No full front page. I’m home, and the dog is yelping

30 Replies

Folks, it’s after 8 p.m. on Tuesday, and I haven’t had time to do the Virtual Front Page yet. Had to leave the office before I could get to it.

I’m calling it a day. I’d go ahead and do it now, but I’m at home alone with the dog and he’s downstairs freaking out over the thunder and rain outside, and it’s just too distracting.

There were only two things you really needed to know, though:

  1. After Day of Tumult, Dow Closes Up 430 Points
  2. UK police swell ranks to stem riots

Nothing local that is front-worthy so far.

That’s it. You’re up to date. Unless you care deeply who is on the debt panel.

30 thoughts on “No full front page. I’m home, and the dog is yelping”

  1. bud

    The ongoing squable between Gov. Haley and state treasurer Loftis over the unpaid bills at the DOT seems pretty newsworthy. Also, the increase in healthcare costs effective Jan 1 is pretty important. Combined with other state government problems it seems we are in deep trouble in this state fiscally even if we’re not in danger of an actual default. Who cares what our credit rating is if people are not getting paid, face sharp increases in costs, don’t get raises or worst of all don’t have any kind of job. Just seems like the governor is focusing on the wrong problem.

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  2. Brad

    Hey, I’ll care about those health care costs to state workers when they get high. A 4.5 percent increase? $143 a YEAR, not a month?

    Do you have any idea how much I’d be willing to pay for state benefits? A lot more than that…

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  4. Brad

    Yeah… Either the wording or the numbers are wrong.

    If the employee is paying 4.5 percent more on his share, and the state is paying 4.5 percent more on its share, then they are paying 4.5 percent more on the combined total, right? Not 9 percent.

    If the total increase, though, IS 9 percent, then we’re probably looking at a smaller percentage increase for the state and a larger percentage increase for the worker.

    It would be nice to have the right numbers. But if the $143-a-year increase is right (and at this point that’s a wild assumption), then that’s less than $12 a month. Wow. Back when I had full-blown big-company benefits (which I still doubt were as good as the state’s), I would have LOVED a year when my contribution only went up that much.

    But since the percentages are messed up, I’m guessing that total is, too…

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  6. bud

    That $143 a year may not be much but when matched with a 0% pay raise for the fourth year in a row it starts to become significant. In effect that $143 is money lost to all other economic activities. Perhaps fewer meals out. Maybe that new CD collection is out. That’s money that pushes the overall economy down a teensy bit. Little by little the income of the average household is eroded away. Not rapidly. Not noticebly in the short run but nonetheless eroding. And what’s more, as Brad has alluded to, state workers probably have it better than most others. This is some scary times folks.

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  7. Brad

    Again, welcome to the way the private sector lives. I think I got maybe two raises in the past 10 years — and one gigantic decrease.

    And all that time, medical coverage went up.

    This is why I have trouble understanding why everyone — especially anyone involved in business — doesn’t see the benefit of single-payer. Even back when I was way better off, I saw the problems. If everyone (and of course, it has to be mandatory or forget about it) paid anywhere near the $600 a month I paid at The State — or an income-adjusted amount keyed to that level — we could have health care that would truly be the envy of the world.

    Seriously, just let us all jump into the same system with those state and federal workers, and we erase health insecurity and unleash untold creative energy and growth as people stop clinging to dead-end jobs just for the benefits, and branch out starting new businesses. It would be awesome.

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  8. `Kathryn Fenner

    My parents’ dog had to be tranquilized during thunderstorms until they got her one of these

    http://www.thundershirt.com/

    It works. She’s still a bit concerned, but not about to shake out of her skin. I heard about it on Your Day, on ETV radio–a surprisingly useful program on at noon M-Th….

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  10. bud

    If the state plan is so great then I’d hate to see what others deal with. (Mind you I’m not disputing Brad’s point) We have no vision care. The dental plan is very minimal. Then there are the endless co-pays and deductibles. And most well visits are not paid for. And it’s a nightmare trying to figure out just what they’ll pay, when they’ll pay it and who needs to be called whenever some type of surgery is required. And this is considered one of the best health insurance plans? Scary times folks, scary.

