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A Mixed Story on Health Care Spending

by ElliotHarricks6 Posted on February 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Katherine Hempstead of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is optimistic about the growth of health care spending:

The quarterly trend in overall health spending growth using the Altarum Health Spending Economic Indicators series shows a clear peak in Q1 2015 at 6.7 percent, with subsequent declines every quarter. Partial data for Q4 (October and November) show a spending growth rate of 5.2 percent. While overall spending growth in 2015 will clearly exceed that of 2014, a reduction appears to be underway.

As near as I can tell, this spending data hasn’t been adjusted for inflation. When you do that you get the chart at the bottom, which tells a different story. There was indeed a peak in the first quarter of 2015 followed by a sharp drop, but spending growth has gone up steadily since then.

In the long term, I’m fairly optimistic about the trajectory of health care spending. As Hempstead says, it makes sense that we saw some large increases when Obamacare was first implemented, since it brought a lot of new people into the health care system. But after the first year or two, that will flatten out and long-term trends should continue to dominate.

That said, you still need to look at this stuff in real terms. And when you do that, we’re not quite seeing the steady downward march that Hempstead suggests.

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A Mixed Story on Health Care Spending

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I Have Found the Perfect VP for Donald Trump

by ZellaRamsden6 Posted on February 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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From the Guardian today:

In further news from the always attractive intersection of Kanye West, Twitter, and money….

This ought to be good. Please go on:

In further news from the always attractive intersection of Kanye West, Twitter, and money, the businessman Martin Shkreli — known for price gouging on Aids drugs and paying $2m for the one copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album — has claimed he was swindled out of $15m when he attempted to buy the exclusive rights to The Life of Pablo. Shkreli tweeted that “someone named Daquan”, claiming to be “Kanye’s boy”, contacted him to follow through on the deal, which he did. “I hope you all enjoy this stupid music SO much, and the fact it has brought me so much pain and suffering. I quit rap,” Shkreli tweeted.

Assuming he really had given $15m to someone named Daquan claiming to be Kanye’s boy, Shkreli was able to secure a happy ending. He later tweeted that the Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto was going to help him get his money back. “I always win,” he concluded.

Maybe Donald Trump will pick Shkreli as his running mate. It sounds like a match made in heaven.

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I Have Found the Perfect VP for Donald Trump

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Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia Has Died

by LonnieMarino Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Of “apparently natural” causes during the night. This is going to set up an unbelievable battle in the Senate. I wonder if Republicans will even make a pretense of seriously considering whoever President Obama nominates?

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Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia Has Died

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Weekend Follow-Up #2: The 1994 Crime Bill and Mass Incarceration

by Candida9950 Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The 1994 crime bill has come in for a lot of attention lately, and even Bill and Hillary Clinton have said they now regret some of its provisions. But which ones?

Generally speaking, liberals still applaud several of its biggest accomplishments: the assault weapon ban, the Violence Against Women Act, and the COPS program that funded additional police and better community training.

But Republicans exacted a price for this. In particular, they wanted an expansion of the death penalty and several provisions that stiffened sentencing of felons. As it turns out, though, Republicans didn’t have a very good idea of what their own favorite policies would actually accomplish. Are you surprised? For example, here’s the death penalty:

The crime bill created lots of new capital crimes, but its actual effect was nil. The death penalty was already losing support by 1994, and has been banned by an increasing number of states ever since. On the federal level, death sentences have always been a tiny fraction of the total (around four or five per year), and that didn’t change after 1994.

So what about sentencing? The crime bill did have an effect here, but it was generally pretty modest. Here are a couple of charts from an unpublished review of the law seven years after it passed:

Why the small effect? In the case of 3-strikes, it simply didn’t affect very many people. It did increase average time served by several months, but that’s about it. And the much-loathed Truth-in-Sentencing provisions had even less effect. This is because more than half the states already had TIS requirements even before the 1994 bill passed, and not many passed new ones as a result of the law. It did push up the trend in incarceration and time served by a few tenths of a percentage point, but that had only a minuscule effect on overall incarceration rates.

The crime bill also included a few other witless measures, like reducing educational opportunities for inmates, and it unquestionably contributed to the crime hysteria that was prevalent at the time. Nonetheless, its most hated features never had a big effect.

Two years later Clinton also signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which had some pretty objectionable changes to habeas corpus. This was arguably worse than anything in the 1994 bill, but it didn’t have a substantial overall effect on incarceration rates.

