Foolippic

D. Marvin Jones is a law professor at University of Miami Law School in Florida. After he was arrested for soliciting a prostitute who was actually an undercover cop, the website Above the Law posted entries about him, reprinting the incident report, a picture of him, a photocollage of his face on a twenty-dollar bill (the amount he was alleged to have offered the prostitute).  The charges were dropped, and now the professor is suing Above the Law.  Unfortunately, his pleading is apparently twaddle, claiming he was represented in a false light (except that the Florida Supreme Course just last year ruled that there was no such claim under Florida law), invasion of privacy (but the incident report is a public record), violation of copyright (over the photograph, of which he’s not the copyright owner and would be fair use anyway), and some incomprehensible bit about the photocollage being a “racist cartoon” which Ben Sheffner of the Copyrights & Campaigns blog believes is barred by the Communications Decency Act.  I’m not sure I buy the last bit, but I’m not sure I understand what claim Jones is making.  Sheffner sums up:

Copyrights & Campaigns: Law Professor sues ‘Above the Law’ blog; time to go back to complaint-drafting school

Jones has asked for a total of $44 million, as well as an injunction ordering ATL to remove the offending content. He’ll be lucky if he escapes without an award of sanctions and attorneys’ fees. (Florida has two narrow anti-SLAPP statutes, but they don’t appear to apply here.)

Just to be clear, I think it’s perfectly fine if Jones solicited a prostitute, if that’s what he did (he claims not, and the police did drop the charges) and the police should have far better things to do with their time. What’s reprehensible is his filing this frivolous lawsuit. For a law professor to do that should be beyond the pale, and it’s for that he deserves both court-imposed sanctions and public ridicule.

Promising no tax increases whatsoever on families making less than $250K

Promising a net spending cut

Promising “”If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” In case you’re not clear on this point, forcing the insurance companies to rewrite the policies out from under you to conform to guaranteed issue, community rating, mandated coverages, and stiff penalties on people who have insurance that is deemed “inadequate” while slapping a tax on “Cadillac plans” is taking away the plan you have and like and replacing it with one the government likes.

Promising to broadcast the health care negotiations on C Span, instead of conducting them behind closed doors.

Promising to post bills to the web for five days before they’re signed to allow the public to comment. (Now he tells us “the time for debate is over” when there is no finalized legislation that’s even made it through Congress.) Promising to have the most open and transparent administration in history. Promising “post-partisan” politics. Promising to end “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Promises, promises…

CARPE DIEM

America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the industry’s trade association representing 1,300 members (how could that be a monopoly?), recently reported that annual health insurance premiums averaged $2,985 for individual coverage and $6,328 for family plans in 2009. Using the industry average profit margin of 3.3% means that insurance companies make less than $100 per policy in profits for individual coverage, and a little more than $200 in profits for each family policy. Doesn’t seem too “excessive” or an indication of monopoly power, does it?

Alternatively, even if we could strip away 100% of the health insurance profits, it would only result in about $100-200 of annual savings for consumers of health insurance. Is that what we could expect then from a government-sponsored “public option” that wasn’t “profit-driven” – annual savings of only $100-200?

And here’s the graphic, showing the profit margins in the health insurance industry compared to other industries:

Among the companies making more profit than the average health insurance company? Tupperware, the railroads (!), Hershey, and Yum food brands.

So remember this the next time you hear Obama blame health insurance profits for out-of-control health care costs. And he will, because demonizing the people who disagree with him is one thing he’s good at.

CARPE DIEM: How Do We Keep Gov’t. Honest? Medicare Denies More Inusrance Claims Than the Private Sector

An analysis of almost 10,000,000 insurance claims by the AMA to seven private insurance companies and Medicare between March 2007 and March 2008 reveals that more than half a million (574,591) claims were denied, and the chart above displays the percentage of claims denied by each insurer during that period. Medicare led the group with the greatest percentage of insurance claims denied (6.85%), more than double the denial rate for private insurers like UHC (2.7%), Coventry (2.9%), Humana (2.9%) and CIGNA (3.4%).

The Left, including Obama, is fond of pointing out that Medicare proves that the government can run medical services. That’s exactly what the Middle and Right are afraid of. And what do you think is going to happen to the number of denials when the Obamites try to cut out the hundreds of millions of wasteful Medicare spending they promise to eliminate to partially pay for their extravagant new entitlements?

Federal Trade Commission – Commissioners

The current Chairman is Jon Leibowitz. The other commissioners are Pamela Jones Harbour, William E. Kovacic, and J. Thomas Rosch.

These are the folks that voted 4-0 to assert their authority to regulate blogs–every single blog written by an American citizen–as if they were paid celebrity endorsers hired by an ad firm. If you blog you could be subject to a fine of $11,000 per instance if they decide you’ve inadequately disclosed that you got a free copy of the book to review or that Google will serve up an on-topic Ad-Sense ad once you mention a product. But don’t worry, even though the criteria for what constitutes adequate disclosure aren’t spelled out at all, they’ll only haul you to court on a “case-by-case” basis.

