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Now that the public option appears to have been declared really, really dead, focus can brought upon the areas of health care reform that most people want. One of those is “portability”, the promise that someone with health insurance will be able to retain it after losing their job.

The problem with most of the promised reforms is that they ignore the principles that make insurance possible in the first place. As Howard Audsley notes in Conversations Around a Wood Stove:

insurance is a social mechanism for the transfer of the risk of monetary loss from the individual to a larger group. The concept is that risk of loss fits a random pattern of probability. It works very well for things like lightning strikes, hail, wind, etc. Risk and the premiums charged for insurance vary directly with the probability of loss. Hurricane insurance premiums are greater for folks living in Pensacola than for those in Minneapolis. Car insurance premiums for a guy with 3 DWI’s and two at-fault accidents are higher than for grandma, who only drives to church on Sunday. Life insurance premiums for an aging rodeo clown who smokes and has a bottle hidden behind chute #9 are higher than for a young (straight) desk clerk. You get the idea.

Insurance doesn’t work when the pool is exposed to catastrophic losses (exclusions for acts of war, earthquakes, etc), or when the pool as a whole is exposed to a high probability of loss. Assuming a guy with 3 DWI’s still has his license to drive, he isn’t going to be able to buy insurance from a commercial company. It will have to be a low limit, state fund that sells him insurance. How about $1,500 a quarter for $10,000 liability only coverage? That is the way it works.

So how does insurance work when the premiums can’t be paid at all? The short answer: it doesn’t.

Most people don’t realize that their employer often picks up 80% or more of the monthly health insurance premium. The guy who thinks he is paying too much for health insurance at $300 a month doesn’t realize the full bill is $1,500. When he loses his job he finds that COBRA payments are the full amount (the law allows up to 102% of the total cost). So you can get your health insurance coverage, for up to 18 months, but it will cost you dearly. Right at a time when you cannot afford to pay for it.

It is unreasonable to assume that insurance companies will be able to pick up the cost of covering people who are not paying for coverage. There is no free lunch, so premiums have to increase from the paying customers to cover those who are between jobs … and sometimes people are “between jobs” for a long time, especially if all their needs are met.

Portability could be provided, and without using tax dollars to do it. Allow insurance companies to offer “loss of job” riders, allowing employees to pay extra each month to insure specifically for COBRA payments for unemployment. Some insurance companies already offer “loss of job” insurance; an example plan pays out $1,500 a month for up to four months for a premium of $70 per month. A similar product is found in the “mortgage protection plans” that pay your mortgage payments for up to six months (cost is about $40 per $1,000 of monthly payment).

If we must, we could structure such a plan the same way we do the horribly inefficient “Worker’s Compensation” plans, with a state payroll tax of one to two percent of all worker’s wages. The problem is, like all government give-aways, such a plan is ripe for the same kind of fraud as Worker’s Compensation.

Politics health care reform, health insurance, public option

As an agnostic on the global warming debate, I’m often amused by the stridency of those claiming a scientific high ground. The test of anyone trying to tell the future is, well, if that future comes true or not. To put it in religious terms:

When the word of the prophet shall come to pass, then shall the prophet be known, that the Lord has truly sent him. (Jeremiah 28:9)

Those embracing “scientific consensus” will bristle at that quote since they are not merely religious, but have the weight of “scientific consensus” on their sides.

The problem is that after dire warnings from non-scientists adhering with religious fervor to the cause, some of the predictions are not coming true. Warming isn’t happening as they anticipated, as the BBC’s Tom Fielden’s blog notes:

Far from suggesting the planet will get warmer, one of the world’s leading climate modellers says the latest data indicates we could be in for a significant period of steady temperatures and possibly even a little global cooling.

Professor Mojib Latif, from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany, has been looking at the influence of cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. When he factored these natural fluctuations into his global climate model, professor Latif found the results would bring the remorseless rise in average global temperatures to an abrupt halt.

“The strong warming effect that we experienced during the last decades will be interrupted. Temperatures will be more or less steady for some years, and thereafter will pickup again and continue to warm”.

Scientists have most often couched their language to consider this kind of possibility, but not the non-scientist adherents who have popularized the message. Politicians and environmental activists seem to embrace the global warming hypothesis for other reasons, like protection of the environment, energy independence, etc. And in their strident, almost religious advocacy they have painted themselves into a corner.

The good news is that a scientific consensus seems to be forming that we have 10 to 30 years to transition away from releasing greenhouse gasses for energy production, and can prevent the warming the scientists still think is a strong possibility in the future. We don’t have to kill every other person to reduce our “carbon footprint”, or throw the entire mid-west and northeast into a serious depression by immediately ceasing the use of coal. We can let market forces and gentle government nudging move us toward cleaner energy production and energy independence.

Ever since the Puritans landed and worried that hidden witchcraft threatened society, religious and non-religious Americans have held a sense of impending doom unless we do something. From Cotton Mather to Joe McCarthy to Al Gore, the American penchant for believing in pending apocalypse remains.

The new models actually give me more hope than before. Rather than being “too late” and past a “tipping point”, we can work toward solutions. Increasing clean domestic energy production, replacing coal on a reasonable time table (or finding a way to use it without releasing mercury and other toxins into the air) and freeing ourselves from reliance on the middle east for oil are noble and reasonable goals. And if the scientist’s finally have their models fine-tuned, we also avoid global warming (if it exists).

