Tag Archives: second

Here’s Why CBO Projects 10% Lower Premiums Under the Republican Health Care Bill

by NataliaHudgins Posted on March 18, 2017

Mother Jones

One of the surprising things about the CBO score of AHCA, the Republican health care bill, is their conclusion that premiums will fall starting in 2020. By 2026, average premiums will be 10 percent lower than they would be under Obamacare. But why? Here’s CBO:

First, the mix of people enrolled in coverage obtained in the nongroup market is anticipated to be younger, on average, than the mix under current law. Second, premiums, on average, are estimated to fall because of the elimination of actuarial value requirements, which would result in plans that cover a lower share of health care costs, on average.

….By 2026, CBO and JCT project, premiums in the nongroup market would be 20 percent to 25 percent lower for a 21-year-old and 8 percent to 10 percent lower for a 40-year-old—but 20 percent to 25 percent higher for a 64-year-old.

Hmmm. Let’s translate this into English. First, CBO assumes that premiums will go up for old people, forcing many of them to drop out of the market. Since old people have expensive premiums, fewer old people means the average for the remaining pool will be lower.1 Second, AHCA policies will cover far less of your medical expenses, so naturally they’ll be cheaper.

The chart below shows how this “reduces” average premiums. If you use CBO’s projections and do a little arithmetic assuming a modestly younger pool, you get the average premium estimate for the overall pool shown on the left. AHCA is cheaper than Obamacare.

But the current age breakdown in the Obamacare insurance pool is 28 percent young, 38 percent middle-aged, and 26 percent old. What if you assume that stays the same? You get the premium estimates in the middle.

Finally, what if you assume that AHCA paid for 87 percent of your medical bills, just like Obamacare? Then you get the premium estimate on the right.

In other words, if you compare apples to apples, AHCA produces far higher overall premiums than Obamacare.2

Note that CBO didn’t do anything wrong here. They simply did their projections based on a (correct) assumption that AHCA would be too expensive for many old people and would produce crappier policies that had higher deductibles and paid far less of your medical bills. The “average” premium is lower, but obviously not in a way that helps anybody in real life.3

1Think about it this way. If a high school sends all its A students to a magnet school across town, the school’s average GPA will go down. This is despite the fact that nobody’s grades have actually changed.

2This is a fairly extreme example because the actuarial value changes a lot (87 percent vs. 65 percent) for the cheaper policies preferred by low-income folks. CBO has a second example that uses a middle-class worker, and it produces similar but less dramatic results.

3Hardly anybody, that is. If you’re young and don’t get any medical care, then the lower premiums really do help you.

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Here’s Why CBO Projects 10% Lower Premiums Under the Republican Health Care Bill

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Immigration and Crime: A Mini Data Dive

by ThorsteDailey Posted on March 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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This post is longish and doesn’t really have much payoff at the end. It’s just something that turned into a bit of snark hunt, so I figured I’d document it. You have been warned.

It starts with a column by Mona Chalabi, the Guardian’s “data editor,” which claims to outline her research on the question of whether illegal immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. It’s faintly ridiculous and I’m a little annoyed by it, but then I come to this:

I find a study by Bianca E Bersani. I look her up — she’s a associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Using numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, her study finds that about 17% of all first-generation immigrants who are age 16 have committed a crime in the past 12 months….But wait. Is that number high or low? I decide to find out how often native-born people in the US commit crimes. Luckily, her study has that too. It’s higher: about 25% of all native-born people in the US who are 16 have committed a crime in the past 12 months.

That seems kind of high, doesn’t it? Then again, “committed a crime” could encompass things like smoking a joint or stealing a box of paper clips from school, so who knows? The data comes from a paper called “A Game of Catch-Up? The Offending Experience of Second-Generation Immigrants,” so I check it out. But there’s nothing there. The paper has nothing whatsoever to say about either 16-year-olds or first-generation immigrants. What’s going on? Here’s the chart Chalabi presents:

This is a little odd. It suggests that 25 percent of 16-year-olds have committed a crime in the past year, but only 20% of 17-year-olds. That doesn’t jibe with what I know about crime rates. And the source is Pew Research. So let’s go look at the Pew article. It’s a lengthy description of Bersani’s article, and it includes this chart:

This is odd again. It’s the same chart, all right, and the author spends a lot of time describing “A Game of Catch-Up?” But as I mentioned above, that article contains nothing like this at all. What’s more, it appeared in Crime and Delinquency, but the chart is sourced to Justice Quarterly.