I’m pretty sure that this will get thrown out as being an un-Constitutionally vague infringement on First Amendment rights as soon as somebody with deep enough pockets challenges it, but I’m also sure that nobody who voted for this should be allowed in a position of power.

China Celebrates 60 Years of Achievement Under Communist Rule

China has showcased its military capabilities, as well as its economic and social progress, in a huge parade to mark the 60th anniversary of the Communist state.

Let’s see, 65 Million Chinese killed by the PRC since its founding, so a bit over a million of its citizens per year. What better way to celebrate than a parade of ballistic missiles capabable of carrying nuclear warheads through Tiananmen Square?

TaxProf Blog: 47% Will Pay $0 Income Tax in 2009

CNN, 47% Will Pay No Federal Income Tax:

In 2009, roughly 47% of households, or 71 million, will not owe any federal income tax, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

Some in that group will even get additional money from the government because they qualify for refundable tax breaks.

If you don’t have to pay income tax, but can vote to raise taxes on others…

Personally, I’d like to see a VAT instead of an income tax. Naturally, the Obama administration is contemplating pushing for one on top of the current income tax.

Economics in One Lesson, The Lesson Applied, Public Works Mean Taxes

There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than the faith in government spending. Everywhere government spending is presented as a panacea for all our economic ills. Is private industry partially stagnant? We can fix it all by government spending. Is there unemployment? That is obviously due to “insufficient private purchasing power.” The remedy is just as obvious. All that is necessary is for the government to spend enough to make up the “deficiency”.

An enormous literature is based on this fallacy, and, as so often happens with doctrines of this sort, it has become part of an intricate network of fallacies that mutually support each other. We cannot explore that whole network at this point; we shall return to other branches of it later. But we can examine here the mother fallacy that has given birth to this progeny, the main stem of the network.

Did I say today? I meant 1946, when this was first written.

From an interesting article about British Columbia’s relatively new network of private medical clinics and the efforts by the government to shut them down, comes this gem from a defender of the status quo:

In Canada, a move toward a private healthcare option — latimes.com

“We can and need to improve [healthcare]. . . . But it’s always going to be more effective, and it’s certainly going to be more equitable, if it’s done within the public system,” said Robert Woollard, a longtime family practitioner and member of Canadian Doctors for Medicare, which has applied to join the lawsuit in British Columbia. Woollard said the public system has the nimbleness to provide speedy, quality care to those who truly need it.

“Just six or eight weeks ago, I had a patient come in who needed urgent attention to her knee. She was in severe pain,” he said. “She was seen by a [reviewing] team within a week, and she was slated for surgery that will probably happen in the next two to three months.”

So up to two months previously a patient came in who needed urgent attention and was in severe pain, and she’ll have her surgery within another two or three months…and this guy thinks of it as a victory for the public system showing that when it’s truly urgent the system will come through for you. It’s equitable because everybody suffers horribly! Yay!

CARPE DIEM: Almost 4 Out of 10 Uninsured Americans Live in Households Making More Than $50,000 Per Year

Almost 4 Out of 10 Uninsured Americans Live in Households Making More Than $50,000 Per Year

According to this Census Bureau report “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2008″ (released today), there were 46.34 million uninsured Americans in 2008, up from 45.6 million in 2007.

The chart above shows the household income levels of those 46.34 million uninsured Americans. There are 9.725 million uninsured Americans living in households making $75,000 per year or more, and this represents more than 1 out every 5 unisured (21% of the total). There are about 8 million Americans without health insurance in households making between $50,000 and $75,000, representing 17.3% of the uninsured. With those two groups combined, 38.3% of Americans without health insurance (17.75 million people) lived in households with $50,000 or more of household income in 2007 (see Table 7 for these data).

This is important, because there is no reason that we should be considering families that make over $50,000 as part of the group of uninsured that need to be addressed by urgent Federal action.  This is a favorite tactic of the crisis-mongers, lumping unlike things into one big number the better to scare you with (as when they count the two nights you spent with relatives while moving from your old apartment to your new one as making you “homeless”).

Uninsured Subpopulations

Note that the analysis done ensures that the categories don’t overlap, so that e.g. you’re only in the Childless adults 18-34 category if you do not also belong to the over 300% of poverty category (for a single person that’s about $30k, for a family of 4, about $60k).

One final statistic: according to the CBO analysis of the actual bills, the number of Americans who would be over the threshold for subsidy, still unable to afford health insurance and have to pay substantial tax penalties because of the mandate would be about 8 million.

So tell me, is it really worth paying One Trillion Dollars for a health care policy that swaps 10 million uninsured because they can’t afford it for 8 million uninsured because they can’t afford it who must now pay stiff penalties?