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Update: What Do Critics Mean Who Say Obamacare "Isn’t Liberal Enough"?

by RobinLeflore Posted on April 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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I periodically drone on about the laziness of polls that ask a simple approve/disapprove question about Obamacare. The problem is that a lot of people say they disapprove because Obamacare isn’t liberal enough. These are folks don’t necessarily disapprove of the concept of national healthcare in general or Obamacare in particular, and shouldn’t really be counted among right-wing opponents of the law.

A couple of weeks ago, a Kaiser poll gave us a slightly deeper glimpse into all this. They asked the disapprovers why they disapproved, and it was clear that some of them had lefty criticisms of the law, not conservative criticisms. But the evidence was still a bit fuzzy.

Today, Mark Blumenthal goes further. In a recent HuffPo poll, about 9 percent of the respondents said they opposed Obamacare because it wasn’t liberal enough. Then, in a follow-up question, they were asked, “In your own words, what do you mean when you say the health care law is not liberal enough?”

The results are on the right. There’s still some ambiguity here, but I’d classify several of the responses as likely left-wing criticisms. Adding up the percentages, I get 6 + 4 + 15 + 4 + 4 + 3 = 36 percent. That’s a little less than half of those who had a response.

So, very roughly speaking, in future polls I’d guess that about half of the “not liberal enough” folks are basically supporters of Obamacare but want the law to go further. It might even be more than that, but it remains hard to parse the motivations behind all of these responses with precision. Is “too complex” a liberal or conservative criticism? How about “lack of choice”? Hard to say.

In any case, this adds some context to the whole debate about Obamacare critics who say it’s “not liberal enough.” It’s also an object lesson against assuming too much ideological coherence from survey respondents. A larger survey with a bigger sample size and a little more structure to the questions would be welcome.

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Update: What Do Critics Mean Who Say Obamacare "Isn’t Liberal Enough"?

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The New York Times Fails to Explain Why "Super Predators" Turned Out to Be a Myth

by ArcherRetzlaff Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sorry for the radio silence. I went in to see my pulmonary specialist today, and he was very distressed at my lack of progress on the breathing front. So he immediately sent me downstairs for a new battery of tests, including a stat review of the echocardiogram I did last week. Verdict: I am in the bloom of health. I have the lungs of a sperm whale and the heart of an ox. As a last ditch diagnostic effort—and since they already had an IV tube in my arm anyway—the ER doctor pumped me full of an anti-anxiety drug just to see if my attacks were brought on by stress. Apparently not, which isn’t surprising since I lead an enviably stress-free life.

Unfortunately, once they had done that I wasn’t allowed to drive myself home, so I had to wait for Marian to get off work and come pick me up. In the meantime, I kept up on the latest news with my iPhone. Or tried to, anyway. Kaiser brags about its Wi-Fi network, but it didn’t work at all, and the nurses confirmed that everyone complains about this. So I switched to the cell, but despite the fact that there was a cell tower about 200 yards away, Verizon was unable to provide me with even 3G service most of the time. Bastards.

Still, while I was crawling through the news at 300 baud speeds, I did come across a New York Times story about the mid-90s fear of “super predators,” teenage criminals with no conscience and no impulse control, who would soon be rampaging across the city destroying everything in their wake. In fact, just the opposite happened. Teen crime has declined dramatically since the mid-90s, and New York City is safer now than it’s been since the 60s. What happened?

But how to explain the decline in youth violence?

Various ideas have been advanced, like an improved economy in the late ‘90s (never mind that it later went south), better policing and the fading of a crack cocaine epidemic. A less conventional — not to mention amply disputed — theory was put forth by some social scientists who argued that the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling on abortion in Roe v. Wade had an impact. With abortions more readily available, this theory went, unwanted children who could be prone to serious antisocial behavior were never born.

That’s really disappointing. The burnout of the crack epidemic is at least plausible as a partial explanation, but the rest is nonsense. Nobody still thinks the economy had anything to do with the drop in crime. Better policing might have had a minor impact, but crime dropped even in cities that didn’t change their police tactics. And the abortion theory hasn’t really weathered the test of time well.