So now it’s off to Justice Quarterly. It turns out that everyone is describing the wrong article. I wonder if any of them actually read it? The correct article is “An Examination of First and Second Generation Immigrant Offending Trajectories,” also by Bianca Bersani. Fine. What does that article say? Here is Bersani’s chart, colorized for your viewing enjoyment:

It appears that everyone has been copying the chart properly. For what it’s worth, though, I’d make a few comments:

This data is for all immigrants. Donald Trump’s focus is solely on illegal immigrant crime.

Bersani’s data is from 1997-2005. That’s pretty old. Crime and arrest rates of juveniles have gone down more than 50 percent since then, and the population of illegal immigrants has gone up more than 50 percent since then. I don’t know if that changes the relative values in this chart, but it would certainly change the absolute values.

The data comes from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which uses a very large oversample of Hispanic and black youth. Bersani appears to be using the full sample, and since Hispanic and black adolescents commit crimes at higher rates than whites, it means the numbers for native-born Americans are exaggerated. At a guess, the real figures are 2-3 percentage points lower.

The NLSY97 data includes six types of crime that were included in Bersani’s study: (1) damaging property, (2 and 3) stealing less or more than $50, (4) other property crimes, (5) assault/serious fighting, and (6) selling drugs. By far the biggest contributors were property damage and petty theft, with fighting in third place and the others far behind. Auto theft and using a gun to steal (not included in Bersani’s study) were minuscule:
Since the vast majority of the crimes in this study are minor—and we can assume that serious violent crime is even less prevalent—it’s not clear how much this tells us. I don’t think anyone cares much whether immigrant teenagers steal six packs of beer at a greater rate than native-born Americans. We mainly care about more serious violent crimes: robbery, rape, murder, and aggravated assault. Those aren’t addressed at all.

I’d add that Bersani didn’t just add up all the crimes committed by various groups. Her methodology is pretty impenetrable to anyone who’s not an expert:

I use group-based trajectory modeling…identifies clusters of individuals who display similar behavioral trajectories over a period of time…Nagin and Land’s (1993) semiparametric group-based modeling approach…estimated using a zero-inflated Poisson form of a group-based trajectory model:

where ln(kjit) is the natural logarithm of the number of total crimes for persons i in group j at each age t. The equation specified above follows a quadratic function of age (age and age2)….

I have no idea what this means or whether it’s appropriate, but I’m a little skeptical about a model that suggests that 17- and 18-year-olds commit crimes at lower rates than 16-year-olds. Most crime data I’ve seen shows the opposite. Then again, most crime data doesn’t include extremely minor crimes like shoplifting and property destruction. It’s possible that adolescents age out of that stuff pretty early.

Long story short, I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from this study. The data is old; it’s not limited to illegal immigrants; it looks only at adolescents; the crimes under consideration are pretty minor; and the methodology is probably OK, but who knows? Put it all together, and I’d say it doesn’t tell us too much one way or the other about the serious crime rate of illegal immigrants as a whole.

I have yet to see a study that persuasively suggests a higher crime rate for immigrants than for anyone else. Let’s face it: if there’s anything we native-born Americans excel at, it’s crime. That said, the Guardian’s data editor should have known better. There are tons of studies out there that try to estimate the relative crime rates of native-born Americans compared to undocumented immigrants, and cherry picking this particular one makes no sense. It does provide a rough data point suggesting that crime rates of immigrants aren’t any different from the rest of the population, but it’s nowhere near the best study out there. Citing this one and calling it a day is a real disservice.

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Immigration and Crime: A Mini Data Dive

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The Dead Pool – 26 February 2017

by SylvestMccord Posted on February 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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Man of the people that he is, Donald Trump likes to pick rich guys for high-level positions in his administration. Unfortunately, that poses a problem:

President Donald Trump’s nominee for Navy secretary, investor Philip Bilden, is expected to withdraw from consideration, sources familiar with the decision told Politico, becoming the second Pentagon pick unable to untangle their financial investments in the vetting process….Like billionaire investment banker Vincent Viola, who withdraw his nomination to be secretary of the Army earlier this month, Bilden ran into too many challenges during a review by the Office of Government Ethics to avoid potential conflicts of interest, the sources said.

