Rescinding recission
Causality and the cancellation of health coverage over unreported pre-existing conditions
Laura Clawson at Daily Kos writes about a health insurance company maneuver known as recission, which she suggests “pretty much everyone agrees is a disgusting, immoral practice.”
Recission is when health insurers cancel coverage because they claim they were misled. So, for example, if you mentioned your peanut allergy when you applied for coverage — but not your elbow tendinitis — your insurer could void your coverage if they ever found you had lied.
Stated that way, it doesn’t sound so bad. After all, you did fail to report your condition and violated an agreement with the insurance company.
Yet the reality is often more complex. Read more
Irving Kristol
The intellectual godfather of neoconservatism
Irving Kristol died Friday. From the 1950s through the 1990s, Kristol’s thought characterized a strain of conservatism known as neoconservatism. It is fascinating intellectual story. The evolution of liberal, Trostskyite intellectuals – who were, as Kristol famously described, “mugged by reality” – into conservative standard-bearers.
This is a description that summarized Kristol’s own experiences as a New Deal Democrat who questioned the means (though not necessarily the ends) of President Johnson’s Great Society. Kristol and neoconservatives like him believed in the limits of social policy, that is, the extent to which government programs can produce positive results without unintended negative consequences. With Kristol’s help, this idea came to animate Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the high point for neoconservativism. Read more
Can robots make ethical decisions?
Assembly line robots feel alienated from their work, ponder socialism, still hate hippies.
This piece discusses “Modelling Morality with Prospective Logic,” where Luís Moniz Pereira and Ari Saptawijaya declare that morality is no longer the exclusive realm of human philosophers.
They accomplished this feat by resolving the hidden rules that people use in making moral judgments and then modeling them for the computer using prospective logic programs.
-Jake
CBOo-hoo?
Last week, Jake praised the impetus behind the creation of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Yesterday, The New Repbulic‘s Noam Scheiber questioned whether they do their job well.
He also provides at least one answer to Jake’s question about why three sets of facts — CBO, Democratic, and Republican — don’t align.
Good in principle, bad in practice?
–Sam
My professor voted for McCain
Just kidding. That’s impossible.
Mark Lilla, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses the lack of conservative faculty and lack of interest in conservative thought in American academia. He writes:
Over the past decade, our universities have made serious efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on the campus (economic diversity worries them less, for some reason). Well-paid deans work exclusively on the problem. But universities show not the slightest interest in intellectual diversity among faculty members. That wouldn’t matter if teachers could be counted on to introduce students to their adversaries’ books and views, but we know how rarely that happens. That’s why political diversity on the faculty does matter. As it stands, there is a far greater proportion of conservatives in the student body of typical colleges than on the faculty. A few leading thinkers on the right do teach at our top universities—but at some, like Columbia University, where I teach, not a single prominent conservative is to be found.
At Cornell, where I studied undergrad from 2001-2005, Jeremy Rabkin was the one and only conservative member of the government department, but he subsequently left the university. I don’t believe another token conservative has replaced him. At NYU Law, where I study now, there are a few conservative faculty members, mostly libertarian “Law and Economics” Scholars like Richard Epstein, and they enrich the debate on campus. I wish there were more.
The lessons of the Stephen Farrell rescue
What are our obligations to kidnapped war journalists?
There has been much criticism in the past several days over last week’s military operation in Afghanistan that rescued British journalist Stephen Farrell but left four others dead. The issue raises interesting questions about what actions the military should take to aid a captured journalist. Journalists inevitably put themselves in dangerous situations when covering a war, and how much responsibility for their safety should governments and the military accept? Read more
Rationing health care?
Dr. Death is calling your number
One worry about universal health coverage is that there will be less state-paid care to go around, leaving seniors who currently rely on Medicare to compete with others for a slice of publicly funded medical pie. This would lead to rationing, the worriers say, and the inevitable demotion of seniors, the disabled, and, of course, the unborn to the bottom of the list. Read more
Chait’s culture war
Jonathan Chait has a new piece on Ayn Rand at The New Republic that attempts to tie together Rand’s philosophy with current conservative psychology. Much of it reflects standard and well-worn critiques of Rand, but it’s worth dwelling on one line of attack.
Chait’s strange turn is to attempt to completely divorce measures of productivity from compensation. He writes, “Is income really a measure of productivity? Of course not….Most of us perceive a world with its share of overpaid incompetents and underpaid talents. Which is to say we rightly reject the notion of the market as the perfect gauge of social value.”
I’m not sure that even strict Randians would argue that the market perfectly sets “social value,” whatever that is. Chait surely does not point to modern conservative commentators that have done so. Markets obviously prize skills differently.
Chait’s mistake is to conflate created economic value which is, indeed, measured financially by those willing to pay for services, with “social value.” He brings out the rather tired comparison of Donald Trump’s salary to “a thousand police officers.” Instead of revealing a shocking defect in the character of the rich, Chait has really just shown that rich people are good at things that make them rich, while many others are incapable or unwilling to do those things.
A good Randian would likely believe that Chait has missed the point completely. It’s not that economic value leads to social value; it’s that social value is not necessarily the end goal. Rand critiques the core principles that Chait, a good Liberal, would stand on – good of the many, wellbeing, fairness, etc. Without debating first principles, Chait’s piece appears to be a bit of a personal smear piece against Rand, her followers, and “The Rich” in general.
Is it unfair to televise an Obama speech?
Politicians and Free Media
Last Wednesday President Obama delivered his second speech to a joint session of Congress. The speech marked the fifth time since coming to office that the White House has ask TV networks to cover the President speaking during primetime (as a comparison, President George W. Bush addressed the nation during primetime only four times during his eight years in office).
Primetime is, well, the prime time to catch viewers. Some 32 million viewers watched the President’s health care speech. It is also the most lucrative period for TV networks, a fact that makes the hour-long, commercial-free broadcast a significant imposition. Of course, the TV networks need not air the President just because he requested it. FOX showed the season premiere of “So You Think You Can Dance” last week, the third time the network chose not to broadcast a primetime appearance by President Obama. But every other major networked and all the cable news stations, out of patriotic duty or respect for the office of the President, continue to televise President Obama’s prime time speeches and news conferences.
There are numerous normative issues here, including the interrelated ones of the responsibility of TV networks to air the President and whether the President can abuse the privilege of his office in repeatedly asking the networks to broadcast him in prime time. I want to briefly investigate a different question: is it unfairly unequal to televise the prime time addresses and press conferences of the President but not those of the other Party’s major figures? Read more
I shall not tell a lie (unless I have to)
An interesting exchange between Adam Liptak of the New York Times and Andy McCarthy at the Corner:
Two other brief points should be made. First, Adam argues that the founding generation “thought secrecy in government one of the instruments of Old World tyranny and committed itself to the principle that a democracy cannot function unless the people are permitted to know what their government is up to.” That was hardly the blanket position of the Founders, particularly on matters of military consequence. George Washington himself said as the general in command of the first American forces, the “necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged… [U]pon Secrecy, Success depends in Most Enterprises…and for want of it, they are generally defeated.”
There may be some confusion of principle here. Washington is probably (and I’m speculating) of the mind that secrecy during the prosecution of war is crucial. But the issue in question is whether photos of prisoner abuse can be retrospectively released.
Here the concern would be that our future ability to wage effective war and procure quality intelligence would be threatened by transparency.
–Sam
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