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  11. Doug Ross

    As I heard Bill Maher say recently, “We can have Canada’s healthcare system. All we need is to have Canada’s military system.”

    I’ll buy into single payer if everyone pays the same amount. One rate for singles, one rate for families. But if single payer means paying a percentage of my income or people having “free” healthcare at my expense, then forget it.

    It’ll never happen though, thankfully, because the government has already proven it can’t manage Medicare effectively.

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  12. Brad

    Here’s the thing, Doug — you make demands that make it impossible.

    It does not follow that you have to give up your military for health care — if we’re paying for the health care. And that’s why I propose.

    Which should answer your objections (other than to your quasi-religious objection to having the government do it), except that you hold up your hand and refuse to scale the premiums according to income. That’s unreasonable. I don’t know what your problem is with people paying according to ability. Most people are cool with that. This is the same as your not wanting people to pay higher property taxes when they live in a more valuable home.

    It’s just your way of saying, “Oh, you figured out a way to pay for it? Then I’ll come up with another objection.”

    I’ve always thought we should all pay into such a system. And as I have often said, I’d be happy to pay the $600 a month I paid at The State. But only if I’m making the salary I was making at The State. That’s a bit much for people making average or below salaries. But everyone should pay. You know why? Because it would make YOU so mad if there were people who paid nothing. It ticks you off so much already that there are people who don’t pay income tax.

    So bend a little, and we could make it work. At least, here on the blog.

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  13. Doug Ross

    You’re always happy to spend my money for me, Brad. You think I should be honored to pay more for the same thing you would get… even when historically I have used far LESS of the medical services I have paid for. Of course you’d be for that. I’d like a system where I can get Krispy Kreme donuts cheaper based on my ability to eat them.

    I’ve paid tens of thousands of dollars into both private insurance, Medicare, and (via taxes) Medicaid. I’ve paid in far more than I’ve ever taken out (with a family of five we’ve only had three births, one kidney stone surgery, and a couple MRI’s for my son’s pitching arm in 25 years beyond office visits and prescriptions). I’ve never complained about paying for my insurance because I understand what it is there for. And the companies I’ve worked for have always offered varying degrees of coverage at different prices — BUT the same cost for everyone, not based on my salary. Same access, same cost. You want to punish success by saying “You’re just lucky you can make more money, let’s take some of that to give to other people”. A modern day Robin Hood, you are.

    How about YOU bend a little and tell me what the maximum a person should have to pay into a single payer system should be? I’m willing to go to $1000 for family coverage. And will you require a minimum along with copays and deductibles?

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  14. Doug Ross

    It comes down to priorities – whether talking at the macro level of choosing aircraft carriers and bombs over better healthcare for the poor; or at a micro level where I decide that paying for my insurance coverage for my family is more important than what kind of car I drive, my cellphone, my cable tv, my vacations, my meals out at restaurants. We should have a system in place that provides healthcare to people who cannot afford any of those items. I’m fine with that. But I draw the line on paying for someone else’s insurance if they can afford $100 / month cable bill and $50 cellphone bill. If healthcare is so critical, people need to prove it by participating in the cost.

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  15. Karen McLeod

    Doug, you are already paying for the “health insurance” for the poor via higher premiums; that’s the way the public hospitals cover the cost of indigent care. However, they only get emergency care, so instead of taking care of the problem, and reducing the need for health care they are forced to come back again and again in acute need. It’s the bigger bucks for the worst care. A single payer system would reduce costs noticeably down the road, while reducing the cost of non productive people (ie. those too sick to work). It’s a winner for all of us.

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  16. bud

    According to Wiki the US currently spends about 4.7% of GDP on defense. Isreal doesn’t spend a huge amount more than that, about 6.3%. Surprisingly with a very dangerous neighbor to it’s north and a significant national wealth South Korea only spends 2.9%. The Canadians spend about 1.5%. We can certainly afford to throw away that kind of money but why do it? We could invest about half of what we spend of worthless weaponry and un-needed soldiers/sailors on a good quality national health care system. Medicare for all is what I’d do. Not withstanding Doug’s comments Medicare works pretty well, certainly far better than most private insurance. But I guess we’ve already had that debate and my side lost. Still, given the serious nature of the nations health this seems like the best way to go.