To become Secretary of State, maybe all this divesting of huge fortunes is worth it. But Navy Secretary? Probably not.

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The Dead Pool – 26 February 2017

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Do Strict Voter ID Laws Suppress Minority Voting?

by Selma9314lp Posted on February 19, 2017

Mother Jones

Do photo ID laws reduce minority turnout? Previous studies have suggested that the answer is yes, but the effect is fairly small. However, in the Washington Post last week, three scholars wrote about a new study they conducted, which offers “a more definitive assessment” than previous studies. Their conclusion: states with strict photo ID laws produce a far lower turnout among minorities than other states.

It’s taken me a while to comment on this because I had to read the report a few times to make sure I understood everything. In the end, I found several reasons to be skeptical of their conclusion.

First off, they found much stronger effects in primaries than in general elections. Now, maybe this really is the case, and I can certainly invent plausible stories about why it might be so. But it still seems odd.

Second, in a draft version of their study, they say this:

Importantly, we see no effects for Asian Americans, the one minority group that is, by at least some standards, not socioeconomically disadvantaged. The effects of these laws seem to be concentrated toward the bottom end of the racial hierarchy.

In later drafts, their numbers have been updated and it turns out that Asian Americans are affected by voter ID laws—which makes their important finding disappear. But if this was an important verification in one draft, it ought to be an important discrepancy in the final draft. However, it’s not mentioned.

Third, hardly any of their findings are statistically significant. I’m not a big stickler for 95 percent significance always and everywhere, especially for something like this, where there’s one messy set of real-life data and you have to draw conclusions from it one way or another. If the results are significant at 85 or 90 percent, that’s still strongly suggestive. Nonetheless, that’s all it is.

Fourth, the effect size on African Americans is considerably less than it is for Hispanics and Asian Americans. Maybe this is just because blacks are more politically organized, and therefore more likely to overcome the deterrent effects of photo ID laws. Maybe.

So far, none of these are deal breakers. They made me a little tentative about accepting the authors’ results, but that’s all. But then we get this:

Here’s what’s going on. On the left, you see their main results, based on a model they constructed. It shows very large effects: in states with strict photo ID laws, turnout decreases 8 percentage points among Hispanics, 2 percent among African Americans, and 5 percent among Asians.

On the right, you see the results from a second test. It compares turnout in states before and after they enacted strict photo ID laws, and it shows much smaller effects: about 2 percentage points for all minorities. This strikes me as a better test, since it eliminates lots of confounding variables that crop up when you compare one set of states to a different set. But the authors go to considerable lengths to downplay these results, for reasons that I don’t find very persuasive. Yes, their sample size is smaller, and yes, things can change from year to year. But their sample sizes aren’t that small, and the differences in a single state over the course of two years is probably smaller than the differences between states in the same year.

Maybe I’m totally off base here. I don’t have the raw data or the chops to analyze it. Still, if I had to bet money, I’d bet that the second test is more reliable, and the real effect of photo ID laws is a decreased turnout of about 2 percentage points among minorities. That’s plenty to affect a close election, and the motivation for these laws is plainly partisan and racial. They should be done away with everywhere.

That said, I continue to suspect that the effect is fairly modest.

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Do Strict Voter ID Laws Suppress Minority Voting?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 February 2017

by HannahLombardo Posted on February 17, 2017

Mother Jones

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We have exciting news this week: Yale University has decided to rename one of its colleges after Hopper. It’s a well-deserved honor for her contributions to this blog, and she will be replacing the odious John Calhoun, who spent the second half of his life defending states rights and slavery in uncompromising terms.

You will note, by the way, that Yale plans to keep up a pretense in public that Hopper College is actually named after an admiral who earned degrees from Yale in the 30s and went on to do some kind of computer stuff. But we all know better, don’t we?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 February 2017

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Donald Trump Rants and Raves At Press

by EmmaJyylkepeom Posted on February 16, 2017

Mother Jones

President Donald Trump intensified his attack on the media in a wild press conference Thursday, once again characterizing the press as “dishonest” in response to recent reports that have depicted an administration increasingly in turmoil. He also defended Michael Flynn, who resigned Monday as national security adviser, amid mounting evidence that he misled administration officials about his phone calls to the Russian ambassador.