I swear, I think the New York Times has some kind of editorial policy about never mentioning the most obvious link of them all: the decline in gasoline lead between 1975 and 1995. It’s not as if I think the lead-crime theory is a slam dunk or anything, but surely the evidence is strong enough that it belongs in any short summary of the most likely causes of crime decline? It sure as hell has more evidence in its favor than economics, better policing, or legal abortion.

And yet the New York Times stubbornly refuses to so much as mention it in passing. I found one short piece on the subject from 2007, and then nothing. During the past seven years, even as the evidence linking lead to declining crime rates has become more and more solid, they don’t seem to have mentioned it even once. Are they afraid of pissing off the police commissioner or something? What’s the deal?

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The New York Times Fails to Explain Why "Super Predators" Turned Out to Be a Myth

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In Defense of "Flash Boys"

by Ethel3847dlr Posted on April 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Felix Salmon reviews Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys today, and he’s not impressed. I think Salmon’s basic criticism is on point: the big problem with high-frequency trading isn’t that small investors get ripped off, it’s that the system is so complex that literally no one really understands how it works or what kind of danger it poses:

By far the biggest risk posed by the HFT industry, for instance, is the risk of the kind of event we saw during the flash crash, only much, much worse. The stock market is an insanely complex system, which can fail in unpredictable and catastrophic ways; the HFT industry only serves to make it much more brittle and perilous than it already was. But in Lewis’ book-length treatment of HFT, he barely mentions this risk: I found just one en passant mention of “the instability introduced into the system when its primary goal is no longer stability but speed,” on Page 265, but no elaboration of that idea.

HFT cheerleaders like to brag that their algorithms increase liquidity. And that’s probably true. The problem is that HFTs don’t guarantee liquidity. In fact, it’s far worse than that: they displace other sources of liquidity during normal times, but there’s a good chance that during a crisis, at precisely the moment when liquidity is most important, HFT traders could suddenly and systematically exit the market because events have outrun the parameters of their algorithms. This could easily spiral out of control, turning a bad situation into a catastrophe.

Is this a real threat? Nobody knows. And that’s the problem. HFT is so complex that literally no one knows how it works or how it will react in a crisis. This is not a recipe for financial stability.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for a very entertaining book, so Lewis instead focuses on the ability of HFT shops to “front run” orders in the stock market—that is, to see bids a few milliseconds before anyone else simply by virtue of having computers that are physically closer to a stock exchange than their competitors. An HFT algorithm can then execute its own order already knowing the direction the price of the stock is likely to go. But even though this isn’t the biggest problem with HFT, I do think Salmon is a little too dismissive of it. Here he is on the subject of Rich Gates, a mutual fund manager who discovered he was being front run

Gates “devised a test,” writes Lewis, to see whether he was “getting ripped off by some unseen predator.”….Gates “was dutifully shocked” when he discovered the results of his test: He ended up buying the stock at $100.05, selling it at $100.01, and losing 4 cents per share. “This,” he thought, “obviously is not right.”

Lewis does have a point here: It’s not right….In Gates’ mind, what he saw was the 35,000 customers of his mutual fund being “exposed to predation” in the stock market. Between them, those customers had lost $40: 4 cents per share, times 1,000 shares. Which means they had lost roughly a tenth of a cent apiece, buying and selling $100,000 of Chipotle Mexican Grill within the space of a few seconds.

But there’s always going to be a nonzero “round-trip cost” to buying $100,000 of a stock and then selling it a few seconds later….But still, $40 for two $100,000 trades is hardly a rip-off. Especially when you consider the money that Gates himself is charging his 35,000 mom-and-pop customers.

When Gates was running his experiments, his flagship fund, the TFS Market Neutral Fund, had an expense ratio of 2.41 percent: For every, say, $100,000 you had invested in the fund, you would pay Gates and his colleagues a fee of $2,410 per year. That helps puts the tenth of a cent you might lose on Gates’ Chipotle test into a certain amount of perspective. TFS trades frequently, but even so, any profits that HFT algos might be making off its trades are surely a tiny fraction of the fees that TFS charges its own investors.