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Weekend Follow-Up #2: The 1994 Crime Bill and Mass Incarceration

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Weekend Follow-Up #1: Welfare Reform and Deep Poverty

by RogelioUnderwood Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’d forgotten about this even though I wrote about it two years ago, but here’s yet another chart about “deep poverty”:

In this case, deep poverty is defined as households with income under 50 percent of the poverty line (about $10,000 for a family of three). The calculation is based on more accurate measures of poverty that have since been endorsed by the Census Bureau.

Now, this is a different measure of poverty than the one used by Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer that I noted yesterday. Their measure is both tighter (looking at even lower poverty rates) and looser (it counts households that are in extreme poverty even for short times). So it’s not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison. Still, once you look at the historical numbers, it doesn’t look like the 1996 welfare reform act slowed down the growth of welfare spending, nor did it have more than a very small effect on deep poverty.

None of this is especially meant to defend welfare reform. But 20 years later, it doesn’t look like it really had quite the catastrophic impact that a lot of people were afraid of at the time.

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Weekend Follow-Up #1: Welfare Reform and Deep Poverty

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 February 2016

by AltonMrudqqjhwc Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just look at our little lovebirds. So adorable. So innocent looking. In reality, of course, they are just furry little batteries, recharging for their next romp around the house. In the meantime, though, Hilbert and Hopper remind you not to forget Valentine’s Day. Buy your loved one some treats this weekend. Treats are good.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 February 2016

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Raw Data: Income Gains By Age Since 1974

by LilianaEberhart Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s some raw data for you. It’s nothing fancy: just plain old cash income growth for individuals, straight from the Census Bureau. It gives you a rough idea of how different age groups have been doing over the past few decades. Enjoy.

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Raw Data: Income Gains By Age Since 1974

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Senator Sanders, Why Do You Hate President Obama?

by PhyllisFontenot Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Most of last night’s debate was pretty familiar territory. But toward the end, Hillary Clinton unleashed a brand new attack:

Today Senator Sanders said that President Obama failed the presidential leadership test….In the past he has called him weak. He has called him a disappointment. He wrote a forward for a book that basically argued voters should have buyers’ remorse when it comes to President Obama’s leadership and legacy.

….The kind of criticism that we’ve heard from Senator Sanders about our president I expect from Republicans….What I am concerned about is not disagreement on issues, saying that this is what I would rather do, I don’t agree with the president on that. Calling the president weak, calling him a disappointment, calling several times that he should have a primary opponent when he ran for re-election in 2012, you know, I think that goes further than saying we have our disagreements.

….I understand we can disagree on the path forward. But those kinds of personal assessments and charges are ones that I find particularly troubling.

The problem Sanders has here is that this is a pretty righteous attack. Back in 2011 he really did say, “I think there are millions of Americans who are deeply disappointed in the president…who cannot believe how weak he has been, for whatever reason, in negotiating with Republicans and there’s deep disappointment.” And he really did push the idea of a primary challenger to Obama. And he really did write a blurb for Buyer’s Remorse: How Obama let Progressives Down. So there’s not much he can do about this attack except sound offended and insist that everyone has a right to criticize the president.

But will it work? It was actually the only hit last night that struck me as genuinely effective. Obama still has a lot of fans who are probably surprised to hear that Sanders has been so tough on their guy. If Hillary Clinton keeps up this line, it might be pretty damaging.

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Senator Sanders, Why Do You Hate President Obama?

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God Is Testing Marco Rubio

by ArnoldBYBU Posted on February 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Oh come on. Even Marco Rubio doesn’t deserve this. Maybe it’s time to ease up on the poor guy.

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God Is Testing Marco Rubio

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Here’s a Chart That Puts the Bernie Bro Phenomenon In a Whole New Light

by OPMDottymr Posted on February 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Why do millennials love Bernie Sanders? Here’s a weirdly intriguing possibility: because they don’t have enough daughters. According to Michael Tesler, millennial parents with sons overwhelmingly support Sanders. But millennial parents with daughters overwhelmingly support Hillary Clinton. (There’s a similar effect among older voters, but it’s very small.) And although Tesler doesn’t say this, presumably single millennials are big Bernie fans too.

Is this kind of eerie, or is it totally predictable? I could make a case either way. But even if it’s predictable, the size of the effect is eye-popping. Make of it what you will.

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Here’s a Chart That Puts the Bernie Bro Phenomenon In a Whole New Light

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