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Mother Jones
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Via Harold Pollack, here’s an interesting study of children’s health care. The researchers investigated how good Medicaid coverage was, and the results were surprisingly positive. I have painstakingly modified the chart so that higher numbers are always better, and as you can see, reported satisfaction with Medicaid was equal to or better than private insurance on most measures, and very close on the others.
Now, this is only for children, and the results might be different for adults. Still, a lot of people—including me—generally think of Medicaid as fairly lousy coverage. If this study is correct, we need to rethink this.
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Mother Jones
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Back in 2012, Fred Hof was President Obama’s advisor for Syria. Today, Zack Beauchamp asks him if there was anything we could have done back then to prevent the rise of ISIS:
In mid-2012, President Obama’s key national security officials — Clinton, Panetta, Petraeus, and Dempsey — all recommended a robust training and equipping effort designed to unite and strengthen nationalist anti-Assad rebels. One of the justifications for the recommendation was that they were beginning to see the rise of al-Qaeda-related elements in Syria.
Had that recommendation been accepted and then implemented properly, the ISIS presence in Syria would not be what it is today. Had the US been able to offer Syrian civilians a modicum of protection from Assad regime collective punishment — barrel bombs and all the rest — a major ISIS recruiting tool around the world and inside Syria could have been diluted and even neutralized.
That bolded phrase is doing a helluva lot of heavy lifting here. I wish Beauchamp had followed up and asked Hof if he thinks the US intelligence and military communities could, in fact, have implemented this policy effectively. Their recent efforts, which produced something like five trained rebels, don’t inspire a ton of confidence. My guess is that Obama listened to their recommendations but concluded that in the real world, it wouldn’t have worked. I suspect he was right.
We’ll never know, of course, which means this can be a subject of debate pretty much forever. But there’s sure nothing in the recent historical record to inspire a lot of faith in our ability to carry out a plan like this.
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A friend writes to point out that initial unemployment claims have continued dropping, and are now at their lowest level in 40 years. In fact, if you look at unemployment claims as a percentage of total employment, they’re at their lowest level in forever:
I’m not quite sure what to make of this. Unemployment claims have been steadily dropping since the mid-80s, and didn’t spike during the Great Recession nearly as much as they did during the recessions of the 70s and 80s. Is this because the rules have gotten tougher? Because employers aren’t laying off as many people as they used to during recessions? Or is it just an artifact of the drop in workforce participation, which means fewer marginally attached workers are getting permanent jobs in the first place?
I’m not sure. But initial claims are now below 0.2 percent of the workforce, a modern record.
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Mother Jones
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I want to complain to the studio execs who commissioned the current season of “21st century”; your show is broken.
I say this as a viewer coming in with low expectations. Its predecessor “20th century” plumbed the depths of inconsistency with the frankly silly story arc for world war II. It compounded it by leaving tons of loose plot threads dangling until the very last minute, then tidied them all up in a blinding hurry in that bizarre 1989-92 episode just in time for the big Y2K denouement (which then fizzled). But the new series reboot is simply ridiculous! It takes internal inconsistency to a new low, never before seen in the business: the “21st century” show is just plain implausible.
So far, I give the 21st century two stars. It might be better if they’d just release the whole thing at once so I could binge watch it, instead of forcing me to live through this nonsense week by week.
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