I realize almost any comment that starts with “what’s the deal with…” should probably be stopped there, but honestly, what is the deal with “bonus tracks”? I mean, just who are we fooling here? If it comes with an album you pay for, it’s just part of the album. There’s nothing provably “bonus” about it. It’s just an insult to your intelligence.
Belichick and Average Situations
November 16, 2009 — Jon
A wide range of commentators have weighed to argue that yes, Bill Belichick made the right call to go for it on 4th and 2 from their own 28 yard line. Many of them use fancy numbers like this post from Advanced NFL Stats:
With 2:00 left and the Colts with only one timeout, a successful conversion wins the game for all practical purposes. A 4th and 2 conversion would be successful 60% of the time. Historically, in a situation with 2:00 left and needing a TD to either win or tie, teams get the TD 53% of the time from that field position. The total WP for the 4th down conversion attempt would therefore be:
(0.60 * 1) + (0.40 * (1-0.53)) = 0.79 WP
A punt from the 28 typically nets 38 yards, starting the Colts at their own 34. Teams historically get the TD 30% of the time in that situation. So the punt gives the Pats about a 0.70 WP.
But here’s the problem with football stats — and apologies to people who listen to me bloviate every Sunday about this — but first, they’re based on relatively small sample sizes. An NFL season is 16 games, and in such a small collection of data points, almost anything can happen that would be less likely to occur in a set of 82 games with tons of possessions like the NBA or a 162 game baseball season. So there’s that.
But outside of these sort of larger epistemic questions though, there’s the problem of using this data in real world situations. Simply put, not all 4th and 2 opportunities are created equally. No matter what the statistical averages suggest, there’s no such thing as an “average” situation in sports in the way there is in blackjack or craps. There are 4th and 2 situations when you’re up big, when you’re down big, when you’re playing a bad team, when you’re playing a good team, when your offense is tired, and many, many, many others, all of which are markedly different playing experiences and will lead to markedly different outcomes.
This lack of a truly “average” situation is only complicated by the limits of inference attributable to historical performances in sports. For example, there’s no theoretically sound reason that it would be impossible for a football team to convert on literally every single fourth down opportunity they faced, or, alternatively to fail on every single opportunity. Unlikely? Of course. But the point remains that there’s no immutable law of probability binding these outcomes. As such, how much faith can you really place in a 9 percent increase in Win Probability — especially when you only have 16 games to play?
Troop Escalation and Public Opinion
November 13, 2009 — JonFirst — sorry for the long delay in posting. I’ve been on vacation working maniacally, and just haven’t had much time to blog. But now I have a brief window of daylight, and just wanted to offer a few thoughts on the question of escalation in Afghanistan.
My regular readers will know that I’m quite skeptical of the War there, mostly because I think the costs associated with prolonged involvement pretty considerably outweigh what potential benefit they might offer. Unfortunately for President Obama, between campaigning on escalation and conservatives who are poised to criticize Obama for anything short of meeting the exact demands of his top commanders, the political situation is fairly tricky (Stephen Walt has a nice summary here). But is it really that dire?
Via Matty Glesias, we see some Gallup polling that shows there might be some more wiggle room than an initial read of the politics would suggest.
As you can see, the public is more or less split unevenly between increasing troops by Gen. McChrystal’s recommendation and beginning to withdraw troops, a view despite obvious public support, hasn’t enjoyed much support within the Administration. Accordingly, this option hasn’t really been taken seriously within the public debate, but it seems that’s starting to the change.
More interesting though is the anemic support for increasing troops by a number less than Gen. McChrystal’s recommendation and maintaining the status quo. In light of this, a “compromise” option of adding troops at a lower level than requested doesn’t seem to have much of a political constituency. Since there hasn’t been much PR groundwork for a scale down, it would be a tough road, but it seems the political stakes lie actually between escalation and scale down. And as Matt Yglesias points out, most of the support for escalation comes from self-identified Republicans, so I’m not sure what pleasing this audience gets Obama politically.
Like I said, it would take a lot of PR groundwork — and probably a few high ranking officials willing to fall on the sword — but I’m optimistic about the options this polling opens up. Ultimately, it seems political interests and national interest might line up on this one.
Election Fallout
November 4, 2009 — JonUnquestionably, conservatives will attempt to spin gubernatorial wins in Virginia and New Jersey as somehow signaling a shift in national mood, but as Kevin Drum points out, when balanced with Democratic pick ups in the House in CA-10 and NY-23, it’s a bit more of a story of ousting the incumbents. What’s more, as Matt Yglesias notes, national polling is actually a better way of gauging the national mood, and that unequivocally favors Barack Obama and the Democrats.