MORE: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

That’s true. But the whole point of HFT has always been to skim tiny percentages from a large number of trades. Nobody has ever suggested that individual traders are losing huge amounts of money to HFT shops. Nevertheless, that’s no reason to downplay it. In fact, that’s one of the things that makes HFT so insidious: it’s yet another way for Wall Street players to game the system in a way that’s so subtle it’s hardly noticeable. This is the kind of thing that permeates Wall Street, and I think Lewis is correct to aim a spotlight at it.

There are plenty of reasons to be very, very wary of HFT. I wish Lewis had at least spent a few pages on the potential instability issues, but let’s face facts. Front running is a perfectly legitimate problem to focus on, and it’s likely to generate a lot more public outrage than a dense abstract about the possibility of robots causing a financial crash sometime in the dim future. So if you’re the rare person who can attract a lot of attention to a legitimate financial danger, it makes sense to write a book that concentrates its fire on the most accessible aspect of that danger. That’s what Lewis chose to do, and I don’t really have a problem with that.

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In Defense of "Flash Boys"

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

by BettinaYLPM Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

How big is the midterm penalty for Democrats? Eric McGhee tells us in handy chart form. Given President Obama’s current approval rating, his model says Democrats would have a 75 percent chance of holding the Senate if this were a presidential election year. But in a midterm, Dems have only a 10 percent chance:

Ed Kilgore writes about this a lot, and warns Democrats not to get too mired in fruitless efforts to attack the “enthusiasm gap.” After all, the kind of people affected by enthusiasm are the kind of people who are likely to vote anyway. A loud populist message might thrill them, but it won’t do much to affect turnout among minorities and the young, who typically have more tenuous connections to politics. Instead, Democrats should focus on old-fashioned efforts to get out the vote. Or, more accurately, brand new rocket science efforts to get out the vote:

There’s plenty of evidence that turnout can be more reliably affected by direct efforts to identify favorable concentrations of voters and simply get them to the polls, with or without a great deal of “messaging” or for that matter enthusiasm (no one takes your temperature before you cast a ballot). Such get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are the meat-and-potatoes of American politics, even if they invariably get little attention from horse-race pundits. Neighborhood-intensive “knock-and-drag” GOTV campaigns used to be a Democratic speciality thanks to the superior concentration of Democratic (especially minority) voters, though geographical polarization has created more and more equally ripe Republican areas.

….If that’s accurate, then the most important news for Democrats going into November is that the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is planning to spend $60 million on data-driven GOTV efforts specially focused on reducing the “midterm falloff” factor. The extraordinary success of Terry McAuliffe’s 2013 Virginia gubernatorial campaign in boosting African-American turnout for an off-year election will likely be a model.

Messaging matters. But in midterm elections, shoe leather matters more, even if it’s mostly digital shoe leather these days.

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

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An Important Question About April Fools’ Day

by EulahWhitten Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Let’s take a break to discuss something important: Is it April Fools or Aprils Fools’? According to the AP style guide, it’s April Fools’. However, Google’s Ngram Viewer, which counts occurrences of phrases in books, tells a different, more nuanced story:

April Fools has been more common than April Fools’ for the entire past century.
However, April Fools’ Day has been far more common than April Fools Day.

So there you have it. Basically, you can probably punctuate it any way you want. Either way, though, I have some bad news for you: the usage of both terms has skyrocketed since 1960, increasing about 3x relative to everything else. This suggests, sadly, that we’ve all gotten way more obsessed with stupid April Fools jokes in recent years.

But there’s also some good news: usage peaked around 2000 and has gone down over the past decade. Unless this is an artifact of Google’s algorithm (which it might be), perhaps it means that we’re finally getting tired of the whole thing. That’s a nice thought, though I quail at the prospect of what’s probably replacing it in our collective id.

BY THE WAY: The increasing popularity of trying to outfox April Fools-savvy readers by playing jokes on March 31 is no longer clever. Knock it off. If you really think you have something good enough to fool people in an amusing way, it should be good enough to work on April 1.

