Stop the presses: rate of uninsured lowest since late 2008

The New Neo Posted on by

If this hadn’t happened, now that would have been a shock. After all, if you give Medicaid to a whole new group of people, offer subsidies to a huge number of other lower-income people, and stick everyone else with penalties for not getting insurance, it could be expected that the rate of those without health insurance would go down.

And I don’t recall (although I could be missing something) that anyone on the right was suggesting that the total rate of the medically uninsured would fail to go down as a result of Obamacare. The real questions were and are (a) how much of a dent it would actually make in the uninsured (a figure that was probably somewhat elusive to begin with); (b) at what cost, both in money and disruption; (c) what quality of insurance would be the result; (d) what the effect on our health care system would be over time; and (e) the effect on our liberty.

But anyway, here are the stats are from Gallup. Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to the actual study, and I always prefer to look at the more complete picture, but let’s look at the chart from the summary version:

healthinsurancedrop

The first question I have is why the chart only begins in 2008. I did a search for a chart of earlier stats and kept getting that same chart that appears above. I’m beginning to think that Gallup may only have begun asking the question in 2008, but I just don’t know. At any rate, as you can see, in early 2008 the uninsured rate was even lower than it is now. What happened in late 2008 to make the rate rise? It’s pretty easy to guess: the financial downturn, which I am fairly certain had a chilling effect on the number of Americans with health insurance.

I also can’t get figures on the margin of error in the Gallup poll, but the drop here (at least in some sub-groups) may be within it. I happen to think that the overall drop is real, however. It makes perfect sense that the rate would drop, for all the reasons I wrote in that first paragraph, and I would be stunned if it did not.

Gallup also points out that by far the greatest drops occurred in the following categories: people with incomes under $36,000, and blacks. That is completely understandable and expected, as well, because it’s logical to assume that it reflects both the Medicaid expansion and the effect of subsidies (although it’s interesting that—as I’ve read in other sources—there was not a similar drop in the percentage of uninsured among Hispanics).

Here’s the chart:

breakdownuninsuredrate

Unfortunately, the chart only compares the last quarter of 2013 to the first quarter of 2014; I would have liked to have seen it go further back in time for a fuller picture.

How much of the drop involves the Medicaid expansion? How much the fact that the unemployment rate (at least, in the flawed way it’s measured) also dropped between the last quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of 2014? How many of the newly-covered people will continue to be covered a few months from now, and how many will end up defaulting on their payments?

And what are the answers to my questions in paragraph one?

Meanwhile…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Saturday was voting day in Afghanistan:

The strong turnout came despite threats from the Taliban to disrupt the vote and punish all involved in the first democratic transfer of presidential power in the country’s turbulent history.

Lest you think the threats were hyperbole:

Afghan Interior Minister Mohammad Umer Daudzai told reporters that 20 people were killed in violence across the country Saturday, as insurgents tried to disturb the voting processes. Seven military personnel, nine police and four civilians were killed.

Forty-three people were also wounded in attacks targeting mostly voting centers, the minister said, adding that most wounded people were civilians

Meanwhile, Afghan security forces killed more than 80 insurgents across the country and foiled several attacks against voting centers, Daudzai said…

Nearly 1,000 polling sites were closed because of security concerns; another 6,423 were open.

Makes you appreciate our (so far) peaceful voting days, doesn’t it?

Whatever happens, Karzai is out. The Afghan constitution bans him from seeking another term at this point. And if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, a run-off will be held.

RIP Mickey Rooney

The New Neo Posted on by

Actor Mickey Rooney has died at 93.

In my mind, I picture him as an irrepressible young man; that’s the age he was when he gained his greatest fame. As a child, I watched the Andy Hardy movies on my black-and-white TV. Whenever it rained at summer camp they’d show seemingly endless films, a great many of which featured Rooney with horses. I wasn’t all that interested in the horses, but I loved Rooney’s energy and cocky attitude.

That energy took him through a long long life—not to mention eight wives, including the beauteous Ava Gardner.

