Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

Rock, paper, scissors

I forgot to address one Budge comment in the post below:

You say that wealth is created from labor. I disagree. I say that wealth is created by the combination of capital, labor and entrepreneurship and are co-dependent. What the engineer designs is of no use unless adequate capital is put at risk to achieve scale economies. And specialized labor must be paid an adequate salary to create production. But labor alone cannot create wealth. It has to have inputs to turn to products that can be made economically efficiently.

Labor precedes capital. There is no capital without labor.

Resources without labor just sit there.

Therefore, labor is the source of all wealth.

Academic.

Triangulating on Triangulators

The health care debate has been crystallizing in my mind this past week – I’ve been suspicous of Senator Max Baucus. He’s holding the football and the regular Lucy’s are lining up. But what does he want? How does he intend to get it?

This morning I was visited by a ghost of Democrats past. It was eerie – he spoke with a drawl and had some charm and charisma and a thing for cigars. His name: Triangulation.

In the 1990’s, Bill Clinton enlisted the support of Democrats to advance various right wing causes, among them the deadly Iraq sanction regime, welfare “reform”, increased incarceration of blacks, the attack on Serbia, and privatization of Social Security. Democrats presumed that his rhetorical support for their causes meant he could be trusted to follow through. They didn’t apply force on him – odd thing about liberals – they do not threaten office holders. They merely trust them to carry out their will. Bill Clinton took them down his road.

As Mel Brooks reminds us, it’s good to be king, and Democrats like being in power. Once in power, they are like sheep lined up at the sheering wagon. With health care reform, it is Max Baucus holding the clippers.

The game is afoot. (I am one tall, handsome and balding mixed metaphor this morning.) First, Baucus took “single payer” off the table. Democrats were OK with that. Don’t let the “perfect spoil the good”, they were told.

Second, he’s making coverage mandatory. There’s some justification for that, though it seems heavy-handed. But the key to mandatory coverage, from the Baucus standpoint, is the so-called “public option”. With a true option, we will have a choice between private and public coverage. I was traveling down this path until I realized that Baucus does not intend us to have a real choice.

The “choice” will belong to his campaign contributors – the health insurance companies. They will get to “choose” who they cover. They will be allowed to cherry pick – healthy people will be required to purchase private coverage. Government will pay the premium for poorer people, but as with Medicare D (another Baucus product), there will be no price negotiation allowed.

The “public option” is really an “insurance company option” on who to cover. Anyone deemed unprofitable will be turned over to government. Since it will be by definition a high-risk pool, it will be expensive coverage. Those of us who are not poor and who do not qualify as healthy enough for private coverage will be forced to pay exorbitant premiums.

Who will manage the high-risk pools? Again, it will be private insurance companies. However, they will not be at risk. They will merely be paid a management fee, and will have a guaranteed profit.

We have such a plan in Montana, as I wrote about before. It’s called the “Montana Comprehensive Health Association“. It’s a high-risk pool, very expensive with high co-pays and deductibles, and a private insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Montana, is paid to manage at no risk to itself. There are 77,000 uninsured Montanans. MCHA covers perhaps three thousand of them. If Baucus were in charge, all 77,000 would be required to purchase MCHA coverage.

So it’s time to sink the ship. There are conservatives out there who are opposed to any kind of health care reform. It is time to enlist their services. For once, those deceptive TV ads will be welcome. For my small part, I’ve written letters to the editor to newspapers in Missoula, Great Falls, Billings and Bozeman. In them I emphasize that Baucus wants to use the IRS to force people to buy private health insurance policies. That ought to rile up some libertarian and conservative feathers. (Last metaphor – I promise.)

The objective is to drown the Baucus plan in the bath tub. (Aye!) There’s tons of good energy out there right now for reform, but triangulation has reared its ugly head again. It’s time to triangulate on triangulation, progressives and conservatives alike taking aim.

Ready, aim, fire.

P.S. Strong Mike Dennison piece in today’s Gazette, perhaps all the Lee newspapers.

