of catastrophe level insurance [like auto]
• Set up safety net to cover low income folks with the subsidy calculated based on market rate of minimum catastrophe insurance rates and the subsidy progressive, ie lower subsidy as one’s income approaches the trigger (eg, $75k) and higher as income goes lower

In my mind, people would finally be cost sensitive to insurance, deductibles and medical care; insurance policies would develop away from employers and control of care would remain with doctors/patients.

I think that these are all good suggestions that would drive costs down. There are a few things missing, however.

First, there is no provision for pre-existing conditions which is one of the biggest problems in the current system. A second and related point is that you would not only have to compel people to buy insurance, but also compel insurers to provide it to everyone at a reasonable price.

Imagine that someone with a nasty pre-existing condition--say, diagnosis of pancreatic cancer--and goes to Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Texas and asks to buy catastrophic care insurance. BC/BS will correctly see this person as a ticking time medical cost time bomb. At a minimum this is a person who is looking at an expensive course of treatments with a highly specialized oncologist and also likely one or more complicated and expensive surgeries (perhaps even organ transplant). I could easily imagine that the expected short-term tab for this person's health care would run into hundreds of thousands of dollars and the administrative costs for BC/BS are also likely to be substantially higher than for their typical customer.

If BC/BS is going to sell this person a policy, it is going to be very, very, very expensive because they are not only insuring against unexpected events (this guy could also be in a serious auto accident or develop brain cancer) but also making projections about all but certain costs. In a single-payer system (and, to a lesser extent, with something like the "public option"), this individuals risk just gets priced into the overall risk of the insured pool, i.e., his insurance is subsidized.

A third point is that I think nudging toward catastrophic-care-only insurance is bad policy because it results in both worse health care outcomes and higher costs. For example, maintenance-level care for a diabetic is pretty cheap but catastrophic care (treatment for diabetic coma, renal failure, amputations, etc) is very expensive. We're all better off if diabetics have access to inexpensive, convenient maintenance treatment and policy should nudge in that direction.

Steven Pinker's "Blank Slate"

Just finished reading Steven Pinker's excellent book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Here are some quick thoughts on it.

Pinker convincingly argues that the nature v nurture debate is all but over and that nature has won. As an adoptee who was raised in a home with a child who was subsequently born to my adoptive parents, this comes as absolutely no surprise to me. I also appreciated Pinker's take-no-prisoners approach to dealing with political critiques of the results of scientific research. He lambasts the political left for its attacks on sociobiology and excoriates the religious right for decrying modern theories of mind as unholy with equal vengeance.

Unfortunately, Pinker ventures into what seems clear to be unfamiliar territory for him when he moves away from science and toward the humanities. For example, he advances the empirically discredited theory that democracies don't fight wars argument several times in support of the claim that the more we know each other, the more civil we become and treats a very simplistic and utilitarian view of the nature of justice as a given. More disappointing--given his core argument that there is such a thing as human nature--he seems to be completely unaware of Marx's arguments for man's inherent nature as a maker of things and a social creature.

Senate Intel Committee Pushing for More Transparency

Spencer Ackerman catches a late-Friday-afternoon release from the Senate Intelligence Committee about the 2010 intel-funding bill. The bill includes new disclosure provisions that are likely to ruffle feathers in the intel community, including a requirement that all members of Congress be briefed on the "features" of briefings received by the "Gang-of-Eight".

A lot hinges on the interpretation of "features", but this has the potential to bring some much needed sunlight. One of the peculiarities of the Gang-of-Eight briefing process is that members are not allowed to discuss anything on which they were briefed, including things that are public knowledge. Un-briefed members clearly can't be held to this standard since, well, they weren't briefed. Just knowing that there has been a briefing on, for example, detainee treatment could be enough to get some members asking the kinds of questions that might have made the path to Guantanamo much more difficult.

Amazon's Kindle Caper

David Pogue reports in today's New York Times:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

Apparently, the publisher of these books decided that they didn't want to sell electronic versions after all. Amazon's response was not merely to stop selling these books, but to delete them from the Kindle's of people who had already purchased copies and credit their Amazon accounts for the purchase price.

This is outrageous. There are times when a book may be worth far more to you than you originally paid for it. An extreme case is textbooks: imagine discovering the night before a major exam that the textbook you had purchased has disappeared from your Kindle. Less extreme but annoying, imagine you are half way through a Kindle book that you are reading on a beach vacation, and it vanishes between your morning and afternoon chill time under the palapa. This is going to hurt Amazon more than I think they realized.

Oh, the author of the books that disappeared? George Orwell. Fitting.