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An Important Question About April Fools’ Day

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Senate Report: Torture Didn’t Work and the CIA Lied About It

by MichaelPud Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post has gotten hold of the Senate investigation into CIA interrogation practices and—

No, wait. They haven’t. They’ve only learned what the report says “according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.” It’s impossible to say if these sources are characterizing the report accurately, and their summary descriptions of the report make it very hard to judge how fair the report’s conclusions are.

But with those caveats and cautions out of the way, what does the report say? This:

Several officials who have read the document said some of its most troubling sections deal not with detainee abuse but with discrepancies between the statements of senior CIA officials in Washington and the details revealed in the written communications of lower-level employees directly involved.

Officials said millions of records make clear that the CIA’s ability to obtain the most valuable intelligence against al-Qaeda — including tips that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 — had little, if anything, to do with “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

….“The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,” said a second U.S. official who has reviewed the report. The official described the persistence of such misstatements as among “the most damaging” of the committee’s conclusions.

Detainees’ credentials also were exaggerated, officials said. Agency officials described Abu Zubaida as a senior al-Qaeda operative — and, therefore, someone who warranted coercive techniques — although experts later determined that he was essentially a facilitator who helped guide recruits to al-Qaeda training camps.

However, for those of us who think that detainee abuse is, in fact, as important as the lies that were told about it, there’s this:

Classified files reviewed by committee investigators reveal internal divisions over the interrogation program, officials said, including one case in which CIA employees left the agency’s secret prison in Thailand after becoming disturbed by the brutal measures being employed there. The report also cites cases in which officials at CIA headquarters demanded the continued use of harsh interrogation techniques even after analysts were convinced that prisoners had no more information to give.

The report describes previously undisclosed cases of abuse, including the alleged repeated dunking of a terrorism suspect in tanks of ice water at a detention site in Afghanistan — a method that bore similarities to waterboarding but never appeared on any Justice Department-approved list of techniques.

So the torture was even worse than we thought; it produced very little in the way of actionable intelligence; and the CIA lied about this in order to preserve their ability to torture prisoners.

Anybody who isn’t sickened by this needs to take very long, very deep look into their souls. For myself, I think I’ll go take a shower now.

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Senate Report: Torture Didn’t Work and the CIA Lied About It

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It’s Time to Start Quoting Our Public Figures Accurately

by ChelseyUyc Posted on March 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jesse Sheidlower makes a point near and dear to my heart today: it’s time to get rid of the dashes. You know the ones: f—, n—–, s—, etc. This is not a plea for reporters to write like Hunter S. Thompson, it’s a plea to fully report the obscenities uttered by famous people that our news organizations are too delicate to report:

There have been numerous cases in recent years when the use of offensive language has been the news story itself. In 1998, Representative Dan Burton referred to President Clinton with an offensive word. In 2000, a microphone picked up George W. Bush using a vulgar term to describe the New York Times reporter Adam Clymer. In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney insulted Senator Pat Leahy on the Senate floor with yet another vulgarity. In 2007, Isaiah Washington was kicked off the television show “Grey’s Anatomy” for referring to his fellow actor T. R. Knight with a gay slur. This January, Representative Michael Grimm threatened an aggressive reporter, using an obscenity.

These stories were covered widely, but in most cases, the details were obscured. The relevant words were described variously as “an obscenity,” “a vulgarity,” “an antigay epithet”; replaced with rhyming substitutions; printed with some letters omitted; and, most absurdly, in The Washington Times (whose editor confessed this was “an attempt at a little humor”), alluded to as “a vulgar euphemism for a rectal aperture.” We learn from these stories that something important happened, but that it can’t actually be reported.

When a public figure uses an obscenity, it’s news. Readers deserve to know exactly what was said. Consider my favorite obscene quote of all time, courtesy of Richard Mottram, a British civil servant:

We’re all fucked. I’m fucked. You’re fucked. The whole department is fucked. It’s the biggest cock-up ever. We’re all completely fucked.

You just don’t get the flavor if you don’t spell out the words. And in the US, we often don’t even get the quote with the dashes. As Sheidlower says, we get “a vulgarity” or “a long string of obscenities” or something similar, making us feel like everyone else knows what happened and we’re being deliberately left out. It’s long past time to knock this off. News outlets should print the news, full stop. If an obscenity is part of it, accuracy and integrity are more important than delicate sensibilities.