On Caring so Deeply …

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Senator Baucus wants to have a hearing and wants to exclude the most prominent public point of view, and at the same time reminds them that he can’t hear all points of view unless he has his hearing from which he has excluded the most prominent public point of view. He cares so deeply – you can see the lines of concern on his forehead.

Other politicians are better at this sort of thing – acting, it is called. Max is so bad at it that it’s a wonder he has managed to fool so many Montana Democrats for so long. It says far more about them than him.

A “Public Option”?

Senator Max Baucus is saying that he favors a “public option” in his health insurance proposal, but is not specific as to what that might be. I suspect that this is where he and the insurance industry are going to nail us – the devil will be in their details.

In Montana we already have a public option. We just don’t call it that. It’s called the “Montana Comprehensive Health Association“. There are something like 77,000 Montanans without health insurance, and MCHA picks up maybe three to four thousand of them. The reason it covers so few is that it is a horribly expensive high-deductible plan. But it is a “public option”.

Here’s the rules for qualifying for MCHA:

1)You have been rejected or offered a restrictive rider by two insurers within the last six months or have one of the listed specified illnesses (see this link – there’s a bunch); and
2) You are not eligible for any other health insurance coverage, or,
3) You have comparable coverage but are paying or have received a notice of a premium rate that is more than 150% of the average premium rate used to calculate MCHA premium rates.

In other words, you can go there only after the private insurance people have decided you are too high a risk for them.

Baucus and the insurance industry need to come clean on what they mean by “public option”, and soon. This could be a trap door, with Baucus holding the lever.

Footnote: Blue Cross Blue Shield administers MCHA, but has no risk – they merely collect a fee for use of their network. This is their idea of a “public service”.

Up to their old tricks …

Bill Moyers had an interesting show (see here for transcript) last Friday on single payer health insurance – a troubling insight came from guests Dr. David Himmelstein, on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Steffi Woolhandler, founder of the advocacy group Physicians for a National Health Program.

It has to do with the so-called “public option” that I and others have been advocating as the “good vs. perfect” solution to our health care problems. I like it because I believe that if people are given an option to buy in to Medicare or VA, that it will slowly crumble the foundations of the private insurance system that is the heart of our problem.

Speaking of the downside of a public option, the doctors spoke of a program called “Medicare Advantage”, which is supposed to offer superior private insurance care to seniors:

Himmelstein …we’re worried that the public plan actually becomes a dumping ground for the unprofitable patients. As it’s happening in Medicare. … the private insurers have all kinds of tricks to avoid sick patients, who are the expensive patients. So, you put your signup office on the second floor of a walkup building. And people who can’t navigate stairs are the expensive people.

Wolfe …Get rid of the heart failure patients.

Himmelstein Or you have your signup dinners in a rural area at night, where only relatively healthy people are able to drive and stay up that late. So, there’s a whole science to how you sign up selectively healthier patients. And the insurance industry spends millions and millions of dollars on that. And would continue to as they’ve done under Medicare. Selectively recruiting healthier patients, who are the profitable ones, leaving the losses to the public plan.

Insurance industry shill Senator Max Baucus and his sub-shills are saying that there is a public option on the table, but are not specific as to what it is. Since the Democratic wing of the Republican Party has already abandoned single payer, we will be stuck with either no public option at all, or one that is structured in such a way as to allow private insurance companies to continue to operate as they do now: Cherry-picking healthy clients, dumping everyone else on government.

Himmelstein and Wolfe maintain that we can only succeed if we do what Canada did in 1970 – kick the insurance companies out of business. If anyone suggested in Canada that they go back to their pre-1970 system, there would be a bloody revolt.

PS: By the way, Medicare Advantage is 1) subsidized, 2) costs 15% more than regular Medicare, and 3) with the program, insurance people are up to their old tricks, skimming the Medicare population for the healthy ones and avoiding the rest. It could be a foreshadowing of the Baucus public option.

Prison seems too kind.

Try it on our side, why dontcha Max?

I knew this was coming, but it pisses me off nonetheless:


ehealthinsurance.com

Dear Mark,

We regret to inform you that your application for health insurance coverage has been declined. BlueCross BlueShield of Montana will contact you directly to provide more information about their decision. eHealthInsurance has not been informed why your application was declined.

