In an earlier post Wonks Anonymous reported that California's major health insurer, Anthem Blue Shield raised its individual policy rates by almost 40%. The full story by Victoria Colliver is worth the read. Today, benumbed and befogged by an attempt to make sense of Mexican Development, Wonks Anonymous decided to take a small break and figure out just how the new rates would compare with costs for Medicare.

In a previous post Wonks Anonymous suggested that we might allow people over fifty to buy in to Medicare at an actuarially fair rate as determined by the Medicare trustees. He noted that in 2008 Medicare cost $862 per beneficiary per month. That being for covering a population of older and disabled people.

Just checking the article again he found:

"There aren't any other parts of our society where people have no regard for inflation rate and increase their prices this much. I can't imagine anything in the world that's going up 39 percent," said Josh Libresco, 54, of San Rafael, as he grappled with the news that his family premium will go from $858 per month to $1,192 - and that's with a $5,000 deductible.

This for a 54 year old with family members who are probably younger and less expensive to insure. This with a deductible that comes close to average annual family medical expenditures.

It seems that we are approaching a situation where Medicare will not need to do any estimates for younger consumers. Just charge its average rates. Yes, Professor Krugman, adverse selection is a problem. Monopoly and an inefficient private sector are also causing these rate increases.

        

Wonks Anonymous recognizes that there may be strong arguments for super majority rules and other legislative procedures and traditions the require consensus decision making. Wonks Anonymous, in fact, works for a fine organization that emphasizes consensus decision making.

That being said consensus decision making requires a great deal of self restraint in order to function properly. In particular members of a deliberative body should not exploit their power to block action on important measures to secure their own narrow interests. A Senator should not stop a Health Care Reform in its tracks in order to get special payments for their states and it is certainly no acceptable for individual Senators to block Presidential appointments in order to get approval of earmarks for their states.

Yet this sort of nonsense is happening right now - see Krugman's summary and comments. And, aside from Krugman and other bitter old liberals, it is virtually unnoticed because, guess what, the people who are obstructing government for personal gain are either Republicans or so called moderate Democrats. Everybody knows that the press corps and the pundisphere is unable to write a criticism of a politics unless they can start with the phrase: Both sides share the blame.

Good conservatives who support the arcane and antiquated institutions of the Senate should realize that these institutions will be eliminated or the country will be ruined unless the Senate and the conservative movement learns to police itself. One of the most effective tools to promote self restraint is public shame.

How can we expect to get the "better class of moderate" that Ross Douthat claims to want if Douthat and his friends are unwilling to call out various Republicans and conservatives on their destructive antics?

        

So the President has shown a little spine and started the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell which is kind of a Separate But Equal policy for gays in the military. We won't officially hunt you down and throw you out but if we hear about you from some zealous homophobe your career is toast.

Repeal is supported by the military brass and even by Colin Powell, darling of right thinking conservatives and moderates everywhere.

Predictably this is red meat for the bigots who make up the Republican base. See this report by Joe Garofoli of the SF Comical.

Now there are a lot of reasonable conservatives out there who believe in bipartisanship and who are just dying to sit with us liberals around a campfire and sing Kumbaya if only we weren't so radical and destructive. You know, people like Ross Douthat of the NY Times or San Francisco's own Debra J Saunders.

It seems to Wonks Anonymous that there is no time like the present. Western tradition has never opposed gay military service - see Alexander the Great, The Theban Sacred Band and Julius Cesar among others. We need the troops and besides armies around the world have shown that openly gay soldiers are no problem for morale.

Come on guys. This is your chance to show that you don't really hate gay people even though you don't want to let them get married. It is a golden opportunity to craft a position in favor of tradition yet opposed to the rabid bigotry of all of those folks who you joined in your opposition to gay marriage. You know, the ones who you no longer want to hear about now that proposition H8 passed.

And come spring we can all get together on the beach somewhere in Northern California. Wonks Anonymous will bring the Top Dogs and fixin's for S'mores.

        

Freed of the looming threat of Health Reform and intrusive Government regulation Anthem Blue Cross of California is taking steps to provide better service to its individual customers.

Victoria Colliver reports in this morning's SF Comical that they have raised individual rates by about 40%. A short article and worth a read.

        

Tom Campbell is kind of a local landmark in California. He is an active Republican politician who has also managed to be a professor at Stanford and the head of the UC Berkeley Business School. He is currently running for the Republican Senatorial nomination against Carly Fiorina. That would be the woman who took HP from being a world leader in high tech research and manufacturing to being a second rate reseller of "me too" goods made in China.