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It’s Time to Start Quoting Our Public Figures Accurately

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Health Insurance Rates Are Going Up Next Year, But It’s Nothing to Panic Over

by LazaroWorley Posted on March 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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The LA Times has a piece today about the next battleground for Obamacare: rate increases for 2015. The warnings are already coming thick and fast:

WellPoint Inc., parent of California’s leading health insurer in the exchange, Anthem Blue Cross, has already predicted “double-digit-plus” rate increases on Obamacare policies across much of the country.

…. Health insurers aren’t wasting any time sizing up what patients are costing them now and what that will mean for 2015 rates. Hunkered down in conference rooms, insurance actuaries are parsing prescriptions, doctor visits and hospital stays for clues about how expensive these new patients may be. By May, insurance companies must file next year’s rates with California’s state-run exchange so negotiations can begin.

I hope everyone manages to restrain their Obamacare hysteria over this. Here in California, we’ve played this game annually for years. Health insurers in the individual market propose wild increases in their premiums—10 percent, 20 percent, sometimes even 30 percent—and then dial them back a bit after consumer outrage blankets the media and the Department of Insurance pushes back. But even then, we routinely end up with double-digit increases. Just for background, here are the average annual rate increases requested by a few of California’s biggest insurers over the last three years:

Anthem Blue Cross: 10.7%
Aetna: 12.1%
Blue Shield: 15.4%
HealthNet: 12.0%

And this doesn’t include changes in deductibles or out-of-pocket maximums. Add those in, and the annual proposed increases are probably in the range of 15-20 percent. Obamacare, of course, limits both those things, which means that in the future insurance companies will have to put everything into rate hikes instead of spreading the increases around to make them harder to add up.

Bottom line: if we end up seeing double-digit rate increases, it will be business as usual. Insurance companies will all blame it on Obamacare because that’s a convenient thing to do, but the truth is that we probably would have seen exactly the same thing even if Barack Obama had never been born. So let’s all keep our feet on the ground when the inevitable huge rate increase requests start flowing in. It’s mostly an insurance company thing and a healthcare thing, not an Obamacare thing.

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Health Insurance Rates Are Going Up Next Year, But It’s Nothing to Panic Over

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Obama Should Have Personally Announced the Latest Obamacare Deadline Extension

by JosephineCandel Posted on March 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Chris Hayes used his program tonight to highlight a deadline extension for a health care program—one that happened back in 2006. Here’s how Knight Ridder reported it at the time:

With pressure mounting to extend next Monday’s enrollment deadline for the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the Bush administration took another small step in that direction Tuesday, waiving penalty fees for very low-income seniors and people with disabilities who sign up late….The move follows a recent administration decision to allow the same impoverished beneficiaries to sign up for Medicare drug coverage until Dec. 31.

“In other words, you can apply after May 15th without penalty. And that’s important for low-income seniors to understand,” President Bush told a group of older Americans in Sun City Center, Fla., on Tuesday.

This is mostly being used to show Republican hypocrisy. They’re all yelling and screaming about President Obama’s “lawlessness” in extending the deadline for Obamacare signups, but none of them uttered a peep of protest when President Bush did the same thing. What a bunch of partisan hacks.

And fair enough. But I have a different lesson to take from this: You’ll notice that Bush treated his extension like something worth taking credit for. He personally announced it. In a speech. That showed up on television. And people heard about it because the press pays more attention to things when the president says them.

Obama’s deadline extension, by contrast, was passively conveyed to the media via anonymous “administration officials.” Granted, Obama is in Europe at the moment, and maybe he’ll say something personally when he gets back. But even if he does, it’ll be old news by then and nobody will bother with it.

That’s a missed opportunity. And it’s especially unfortunate given today’s news that 61 percent of the currently uninsured are unaware of the March 31 deadline. It sure seems like the deadline extension would have been a handy excuse to put the president in front of the cameras to tell everyone that they had only a few days left to start the signup process.

