Category Archives: Health

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The ObamaCare Train Wreck

8 Comments

Thoughts from Richard Epstein.

Even its supporters are having trouble excusing it. Read this from Ezra Klein.

Hey, it’s not like this wasn’t perfectly predictable, and predicted.

[Update a while later]

Was the site crash caused by rate shock?

[Update a few minutes later]

Wow, even the New York Times is becoming racist:

“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’ ”

Interviews with two dozen contractors, current and former government officials, insurance executives and consumer advocates, as well as an examination of confidential administration documents, point to a series of missteps — financial, technical and managerial — that led to the troubles.

It’s almost like these people think politics is more important than actually competently running the government.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Perverse Incentives Of ObamaCare

14 Comments

Yes, by all means, you should earn less money:

This, right here, is the toxic essence of the welfare state. It’s already been proven over and over that for the lower classes, welfare incentivizes permanent dependence: Since one gets more money receiving a raft of federal entitlements than one would get earning a salary at a low-level job, it’s a rational economic decision to remain unemployed, on purpose. Which millions of Americans do, generation after generation, creating a permanent underclass that only consumes the common treasury without ever contributing anything to it.

What Obamacare does, as demonstrated by this eye-opening article, is bring the same economic disincentive to the middle class: It is now a rational economic decision for the average American to earn less money. And to earn less you must work less, and when you work less, you contribute less to the common good.

With people intentionally contributing less to the common good, there will be less federal money available to finance the subsidies (which are fiscally unaffordable even without this problem), leading to an unavoidable downward economic spiral for the entire nation.

That’s OK. Remember, the president told us that, at some point, you’ve earned enough money. He’s just lowering that point.

Business, Health, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Expensive ObamaCare Web Site

16 Comments

There is no good excuse for it:

From the evidence, it’s clear that the Obamacare exchange servers saw errors of all different kinds. They weren’t prepared for the load, even though this was never very heavy. California reported about 600,000 unique visitors, and Colorado reported about 55,000 unique visitors.

There were screen captures of database errors, not because the data was bad, but because the structure that holds the data was misdesigned.

There were 404 errors, which are totally design errors, meaning that the web sever was trying to get to a page that didn’t exist. (This led to the best hashtag of the day, #404care.)

There were non-descript server errors like the one I got from the California server.

There were user-interface errors. At about 10:00 AM, Colorado suspended new accounts on its site (it’s one of the ones using its own site, not the main exchange site), and didn’t get around to allowing new accounts again until 3:00 PM. At that point, the “New Account” button sent you to the login page for existing accounts. If you chose to enter your childhood phone number for a secret question, it wouldn’t take it, no matter what format (certainly not the format it used when asking for your current phone number).

This is why I say it was clear that this wasn’t just one of those things. The volume of inquiries wasn’t high by large-system standards, and the rest of the errors were in the control of the programmers.

These were design and execution errors, pure and simple. They were all catchable, with proper beta and load testing.

Yup.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Paleo Diet

11 Comments

Is it a fad? An interesting interview by Ben Domenech:

…the existing food movement that sprang up around organic food was largely driven by, particularly in the early years, the vegetarian world and the plant-based diet world, with a good bit of progressive ideology. And so that is alienating to a lot of people who might want to be healthier, who do care about where their food comes from. We saw the same thing happen in the environmental movement. You’ve got scores of hunters who care deeply about conservation and practice it in their own lives, and but due to differences in culture hunters have largely been excluded from the environmental movement.

I think there was a latent demand for an alternative approach to healthy eating and healthy living that wasn’t, that didn’t require you to buy in to all this other ideology. Because basically until paleo, until this general evolutionary approach came along, the only options were, you can be a sort of like a hippie vegan progressive, or you can eat tons of McDonalds and become obese and proudly tout that you don’t care where your food comes from, or you can go on some fad diet. And those aren’t actually very good options for a lot of people.

So, first I just think there was latent demand for it. And then there there’s definitely something to the fact that paleo doesn’t look down on eating meat and that definitely appeals to a slightly more masculine group of folks. The latest surveys have shown that paleo is actually split about 50/50 between men and women, but that’s far more men relative to all other dietary movements, which tend to be 70, 80% women. So, people will say it’s all macho, all these men are into it. It’s actually about 50/50, but it just feels a little bit more masculine relative to everything else.

It really has taken off more among libertarians than the general population, I think.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Damning ObamaCare With Faint Praise

14 Comments

Even its supporters are struggling:

Wing and Young have set up quite a straw man, taking ObamaCare opponents’ most exaggerated fears and exaggerating them even further.