“If anything, he did something right,” Trump said of Flynn. While he denied ordering Flynn to discuss easing American sanctions against Russia, he said that doing so would have been acceptable.

“Mike was doing his job, he was calling countries and his counterparts,” he said. “So it certainly would have been okay with me if he did it. I didn’t direct him, but I would have directed him because that’s his job.”

Asked repeatedly if his campaign aides were in contact with Russian officials during the 2016 election campaign, Trump dodged the questions, saying only, “I had nothing to do with it.”

Trump began the press conference by announcing his second pick for labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, following Andrew Puzder’s decision to withdraw his nomination yesterday. Trump dedicated only a brief moment to discussing Acosta before he turned to his main message for the afternoon: his grievances with the press. “Many of our nation’s reporters and folks will not tell you the truth,” Trump said in his attacks against the media and the ongoing leaks. “We have to find out what’s going on because the press is honestly out of control.”

Trump complained of the “mess” he inherited from the past administration and disputed reports that the White House is in disarray. “It is the exact opposite,” he said. “This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.”

Asked how he could simultaneously complain about leaks by government officials and claim that the news reports based on them were false, Trump said, “The leaks are real. The leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.”

Trump went on to complain about how he has been covered by the media, predicating that:

the media will say, “Donald Trump rants and raves at the press.” I’m not ranting and raving. I’m just telling you. You know, you’re dishonest people. But — but I’m not ranting and raving. I love this. I’m having a good time doing it. But tomorrow, the headlines are going to be, “Donald Trump rants and raves.” I’m not ranting and raving. Go ahead.

Watch the whole press conference below:

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Donald Trump Rants and Raves At Press

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About 700 species are already being hurt by climate change.

by BridgetBaccarini Posted on February 14, 2017

On Sunday, officials ordered the evacuation of nearly 200,000 Northern California residents with assurances that “this is NOT a drill.” Their communities are at risk of being flooded by water from overflowing Lake Oroville, the state’s second largest reservoir.

After years of drought, California has recently been pummeled by rain and snow. That’s caused the lake’s water level to rise so much that water has flowed out not just via the main concrete spillway, but via the emergency earthen spillway, too. In early February, a gaping hole appeared in the main spillway, and it’s since grown. Authorities have determined that the second spillway is also at risk of failing.

The Sierra Club and two other environmental organizations warned about potential problems with the emergency spillway 12 years ago, but federal and state officials rejected concerns and said the spillway met guidelines, the Mercury News reports.

Situations like the one at Oroville Dam could crop up more often in coming years as climate change intensifies California’s cycles of drought and heavy precipitation. The state inspects its dams more than many others (although that’s not saying much), but extreme future storms can be expected to put enormous stress on the state’s essential water infrastructure.

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About 700 species are already being hurt by climate change.

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The Dead Pool – Special Michael Flynn Edition

by TamikaCsi5 Posted on February 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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My previous post (“Michael Flynn Is In Big Trouble”) was either an example of spectacularly good timing or spectacularly bad timing. I’m not sure which. In any case, just as I clicked the Publish button, an alert popped up on my screen telling me that Michael Flynn had resigned. Thank God. The man was a paranoid nutcase, and National Security Advisor is the last place in the world for a nutcase.

The real reason Flynn resigned, of course, is that he lied about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. There’s no official reason yet, though. I imagine it will be something like I’m confident I did nothing wrong, but I don’t want to be a distraction during this critical time.

Question: Will the investigation continue? There’s still a question of how much Trump knew about all this, after all. Second question: Where will Flynn end up? The Heritage Foundation? Infowars? Working for RT? At CNN as a national security analyst? We’ll have to wait and see.

UPDATE: Here is Flynn’s resignation letter. No real reason given except that he “inadvertently” provided Mike Pence with “incomplete information” due to “the fast pace of events.” Really? A National Security Advisor who has a hard time handling the fast pace of events? That’s really not a position for someone who’s easily flummoxed.

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The Dead Pool – Special Michael Flynn Edition

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Michael Flynn Is In Big Trouble

by ArmandoBuntine Posted on February 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post has the latest on Flynngate:

The acting attorney general informed the Trump White House late last month that she believed Michael Flynn had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States….It is unclear what the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, did with the information.