Carly wants to warn California Republican voters that Campbell is a Fiscal Conservative In Name Only - FCINO, say that fact three times - and she does so by showing a seemingly innocent sheep change into some kind of awful man/sheep monster. Joe Garofoli reports the full story here.

Which leads Wonks Anonymous to wonder: Is this what Republican voters really want? Someone who will sheepishly follow the directives of the party leadership, the Fox News Commentariat and the corporate lobbyists who currently call the shots in Republican land?

If they do then Carly, who managed a major corporation into the ground guided by business school platitudes and never seems to have had an original thought in her life, is their girl,

        

Much wiser heads than Wonks Anonymous are now considering our budget problems which really amount to two huge debt service problems.

First there is the debt held by the public and foreign governments interest and repayment of which requires about 20% of the budget. This debt is held by rich people and investors and the wonderful democratic government of China. It is a sacred obligation that must be honored.

Second there is the debt held by the Social Security Trust Fund which is not on line to be repaid until about fifteen years from now when my generation starts to retire in force. It is an accounting fiction and, besides, repaying it will mean taxing deserving and attractive young people to support unattractive geezers who are all rich as trolls anyway.

Hence the growing Washington clamor to make Social Security into another poverty program, the cry for means tested Social Security.

Because we all know how well welfare works.

So, for anybody who is lucky enough to have not experienced welfare here is a simple example of how means testing works:

First we decide how much a recipient of our collective charity deserves to have. Let's be generous and say $20,000 a year per household, which is about the average of current Social Security payments. Old people with no other income or assets will get annual checks amounting to $20,000.

Next we decide how much we take away in benefits for every dollar of income. Again let's be generous, let every dollar in income take away fifty cents in benefits. If pensions and annuities pay $10,000 then we subtract $5,000 from Social Security payments. The geezer gets $25,000 to live on. $20,000 outside income leaves the geezer with $30,000. If the old fogey has made prudent investments and has $40,000 in outside income he gets nothing.

Ignoring taxes, every dollar of future income that we purchase now through saving and investment will give us fifty cents in future consumption. This amounts to a 50% marginal tax rate. Nobody, not even a working person who pays income and payroll taxes, pays this much. Wonks Anonymous would like to know if his readers would consider this as an incentive to contribute to their IRA accounts.

And this simple discussion leaves out the interesting question of assets.

What do you do with your house? It seems to Wonks Anonymous that you will not need it after you are dead so the Government should be able to force anyone who applies for Social Security to get a reverse mortgage and buy an annuity with the money. Income from the annuity can be used to reduce benefit payments.

And your investment choices should also be supervised lest foolish decisions make you a ward of the state. Everyone on Social Security and probably people whose assets were worth less than a certain amount should also be forced to purchase an annuity.

All things considered this is a fine conservative program that will increase individual freedom, encourage thrift and lead us all to golden years free of government intrusions in our lives.

        

Ross Douthat waxes lyric about Paul Ryan a Republican Senator from somewhere who actually is making concrete proposals which we are supposed to love, love, love because they combine Republican ideals - that would be lower taxes on rich people and less government spending that doesn't go to defense contractors - with the Democratic commitment to progressive redistribution of income.

Here is how it would work:

A simplified tax code, consisting of a two-bracket income tax with a large standard deduction and a business consumption tax, would pay for a means-tested safety net, and a system of tax credits, risk pools and low-income subsidies would underwrite a free (or, well, somewhat freer) market in health care. In other words, Ryan would balance our books by shifting away from programs that shuffle money around within the middle and upper-middle classes — taking tax dollars with one hand and giving health-insurance deductions, college-tuition credits, home-mortgage deductions, Social Security checks and so forth with the other — and toward programs that tax the majority of Americans to fund means-tested support for the old, the sick, and the poor.

Scrapping progressive tax rates and eliminating the various tax loopholes that favor investors are right out of course so we need to get progressive somewhere. We can do that by making sure that the fats cats in the middle strata pay their share. Meanwhile we can save lots of money by paying income supports and taking care of the medical needs of only the very, very, absolutely poorest of the poor.

The rich stay rich while the inferior orders pay for their own and enjoy a much more equal income distribution at the bottom.

So Wonks Anonymous has two question for Mr Ryan:

Why no just write a bill to abolish Social Security and Medicare? If we means test these programs then we might just as well abolish them because we have two perfectly good means-tested programs that help the old sick and poor. These would be individual welfare - SSI and SDI - and Medicaid.

And if doing this to my generation is a grand idea, why not do it to everyone, even those who now are on these programs?