I could put up any number of clips here, but for some reason this one comes to mind first, made when Rooney was about fifteen. “Goodnight unto you all!”:

But perhaps his greatest joy was performing with Judy Garland. Now that we’ve said good-night, let’s say “good morning”:

RIP.

Andrew Sullivan asks: what’s the difference between Hillary and Eich, since they both once opposed gay marriage??

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Sullivan[emphasis mine]:

Hillary Clinton only declared her support for marriage equality in 2013. Before that, she opposed it. In 2000, she said that marriage “has a historic, religious and moral context that goes back to the beginning of time. And I think a marriage has always been between a man and a woman.” Was she then a bigot? On what conceivable grounds can the Democratic party support a candidate who until only a year ago was, according to the latest orthodoxy, the equivalent of a segregationist, and whose [husband’s] administration enacted more anti-gay laws and measures than any in American history?

There are several grounds. The first is that a gay marriage heretic can be saved by recantation. Here’s the definition:

To formally abandon a belief or a particular statement of belief, generally under order from an ecclesiastical authority…to enforce an orthodoxy. If ordered to recant by such an ecclesiastical authority, one who refused to recant is anathematized or excommunicated.

Hillary Clinton (and President Obama) have recanted, which saves them and also turns them into poster children for the evolution of correct liberal thinking. It doesn’t matter whether their present feelings are their true ones—and actually were their true feelings all along, with their previous anti-gay-marriage stances the false ones—or not. What matters is their public declarations.

That is exactly what Eich stubbornly refused to do, and he paid for it.

As evidence that Eich’s recantation may always have been the goal, I offer this:

I guess this counts as some kind of “victory,” but it doesn’t feel like it. We never expected this to get as big as it has and we never expected that Brendan wouldn’t make a simple statement. I met with Brendan and asked him to just apologize for the discrimination under the law that we faced. He can still keep his personal beliefs, but I wanted him to recognize that we faced real issues with immigration and say that he never intended to cause people problems.

It’s heartbreaking to us that he was unwilling to say even that.

We absolutely don’t believe that everyone who voted yes on Prop 8 is evil. In fact, we’re sure that most of them just didn’t understand the impact the law would have. That’s why so many people have changed their mind in 4 short years ”“ because they saw the impact and pain that the law caused to friends and family members.

People think we were upset about his past vote. Instead we were more upset with his current and continued unwillingness to discuss the issue with empathy. Seriously, we assumed that he would reconsider his thoughts on the impact of the law (not his personal beliefs), issue an apology, and then he’d go on to be a great CEO.

The fact it ever went this far is really disturbing to us.

If that’s not enough to convince you, there’s also this sort of thing:

…[T]he ringleaders [were] men such as Owen Thomas, a tech gossip columnist and amateur tyrant who was so vexed by Eich’s employment that he saw fit to issue what can only be described as a catechism. Among the commandments that Thomas etched onto his website were: “Stop saying that this was merely a private matter that won’t affect your work as Mozilla’s CEO”; “Say that whatever chain of logic led you to conclude that your personal views required you to support Proposition 8 was flawed, erroneous, incorrect”; “Say that you support the rights of people to enter into same-sex marriages everywhere”; and “Make a donation equal in amount to the money you gave to Proposition 8 and candidates who supported it to the Human Rights Campaign or another organization that fights for the civil rights of LGBT people.” Elsewhere, a Credoaction petition accrued 75,000 signatures behind the demand that “CEO Brendan Eich should make an unequivocal statement of support for marriage equality. If he cannot, he should resign. And if he will not, the board should fire him immediately.”

The recantation was most important, and Eich failed to deliver. So he had to go. Let that serve as a warning to others.

I don’t think that Hillary Clinton would be quite so eagerly supported today had she not recanted. I also don’t think that act was the least bit difficult for her, since I don’t think her original anti-gay-marriage stance was sincere in the first place. But even without a recantation she still would have been supported, because her pluses (much like Obama’s in 2008) trump her negatives for the left, and the left feels no need to be consistent in its principles. As a liberal/left woman, she is a member of a protected group, and the left also knows that she can be counted on to do the left’s bidding, for the most part, once her presidency is secured.