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Obama Should Have Personally Announced the Latest Obamacare Deadline Extension

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Narrow Networks Are Going to Bite a Lot of Obamacare Customers

by JulianneR05 Posted on March 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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A few days ago, reader JF sent me an email about a problem he’s had with his new Obamacare policy:

I’m a single dad living in LA. I have been underemployed/unemployed for the past few years, and until January had been paying through the nose for an individual policy for myself and my son. I am very familiar with the ins and outs of health insurance and I’m used to checking with every provider beforehand to quantify out of pocket costs. It was a godsend to have affordable insurance as of January. I qualified for a heavily subsidized Silver plan. I want the ACA to work, and to work well.

It didn’t for me. Here’s what happened. The first time I sought care under my new policy it was in January for a standard annual checkup. I’m a healthy guy so for me it’s a few questions from the doctor and then they draw blood. My ACA plan allowed me to get this care with a co-pay of $3.

Then I got the bill from the blood lab for $800. The doctor sent it to a lab outside the ACA network. Yeah, I know, I could have double checked with the doc to make sure the blood was sent to an in-network lab (I had already checked once). Bottom line is that a CBC blood test is going to cost me EIGHT MONTHS worth of my subsidized insurance premiums.

Here’s the bad story on the horizon: Imagine what’s going to happen when millions of newly insured people, not savvy about how to police health care costs, start to get bills that far exceed what CoveredCA or healthcare.gov promised them? “My Obamacare policy cost me $800 for a blood test” is the next headline. It’s in line with the horror stories from Steven Brill last year.

I think progressives need to start talking about this because it should be addressed by our side, not just to avoid mid-term election embarrassment, but because poor folks can be harmed by it. Hand waving this away as “we got poor people insurance, our job is done” is a mistake.

How common are experiences like this? Common enough that a recent Commonwealth Fund report explicitly addresses this precise problem. Andrew Sprung saw the report, and it triggered his memory about a similar problem he had a few years ago when he checked himself into an ER with chest pains:

The ER team decided to keep me overnight and informed me that I would be checking out against advice if I left early. By the time I’d had two EKGs it was clear nothing was wrong with my heart, but I subjected myself to a CT-scan with stress test, an ultrasound, and a $20k tab of which we paid nothing except maybe a $100 deductible (and which the self-insured hospital network essentially paid itself, I suppose).

So I was weak and foolish — with one exception. At the beginning, I had to sign a release agreeing to pay for any out-of-network care I received in-hospital. The attending doctor was at hand at the time. I asked him if he was in-network. He said he didn’t know. I said, how can you not know? He said his office dealt with “hundreds” of insurance plans. He offered to check. I said please do. He came back a few minutes later and said he had confirmed that he accepted the insurance plan provided to employees of the hospital he was standing in.

So there are several lessons here. First, narrow networks aren’t unique to Obamacare. They’ve been a growing problem with private insurance plans for years (see chart on right). Second, it gets worse with Obamacare in some states because of the narrow networks supported by nearly all ACA insurers. JF confirmed to me that he had a Blue Shield plan, but that’s not the whole story. “The blood lab in question is in network for Blue Shield, but not for Blue Shield CoveredCA plans, as per everyone I’ve spoken to about it.”

Third, it’s really hard to be alert enough all the time to avoid this. You have to remember to ask every time. You have to ask every doctor, and you have to ask for every lab test. And most doctors don’t know, and don’t really want to be bothered finding out. So you have to be very, very persistent.

And most of us aren’t very, very persistent. Especially if, say, we’re in an ER worried that chest pains might be an indication of an oncoming heart attack.

How big a deal is this? I don’t have any way of knowing. But JF is certainly right that it’s the kind of thing that can give Obamacare a bad name if it happens often enough. Unfortunately, there’s no plausible legislative tweak to address this, since Republicans are implacably opposed to improving Obamacare in any way, shape, or form. At best, there might be a way to partially address it with HHS regulations.

In any case, buyer beware. If you have any kind of health coverage at all, this is probably something to keep in mind. If you have an Obamacare policy, especially in a narrow-network state like California, it’s something to keep doubly in mind.

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Narrow Networks Are Going to Bite a Lot of Obamacare Customers

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