I know I quoted @andy_hilmer there not you. I hope I made that clear.
This was my impression and the reason I linked to the Arrow text. It is short and poignant the most quoted health economics text–and it is actually an argument against marketisation.
I get that this is what you think but it comes off, to me, as a projection of how you were… dismissive of @Mindysan33 for precisely this reason. As for the rest of this, what I’m hearing from you is my own words coming back to me about what the academic discussion was post-ww2. You miss that it’s been completely ignored in the way the industry is structured. Yes, the ACA was conjured from health policy academia which looks at the medical industry from a larger perspective than the markets for insurance/pharma/providers, except that the ACA itself does not implement that meta-perspective in any important part of the financing, incentives, oversight, cost controls, etc.
This institution which you have studied has been effectively sidelined in this country since the 30s, with Reagan pinning it to the ground in the 80s, and abroad the drumbeat to walk it back to pre-social medicine is taking hold in places like Britain. The public sentiment isn’t shifting so much in those countries, it’s the people in power who see zero value in continuing what they see as a sop to the masses. The entire British establishment, for instance, runs from resigned about cuts to enthusiastically pursuing them.
Perhaps what I was taking as a dismissive tone from you was more a matter of you being primed for a fight about the value of your field. If you view this response as me digging deeper… then you should check that tone again. If you still feel it necessary to be primed for the fight over how socialist the U.S. health care system is, consider that a well-made and monumental academic foundation means little if the foundation still only has one or two small wings on top of it while the institution as a whole is mostly still a sprawling city of mud huts two counties away in a swamp.
Perhaps that bricks and mortar metaphor is too metamophorical. Many of us don’t have the luxury of idealizing the academic underpinnings of something that, for us, does not exist.
An effective gerrymander doesn’t give the opposition zero seats, it gives them a disproportionately small number of extra-safe seats. Most of the close contests to the winners, most of the blowouts to the losers.
Not the worst in the country, but not clean, either. And enough to help the Dems to supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. Shifting demographics plus the batshit craziness of the GOP made that easier to achieve, but a bit of electoral fiddling was involved in putting them over the top.
That said, however, I was thinking more presidential in regards to California Republicans. There really isn’t any point in them casting a presidential vote in the current context, and I think that this has a substantial effect on depressing their turnout.
So like Democrats in Texas?
Him and Martin Shkreli have THE most punchable faces. It’s that stupid smirk.
Bwahaha. Check your insurance to see if it covers treatment in the local Burn-Clinic.
Keep digging and make sure you never ever concede you might have misread someone’s comment or made a mistake. If you keep at it you might become President of the USofA. Making arguments free from the restrains of evidence is apparently the sole qualification these days 
.
Otherwise, when you are making a counter argument please provide textual evidence. I know this is not an academic discussion, but you keep at it so here is the evidence from Grossman’s Health Capital published in 1972. It is one of the most referenced Health Economics paper and the first to make the argument for “Health Capital” (along the lines of the equally awful concept of “Human Capital”). It set out the case for individual responsibility away from the solidarity principle of earlier discussions on healthcare. The quote below is an Economist’s version of the arguments regularly spewed out by republicans and their henchmen on personal responsibility.
Within the new framework for examining consumer behavior, it is assumed that individuals inherit an initial stock of health that depreciates over time-at an increasing rate, at least after some stage in the life cycle-and can be increased by investment. Death occurs when the stock falls below a certain level, and one of the novel features of the model is that individuals “choose” their length of life. Gross investments in health capital are produced by household production functions whose direct inputs include the own time of the consumer and market goods such as medical care, diet, exercise, recreation, and housing.
Finally for reading clarification, your comments on my writing one by one:
Please provide textual evidence how I was dismissive, either in spirit or words.
Where exactly did my fighting spirit reveal itself in what I actually wrote? We have now moved from “how dare you comment, it is not your field” to “you just keep banging on about it because it is your field” within the same discussion?