[Hat tip: Instapundit.]

Mozilla: in the Silicon Valley bubble

The New Neo Posted on by

The folks at Mozilla may yet live to regret their decision in cooperating with the forcing out of Brendan Eich. Apparently the internet giant has been getting a lot of negative reaction to its jettisoning of Eich for his 2008 contribution in support of California’s Proposition 8.

I have no idea whether this will end up hurting Mozilla, but I doubt very much that Mozilla anticipated even the possibility. The folks at Mozilla travel in a world in which PC thought dominates, and if you don’t believe me, take Nate Silver’s word for it (and after the 2012 election, I’m inclined to take Nate Silver’s word for just about anything):

I checked the records for some of the largest technology companies in Silicon Valley: specifically those that were in the Fortune 500 as of 2008. The list includes Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco Systems, Apple, Google, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Oracle, Yahoo, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Symantec. I limited the search to donors who listed California as their location.

In total between these 11 companies, 83 percent of employee donations were in opposition to Proposition 8. So Eich was in a 17 percent minority relative to the top companies in Silicon Valley…

At Intel, 60 percent of employee donations were in support of Proposition 8. By contrast, at Apple, 94 percent of employee donations were made in opposition to Proposition 8. The opposition was even higher at Google, where 96 percent of employee donations were against it, including $100,000 from co-founder Sergey Brin.

There isn’t much data on Mozilla…But it’s likely that employee sentiment at Mozilla is much like that at Google. The organizations share a lot in common…

The point is that many of these companies are staffed by people so heavily in support of gay marriage, and are immersed in an environment that is also so strongly supportive, that they probably have forgotten that the entire country is not quite like that—and that even a significant number of people who are in favor of gay marriage may not be in favor of forcing someone who’s against it to resign. Mozilla’s business, however, is not limited to Silicon Valley or even California, a fact those in charge who helped to force Eich out may sometimes forget. It’s even possible that Mozilla may be hoist on its own petard, and experience unforeseen economic consequences for its actions.

[ADDENDUM: And by the way, there’s a world of difference between boycotting a company for its company policies and company actions—in this case, facilitating Eich’s “resignation”—and threatening a boycott to force a company to get rid of a CEO or any employee for his/her private, personal, non-company and non-performance-related political beliefs. A world of difference, although both are legal.]

Don’t worry, folks

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed that, for whatever reason, a “worry” theme has emerged today in my posts (see also this).

Which gave me the idea for a musical interlude from one of my very favorite groups:

And as a bonus:

After nearly a quarter century of global warming worry…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it seems we’re about where we began:

globalwarmingPoll

If you look at the chart, you’ll see that, so far, worry about global warming peaked around 2000 and again in the years 2006-2008. I’m not sure what was happening in 2000 (Al Gore’s presidential campaign?) to cause this, but it was 2006 when his movie came out and he won an Oscar, and 2007 when he received the Nobel prize.

From the Gallup report:

Politics remain a powerful predictor of Americans’ worries about global warming, with more than half of Democrats saying they worry about it a great deal, compared with 29% of independents and 16% of Republicans…

Young Americans aged 18 to 29 are more worried about global warming than older adults, particularly those 50 and older…

Worry about global warming is not related to education in any systematic way; those with postgraduate education are no more worried than those with a high school education or less.

If I were a global warming activist (or is it an anti-global warming activist?) I’d be perturbed by the failure of my propaganda to make a long-term change in people’s point of view on this. I also know that nothing will stop global warming activists from trying. The people I know who are dedicated to this truly think we are facing Armageddon.

Don’t tell a worrier to stop worrying

The New Neo Posted on by

It will only make things worse.

And they’re likely to get mad at you in the process.

I’ll bet all you non-worriers have done it to the worriers in your life: told them the equivalent of “Just stop it. It doesn’t do you any good, and most of the stuff you worry about never happens anyway.”

