Tag Archives: U.S. politics

The Argument Culture

In 1998, Deborah Tannen wrote a book called The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words. Basically what it describes is a culture where the objective of every discussion is to win, not to seek consensus or at least come to understand the reasons for other people’s positions.

Our society has become overwhelmingly adversarial, with consequences not only in our ability to solve problems but also in our personal relationships.  The war on drugs, the battle of the sexes, politicians’ turf battles—war metaphors pervade our talk and shape our thinking, urging us to approach anything we need to accomplish as a fight between two opposing sides.

Tannen traces this tendency to the history of our educational system, and shows its roots among boys at play.  Exploring how other cultures approach opposition, and discussing the influence of electronic communication in ratcheting up the level of aggression, Tannen shows how we can move toward more constructive dialogue in our public as well our private lives.  This book will change forever how you see forces that powerfully shape our lives, and suggests new ways of reaching our goals.

An American Sickness

The New York Times has a review of a new book called An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back. Here’s an excerpt from the review:

Rosenthal thinks the health care market is different, and she sums up these differences as the “economic rules of the dysfunctional medical market.” There are 10 — some obvious (No. 9: “There’s money to be made in billing for anything and everything”); some humorous (No. 2: “A lifetime of treatment is preferable to a cure”) — but No. 10 is the big one: “Prices will rise to whatever the market will bear.” To Rosenthal, that’s the answer to Scalia’s question. The health care market doesn’t work like other markets because “what the market will bear” is vastly greater than what a well-functioning market should bear. As Rosenthal describes American health care, it’s not really a market; it’s more like a protection racket — tolerated only because so many different institutions are chipping in to cover the extortionary bill and because, ultimately, it’s our lives that are on the line…

The difference between the United States and other countries isn’t the role of insurance; it’s the role of government. More specifically, it’s the way in which those who benefit from America’s dysfunctional market have mobilized to use government to protect their earnings and profits. In every country where people have access to sophisticated medical care, they must rely heavily on the clinical expertise of providers and the financial protections of insurance, which, in turn, creates the opportunity for runaway costs. But in every other rich country, the government not only provides coverage to all citizens; it also provides strong counterpressure to those who seek to use their inherent market power to raise prices or deliver lucrative but unnecessary services — typically in the form of hard limits on how much health care providers can charge.

In the United States, such counterpressure has been headed off again and again. The industry and its elected allies have happily supported giveaways to the medical sector. But anything more, they insist, will kill the market. Although this claim is in conflict with the evidence, it is consistent with the goal of maximum rewards to (and donations from) the industry. As a result, Medicare beneficiaries have prescription drug coverage (passed by Republicans in 2003), but Medicare administrators have no ability to do what every other rich country does: negotiate lower drug prices. In January, President Trump said drug companies were “getting away with murder” because they had “a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power,” insisting he would get Medicare to bargain. Should we really be surprised that the dealmaker in chief dropped the subject after meeting with pharma executives earlier this year?

At the individual level, there are really only two things I can think of to do. One is to attempt to shop around for health care. If you call your doctors office or hospital and ask for the price they charge for a particular service you are considering buying, which is how every other market works, they are likely to laugh at you. Your insurance company might actually help though. I have tried this with Blue Cross Blue Shield with limited success, but it definitely takes time and effort. The second option is to go abroad for checkups, lab work, and elective procedures. It’s not that hard to combine a vacation with a doctor or dentist visit. Insurance companies will generally cover it, because it will almost always save them money, but you definitely have to talk to them in advance. Foreign hospitals (I have experience in Singapore and Thailand) will sometimes bill U.S. insurance companies provided you have a letter form the insurance company up front. Otherwise you might have to front the cash and do the paperwork for reimbursement when you get back.

Like I said, all this takes time and effort, but there are significant savings to be had. So why aren’t third parties stepping into the vacuum to make comparison shopping and medical tourism easier for the masses?

March 2017 in Review

Most frightening stories:

  • La Paz, Bolivia, is in a serious crisis caused by loss of its glacier-fed water supply. At the same time we are losing glaciers and snowpack in important food-growing regions, the global groundwater situation is also looking bleak. And for those of us trying to do our little part for water conservation, investing in a residential graywater system can take around 15 years to break even at current costs and water rates.
  • Trump admires Andrew Jackson, who I consider a genocidal lunatic and the worst President in U.S. history.
  • Fluoridated drinking water could eventually be looked back on as a really stupid idea that damaged several generations of developing brains, like leaded gasoline. Or not…I’m not sure who to believe on the issue but caution is clearly warranted.