We understand this is not the result you had hoped for. If you don’t have an employer-sponsored health insurance alternative available, here are some other options you may wish to consider:

* Public Health Coverage and Assistance Programs. The Foundation for Health Coverage Education, a non-profit private organization, sponsors the U.S. Uninsured Help Line at 800-234-1317 and the Coverage For All website, where you will find a list of the options available in your state. Use their helpful tools and expert assistance to find and apply for a broad variety of state-sponsored health coverage and public assistance programs.

* Social Security and Medicare. If you have a disabling condition which has lasted or is expected to last 12 months or longer and you are unable to perform any work activity, you may be eligible. Contact Social Service Coordinators for an eligibility evaluation at no cost to you at 1-866-440-2983 or online at: http://www.sscdisability.com\ehealth

If we can be of any further assistance, please call us at 800-977-8860. We’re available Monday through Friday, from 5am to 8pm Pacific Time.

Gary Matalucci
Vice President of Customer Care
eHealthInsurance Services, Inc.

The #1 service to compare and buy health insurance

Note: 1) Matalucci doesn’t involve himself or his company in seeking to find insurance. That’s not his job. eHealthinsurance Services, Inc. is a private company contracted with the health insurance industry to sift through the population and find profitable clients. They are interested in making money, period.

2) This is precious – they suggest I find some sort of public assistance, Medicare or Social Security. That’s is the private insurance business model – to cherry-pick the best, and dump the rest on government.

Are there a more contemptible set of leaches than the private insurance industry? They are useless appendage – “lice on the body politic” (Koopman, circa 2005). The best we can do for ourselves is to find them a productive outlet for their talents. Maybe they can pack boxes and load freight cars down at the Styrofoam factory.

Anyway, this is what it’s like out in the real world.

Freedom of Religious Choice in Iraq

There’s an interesting controversy developing in al-Matowa, a province in southern Iraq with a small, but larger than average, Christian minority of residents. As with all of Iraq, the Muslim faith constitutes the majority of the province, and Islam is taught in the schools. Students are taught the Qur’an, and each morning must pray and bow towards the south, or towards Mecca, the city designated by the prophet Mohammad as the holy city of the Islamic faith.

Christians of al-Matowa do not want their children raised in the Islam faith, and have protested to the local Kufat, or what we would call a school board. They have asked that their children be allowed to leave the classroom during morning prayer, and to be separately taught Bible studies rather than the Qur’an.

The Kufat recently ruled that since Iraq is a Muslim country, it was the right of the majority of Iraqis to have their religion taught in the schools.

Under Saddam Hussein, schools were secular, and religion was taught only in the mosques, or holy schools, with children dividing their time between both. Christian children at that time would stay with their parents and study the Bible, or attend religious services at their own churches. Saddam managed to hold together a tenuous peace among the various faiths by respecting each, including the minority Christians. It seemed to work. Now, with the new government and a re-assertive Muslim movement, the government is actively trying to bring Christians into the Islamic faith. It is a precept of the Muslim faith (called “masi-al-habi”) that Islam shall one day the the common faith of the entire globe.

It’s an interesting quandary for the newly-democratic Iraqis. Do they respect freedom of religion, or do they insist that the majority religion be taught to all?

Please! Someone! Click on the link above.

Guns in the national parks?

Hiking, backpacking and camping in place like Yellowstone and Glacier, where grizzly bears roam free, requires care, planning, and courage. Noises and shadows at night are troubling, sleep is often light and interrupted. Food has to be handled carefully, stung up high at night. We cannot eat, sleep, and store food in the same places. Pepper spray offers little consolation.

Hiking, backpacking and camping with guns in places like Yellowstone and Glacier, where grizzly bears roam free, requires no care, little planning, and no courage at all. You can shoot your way out of any situation.

I predict that in our national parks, small game will soon be targeted for sport killing, and that large mammals will routinely be killed in “life threatening” situations. Even though it has been years since anyone has been killed by a grizzly bear, they will soon be dropped whenever they even threaten a gun-toting human.

That’s what happens when cowards with guns roam free.