Most Americans have little or no idea what’s actually contained in the health care reforms successfully passed despite fierce and unanimous Republican opposition. Drew Altman of the Kaiser Family Foundation reviews a few provisions:
“Since the bill's passage, the Department of Health and Human Services has set up a program to help people with preexisting health conditions get coverage through state or federal high-risk pools; established a program to help employers provide health insurance to early retirees; issued rebates to help pay drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries stuck in the "doughnut hole"; provided tax credits to small businesses to provide insurance coverage; and created a consumer-friendly Web site, http://HealthCare.gov, that rivals anything coming out of Silicon Valley (where our organization is based).
“Several popular provisions take effect Thursday [today]. They include allowing adult children up to age 26 to be on their parents' insurance; banning lifetime benefits caps and loosening annual limits on insurance coverage payouts; prohibiting insurance companies from kicking people off of their policies when they get sick; and requiring that newly purchased insurance policies cover preventive services at no cost to patients.”
Individually, Altman points out, these provisions have overwhelming support among the public. Many other provisions don’t go into effect until 2014, a concession that was made toward controlling budget deficits. Most of those are also widely popular, the one exception being that most people will eventually be required to have insurance, even if they have to buy it themselves. But universal coverage is the greatest cost saver in the plan, and I can see no real difference between requiring drivers to have auto insurance and everybody else to have health insurance. Besides, the cost of such coverage will be keyed to ability to pay and in fact will be minimal.
Almost all of the voluntarily uninsured today are young people who never believe they can get seriously ill or injured. They’re almost right, statistically, but those who do quickly convert to a public liability when they lose jobs and go on unemployment or welfare and become eligible for Medicaid. In other words, all the rest of us are involuntarily subsidizing their health care in the current system. Talk about socialism.
Altman notes that expansions of benefits in the past, including Medicare itself, were widely unpopular at the time they were passed, but opposition evaporated quickly as the programs began to take effect.
The Republicans’ “Pledge to American,” released today, promises to repeal Obama’s health care reforms. Not a chance. And when we begin to ask specific questions about things like why they want to repeal the exclusion of preexisting conditions for health coverage, they’re going to have a hard time answering.
Look for lots of prevarication and a quick return to talking points:
Talk about socialism.
[P.S.
Liberal elite media watch:
Neither NBC nor PBS ran a story on the changes in health care policy which went into effect today. Both covered the Republican Pledge to America.]
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Four thoughts of autumn
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
George Eliot
No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.
John Donne
Elegy IX--The Autumnal.
The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall.
Johnny Mercer
[There are so many fine versions of Autumn Leaves. An unlikely favorite of mine is Nick Brignola's, medium-tempo on a baritone sax, from his album Live at Sweet Basil.]
Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.
William Cullen Bryant
George Eliot
No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.
John Donne
Elegy IX--The Autumnal.
The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall.
Johnny Mercer
[There are so many fine versions of Autumn Leaves. An unlikely favorite of mine is Nick Brignola's, medium-tempo on a baritone sax, from his album Live at Sweet Basil.]
Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.
William Cullen Bryant
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
A few facts
An article in today's Washington Post announces that for the first time, women are now earning doctoral degrees in greater numbers than men. We've reached this point in a trend that has been developing for decades. There have long been more undergraduate women than men. It just took a few years for the female majorities to move up the educational ladder.
It takes an average of seven years to earn a Ph.D.
Men are now underrepresented in higher education for several reasons: they are less likely to finish high school, more likely to join the military, and more likely to go to jail. Although at seven years, jail wouldn't be a bad place to earn a Ph.D. It's that or lifting weights.
Once in an academic position, women's salaries lag men's, mostly because careers conflict with having children. Pursuing tenure takes a full six years, and those are the prime childbearing years. (The actual pursuit of childbearing takes only nine months, which is well-known.) But while men are busy doing research and publishing articles and books, women are changing diapers, though I know a few women whose careers have left their male colleagues far behind.
The average salary for male tenured professors is $89,000. For women, $70,000. It's hard to persuade a public whose average salaries are closer to $30,000 that faculty are underpaid, but compared to other professions, many of which require less education, those salaries are on the low end. At Oregon Institute of Technology, where I taught for twenty years, it wasn't uncommon for new graduates just entering the workforce to earn higher salaries than faculty at the peak of their careers. I thought we should earn a small percentage of each graduate's salary for their first five years of employment. That would only be fair.
We should also get a company car. I always wanted a Porche but ended up driving a Mitsubishi. I mean, come on.
I never earned more that $50,000, a member of the lowest-paid department at the lowest-paid institution in the lowest-paid system in the nation. Still, I never felt much resentment about salary. In my field when I started, there were on average over a hundred applicants for every new position. I felt lucky to break into the field at all. Talk about landing on your feet.
Today, there are on average three applicants for every position, and two of them still have a year or so to go in jail before they complete their Ph.D. We try to hire candidates with the fewest felony convictions, though it takes more than just one assault to get seven years. Not to mention time off for good behavior.
Despite relatively low salaries, Mary and I were both able to retire at 55. Chances are high that this benefit will become completely extinct starting about next Tuesday, what with the aging population, worries about Social Security, and shrunken retirement savings resulting from the implosion in the value of investmens.
Again we were lucky based on a few happy circumstances, like double-income/no kids (DINKs). This is the quickest path to early retirement. For every baby you don't have, you can retire five years earlier. If you don't have only nine babies, you never have to work at all. And because of compound interes, the earlier you start not having babies, the earlier you can retire
Also, we lived in about the least expensive housing market in the country. When we moved here in the early eighties, they would just give you a house. You had to agree to keep the lawn mowed.