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  17. Steven Davis

    “Again, welcome to the way the private sector lives. I think I got maybe two raises in the past 10 years — and one gigantic decrease.”

    I don’t recall you busting your butt to find work outside of Columbia after being laid off. As a “newspaper executive”, you could have probably hired a head hunter to help you locate another executive position somewhere in the US. But you stayed in a region where your choices were The State or the Free Times.

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  18. Doug Ross

    @bud

    If Medicare works, why does it have to be part of the debt celing discussion? If Medicare works, why do we see so many news stories about Medicare fraud compared to the private sector? It doesn’t work – it simply has the weight of a mandatory government enforced monopoly behind it.

    @Karen

    Yes, my private insurance premiums may be higher due to the poor. But I don’t pay higher premiums based on my salary which Brad is advocating. It’s a shared expense. I already pay more into Medicare than most people do and there’s no guarantee I’ll get anything 20 years from now when I may need it.

    Brad’s sidebar advertiser, AARP, is an organization that derives the vast majority of its income from royalties paid to it by UnitedHealthcare for selling branded AARP private insurance.

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  19. Doug Ross

    And, Brad, I have always been in favor of allowing private citizens to buy into the state health system. Seems like that would be something Bobby Harrell and Hugh Leatherman could get done in one legislative session. Let’s see who comes out of the woodwork to protest. Or get Vincent Sheheen to do it. That would be a fine feather in his cap if he could get it done before the next election.

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  20. Brad

    Yeah… I wonder why that never happens?

    Everybody says they’d be for it — like the old thing about “We just want the same coverage Congress has” — but nobody ever seriously tries to make that happen.

    OK, wait, duh. It’s because it we paid what state employees pay for it, most of the cost would remain unmet. Employers pay at least twice (and I think, in the case of the state, more than twice) of the cost of the insurance. It’s part of the employees’ compensation. It might be a bit tough to suddenly extend that to more than 4 million people who are not providing the employer (the state) with low-salaried labor in exchange.

    So unless you want to create a huge state entitlement in which the state is having to pay for more than half of our insurance, we’d have to pay more than twice what Bud is paying for it.

    It would be more like COBRA. And as I recall, before I went off of it, COBRA was costing about $1,400 a month, and the only reason I could swing it was because the gummint was subsidizing COBRA for a certain amount of time after people got laid off. It was still really expensive for me.

    That, by the way, was the one gummint benefit I got to any substantial degree after being laid off (a benefit we would not need if our coverage were not tied to our employment). I only got the lousy $320 weekly unemployment check about 3 times.

    All of this raises questions about how much my single-payer plan would work, since the premiums people pay now in conventional plans are generally only a portion of the full cost. There would probably have to be a contribution by employers to that, too. Which is problematic until you think, employers are getting a benefit from it — the benefit of not having to provide that benefit any more. That would be worth paying any amount below the current cost to a business (which should be achievable because you’d no longer need HR people to administer all that, keep track of it and hold all those open-enrollment meetings).

    But somebody a lot smarter than I am about accounting and how insurance works would have to come up with the details. Maybe it wouldn’t be workable. But I haven’t heard a good reason yet why that is so. Mostly I’ve just heard a lack of political will to try.

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  21. bud

    Some people would feel really lucky to draw $320/week. Why did you only draw it for 3 weeks? Was it because you were able to make more by freelancing?

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  22. Doug Ross

    By “buy in”, I meant at full unsubsidized cost. Access to insurance is supposedly a big issue. I would hope that expanding the pool of those covered significantly would drop the cost.

    That eliminates the issue of portability and access. The cost issue is best handled by a private insurer with an incentive to hold down costs in order to increase profits (with some type of mandatory % that must be spent directly on patient care and incentives for the insured to pursue health lifestyles).