Most hopeful stories:

  • A new political survey says there is a chance that a majority of Americans are not bat-shit crazy. Which suggests they might not be too serious about Steve Bannon, who believes in some bat-shit crazy stuff. There are a number of apps and guides out there to help sane people pester our elected representatives when they fail to represent our interests.
  • South Korean women are projected to be the first to break the barrier of an average life expectancy of 90, with a 50% probability of this happening by 2030.
  • Advanced power strips can reduce the so-called “vampire loads” of our modern electronic devices that are never really off.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • This long NASA article first gets you excited about the possibility of life on eight new planets it has just discovered, and then throws cold water (actually, make that lethal X-rays) all over your excitement.
  • Bill Gates has proposed a “robot tax”. The basic idea is that if and when automation starts to increase productivity, you could tax the increase in profits and use the money to help any workers displaced by the automation. In related somewhat boring economic news, there are a variety of theories as to why a raise in the minimum wage does not appear to cause unemployment as classical economic theory would predict.
  • CRISPR could be used to create new crops out of the wild ancestors of our current crops.

America’s worst President: “does that sound familiar?”

My vote has always been for Andrew Jackson, for two reasons. First, he destabilized the financial system, ushering in a century of unnecessary chaos. Second, he mounted a truly evil genocidal campaign against ethnic minorities. To quote Donald Trump (just slightly out of context), “does that sound familiar?”

By the way, I put Truman second for dropping the bomb. Then Lyndon Johnson, for the blood on his hands in Vietnam. I would put George W. Bush in the top 5 or so for starting two aggressive, unnecessary wars and destabilizing an entire region of the globe. If Trump manages to destroy our health care system and set climate change mitigation back by a decade, he may deserve a top 5. If there is a major war or nuclear detonation on his watch, he may still earn that #1 spot.

February 2017 in Review

3 most frightening stories

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • The idea of growing human organs inside a pig, or even a viable human-pig hybrid, is getting very close. Tiny brains can also be grown on a microchip. Bringing back extinct animals is also getting very close.
  • Russian hackers are cheating slot machines by figuring out the pattern on pseudo-random numbers they generate.
  • From a new book called Homo Deus: “For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.”

January 2017 in Review

I just realized I forgot to do a month in review post in January. Well, I had a lot going on in my personal life in January, most notably the arrival of a tiny new human being. Blog posts are not the only thing I forgot – I forgot to pay some important bills and to do some important paperwork at my job too.

3 most frightening stories

  • Cheetahs are in serious trouble.
  • The U.S. government may be “planning to roll back or dilute many of the provisions of Dodd-Frank, particularly those that protect consumers from toxic financial products and those that impose restrictions on banks”.
  • “Between 1946 and 2000, the US and the Soviet Union/Russia have intervened in about one of every nine competitive national-level executive elections.” The “Great Game” is back in Afghanistan.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

apps for pestering Congress

Here are some apps you can use to pester your elected representatives semi-automatically. Please, do not use them for revenge, stalking, or other nefarious purposes.

  • Countable – sets up a website app to email all your elected representatives the same message with a few clicks (I don’t think this is free though…)
  • Democracy.io – similar email app and free (I think)
  • FaxZero – similar, for faxes

Calling is supposed to be the most effective. If you have the time and motivation to do that, here are a couple articles: Call the Halls and and this Wired article called Congress’ Phone System Is Broken—But It’s Still Your Best Shot.

what Americans believe

Apparently Survey Monkey does a weekly poll of what actual Americans actually believe. Respondents are self-selected, but Survey Monkey tries to use demographic weighting to obtain representative results. A few interesting outcomes from the February 22 edition:

  • 54% disapprove of Trump, and 43% strongly disapprove.
  • 55% disapprove of Democrats in Congress and 59% disapprove of Republicans.
  • 60% have confidence in the judicial system.
  • 52% have a favorable impression of the Affordable Care Act.
  • 56% oppose building a border wall with Mexico.
  • 47% would like to see National Parks expanded, and only 9% would like to see them shrunk.
  • 68% oppose taxpayer-funded vouchers for private school.
  • 80% support NATO.
  • 66% are worried about a major war in the next four years.
  • 58% have a family member or close acquaintance who is an immigrant.

If I had more time I wouldn’t mind having a more thorough understanding of the sampling and weighting involved, but on their face these numbers just support the idea that our politics is broken. Our politicians are not delivering policies that a majority of Americans would support, which suggests our voting system is not delivering politicians who really represent us.

U.S. Endangered Species Act

The Los Angeles Times says a Trump administration attack on the Endangered Species Act could be coming. The last paragraph of the article has a links to number of (sincere) criticisms of the act and ideas for how it could be improved.

The act does have its shortcomings. The focus is on habitat preservation, which is important, but scientists now believe there need to be more adaptive solutions, such as public-private partnerships to integrate wildlife habitats with development, and more efficient use of the act as the nation adapts to changing habitats. That should be the road map for revising the act, and conservationists from the left and right need to pressure Congress to ensure pro-development forces don’t destroy the act under the guise of fixing it.

banking deregulation is back

Remember that financial crisis thing in 2008 where U.S. financial firms almost destroyed the world economy? No, neither does anyone in Congress, because they are dead set on destroying the regulations put in place after the crisis to try to keep it from happening again. Here is a long article from the Center for Public Integrity.