They set up a straw man on the other side of the debate as well. The article opens with the “concession” that “the Affordable Care Act isn’t perfect. . . . Like most laws, Obamacare never will be perfect.” (That “most” is a nice touch. One wonders if they have an example in mind of a law that is perfect.) But we don’t recall anyone promising that ObamaCare would be perfect. What Obama and his backers promised was that it would be very, very good–that it would provide “universal” (or nearly so) coverage while reducing costs and maintaining or improving the quality of medical care.

Now, however, Wing and Young dramatically scale back that promise, describing ObamaCare as an “ambitious reform effort meant to make a dent in the nearly 50 million Americans who currently lack health insurance.” Again, that’s a contradiction in terms: It was in fact “ambitious,” but it would not have been so if it meant only to “make a dent.”

This is all by way of setting a very low standard for evaluating ObamaCare, one that will ensure it will be judged a “success” as long as it doesn’t destroy America. But the meat of the article is actually an indictment of ObamaCare, at least if one applies a reasonable standard of asking whether on balance it is a good piece of legislation.

It’s not. It’s an awful piece of legislation, perhaps the worst in history. At least recent history. Which is no surprise, when you consider the manner in which it was passed.

Culinary, Health, Popular Culture, Science And Society

Popcorn At The Movies

14 Comments

A history.

But here’s a question for paleo types. Yes, I know it’s a grain, and grains are bad, but it’s probably the least processed grain we eat. How bad is it, relatively?

Hmmmmm… [googling]

There seems to be a consensus that it’s definitely not paleo. But some say there are worse things if you’re going to cheat. I saw this one horror story, but I think that’s more a problem of the crap they put on it in the theater than the corn itself. I always pop it in butter, and put butter on it, but there are a lot of recommendations for coconut oil instead..

There are a lot of warnings (appropriately, I think) about the microwaved variety. I have to say, that I hadn’t realized how many paleos are anti-GMO. I think that’s taking it beyond eating healthy, and turning it into a religion.

Business, Economics, Health, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Healthcare.Gov

43 Comments

What went wrong?

I imagine there was a dialogue last Monday afternoon that went something like this:

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: Why does the username have to have a number in it?

BACK-END DEVELOPER: It’s in the government username regulations. Didn’t you read them?

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: No, we don’t do accounts, we just hand the input to you.

BACK-END DEVELOPER: And we told you your front-end the input was no good! See the ErrEngineDown in the URL?

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: Fine, fine. Sigh. Nice to finally talk to you, by the way.

BACK-END DEVELOPER: Yeah, you too. Are you in D.C.?

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: San Francisco.

BACK-END DEVELOPER: Know any good jobs in D.C.? I hate this place and they’re furloughing me as soon as we fix this mess.

Each group got its piece “working” in isolation and prayed that when they hooked them together, things would be okay. When they didn’t, it was too late. It is entirely possible that back-end developer CGI is primarily at fault here, but no one will care because they just see that the whole thing doesn’t work. As you learn early on in software development, there is no partial credit in programming. A site that half-works is worse than one that doesn’t work at all, which is why the bad error handling is so egregious. You always handle errors.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

[Update a few minutes later]

The roll out was nothing short of disastrous:

The left likes to flatter itself as thinking in terms of reason, facts, expertise, openness to doubt, and scorn of dogma and magical thinking.

Is this anywhere close to true?

When experts told the Obama Administration it was a fact the website was not ready, did they take seriously this advisement?

Nope! They simply said there was no cause for alarm; the strange gods of the left would just sort everything out.

Oddly enough, they didn’t.

It’s almost like they’re not quite as brilliant and rational as they’re always telling us they are.

And then there’s this. That’s right, Sheila Jackson Lee, who thinks that the Apollo astronauts went to Mars, thinks that the solution to the government shutdown is martial law. Meanwhile, the good lefties over at The Atlantic are more measured. They just want to have the Speaker of the House arrested.

It’s almost like they have a will to power, or something. And of course, as always with the left, when they accuse the “right” of this sort of thing, it’s projection.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, so just what are CGI Federal’s ties to the administration? You’d be a fool to think there are none.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

ObamaCare’s Broken Promises

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…pile up:

To recap, then: Before, during, and after passage, Americans were promised that Obamacare was going to lower premiums for “everyone” (the goal of merely maintaining premiums being too modest); it was not going to interfere with anybody’s health care or health insurance if they already had it; and it was not going change anybody’s patient-doctor relationship. The message was unmistakable: All the government wanted to do was extend health insurance to people who didn’t have it. This wouldn’t affect you. No need to worry. Period. Move along.

In addition to the totally partisan nature of this thing, one of the other many things that distinguishes it from previous entitlements is the many grandiose lies that were told about it to sell it, going back to the president’s first campaign.