Tag Archives: syrian-refugees

It’s Time For Kansas to Rejoin the Real World

by CaryThielhhwjd Posted on September 22, 2014

Mother Jones

The Republican governor of Kansas has pauperized his state in order to fund tax cuts for the rich, while the Republican Secretary of State is busily trying to game the midterm ballot to ensure the reelection of the current Republican senior senator. I’d think this was a parody from the Onion if I didn’t know it was for real. I sure hope the good folks of Kansas finally manage to come to their senses this November.

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It’s Time For Kansas to Rejoin the Real World

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College Doesn’t Pay Off for Everyone

by RichelleButterf Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why has college enrollment edged downward in recent years? After all, the college premium is still pretty handsome, which makes a university degree a pretty good investment. Dean Baker thinks the answer might lie in how the college premium is distributed:

Work by my colleague John Schmitt and Heather Boushey shows that a substantial proportion of college grads, especially male college grads, earn less than the average high school grad. They found that the lowest earning quintile of recent college grads (ages 25-34) earned less than the average high school grad. The implication is that many young people may be reasonably assessing their risks of not being a winner among college grads and therefore opting not to get additional education. To get more young people to attend college it is important that most can predictably benefit from the additional education, not just that the average pay of college grads rises.

I’m not sure I buy this. Schmitt and Boushey present the chart on the right, and sure enough, the lowest ten percent of college grads (red line) earn less than the average high school grad. But this has always been true. What’s more, it’s actually less true today than in the past. Among both men and women, even the lowest-achieving college grad is relatively better off now than in 1980.

Even if the bottom 10 percent are still worse off than an average high school grad, I’m not sure how a rising trend could lead to lower assessments of the value of college paying off. It seems like there must be more going on here than that.

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College Doesn’t Pay Off for Everyone

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Aetna CEO: Obamacare Pretty Much On Track

by gorso6 Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Aetna is one of America’s biggest health insurers, and it’s currently operating in 17 different Obamacare exchanges. On a call this morning, CEO Mark Bertolini passed along a couple of interesting factlets:

Bertolini said about half of the company’s premium increases, whatever they turn out to be, will be attributable to “on the fly” regulatory changes made by the Obama administration. He cited as an example the administration’s policy of allowing old health plans that were supposed to expire in 2014 to be extended another three years if states and insurers wanted to.

….Aetna has added 230,000 paying customers from ACA exchanges, and it projects to end the year with 450,000 paid customers. It said it can’t yet draw a “meaningful conclusion” about the population’s overall health status.

The first is interesting because it suggests that Aetna’s premium increases won’t be based on fundamentals. That is, they aren’t rising because the customers Aetna signed up were older or sicker than they expected. That’s good news, even if the regulatory shakeouts of Obamacare’s early days are causing a bit of pain.

And the second is interesting because Aetna apparently expects to double its Obamacare customer base by the end of the year. That’s roughly what the CBO projected earlier this year, and this is a bit of evidence suggesting that they got it right.

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Aetna CEO: Obamacare Pretty Much On Track

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Here Are Baseball’s 2 Least Loved Teams

by Lucile2956 Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Over at The Upshot, a crack team of researchers has put together an interactive map showing which baseball teams are preferred in which regions of the country. The overall results are pretty predictable, of course, but the authors make a few interesting points about exactly where the geographical dividing lines are between traditional rivalries. I thought the most interesting part was which teams were left out completely. Here’s the map:

There is not a single zip code in the entire country that favors the New York Mets. Even in 11368, the home of Citi Field, fans prefer the Yankees by 53 to 25 percent.

And the Oakland A’s have it even worse. In 94501, the home of the Oakland Coliseum, fans prefer the San Francisco Giants by a whopping 59 to 18 percent. This is spectacularly embarrassing. The Mets, after all, are at least in the same city as the Yankees, so divided loyalties are natural. The A’s are in Oakland, a different city with a culture of its own. Sure, maybe there’s no there there, but that’s a culture! And yet, even the working-class East Bay has apparently been so taken over by yuppified San Franciscans escaping sky-high rents that the A’s can’t get any love even after being canonized by Michael Lewis and Brad Pitt as the champions of Moneyball. Sad.

(The Toronto Blue Jays aren’t on the map either, but I assume that’s because the map doesn’t include Canada. I draw no conclusions about Toronto’s fan base, though I suspect we can assume it’s pretty minimal too.)

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Here Are Baseball’s 2 Least Loved Teams

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Paul Ryan Goes Small on Medicare Reform

by AlyciaHeck Posted on April 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you have a good memory, you may recall that a couple of years ago I had an unexpectedly positive reaction to Paul Ryan’s latest Medicare reform plan. His 2013 edition was still based on premium support (i.e., vouchers), but he’d made some changes. Instead of simply capping the vouchers at the rate of overall inflation, which wouldn’t come close to keeping up with medical costs, Ryan proposed that insurers would bid for Medicare business. Vouchers would be set at the cost of the second-lowest bid, and seniors could use their vouchers to buy into traditional Medicare if they preferred.

Not bad. In fact, it was basically Obamacare with a public option. But there were still problems. Ryan kept his inflation-based cap, which suggested he didn’t really believe in the power of competition after all, and seniors would still end up paying more under his plan than they do now.

But over at TPM, Sahil Kapur points out something I missed: Ryan’s 2014 Medicare plan is different still. The voucher is now based on the average bid, not the second-lowest bid, and the inflation cap is gone. The market will either produce savings or it won’t.

That’s good news. But it also goes to show the difficulty of truly reforming Medicare, especially if you don’t tackle the broader problems of health care costs at the same time. The CBO has analyzed the effect of Ryan’s 2014 changes, and they conclude that by 2020 the Ryan plan would save a grand total of $15 billion per year. That’s 2 percent of net Medicare spending.

Now, this is nothing to sneeze at. Savings are savings. However, like the cost containment proposals that are part of Obamacare, this represents a highly speculative estimate. We might get the 2 percent, we might get nothing.

The bottom line is this: Without root-and-branch changes to our health care system, you’re simply not going to get big cost savings. If you make radical changes, as Ryan originally tried to do, it comes out of the pockets of seniors. If you keep seniors whole, you’re going to get small savings at best. Ryan’s 2014 plan might be a good one, but is it worth the experiment for such a small and questionable payback? Hard to say.

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Paul Ryan Goes Small on Medicare Reform

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