    But it will still come down to who pays for the people who can’t or won’t pay and how much should we set as the minimum for entry into the system. That money has to come from somewhere. And if it is truly the most important need for our citizens, let’s cut defense spending by 10% and foreign aid by 10% and see where that gets us.

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  23. Tim

    Not sure if Doug was thinking this, but perhaps he meant that employers could buy into the state system. they would pay for the contribution the state pays and private employees would be responsible for the rest. A bigger pool might mean lower risk/cost.

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  24. Mark Stewart

    Doug,

    The thing is almost nobody receives (or needs) the medical treatment that would equal the premiums paid over a working career.

    The vast majority of the costs are incurred near the end of life. So if ya’ll just stop having accidents, doing stupid things and growing old everything would be okay …

    As gruesome as it sounds; there is good reason to limit the total dollars paid under a single-payer system (or even under our current mash-up). That’s better than the “death panel” baloney of care restrictions. Need more care? Find your own way to pay.

    Empathy is not mercy; we’ve tried to insulate ourselves from the vagaries of life through our pursuit of medical care at all costs; but the universe is not a merciless place and God continues to expect that people will be born, age and die.

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  25. Brad

    Are we dealing here, Doug? If so, that’s cool. I like it.

    I believe that what you and Tim say is true. It’s one of the reasons I want single-payer. I believe that if you get everybody into the system, their health care WILL cost less. From the fact that people will catch health problems before they get bad (and expensive) to the fact that providers won’t have to employ armies of people to negotiate a gazillion different plans, to the fact that you’ve got a negotiating force of such proportions that providers and drug makers would have to work with it on costs (you can turn your back on Medicaid, but not on this), you’d squeeze out a lot of cost. And you’d be spreading the risk a lot wider, with a lot more people paying in — thereby reducing individual costs.

    As for military — well, you could probably cut 10% out by reforming purchasing and keeping Congress out of a lot of decisions (to the extent you can do that constitutionally, a la BRAC). But if you cut out ALL foreign aid, it wouldn’t yield much money, and it would be strategically a bad idea.

    I DO believe that among DOMESTIC issues, health care is the greatest unmet need. But that doesn’t change the fact that the primary functions of the federal government are NOT domestic. You can’t quit maintaining your military and dealing with other nations (which, when you’re the big dog, often means HELPING other nations). You have to find a way to do both.

    Frankly, I wouldn’t want the federal government to get involved in health care, just as I don’t want them involved in education. But I really think that with something this massive, and with these particular dynamics, a national approach is the only way. I think it’s beyond the ability of a state to deal with. Given the nature of interstate commerce (the one big domestic responsibility of Washington), a state trying to deal with something like this is like poking a balloon in one place and having it bulge out in another; you haven’t contained the balloon.

    Anyway, I think it’s cool that Doug and I are talking common ground on this…

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  26. `Kathryn Fenner

    @ Doug–why one rate for singles and one for families? I mean, I already pay to educate your children, etc. Per capita, if you’re going to be “fair.”

    @bud–We use the Blue Cross HMO feature instead of the straight up (indemnity) health plan, and it has been fine in terms of coverage, co-pays (although ever increasing!). Dental plans–has any one ever found a dentist who actually charges “usual and customary” rates? harumph

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  27. bud

    The cost issue is best handled by a private insurer with an incentive to hold down costs in order to increase profits (with some type of mandatory % that must be spent directly on patient care and incentives for the insured to pursue health lifestyles).
    -Doug

    Costs would be kept down by denying coverage in way possible. Profits and huuuuuuuge CEO salaries would be further skimmed off the top. In the end we’d have the most expensive health care system in the world with very poor results. Life expectancy would suffer. Many folks would suffer long, debilitating illnesses because they couldn’t afford preventive care. Wait. That’s what we have now. Sorry Doug your way has been tried and it has failed. And will continue to fail as long as their are greedy folks gaming the system.

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  28. Doug Ross

    @bud

    “. And will continue to fail as long as their are greedy folks gaming the system.”

    You’re talking about Medicare, right? It is the largest source of healthcare fraud in the world. Even Obama has admitted there are billions being stolen.

    Medicare is a monopoly with a disinterested management and no incentive to be efficient.

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