For clarity’s sake: I am not a health economist. I am not making any assumptions or statements about the relationship between academia and policy in general. I am not providing a historical analysis of ACA. I am not dismissing anyone else’s expertise, knowledge or interest. I am not fighting for the relevance of a field which I consider mostly abhorrent. And I am not doing many other things.
I am a researcher who has happened to do some research into Health Economics as a field of study and its impact on the discourse on how we talk and think about healthcare provision in the US and the UK. I had the audacity to share some of these findings with the bbs community, thinking that it might positively add to the discussion providing a new angle. That is it.
Please, before you respond to me take the time to read what I actually wrote and reference it in your response rather than insist on making assumptions about my personal agenda, and fighting spirit etc… It is dispiriting and futile to have a discussion in which assumptions tRump every textual evidence.
Keep digging and make sure you never ever concede you might have misread someone’s comment or made a mistake.
I’ve done that, but you’re still speaking in irrelevant specifics about what is already generally accepted for policy, but not implementation at the political level… and you’re still attempting to pick a fight. So good luck with that.
This is what I’ve always been a little confused about with US gerrymandering. If you gerrymander a region so party A will win when they have fewer votes, it means there is likely a threshold that can be crossed that, if crosses, will basically completely annihilate party A. If you are winning with 48% of the vote because you win districts 53-47 and lost districts 80-20, then a few percent shift in your opponent’s direction will mean you are almost entirely wiped out - you don’t have that long tail on your side of the distribution.
(Badly handrawn curves - left is a natural distribution, a basically a normal curve with the right have turned upside down. The right is a gerrymandered curve with the steep cliff.)
Gerrymandering is actually really dangerous. But I guess in the US the percentage of support never actually shifts very much? There are so few people who aren’t firmly in one camp or the other that it’s just next to impossible to fall below the threshold and end up with a catastrophe?
[quote=“dfaris, post:21, topic:93013”]
If the noises Trump has been making about a universal plan are more than smoke and mirrors,
[/quote]Sigh.
“After Trump’s Washington Post interview this past Sunday, the conservative health-care universe, including some people on Trump’s own team, quickly concluded that the separate administration plan he described was entirely a figment of Trump’s imagination.” – National Review
Late-stage capitalism.
Yup. That’s exactly what I’ve heard. My favorite example being from a psychiatrist who stopped working in a medical office and started seeing patients only in her home. Her specialty? Suicidal teens. But it was all the fault of having to carry private liability insurance instead of being mostly covered by working in a medical center (within walking distance of her home, where she had complete autonomy and a professional clinical set-up). Those damned lib’ruls.
Yes, that’s exactly right. If you were to run a million simulated elections with fair and then gerrymandered districts, gerrymandering would have the effect of swapping a large number of relatively narrow wins for a small number of catastrophic defeats.
It will seem like a really good idea most of the time, though. Elections are relatively rare, and winning narrowly tends to give you 100% of the power, so this example of “picking up pennies in front of a moving steamroller” seems logical, and will pay off in the short term.
Now imagine yourself in the position of a party that’s gradually polling fewer and fewer votes. Gerrymandering will cover that for a while, and you’ll rely on it to win at all of a wile, but eventually, you’ll head over that cliff and face electoral oblivion.
…unless you work out some other method to bias the vote in your favour.
Gerrymander until it doesn’t work anymore; then bring on the voter suppression; if that doesn’t work, time for naked violence and official disenfranchisement.
Fortunately, basic decency, media scrutiny and a respect for the norms of democracy prevent such a scenario from ever occurring. Right?
…I know I’ve said this before, but y’all should really pay attention to antebellum US history. The Civil War was preceded by a couple of decades’ worth of the slavers actively working to subvert democracy.
The Buchanon and Harding administrations might be some good projects to write about, the anti-statesman series from Doris Kearns Goodwin.
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