“Insofar as the public option has been presented as a big part of the answer to our health-care woes, it’s been in part because it won’t do the things that make insurers unpopular (the saying “no”), and in part because it will control costs. But the only way to make both those things true at once is to give the public option pricing power along the lines of Medicare, which it doesn’t have in either the House or Senate bills.”
—Ezra Klein: Will the public plan have higher premiums than private insurance?
October 2009
Play
“[I]n 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the ‘healthy user effect.’ They hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term…. Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the ‘frail elderly’ didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all…. Jackson’s papers were turned down for publication in the top-ranked medical journals. One flu expert who reviewed her studies for the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, ‘To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!’”
—Do flu vaccines work?
Harry Reid is expected to introduce a health care bill that includes an opt-out option for the states — meaning everyone living in a state controlled by the GOP in 2013 (when health care reforms would kick-in if passed) can kiss the public option good-bye.
What is the problem? I’m 100% in favor of health care reform that only benefits people who live in Blue states. This is like when the Republican governors wanted their states to turn down the stimulus money. More for us!!
“For 2009, total foreclosures are estimated to be 2.4 million. But coupling state-by-state delinquency rates and foreclosure starts (as reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association) with other data, the [Center for Responsible Lending] projects that for most states, foreclosure totals will more than triple over the coming 4 years, for a total of 8.1 million foreclosures, with only about one in ten of these being saved thanks to court-supervised modifications. These figures are consistent with the reset data I’ve repeatedly presented - it appears to be wishful thinking to believe that the credit crisis is over. Most likely, what we’ve witnessed in recent months is little more than the combination of a lull in the reset schedule coupled with a wholly unsustainable burst of deficit spending amounting to over 7% of GDP.”
—John Hussman
The next crisis is already under way →
creditwritedowns.com
Everyone has referenced Einhorn’s latest. It’s good, but this was the best thing I read today. Punchline:
What you should draw from this is the following:
The Great Moderation is revealed as an illusion once we reach the zero bound, where interest rates are near zero. At this point the asset-price reflation can no longer rely on interest rates alone, but must also use increasingly heavy-handed tactics to get the economy going. This is where we now are.
Terminal Debt is fast approaching. Steve Keen believes we are at a Terminal Debt stage, where no more debt can possibly be accumulated to revive growth. However, I have presented you with evidence that this is not necessarily the case (see posts here and here). Nevertheless, it is fast approaching.
The central bank is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. This was the takeaway of the Scylla and Charybdis post: All roads lead to a W-style Japanese depression or a deflationary bust because deflation is secular (Terminal Debt) while inflation is cyclical (asset prices). An inflationary scenario will invite a policy response which kills the recovery.
This is good for government bonds but not for risky assets. Longer-term, this is a good environment for government bonds. They are the risk-free asset in an environment of secular deflation. Shares are not a good investment in this situation despite huge rallies. Remember, we saw huge bear market rallies after 1929 and again in Japan after 1990.
Excellent post.
Listen
Homesick by Kings of Convenience
“Today, my younger cousin announced his plans to live forever. I told him it was impossible. He said, ‘Yeah? Well so far, it’s working.’ MLIA”
—MyLifeIsAverage
Wall Street’s motto.
“The notion that battery E.V.’s and plug-in hybrids might be too quiet has gained backing in Congress, among federal regulators and on the Internet. The Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, introduced early this year, would require a federal safety standard to protect pedestrians from ultra-quiet cars.”
—
Counter-productive.
Hybrid Cars May Include Fake Vroom for Safety - NYTimes
(via dpstyles)My family beta tested the GM EV1 in 1997 for two weeks. That car was practically silent. You really could sneak up on pedestrians and that was before everyone had white earbuds in. GM’s solution was pretty simple. There were two horns: a fairly quiet, pedestrian horn and a normal horn. How much more complicated do we need to get with this?
“The [U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species] office in Geneva confirmed that Monaco has submitted a formal bid to add bluefin tuna to the Annex I list of threatened species and that the proposal will be part of the formal agenda at the next general conference in Doha, Qatar, in March 2010. An Annex I listing grants species the highest level of protection, allowing for the continuation of a domestic market but banning all imports or exports of animals and their parts on the list.”
—Is the Bluefin Tuna an Endangered Species?
“Traffic lights that were once co-ordinated for car speeds were adjusted to cater to the pace of the average cyclist, allowing them to travel long distances without ever getting a red light. To increase safety, stop lines for cars are five metres behind those for bikes. Cyclists get a green light up to 12 seconds ahead of cars to help increase their visibility.”
—Copenhagen: Bicycling paradise of the day
