Saturday AM Blogging

Private equity jumps into the health care arena. Here is one blogger's take.

Obama plan to rescue homeowners. I have huge problems with this approach, and I'll let Keith Hennessey tell you why. "Imagine twin brothers, each with $180K of annual income. One rents, and the other has a $700,000 mortgage on a home that declined from $800,000 in value to $600,000 in value. Both brothers lose their jobs. Why should the renter pay higher taxes to subsidize his brother’s mortgage payments?"

Why women don't want macho men. Interesting article in the WSJ on evoultionary psychology and some recent studies. "After crunching the data—including the women's facial preferences, their country of origin and that country's national health index—the Face Lab researchers proved something remarkable. They could predict how masculine a woman likes her men based on her nation's World Health Organization statistics for mortality rates, life expectancy and the impact of communicable disease."

Good graph showing how the health care bill is being financed. By the way, I mean that the graph itself is good. The actual financing of the bill is a joke.

Mexican police chief decapitated by cartel. I'm sure if we just keep doing what we've been doing that this will stop eventually, right?

Religious stampedes kill the most people. "Over the past 30 years, stampedes have killed at least 7,000 people and injured another 14,000. That's the conclusion that Edbert Hsu (Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) and colleagues reached after a painstaking trawl of news reports in the world's English-language media."

Ha...this is pretty cool, especially if you shop on Amazon as often as I do. (via The Agitator).

Friday

Every time I think our press corps could not suck any harder than they already do, they write something like this.

Sprint's new HTC Evo, it's first Wimax phone.

Ezra Klein on the menu labeling provision in the health care reform bill. Since most of this info is already available if you ask, I,m not a huge fan of micro-managing how restaurants have to display this.

Fascinating online dating statistics.

Indian military weaponizes world's hottest chili. I actually heard an interview on NPR yesterday with the owner of a burger joint in San Antonio that serves a burger with these chiles. He said that customers have to sign a waiver, that they have had to call EMS a few times, and that the cooks have to use gloves when preparing and that they have had to clear the restaurant a few times when they have been left on the grill too long.

The business model of Somali pirates. I love stuff like this.

Thursday

That doesn't exactly inspire confidence. No case citations in Florida health care lawsuit.

Picture of Russian Blackjack Bombers Over Scotland.

Take the DSM-V Disorder Quiz.

The Great Baseball Card Bubble. I was a huge baseball card collector. I went to the shows, built sets, order rookie cards in packs of 100. I LOVED baseball. Growing up in Wisconsin, my brothers would challenge me to games in the dead of winter and it was on....in three feet of snow. My first job was as a paperboy and it was, by far, the best job I ever had. I made like $800 a month as an 8th grader and I think I spent about 90% of it on baseball cards.

Texas first out of the recession. I'm sure it's just an accident.

I don't know if this is serious, but it made me laugh out loud. Is the new tanning tax racist?

Hmmm....More Foreclosures, Please.

Wed Links

How the tablet PC will change the world.

Tyler Cowen on health care reform. My response: It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Via Radley Balko, the awesomeness of Axecop. Axecop is a comic written by a 5-year old and illustrated by a 29-year old. It's outstanding.

Health reform caluclator to find out how it affects you.

Why does Italian academia suck?

Pretty good interview with the world's best chess player, 19-year old Magnus Carlsen. He seems to be pretty grounded. Aware that he is awesome at chess, aware that there are other things in life.

Health Care Reform

Well, the bill is passed and signed into law. I've read a lot about the content of the bill in the press just to see what is getting reported and what is not. I wrote previously on some of the problems I see with the bill, but it was pretty brief. So now I'll give you a litany of reasons, but I'll start with a positive of the bill.

The bill definitely expands coverage to a number of people. Whether we will be able to afford to subsidize that coverage for long is another questions, as is whether people will be able to find a provider and what level of quality we will be able to provide. Of the may problems in the bill, which I'll get into below, I think the biggest one that has gone undiscussed is the lunacy of many of th CBO assumptions. CBOs scoring of the bill is allowing the President and the Democrats to declare that the bill will actually reduce the deficit. It won't and everybody at CBO and among the Democratic leadership knows this for a fact. I'll get into that below.

Medicaid expansion. Many providers don't take Medicaid right now due to the low reimbursement rates and because Medicaid patients are notorious for no-showing (a result, IMHO, of contribtuing nothing to the cost of their care). The bill includes a massive expansion of Medicaid. Now we can give everyone a piece of paper that says they have coverage, but that doesn't make it so. The final package also includes a bump in Medicaid provider rates to Medicare levels, but only for a short period of time after which the states get to pick up the tab.