True, true, true, say the worriers, if they’re being honest. But if they’re being honest they also say, “Easier said than done, non-worrier. Easier said than done.”

It’s not that it’s impossible. In fact, an entire approach called cognitive therapy has evolved to teach the worrier how to do it:

People who are working with a cognitive therapist often practice the use of more flexible ways to think and respond, learning to ask themselves whether their [negative] thoughts are completely true, and whether those thoughts are helping them to meet their goals. Thoughts that do not meet this description may then be shifted to something more accurate or helpful, leading to more positive emotion, more desirable behavior, and movement toward the person’s goals. Cognitive therapy takes a skill-building approach, where the therapist helps the person to learn and practice these skills independently, eventually “becoming his or her own therapist.”

A similar discipline called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy preceded cognitive therapy by about a decade:

One of the fundamental premises of REBT is that humans, in most cases, do not merely get upset by unfortunate adversities, but also by how they construct their views of reality through their language, evaluative beliefs, meanings and philosophies about the world, themselves and others.

…REBT claims that people to a large degree consciously and unconsciously construct emotional difficulties such as self-blame, self-pity, clinical anger, hurt, guilt, shame, depression and anxiety, and behaviors and behavior tendencies like procrastination, over-compulsiveness, avoidance, addiction and withdrawal by the means of their irrational and self-defeating thinking, emoting and behaving. REBT is then applied as an educational process in which the therapist often active-directively teaches the client how to identify irrational and self-defeating beliefs and philosophies which in nature are rigid, extreme, unrealistic, illogical and absolutist, and then to forcefully and actively question and dispute them and replace them with more rational and self-helping ones.

It’s different than just saying “stop that!” What these therapists do is to help clients identify the individual and specific patterns of self-talk that do them in, and to develop counter-statements that make sense to them and give the world a more positive spin.

So, going back to the research I linked at the beginning of this post:

For the study, 71 female participants were shown graphic images and asked to put a positive spin on them while their brain activity was recorded. …

“The worriers actually showed a paradoxical backfiring effect in their brains when asked to decrease their negative emotions,” Moser said. “This suggests they have a really hard time putting a positive spin on difficult situations and actually make their negative emotions worse even when they are asked to think positively.”

The study focused on women because they are twice as likely as men to suffer from anxiety related problems and previously reported sex differences in brain structure and function could have obscured the results.

Moser said the findings have implications in the way negative thinkers approach difficult situations.

“You can’t just tell your friend to think positively or to not worry ”“ that’s probably not going to help them,” he said.

I’d love to see a study that compares worrier subjects’ brain reactions before treatment with cognitive and/or rational emotive therapy and their brain reactions after.

But I worry that that will never happen.

Could it be…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that Flight 370’s black box ping has been heard by a Chinese ship?

We’ve had so many previous reports that have turned out to be unrelated to Flight 370 that I’m highly skeptical that this one will turn out to be anything, either.

I think that, if the box is ever located, it will be on something resembling the time scale of Air France Flight 447. The recovery of that airplane’s flight recorder took approximately two years. In addition, it was known from the start where the aircraft had probably gone down, and some debris that was spotted as early as a day later included an airplane seat, highly likely to be from the plane. Then:

Early on 6 June 2009, five days after Flight 447 disappeared, two male bodies, the first to be recovered from the crashed aircraft, were brought on board the Caboclo along with a seat, a nylon backpack containing a computer and vaccination card and a leather briefcase containing a boarding pass for the Air France flight. The following day, 7 June, search crews recovered the Airbus’s vertical stabilizer, the first major piece of wreckage to be discovered.

And yet it took two more years to find the plane’s black boxes. So, considering how little we still know about Flight 370, it would be nearly a miracle to have heard a ping at this point.

George W. Bush exhibits his paintings

The New Neo Posted on by

I would love to see this exhibit.