Finally, you can make the argument that Democratic wins in the House are far more important for advancing the national liberal agenda. Brian Beutler at TPM explains:
That creates some simple arithmetic. Yesterday, Democrats had 256 voting members in the House. By week’s end, they’ll have 258. Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could afford to lose no more than 38 Democratic votes on a landmark health care reform bill. Next week, after Owens and Garamendi are sworn in, she can lose up to 40. For legislation this historic and far-reaching, she’ll need every vote she can get–and both seem likely to support reform.
These wins then are a bit more important in strategic terms than the GOP gubernatorial sweep. Ultimately, Democrats will be judged by the success or failure of their policies — much as the GOP was in 2008 — and the greater the likelihood of passing good legislation, the greater the likelihood it will pay electoral dividends down the line.
While it’s important to win elections, a lot of political observers get too caught up these contests as ends in and of themselves, but that’s incredibly short-sighted. Just ask Karl Rove how easy it was to maintain that “permanent Republican majority” in the midst of a decaying health care system, plummeting economy, and unpopular and expensive wars.
Bruce Bartlett Should Understand This
October 29, 2009 — JonFormer Reagan official turned sensible human being Bruce Bartlett holds forth on health care reform:
I don’t dismiss health reform. I just thought it was unwise for the Obama administration to take it up while the economy was in the tank.
For both political and substantive reasons, I thought it should have focused like a laser beam on the economy and related issues like reform of the financial sector.
Secondly, I thought its proposals were ill thought-through and that it would have been better to take the time to develop something more coherent, rather than making things up on the fly, which appears to be the case.
I also believe the administration has done a poor job of addressing what I think is the biggest problem with the American health case system: it costs too much for what we get. We spend in total twice as much of our gross domestic product on health as most other major countries without getting much in return for the extra spending.
Finally, I think the goal of universal coverage is a good one, but the Obama proposal is not properly financed. I think a broad-based new government benefit should be financed with a broad-based tax that is to a large extent paid by the beneficiaries, as is the case with Social Security.
There’s really quite a bit to respond to here, but the first weird thing is that in a prior paragraph Bartlett acknowledges that dramatic spending cuts to entitlement programs (i.e., Medicare and Social Security) are simply infeasible from a political perspective. This is quite true, so it’s not really clear why he doesn’t seem to be able understand how politics have shaped health care reform in the same way. For example, even if you accept the premise that an administration can’t work on more than one issue at a time, it should be obvious to anyone that has worked in politics why Congress isn’t going to take up a massive legislative overhaul in an election year. If health care reform drifts into 2010, it’s going to become even more politicized than it already is, and vulnerable legislators up for reelection are going to have even more whacky incentives than they already do.
Similarly, Bartlett wonders why the administration hasn’t done more to address the efficiency of the system. Of course it’s easy to level these sorts of charges from the outside, but just take a look at where we spend the additional money (from McKinsey).
The dark blue areas illustrate excess spending relative to other countries. So obviously you can see we spend way more proportionally on “health admin & insurance” (the benefit of a private insurance system) and we spend way more on drugs, but by far the biggest quantity is spent on “outpatient care,” or as it’s more commonly known, doctors. Therefore, the easiest way to reduce overall spending in a dramatic fashion would be large, across the board cuts to physicians. First, it’s not clear how you could really do that outside of instituting a single-payer system, and second, if you think entitlement cuts are politically unrealistic, try proposing massive overhaul to institute single-payer health care that would literally halve doctor’s incomes.
Finally, you can say what you like about the harebrained approach to some of the proposals, but it’s worth noting this is a product of the legislative process. Well considered ideas about how to reform the health care system have been around for a long time, but legislators have found they’re difficult to implement cleanly without drawing the ire of powerful interest groups. Thus, you get ideas like non-profit co-ops or a tax on millionaires instead of ending the employer benefit tax exemption.
Overhauling a sixth of the economy is a difficult and messy task, but that doesn’t mean the status quo is preferable.
Mechanics of the Senate Public Plan
October 27, 2009 — Jon
I still haven’t seen this question answered yet, but Robert Pear and David Herszenhorn’s article in this morning’s New York Times offers a pretty good hint at what the “opt-out” mechanism of the Senate’s public plan will look like.
His proposal came with an escape hatch: A state could refuse to participate in the public insurance plan by adopting a law to opt out. Even so, the announcement was a turning point in the debate over how much of a role government should play in an overhauled health care system, and it set the stage for a test of Democratic party unity.
