Health insurance: return of the bad old days

Richard Mayhew, at Balloon Juice, is an insurance industry middle-manager who writes at Balloon Juice. A week ago he wrote a piece entitled "Recission and the Bad Old Days," about all the excuses insurance companies could use to withdraw coverage and dump people into medical bankruptcy. Which of course is an excellent reason to maintain or improve on the ACA.

But I wonder…Mayhew was in the health insurance industry well before the ACA was passed. How did he sleep at night, knowing what was paying his salary? How did any health insurance employees sleep?

And the Trump administration is committing to bringing those times back.

Why So Many Bad Doctors?

Dr. Ben Carson, who everyone remembers from the Republican primary as being uninformed and uncompassionate, is Trump's choice for Director of Housing and Urban Development. Now the word is that Dr. Tom Price, who is anti-abortion, homophobic, ammosexual, and who wants to turn Medicare into an underfunded and inadequate insurance system, is going to be head of Health and Human Services.

Does anyone else think it is odd that such horrific people have medical licenses? Dr. Carson, I gather, is at least an excellent surgeon, but I doubt that Dr. Price is even that. Doctors, as licensed professionals, are required to act ethically. How did Price ever slip through?

Two Baskets

This is from Hillary Clinton's speech, in which she called out that fascists of the alt-right who supported Trump and was roundly blasted for calling all of Trump's supporters deplorable. She was right, and has been consistently misquoted.

Now, she probably ought not to have said this. People hate hearing they are wrong, especially when they are. And her husband's administration had a big part putting people into the second basket, the people who "feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change." Still, I am not at all sure that saying it made much difference. Her words were endlessly twisted during the campaign, apparently out of simple sexism. When Trump said something awful and crazy, he got the benefit of the doubt; when Clinton said something decent, sympathetic, and valid, she got blasted.

So here's the "two baskets" quote, and as things go more and more wrong in a Trump administration we can remember that she got it right.

I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don’t get complacent, don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think well he’s done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

[Laughter/applause]

The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well. —Time.com

25 years to losing

I've discussed the short-term reasons for the Democratic electoral loss in "It's the Sexism, Stupid." But the long-term reason is 25 years of support by both parties for the interests of the wealthy over everyone else. So when Trump offered even a tiny bit of hope, enough voters latched on to it to make common cause with the basket of deplorables and, here we are.

The Case for Auditing the Vote

Or, Jill Stein may have done us an actual service.

J. Alex Halderman:

Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other. — J. Alex Halderman, Director, University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, medium.com

Ron Rivest:

“I wouldn’t be surprised, in light of the DNC, that major voting systems have been compromised,” said Ron Rivest, a founding father of modern encryption systems and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who won the Turing Award, computing’s version of the Nobel Prize. “We do need to be concerned about the integrity of our voting systems in the face of possible attacks by foreign nation-states.— bostonglobe.com”

Barbara Simons:

“If it’s a swing state, those votes could conceivably decide which party wins that state,” said Barbara Simons, past president of the Association for Computing Machinery and an adviser to the US Election Assistance Commission. — bostonglobe.com, previous cite.

These are not lightweight figures. Rivest in particular is a major figure in cryptography. We may be doing this for all the wrong reasons, but it’s a worthwhile thing to do; audits ought to be routine.

Still, going to be one more excuse for Republicans not to count votes. But then, they don’t need excuses.

Deflationary Policy and the Gig Economy

So, what happens?

Uber and the other Transportation Network Companies

Near as I can figure, Uber will start turning drivers away in harder-hit cities; it's the only way to keep the service going. Who is going to bother working with a service that scarcely will provide any work at all? If Uber is going to keep going, it will have to require drivers to put in minimums, and select from among those who do. And, no unemployment insurance for the now out-of-work drivers.

Of course, the founders having made their pile and then some, they could just fold the company.

AirBNB and similar firms

Likely AirBNB goes under. Most of the "unlicensed hotel" AirBNB sellers and similar do go under; they most likely borrowed to fund their services and will not be able to keep up their payments. The legal AirBNB providers may also get hammered; some of them have borrowed to build extensions to their homes and will have also have trouble making the payments. Some people may lose their homes. On the other hand, it may be that regular hotels in cities that are hit hard enough that the whole market switches to AirBNB instead.

That whole thing about entrepreneurship, capitalism, and so on

You're an entrepreneur if you on take financial risk. During a downturn, businesses go under and small businesses of limited capital, like Uber drivers and small AirBNB sellers, go first.

If a Trump administration tanks the economy, there's going to be a lot of unhappy people!

Deflationary policy, or "Mom, they're nuts!" part II

We have here a Krugman post titled, "Why is deflation bad?"

The short-short summary is: (1) it discourages investment; (2) it makes debt harder to bear; (3) it can lead to mass unemployment. If the Republicans do what they say they're going to do, a slam into depression is possible.

I wonder if the people already impoverished by 30 years of neo-liberal economics will, reject the leadership of the Trump administration, or if instead they will double down, and blame the (Jewish, Muslim, African-American) bankers.