Individual mandate. It's weak. So weak that it will not accomplish anything close to what Democrats are claiming it will. The math just doesn't make sense. If you have a choice between spending thousands of dollars on health insurance premiums or paying a small fine, the choice is pretty clear. This is especially true when you take into account the requirements that insurers not underwrite for pre-exisiting conditions and must sell policies at artifically low rates. People will be making a wise choice to put off purchasing coverage until they get sick.

Adverse selection. A corollary of the weakness of the individual mandate. Individual premiums will go up, and not by a little, despite the CBO estimates (more on that below).

Medicare. No SGR fix. This was removed from the bill only to improve scoring. The assumption that Medicare will go forward without a problem as providers face massive cuts in reimbursement rates is a fallacy.

The accounting tricks. See here for just a few.

CBO Assumptions. Where to begin?

• For starters, CBO makes a number of predictions about individual and employer behavior in response to the law. They have to in order to score the bill. But it's a complete and total guess and they basically just make it up. Don't believe me, well believe Uwe.
• CBO assumes individual rates will go up by around 10%. But this is how they get there. They assume the cost of policies will go up 30% based on new benefit levels, then they assume that changes to insurance regulation and an increase in those with coverage would offset that by 20% resulting in a net 10% increase. Here's the problem, there is plenty of info to support the changes of the bill causing individual rates to go up by 30%, but the assumptions offsetting that by 20% are guesses.
• The CBO assumes the individual mandate will be effective. I don't know why as the math makes it a pretty simple decision to forego coverage.
• The CBO ignores the impact of substantial new taxes on GDP.
• The CBO assumes that the independent Medicare commission will effectively control costs. Again, this is just made up, literally. They have zero evidence to support this conclusion.
• The CBO assumes Medicare costs will drop significantly but notes that it may be due to greater efficiencies or lower quality....they aren't sure. This is kind of like the SGR problem. They assume lower costs for scoring purposes and then threaten to make the reductions, but they don't follow through. If the reductions don't materialize there is no repercussion. Congress will just spend anyway. This is how government accounting works.
• The CBO bases the premium subsidies necessary on projected cost increases in health insurance. This is just another case of them assuming costs will be lower, despite the lack of cost controls actually in the bill. The result will be that ever higher tax support will be needed to fund premium subsidies, or the subsidies will by less coverage. But since there is a required floor in coverage, there is only so far you can buy down benefits before subsidies have to be increased.

Cost controls. There isn't really too much in the bill to control costs. Ezra Klein talks about the most important ones, but it's a pretty weak list. The exchanges have some promise, but I don't think of them as a real cost control measure, especially when you take into account the required benefit levels whcih is going to drive how much a premium costs. The Medicare Commission? Time will tell, but put me down as skeptical. I won't discount it, but I think we have seen efforts like this before and Congress can basically override them. The excise tax is actually a good idea, but it is set so far out and so high that it will be a while before we know. I'd also bet that it never actually happens. Medicare bundling has some promise, but it's not a cost control in and of itself. It's good policy though and we need to move in that direction, but I'd count this as equal parts quality and cost control right now. Changing the politics of reform. This one is just pathetic. I know he's grasping, but come on.

This is a short list. There is a lot more in there which is problematic, especially on the insurance reform side, but this will do for now.

Vegas Redux

Vegas was both brutal and fun. Some observations:

1) I lost a lot of money.
2) Whoever invented bottle service is a genius. Evil, but a genius.
3) Nove Italiano is still one of the best restaurants in Vegas
4) I'm not a big night club guy, but Tryst at the Wynn was very cool.
5) I think a total of three points in games cost me about $2000. These guys who set the odds, they're good at it.

Wed- Sports heavy

In honor of March Madness, today's post will be basketball heavy.

I've already ordered Michael Lewis' new book The The Big Short, but WSJ says just read this Harvard undergrad's thesis. Pretty impressive.

Where US foreign aid goes.

The real life Matrix.

Erin Andrews' ordeal comes to an end, kind of.

Congratulations to Houston Yates for winning the Texas state championship. They are currently ranked #1 in the country on MaxPreps and they broke the national record for consecutive games scoring 100+ points. They took some grief for running up the score on some teams. Well, I finally got a chance to see them play and wow are they good. They press the entire game and just run waves of people off the bench. Hard to explain how difficult it is to play against a team like that. Even if you have superior talent, it is tough to win because you kind of have to play their style and the problem with that is that is is "their" style. They practice it every day and you don't.