If this is the case, it’s pretty good news for reformers. If a Governor could unilaterally act to opt-out of the public plan, it’s likelier that conservative Governors could withdraw without much fear of electoral backlash. But if opting out requires that a bill pass both houses of a state legislature and be signed into law by a Governor, the process becomes much more difficult, and much more responsive to hyper-local politics.
That said, it seems the public option that’s emerging from the Senate really won’t be the fantastic price control mechanism reformers hoped for. Check out Igor Volskly for more on this, but one important thing to note would be that since the Senate bills don’t create a national exchange, it’s likely that the “public option” would in fact be 50 or so different public options administered at the state level. And since the plan will be a so-called “level playing field” option (and thus unable to piggyback off Medicare rates), it’s unlikely the plan will be able to successfully exert downward pressure on private plans on the exchange. Still, by excising some administrative costs and cutting profit margin, it will save somewhere around the $25 billion over 10 years the CBO estimates for the public plan in the Senate HELP legislation.
Finally, it’s important to stress that the Senate public option is still very much in its infancy, and CBO scores could push political will one way or the other, but I’d expect the plan to look very close to the “level playing field” option outlined above. Moderates have been tepid at best to even the most neutered plans, so I don’t see how the vote counters predict continued support with a plan that’s more liberal than what’s been proposed from the outset.
AP Bravely Defends Insurers From Gross Calumny
October 26, 2009 — JonRon Fournier, Washington, DC Associated Press Bureau Chief who has been accused of inappropriate partisanship tweets this Calvin Woodward “Fact Check,” commenting “Think of insurance companies as rapacious profiteers? Think again.” Thank goodness someone finally decided to debunk this most pernicious and perfidious myth:
WASHINGTON – In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making “immoral” and “obscene” returns while “the bodies pile up.”
But in pillorying insurers over profits, the critics are on shaky ground. Ledgers tell a different reality.
Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.
It might be true that of health care industries, insurers make the least money, and it might be true that relative to other types of insurance, health insurance isn’t wildly profitable. But the point isn’t the level of profits, the point is that in order to make a profit, private health insurers deny care out of hand, exploit preexisting conditions, and through a particularly unseemly practice called “rescission,” pour over medical histories to find previously unreported — and frequently totally unrelated — conditions to invalidate insurance contracts when patients need them most. Studies have found some 12.3 million Americans were discriminated against for pre-existing conditions in the past 3 years, and roughly 20,000 Americans had policies canceled through rescission over the past 5 years (foisting on individuals a total of $300,000,000 in medical bills they expected insurance to cover).
So, is it true that margins on private health insurance aren’t astronomical? Sure. But reformers’ contention has always been that the margins that do exist owe substantially to denying medical services and care to people who actually need it. As the “Fact Check” itself notes, the words used by Democrats are “obscene” and “immoral,” which believe it or not, don’t actually connote a level at which profiting from denying medical care is just, virtuous, or good. Perhaps someone would like to venture an acceptable profit level for contributing to the bankruptcies of 930,000 Americans per year, or worse, the 45,000 Americans who die each year because they lack health insurance?
Someone Tell Ben Nelson What “Opt” Means
October 26, 2009 — Jon
So you may have heard that Supreme and Glorious Leader Olympia Snowe’s preference for a public option “trigger” notwithstanding, things are looking pretty good for some form the public option. However, as with all legislation, so-called moderates are feeling a bit of doody in their underpants. Take it away Ben Nelson!
NELSON: Well, I certainly am not excited about a public option where states would opt out or a robust, as they call it, robust government-run insurance plan. I’ll take a look at the one where states could opt in if they make the decision themselves. Look, I’m a Jeffersonian Democrat. I think the states can make decisions on their own about their own citizen. And so I certainly would look at that. But I’m not sure where this is going. I don’t think we know at this point in time. So I don’t think I can make any decision about anything until I’ve seen everything.
I understand that Senator Nelson represents a conservative state and all, but this notion that a national public option to which states could opt out is somehow incompatible with the belief that “states can make decisions on their own” is really pretty stupid. Whether the construction is “opt out” or “opt in,” the operative word is “opt,” which in English, can roughly be interpreted to mean “make a decision on their own about their own citizen.” Moderates don’t like it because it would put politicians in the position of directly denying a popular initiative to constituents rather than being able to blame someone else for denying a popular initiative to constituents. But this also gives away the whole game. The fact that moderates fear this position demonstrates that the public option is a popular idea that a lot of people want, and that opposition to its creation really stems from a) political incentives for conservatives or b) undue deference to corporate interests. After all, if the public option were unpopular, couldn’t a politician lead the “opt out” movement without fear of reprisal? Of course, it’s difficult to demonstrate capture by industry or conservative politics in a popular way, so instead you get people like Ben Nelson masking their opposition in the form of wishy-washy bullshit about the American character that doesn’t even withstand the lowest level of scrutiny.
