Category: Thoughts

Modest Proposal on Healthcare

Like any right-thinking liberal, I feel that the individual mandate is a not-all-that-terrible way of getting toward universal healthcare. Not as good as some variant of “Medicare for all,” but better than what we’ve got now.

It doesn’t fix the fact that the insurance companies are still in the business of denying care to people. And it props up those companies.

And of course, a lot of people resent the mandate. And that mandate might be ruled unconstitutional. If it is, the most popular part of the ACA – the “no pre-existing condition denial” part – can’t work.

If it’s not withdrawn, it’ll kill the insurance companies, and we’ll have to turn to providing health care directly, through taxes, without having a special middleman insurer. Win.

If it’s withdrawn so that the for-profit insurers can continue to survive, I’d love to see a rule that anyone denied coverage by a for-profit insurer could enroll in Medicare. Also win.

Who’s with me?

The most horrible thing you’ll read all day/week/month

Worse than that Rolling Stone article about how Michele Bachmann’s congressional district has basically exacerbated bullying and touched off an epidemic of suicide among its teens is this piece in N+1 about violence, particularly sexual violence, in the the largest prison system in the world:

Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.
….
In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

Oh, I love quizzes that tell me about myself

Gawker has a great takedown of David Brooks and his love of crypto-racist Charles Murray.

Brooks, like Jeff Jacoby, seems to exist solely as a token conservative who reassures liberal newspaper-buyers that conservatives are idiots. But I think that’s not really the case. Well, not for Brooks. Jacoby’s opinions really are such a caricature of conservatism I can’t actually believe he’s serious, or that anyone would publish him as an honest and sincere advocate for anything.

But Brooks does a slightly better job of seeming reasonable. I mean, he’s identifying actual problems, like a widening cultural divide accompanying the widening economic divide. But his understanding of the causes and solutions are so stupid it just burns.

Anyway, Murray has a quiz he wants isolated upper-crusters to take to determine about engagement with the 99%. Gawker fills it out for all the candidates, and of course, Obama wins. Durh.

Housepainting

There must already be a poem about painting houses; how it’s all preparation, and goes faster if you’re patient and careful at the start; about cutting in with an angled brush pushed against the grain to just reach an edge or corner; about cleanup and dropcloths and stray speckles found weeks later. Every human endeavor, in good light, is like this.

Redefining marriage is the path to anarchy

Brad Delong has a fantastic takedown of the right’s hand-wringing about marriage. National Review talks lovingly of Athenian philosophers and uses them to oppose Teh Gay, which is … well, let’s just not go there.

But seriously, this argument that changing marriage is putting us on the road to anarchy? Just rewind a couple hundred years and imagine the same tale:

Marriage has always and forever been one thing and one thing only: A sacred contract between a husband and his fathers-in-law, whereby a girl ceases to be the property of her father and becomes the property of her husband, subservient to the prior wives in the marriage. And a marriage like this is a key means of cementing tribal alliances and settling blood debts.

Yes, it may seem unfair to make these arrangements without the consent of the bride, but this is the way things have always been done, and it is the way they must continue to be done. Why, if we could not settle a blood debt by giving a daughter away as chattel, how could we end a vendetta? Without chattel marriage, anarchy and murder would reign!