It's not like the Boomers will have any opportunity to get ready for this.

        

When times get tough and funds get scarce, businesses generally expect fewer people to produce more. When the workforce starts to fray around the edges someone in some business school somewhere comes up with a brilliant new plan for employees to transform themselves, increase their productivity, smile a lot and make everything better.

This always accomplishes its main purpose - that would be a publication credit for the Harvard Business Review. It also has the unfortunate side effect of bothering non-union workers throughout the nation with silly personal development exercises.

In one of which Wonks Anonymous was shown the following check list related to his level of spiritual energy:

• I don't spend enough time at work what I do best and enjoy most.
• There are significant gaps between what I say is most important to me in my life any I actually allocate my time and energy
• My decisions at work are most often influenced by external demands than by a strong clear sense of my own purpose
• I don't invest enough time and energy in making a positive difference to others and to the world.

Having checked yes to all of these statements Wonks Anonymous finds that he is a spiritual loser and needs to do more stuff to regain his spiritual energy.

Maybe if Wonks Anonymous took some vacation days and volunteered at a homeless shelter he would feel better, but not too many PTO days because that would interfere with report production.

Now Wonks Anonymous actually understands that there is a larger purpose for his job. That would be helping a fine organization survive in a environment that challenges it with ridiculous regulation, silly billing practices and a general competitive race to the bottom.

The immediate job, however, consists entirely of doing useless things - monitoring compliance with silly regulations that do no good to God or man - or noxious acts - degrading the quality of the Health Insurance packages that the nameless organization offers and insuring that sick people will pay for their evil ways.

Which, Wonks Anonymous imagines, is the way of most of the business world at this point in time. It must be nice to have a job at a business school.

        

So what do we call our current economic troubles, which are not as bad as the Great Depression but will clearly last a very long time and mess up our golden years and the lives of our kids?

The Not So Great Depression for We're O.K. Generation?

Meanwhile we are committed to fight the eternal War on Scary People which does not seem to have any of the beneficial economic effects that WWII had.

We would have done better but capital markets would not let us.

        

Debra J Saunders thinks that emotion has no place in the discussion of California's proposition to ban Gay Marriage which is now under review by the Federal Courts.

She objects strongly to witnesses who have testified that they dropped their opposition to gay marriage when they found that one of their children was gay and wanted to get married.

She probably objected even more strongly to the emotional testimony by gay people who grew up with pervasive discrimination and hatred. Wonks Anonymous expects that she did not like the testimony of the young man whose parents sent him off to be "cured" of his homosexuality when he was 13 and who seriously considered suicide as a result of that cure.

She did not mention these witnesses. Wonks Anonymous expects that she passed them by because their blatant displays of emotion were so out of place in a court of law where reason ought to rule. She thinks that the discussion should be all about the rights of the majority to interfere in the lives of minorities and to decide questions of private religious practice without restrictions.

That and thousands of years of Western Tradition.

Now Wonks Anonymous thinks that Ms. Saunders has other reasons for discomfort, aside from the fact that her side is clearly losing the emotional discussion. Wonks Anonymous quotes:

Toward that end Thursday, anti-8 attorney David Boies succeeded in marginalizing Prop. 8 supporter Hak-Shing William Tam by prompting Tam to admit that he believes homosexuals are 12 time more likely than heterosexuals to molest children. Talking to the press later, the Yes on 8 folks tried to distance themselves from Tam, but he was one of the measure's official proponents.

Thing is: Tam does not speak for the 7 million Californians who voted for Prop. 8.

Mr. Tam is so unrepresentative of the supporters of Prop. 8 that he wrote the official pro argument for the ballot and toured the state campaigning for the measure with the support of the pro 8 campaign.

Because there are many people like Debra J Saunders who support Prop 8 who are not at all like Tam or the folk who just pushed the hang homosexuals laws in Uganda. They are concerned with promoting a stable, rational society where traditions are respected, taxes are low and economic freedom is unrestricted by the government.

People like Tam and the street preachers who tell us that gays will burn in hell are useful allies in the battle to preserve tradition and economic order but Debra and her friends would like us to know that these guys make them uncomfortable too.

They believe in tolerance and enlightenment and all of that, in the privacy of the home naturally. Some of their best friends are gay. They throw the coolest parties and frankly Debra J wonders why she is not getting any more invites. And she thinks that it is downright impolite to dredge up all those emotional stories of ordinary people whose lives have been ruined by the vicious homophobia that her allies cultivate.

What purpose can this possibly serve, aside from confronting "decent" people with the consequences of their cowardly and self serving actions?