And we had a generous state pension system (Gone now: one of the reasons I retired early was to minimize major cuts in pensions that are now in place). Finally, modest personal savings that sounded like a lot of money at the time. Once you do retire, though, you remember that you have to divide those savings by the rest of your life. You realize it's not all that much money and start saying things like, "I'm living on a fixed income!" Most people would kill today to be able to live on a fixed income.
The main factor in a happy academic career is a congenial department, which means that few to none in higher education are all that happy. My own department consisted of two or three members with diagnosed major mental problems, including myself, and all the rest who needed to get to the mental-health emergency room right now but never did because they were convinced they were the only sane person in the department. Some of them were also convinced they could fly.
I've now been retired eight years, which amazes me to think about it. I'm glad I got out early, though. My remaining mental health required it, and my current condition has recently been upgraded to just "eccentric." I'm very happy, relatively.
Also, my former colleague Jim Etchison just died of a heart attack while on vacation in Maui. His wife was taking his picture and he fell over dead. Jim was sixty-two; I am sixty-two.
It saddens me. Jim was a sweet guy who was always laughing. If there's an afterlife, I picture him laughing at the irony of dying on Maui at age sixty-two while your wife is taking your picture. This is how I would like to go, too, but in maybe twenty years. Or thirty. I'll try to give Mary a heads-up a minute or two before.
If I had it to do over, I wouldn't change a thing.
Yes I would. Who could ever say that? They must have bad memories.
It takes an average of seven years to earn a Ph.D.
Men are now underrepresented in higher education for several reasons: they are less likely to finish high school, more likely to join the military, and more likely to go to jail. Although at seven years, jail wouldn't be a bad place to earn a Ph.D. It's that or lifting weights.
Once in an academic position, women's salaries lag men's, mostly because careers conflict with having children. Pursuing tenure takes a full six years, and those are the prime childbearing years. (The actual pursuit of childbearing takes only nine months, which is well-known.) But while men are busy doing research and publishing articles and books, women are changing diapers, though I know a few women whose careers have left their male colleagues far behind.
The average salary for male tenured professors is $89,000. For women, $70,000. It's hard to persuade a public whose average salaries are closer to $30,000 that faculty are underpaid, but compared to other professions, many of which require less education, those salaries are on the low end. At Oregon Institute of Technology, where I taught for twenty years, it wasn't uncommon for new graduates just entering the workforce to earn higher salaries than faculty at the peak of their careers. I thought we should earn a small percentage of each graduate's salary for their first five years of employment. That would only be fair.
We should also get a company car. I always wanted a Porche but ended up driving a Mitsubishi. I mean, come on.
I never earned more that $50,000, a member of the lowest-paid department at the lowest-paid institution in the lowest-paid system in the nation. Still, I never felt much resentment about salary. In my field when I started, there were on average over a hundred applicants for every new position. I felt lucky to break into the field at all. Talk about landing on your feet.
Today, there are on average three applicants for every position, and two of them still have a year or so to go in jail before they complete their Ph.D. We try to hire candidates with the fewest felony convictions, though it takes more than just one assault to get seven years. Not to mention time off for good behavior.
Despite relatively low salaries, Mary and I were both able to retire at 55. Chances are high that this benefit will become completely extinct starting about next Tuesday, what with the aging population, worries about Social Security, and shrunken retirement savings resulting from the implosion in the value of investmens.
Again we were lucky based on a few happy circumstances, like double-income/no kids (DINKs). This is the quickest path to early retirement. For every baby you don't have, you can retire five years earlier. If you don't have only nine babies, you never have to work at all. And because of compound interes, the earlier you start not having babies, the earlier you can retire
Also, we lived in about the least expensive housing market in the country. When we moved here in the early eighties, they would just give you a house. You had to agree to keep the lawn mowed.
And we had a generous state pension system (Gone now: one of the reasons I retired early was to minimize major cuts in pensions that are now in place). Finally, modest personal savings that sounded like a lot of money at the time. Once you do retire, though, you remember that you have to divide those savings by the rest of your life. You realize it's not all that much money and start saying things like, "I'm living on a fixed income!" Most people would kill today to be able to live on a fixed income.
The main factor in a happy academic career is a congenial department, which means that few to none in higher education are all that happy. My own department consisted of two or three members with diagnosed major mental problems, including myself, and all the rest who needed to get to the mental-health emergency room right now but never did because they were convinced they were the only sane person in the department. Some of them were also convinced they could fly.
I've now been retired eight years, which amazes me to think about it. I'm glad I got out early, though. My remaining mental health required it, and my current condition has recently been upgraded to just "eccentric." I'm very happy, relatively.
Also, my former colleague Jim Etchison just died of a heart attack while on vacation in Maui. His wife was taking his picture and he fell over dead. Jim was sixty-two; I am sixty-two.
It saddens me. Jim was a sweet guy who was always laughing. If there's an afterlife, I picture him laughing at the irony of dying on Maui at age sixty-two while your wife is taking your picture. This is how I would like to go, too, but in maybe twenty years. Or thirty. I'll try to give Mary a heads-up a minute or two before.
If I had it to do over, I wouldn't change a thing.
Yes I would. Who could ever say that? They must have bad memories.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
Mary and I took a ride today, met some friends for lunch, then rode up to the Crater Lake north entrance and around the Rim Road. It was a perfect day, cool up on top but still warm enough for a late summer ride. The lake was especially beautiful.
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