And what a great interview. Note the reference to Churchill, the humor, and the relaxed and affectionate interplay between the family members, as well as Bush’s articulate and fluid manner of speaking. Gone is his studied carefulness, the fear of making an error that his enemies could pounce on that (IMHO) caused some disfluency during Bush’s presidency. Of course, it probably helps that he’s speaking to family members, and about his love of painting.

Laura looks great, too. What’s her secret?

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

My favorite quote from the interview:

“As you know, our dear dog Barney, who had a special place in my heart ”” Putin dissed him and said, ”˜You call it a dog?’” Bush recalled. “A year later, your mom and I go to visit and Vladimir says, ”˜Would you like to meet my dog?’ Out bounds this huge hound, obviously much bigger than a Scottish terrier, and Putin looks at me and says, ”˜Bigger, stronger and faster than Barney.’

“I just took it in. I didn’t react,” Bush continued. “I just said, ‘Wow. Anybody who thinks ‘my dog is bigger than your dog’ is an interesting character.’ And that painting kind of reflects that.”

Here’s a close-up of Bush’s portrait of Putin (the NBC logo is not part of the painting), which I think is quite fine, as well as revealing of Putin’s character:

bushputin

[NOTE: There’s a gallery of Bush’s portraits here.]

More on Eich’s “resignation”

The New Neo Posted on by

If you want to read two wonderful pieces on the subject of Eich’s resignation and the movement that led to it, start with this one, from whence comes this excerpt:

This is NOT about Prop 8, gay marriage and religion. That is just the context in which this latest abuse has come to be. It is about the freedom — in your personal life — to believe as you do, support the candidates and issues you want, and to be left in peace to do so without fear of recrimination at the place where you make your livelihood.

If competent individuals can be fired at work for their personal stances on issues that they do not bring into the workplace, then we are no longer in a free and open society, but a very tightly closed one where fear reigns and keeps us all under control–where our beliefs must yield to pre-set political and religious dogma we are force fed.

Not only is it hard to swallow that something like this could happen in our country, it is hard to fathom how anyone can be so self-righteous, so emboldened, to think it a perfectly good idea to socially engineer society with the same iron fists as history’s liberty-crushing despots. All of that talk about equality, justice, liberty, tolerance and diversity, is just talk. It’s a one way street leading to oppression. And so frenzied are they with their viewpoints — so intent on crushing any opposing ideas– that they are blinded to their own bigotry.

And then read The Anchoress on the subject. She’s really really angry, as you can tell from the uncharacteristic headline (for her, that is: “A Gay CEO with Balls Needs to Hire Eich and Halt this Crap”). Here’s an excerpt:

If the headline strikes some as offensive, it will nevertheless remain, because that’s the case I’m making, and I’m sticking with it: a gay CEO with a pair of brass ones needs to step up and speak truth to a growing, and most illiberal new power. He or she needs to hire Brendan Eich in some sort of corporate leadership capacity for the sake of the most fundamental of freedoms ”” the freedom to think what you want to think, even if your thinking is unpopular or deemed “mistaken” ”” and in so doing boldly declare that our society has no truck with inquisitions…

Let me be clear: I hold out absolutely no hope that this chill wind will be checked or reversed ”” too many people with money and influence and no individual courage at all find totalitarianism an alluring idea. Nevertheless, though everything is part illusion, I’ll still resist and say, as Tom McDonald so succinctly puts it, “this shit has to stop.”

Indeed; it is an execrable, detestable trend that, if unchecked, will affect every facet of our lives as “correct” thoughts and “correct” ways become ever-narrower and trap more and more people in its stinking and miserable gullies…

I would ask my gay friends to openly reject this movement to oppress so-called “wrong” thinking ”” suffocate it right now, as it is being born ”” because eventually it will grow into a monster that will consume anyone, indiscriminately.]

I have one disagreement with the Anchoress, though: this movement is hardly “being born.” Our social engineers of the left have been crusading against various thought-crimes for a long, long time, and establishing the idea of the need to stamp out thought-crime against the righteous PC wisdom du jour. The only thing that’s different now is that it’s reached critical mass, on this issues and many others.