haha, nice.

"A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip." -- Caskie Stinnett

Tyrants's Task

"The task of the tyrant is not to compel, but to persuade even the unwilling that compliance better serves their interest than resistance"-OSC, from 'Ender in Exile'

Time to get cliche people...

It has to be done: my two cents on the "historic event" that happened today when the democrats kicked themselves out of office...

Sure, there are several ways to look at this bill (H.R.4872) - in other words, lots of gaping holes to poke it through. But I will stay with the simplest one to understand and the most blaring problem to go unaddressed by the White House....and that is the Individual Mandate for health care and a term we economists like to refer to as Adverse Selection.

The Economist ( www.economist.com ) defines Adverse Selection as:

When you do business with people you would be better off avoiding. This is one of two main sorts of market failure often associated with insurance. The other is moral hazard. Adverse selection can be a problem when there is asymmetric information between the seller of insurance and the buyer; in particular, insurance will often not be profitable when buyers have better information about their risk of claiming than does the seller. Ideally, insurance premiums should be set according to the risk of a randomly selected person in the insured slice of the population (55-year-old male smokers, say). In practice, this means the average risk of that group. When there is adverse selection, people who know they have a higher risk of claiming than the average of the group will buy the insurance, whereas those who have a below-average risk may decide it is too expensive to be worth buying. In this case, premiums set according to the average risk will not be sufficient to cover the claims that eventually arise, because among the people who have bought the policy more will have above-average risk than below-average risk. Putting up the premium will not solve this problem, for as the premium rises the insurance policy will become unattractive to more of the people who know they have a lower risk of claiming. One way to reduce adverse selection is to make the purchase of insurance compulsory, so that those for whom insurance priced for average risk is unattractive are not able to opt out.

...sigh... Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard - two sides of the same coin that destroys an individual mandate for Health care (insurance).

The young people will only get health insurance (and pay a fine lesser than the cost of health insurance) when they get sick because now they can not be refused for prior illness. Adverse Selection is achieved: only the sick get health insurance (when they actually need it). Moral hazard would be what we see in Canada with increase queue times for getting treatment - because EVERYONE with insurance will goto the doctor for any little reason, because why not?

SIGH. So many ways to reform health care...SO MANY WAYS...and we choose to slowly strangle the health care system to death. I guess that is one sort of reform. Thanks Obama! Way to put your presidential weight behind something SO productive, that will create jobs and lessen deficit spending....oh wait.

I call it now, Obama signed his pink slip for serving only 1 term as president when he signed the dotted line on the "Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010 (H.R.4872).

Moron.