By the same token though, the limited practical difference between an “opt-out” and “opt-in” public option means that I’d definitely accept an “opt-in” plan as part of reform. So I guess if this is how soi-disant centrists need to make their mark, then it’s something I can live with. But still, it’s pretty stupid.
$2700 Per Year
October 24, 2009 — JonNow, everybody knows that the U.S. spends an incredible amount of money on defense. One way of looking at this comparing spending next to other major world players.
Pretty staggering. But another way of looking at spending is how much the average American contributes to this budget. This, via Chris Preble at Cato:
The [recently passed $680 billion] defense bill represents only part of our military spending. The appropriations bill moving through Congress governing veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the massive Department of Homeland Security budget weighs in at $42.8 billion. This comprises the visible balance of what Americans spend on our national security, loosely defined. Then there is the approximately $16 billion tucked away in the Energy Department’s budget, money dedicated to the care and maintenance of the country’s huge nuclear arsenal.
All told, every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on these programs and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.
In addition to cost-benefit analysis critiques, it’s worth just letting this number sink in a bit. That dwarfs the individual cost of Medicare ($1,083), Medicaid ($620), or Social Security ($1,813). Something tells me Americans would be a bit less enthusiastic about foreign misadventure and outward force projection if they knew how much it cost them.
Polarization, Bipartisanship, and Powerful Interests
October 23, 2009 — Jon
I always appreciate a little bit of Taibbi vitriol, but I think this is a pretty poor read of the Democratic predicament:
This is all a long-winded way of saying that we have problems whose solutions involve taking on powerful interests, political challenges that will necessarily involve prolonged and hard-fought conflicts, but what we have in the Democratic Party is an organization dedicated to avoiding such conflicts and resolving issues in the manner of a corporate board, in closed meetings with the chief cardholders where things get hashed out to the satisfaction of everyone present.
Outside the world of political reality, it’s easy to complain about the lack of chutzpah among Democrats in standing up to powerful interest groups, but it really is hard. After all, that’s why they’re called powerful interest groups. I think there are two interrelated causes here, and none in particular has much to do with deference to the political Establishment.
First, this can be understood as a result of Republican intransigence. It’s simply not possible for vulnerable politicians who seek reelection to take on both the Republicans and powerful interest groups at the same time. If Ben Nelson sticks it to a powerful lobby, you can bet that lobby is going to come full force in support of their opponent and significantly endanger reelection prospects. And yes, Ben Nelson isn’t my dream Senator, but there’s no denying he’s better than a conservative Republican. This problem could be avoided however, if Republicans weren’t for the most part fixated on accumulating political power for its own sake and instead acknowledged that there is in fact a health care crisis or that climate change is happening, it would free Democrats to crack down on interest groups without fear of partisan reprisal. Voila.
Second, it’s not entirely fair to pin this on Republicans. You have to acknowledge that today’s current level of polarization (consider perfect partisan sorting in the Senate — the most conservative Democrat is more liberal the most liberal Republican) doesn’t much allow for actual bipartisan coalitions. That is, if you’re making a bipartisan deal it necessarily has to be with someone further down the ideological spectrum, which when weighed with political incentives, makes agreements exceedingly difficult. This wasn’t the case in other periods like the 1960s, when you saw northern Republicans — now largely extinct — band with northern Democrats to pass the Civil Rights Act. There are definitely some advantages to a more polarized Congress, but the difficulty of employing bipartisanship to overcome powerful interest groups certainly isn’t one of them.
Finally, it’s worth noting that both of these causes are exacerbated by the recent trend towards the perma-filibuster.
I should finish by saying that Taibbi isn’t entirely incorrect. Democrats do have 60 votes in the Senate, so it’s plausible that a certain amassing of collective will could overcome these groups, but a) it doesn’t guarantee that full cooperation between Republicans and interest groups wouldn’t derail things entirely and b) it would likely result in pretty massive turnover in the next election. Would the risk of failure and the likely loss of seats be worth it? I don’t really know the answer to that question, but I don’t think it’s as clear as Taibbi thinks.