College basketball's most valuable teams.

NYT article on the nun who keeps Xavier basketball players graduating. "Xavier, a Jesuit university in Cincinnati, is entering the N.C.A.A. tournament seeded sixth in the West Region with a 24-8 record. But Sister Rose Ann Fleming is a perfect 77-0. Since she became the academic adviser for Xavier athletics in 1985, every men’s basketball player who has played as a senior has left with a diploma." That is incredible.

The UConn women have now won 72 games in a row (breaking their record of 70) and have won all of those games by double digits. That's phenomenal. Unfortunately, this guy is right.

In Which My Wife Makes an Excellent Point

So my wife and I were discussing the travails of Rep. Eric Massa. I pick it up in mid-conversation.

Leigh: Well, he's obviously gay.

Me: It doesn't necessarily mean he's gay.

Leigh: Have you ever tickled any of your friends?

Me: (long pause) No.

Leigh: Ok then.

I lose. Slate tackles the story on tickling here.

Sunday Morning

Still upset about that lost hour of sleep. On to it.

The 50 best websites of 2009. Somehow, I did not make the list.

Jonathan Cohn on how the health care vote will proceed. From the post: "As I've said before, the point of holding one vote rather than two is to spare House members an explicit vote on the Senate bill. And, as I've said before, that seems utterly pointless to me. Come November, the distinction between voting for a bill directly and voting for a bill indirectly, via "deeming," isn't going to make much difference." I could not disagree more. One of the takeaways from the MA Senate race was that people were not just displeased with the content of the bill, they were especially displeased with the process. The "backroom deals", the "Cornhusker kickback", the "Gator Aid", the proposal to use reconciliation, etc. Utilizing the "Slaughter solution", which basically allows the House to deem the Senate bill passed rather than voting on it directly, allows Republicans to attack the process. The Democratic leadership seems content to go back home and contest elections on the merits of the bill. I'm not sure they want to defend the merits and the accusations that they used a corrupt process to get it done. Seems like a blunder to me if they do.

NYT article on the rise of for-profit trade schools.

Nissan GTR smokes the Bentley Supersports. GTR costs under $80K, the Bentley upwards of $250K. I report, you decide.

Funny police composite sketches.

Parody Becomes Reality

Here is Nancy Pelosi commenting on the need for health care "reform":

"Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance."

Here is the post from Stuff White People Like on free health care:

"But the secret reason why all white people love socialized medicine is that they all love the idea of receiving health care without having a full-time job. This would allow them to work as a freelance designer/consultant/copywriter/photographer/blogger, open their own bookstore, stay at home with their kids, or be a part of an Internet start-up without having to worry about a benefits package. Though many of them would never follow this path, they appreciate having the option."

Sat Morning

Going to look at some dogs today. Been a rough year around the Wolfe household as we have lost three of our dear pets (actually a rough 18 months). Looking at all the pictures of the dogs at the rescue agencies makes me both happy and sad. Happy that I know we'll be giving an animal a great home (seriously, you don't even understand how much we spoil them). Sad because I can't save them all. In other news, I'm heading to Vegas next week with a group of friends for the opening weekend of March Madness. Cannot wait. On to it.

Absolutely disgusting dunk by J.R. Smith.

Woman turns three shares of Abbott into $7 million simply by reinvesting dividends.

Athletes going broke stories. "Almost 80 percent of National Football League players are flirting with bankruptcy two years after they retire, according to Sports Illustrated. NBA players aren’t faring much better. 60 percent of former National Basketball Association players end up broke within five years of retirement."

Some light weekend reading of the Examiner's Report on the Lehman meltdown. Here's a good short version. The report is 2200 pages long, but I'm definitely going to slog through it.

Add Tom Hanks to the list of morons in Hollywood.

HeeHee.

Felix Salmon said this is the best thing written about regulation of credit default swaps, so read it.

The new Audi R8 Spyder, yet another car I will never own.

Friday

Bruce Bartlett on the national debt. James Galbraith in defense of deficits. Galbraith is wrong about why Wall Street hates deficits and his attempt at explaining why they do is pretty pathetic. He also hand waves away the problems that come from massive deficit spending, but he also makes some very valid points about deficits. In particular, the difference between government spending and household spending. "It may seem like homely wisdom, especially, to say that "just like the family, the government can't live beyond its means." But it's not. In these matters the public and private sectors differ on a very basic point. Your family needs income in order to pay its debts. Your government does not."