Well, within a few days Trump had fired Yates for not defending his immigration order. At that point, I imagine no one in the White House felt like approaching the boss with any other bad news she had passed along. In any case, the issue here is threefold. First, did Flynn talk with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition to assure him he shouldn’t worry about Obama’s sanctions for interfering with the election? Second, was Flynn in touch with Kislyak before the election, while the Russian interference was actively taking place? And third, did he lie about it?

In the waning days of the Obama administration, James R. Clapper Jr., who was the director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the CIA director at the time, shared Yates’s concerns and concurred with her recommendation to inform the Trump White House. They feared that “Flynn had put himself in a compromising position” and thought that Vice President Mike Pence had a right to know that he had been misled, according to one of the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

A senior Trump administration official said that the White House was aware of the matter, adding that “we’ve been working on this for weeks.”

….Kislyak, in a brief interview with The Post, confirmed having contacts with Flynn before and after the election, but he declined to say what was discussed.

So: the intelligence community concurred that Flynn had spoken to Kislyak about sanctions; he “misled” Pence about this; the Trump White House has known about this for weeks; and Flynn was indeed in contact with Kislyak during the campaign. It’s no wonder that the White House has declined to stand behind Flynn and now says they are “evaluating the situation.”

The New York Times has more details:

The Justice Department had warned the White House that Mr. Flynn…could be open to blackmail by Russia, said a former senior official….The White House has examined a transcript of a wiretapped conversation that Mr. Flynn had with Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador….The conversation, according to officials who have seen the transcript of the wiretap, also included a discussion about sanctions imposed on Russia after intelligence agencies determined that President Putin’s regime tried to interfere with the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

Still, current and former administration officials familiar with the call said the transcript was ambiguous enough that Mr. Trump could justify both firing or retaining Mr. Flynn….Former and current administration officials said that Mr. Flynn urged Russia not to retaliate against any sanctions because an overreaction would make any future cooperation more complicated. He never explicitly promised sanctions relief, one former official said, but he appeared to leave the impression that it would be possible.

The AP’s Julie Pace confirms that the White House has been aware of this for weeks. The Times claims that Mike Pence is especially peeved at Flynn and has taken his concerns directly to Trump. They also say that White House officials have already started “discussing the possibility of replacements.”

The other big question here is, inevitably, what did the president know and when did he know it? Was Flynn freelancing the whole time? Or was he acting with Trump’s blessing? A few days ago David Corn asked what had become of the big Russia scandal, which seemed to have disappeared from view, and now we know. It was just waiting for the right moment to rear its ugly head again.

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Michael Flynn Is In Big Trouble

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Trump Sabotage of Obamacare a Big Success: Enrollment Down By a Half Million or More

by LeighTurner28 Posted on February 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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The signup period for Obamacare is over, and total enrollment fell short of last year. The Washington Post reports the details:

The lower total…marks a striking turnabout from the trend as the Obama administration neared its end — when sign-ups for coverage under the law were running steadily ahead of a year ago.

The volume plummeted, in particular, during the final week of the three-month enrollment season — falling from nearly 700,000 in 2016 to just over 375,000. That last week traditionally is a peak time when eligible customers race to get ACA health plans, most of them with federal subsidies. This time, however, the Trump White House directed federal health officials to halt all advertising and other enrollment-outreach activities for the last six days of the sign-up period.

Based on data from Charles Gaba, here’s what enrollment looked like throughout the entire signup period:

Signups were running a bit ahead of 2016 during the entire open enrollment period, but then Trump took office. Republicans began talking about repealing Obamacare, Trump signed an executive order telling agencies to do whatever they could to throw sand in the gears, and outreach efforts were halted. The result was a substantial downturn in the second half of January. My estimate is that all these antics lowered enrollment by about 600,000. That’s 600,000 people who now have no medical coverage and run the risk of bankruptcy if anything serious goes wrong. Nice work, folks.

For additional evidence on this score, Charles Gaba has more. He notes that state exchanges have their own marketing and outreach programs, so they were less affected by Trump’s sabotage efforts. Sure enough, he finds that state exchanges ended up higher than last year by 2 percent or more, while the federal exchange ended up 4.7 percent lower than last year. He’s got all the details here.

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Trump Sabotage of Obamacare a Big Success: Enrollment Down By a Half Million or More

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