Climate, Politics Al Gore, climate change, global warming

Rumor has it that the National Republican Senatorial Committee is exercising their normal “Stupid Is as Stupid Does” routine, as reported by RedState:

Here’s the story that is circulating at the [California Republican] convention: Back in the spring, Elder went to Washington to sit down with John Cornyn and the NRSC, and ask for their support for a bid for U.S. Senate against Barbara Boxer. Cornyn and the NRSC told him the following:

1. If Elder chose to run, they would not support him.
2. The NRSC was already committed to supporting Carly Fiorina
3. The NRSC expected Fiorina to lose against Boxer, but expected her to tie up Democrat resources in the meantime.

So Larry Elder came back to California and did not run.

A straw poll conducted by Chuck Devore’s campaign showed overwhelming support by convention delegates for Devore. Yeah, we expected that. But even Rasmussen shows Devore’s support a point higher statewide than Fiorina (although still trailing Boxer). My concern with Devore is that he’s a social conservative, and may be as unelectable as other social conservatives have been in this state.

Larry Elder is a libertarian Republican with a large enough dose of libertarianism to appeal to California moderates. He would be a spectacular candidate, able to infuse the campaign with more than the standard left-vs-right rhetoric. Sen. Boxer doesn’t have a box big enough to contain Elder, while Devore – who appears greatly superior to Fiorina in terms of experience – will nevertheless be cast as a narrow minded, anti-abortion, homophobic Christian by the left. (Chuck Devore is really a limited-government conservative with great skills, and deserves the nomination more than Fiorina, but the nagging suspicion for me is that he may be unelectable. I hope I’m wrong.)

The people to convince in California are not conservatives: they all hate Barbara Boxer. The people to convince are the very same people who have bought the left’s characterization of the religious right as people to be feared. They vote for liberals as the least threatening choice. A libertarian is the perfect foil for intrusive liberalism, and Larry Elder’s brand of libertarianism would appeal to the most Californians.

But it seems his campaign was derailed before it started. I can think of no greater reason to compel the Republicans to change leadership in Washington (its a scandal that the same group of pale white guys who lost control of Congress are still leading the party).

Politics

The Administration’s rush to show the public just how naive it is resulted in it’s first official act: a public ceremony showing the new President signing an order to close Guantanamo within a year.

Its not uncommon for a new administration to take a few missteps along the way. Fixing those mistakes is always a lot harder than making them. The person on point for closing Guantanamo was White House counsel Gregory B. Craig according to the Washington Post. Craig, like the rest of President Obama’s political advisors, evidently believed their own BS instead of listening to the national security experts:

I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives.

“Broad consensus?” Craig may have come to that conclusion because both candidates, Obama and McCain, promised to close Guantanamo. Setting a date before you have had time to fully study the issue isn’t embracing consensus. It is showmanship, like an opening statement in the courtroom. Foreign policy should not be directed by lawyers.

The President chose to believe Craig’s ideas were better than the national security and foreign policy experts who cautioned against arbitrary timelines. The President seems to prefer initiatives that are fresh, bold, and wrong.

The American people expect our President to be smart about things, evaluate policies, and make rational changes. Our current President talks … he talks a lot … and apologizes. He apologizes a lot, always ready to demean and blame the US for any of the world’s ills. It is time he and his team realized they are no longer on the campaign trail, and were elected to govern.

Removing Craig as the point person on the closing of Guantanamo is a start. Getting serious about the rest of the duties of governing a nation, and not just making inspiring speeches, is the rest of the job. President Obama needs to show the nation that he is more than a one-trick pony, and can do more than apologize and demean America. It is time for Mr. Obama to become President Obama.

Politics Gitmo, Greg Craig, Guantanamo, obama

Andrew Breitbart’s new blog Big Hollywood releases more detail on their bombshell story regarding the Obama administration’s ongoing corruption of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA):

The NEA tainted the creative process by encouraging the art community to address highly controversial political issues. ‘How?’ you may ask. The NEA is the largest single funder of the arts in the United States. This government agency has the power and ability to fund arts organizations and recently expressed a desire to return to funding individual artists, bringing more from the group into the pool of potential grantees.

The NEA did encourage a handpicked, pro-Obama arts group to address issues under contentious national debate. That fact is irrefutable.

This practice has never been the historical role of the NEA. The NEA’s role is to support excellence in the arts, to increase access to the arts, and to be a leader in arts education. Using the arts to address contentiously debated issues is political subversion. And the fact that the White House played a role in encouraging the arts to address contentious issues should also be considered a government overreach.

Of all the commercial enterprises in America, the one needing a government subsidy the least is the arts. Among the highest paid Americans are the singers, actors and other performers who could replace the entire NEA budget if they “gave back” a small percentage of their generous incomes. America may as well create a subsidy for multi-million dollar CEOs so they don’t have to donate so much to their hometowns.

The Obama administration’s effort to politicize the NEA points out the danger in all government sponsored agencies: they can be used for narrow partisan political goals. This is an outrageous misuse of tax dollars and must end. Better yet, end the NEA entirely, and avoid the temptation for future administrations to hijack public agencies for propaganda purposes.

Politics