Greg Mankiw succinctly explains why claims of "deficit neutrality" on the health reform bill miss the point. I'd also add that the deficit reduction the health reform bill purports to achieve assumes that CBO assumptions are correct. If this were purely a case of CBO measuring expenditures versus revenue I'd give it more weight, but CBO is also engaged in trying to predict behavior of individuals if the bill passes and they have ZERO expertise in this.

Really bad cars. Notice anything?

About damn time.

Awesome video of street fighter laying the smack down on a gang of guys.

Arne Duncan is a really smart guy, but this is probably the dumbest sentence I've read this week: "The cost of college should never discourage anyone from going after a valuable degree."

Tribune Company CEO bans certain words from being used. Stupid? Probably, but read the list. He may doing a public service. How did "game changer" not make the list?

Megan McCardle on "green jobs". "But green jobs have become the ginseng of progressive politics: a sort of broad-spectrum snake oil that cures whatever happens to ail you. They are the antidote to economic malaise, an underskilled labor force, the inherent unwillingness of the public to suffer any significant economic and personal dislocation in order to save the environment. They enhance nationalistic vigor. (If we don't act now, the Chinese will steal all of our green jobs!) They stave off aging of stale political platforms. And I'm pretty sure they're good for bunions, too." It's like favoring "multi-lateralism" in foreign policy.

Thursday

I know I've been bad lately. Sporadic. They've been making me work. Anyway, on to it.

The Art of Chess. Crazy chess sets.

What if everybody in Canada flushed at once? Awesome graph of water consumption from the US v Canada hockey game which, by some accounts, was watched by 80% of Canadians.

The world's most beautiful college campuses.

Somehow it doesn't bother me when my industry is criticized by these people. I guess they are not content with having destroyed the auto industry, California, and public education in the United States.

National memory championship. "Mostly won by Britons, last year's world championship was clinched by Briton Ben Pridmore, who memorized a randomly shuffled deck of 52 cards in 24 seconds."

6 of the 10 richest counties in the country are in the D.C. area. Gee, I wonder why.

A debate between Van Jones and Andrew Morriss on green jobs over at The Economist.

8 Unconventional Ways to be Buried.

This is old, but I still love it. Absurd escapes from the old G.I. Joe cartoon.

Saturday

Keith Hennessey explains the mechanics of the two bill strategy for health care reform, then h explains the challenges of that strategy.

In defense of Sean Penn's work in Haiti. Good for him.

Wal-Mart pushing its suppliers to meet environmental standards. "We heard that in the future, to become a Wal-Mart supplier, you have to be an environmentally friendly company," Fung said. "So we switched some of our products and the way we produced them."

From Wired, The Future of Money. Banks and credit cards have had a virtual monopoly on the ability to move money around. This is an interesting take on how that may soon come to an end.

Clausen Puts NFL Teams in a Pickle. Since I'm a huge Domer, I've watched Clausen more than most NFL scouts, certainly more than the average football viewer. My take on him: Clausen is almost perfect technically, his throwing motion is textbook, though his release is a little long because I think he has an average arm (by NFL standards). He throws fades as well as any college QB I've seen. Immature and cocky has been the rap. I really don't know anything about that part, but his teammates defend him and I also watched him take a brutal beating for two years behind one of the worst offensive lines I've ever seen and always get up and never complain. I think it will be his physical limitatiomns that will be a problem, not the other stuff.

NPR story on sexual assaults on college campuses. "He found them by, over a 20-year period, asking some 2,000 men in college questions like this: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?" Or: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn't want to because you used physical force [twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.] if they didn't cooperate?" About 1 in 16 men answered "yes" to these or similar questions."

Photo essay of Iraq as it prepares to vote.

Friday

Monsieur IOZ bitch slaps Thomas Friedman. By the way, IOZ is a gay, nihilist, who writes one of the funniest blogs around. I have to keep my Merriam-Webster link open when I read it though because his vocabulary is expansive.

The Day Trader's Paradise. "Originally there was to be 60 monitors, a mix of 19s and 24s however, it changed a bit and there is now 40 24" monitors and another 20 monitors offsite for development. There is six computers running all the monitors, each computer has a core i7 975, 24 gb of DDR 3 memory, two SLC SSDs in raid 0 and a large amount of nvidia NVS 420s as well as Nvidia 9800 GTs." Pfff....only 40 monitors.

How to save $148 on an iPod touch.

India's Overworked Elephants. This is sad.

Cars I want That My Wife Will never Let Me Purchase Update: Lotus Evora and the Porsche 918. By the way, the Porsche is a hybrid that gets 78mpg and gets you 0-60 in 3,2 seconds.

What Adam Smith thought of the role for government.