Sunday, November 18, 2012 4:41:16 AM
Anybody Notice a Pattern?
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: November 16, 2012
It appears that Mitt Romney was a terrible presidential candidate.
O.K., some people have known that ever since the story broke about strapping his dog on the car roof. But now we seem to be reaching a consensus.
First, there was that matter of losing the election. Then this week Romney told some of his donors that while he was pursuing the “big issues,” President Obama had purchased the support of blacks, Hispanics and young people with goodies like college loans and health care reform. College-age women, Romney claimed, traded their votes for “free contraceptives.”
Show them a birth control pill and they’ll follow you anywhere.
Romney said all this in a private conference call, so he couldn’t have suspected that it would wind up in the media. There is no precedent whatsoever for reporters getting hold of remarks presidential candidates make to private groups about the inherent greediness of American voters.
Nevertheless, quite a few Republicans thought it was a bad idea to insult the integrity of American youth and minorities at a moment when everybody agreed that the electoral future belonged to American youth and minorities.
“Romney, take responsibility for being flawed candidate, w/delusional campaign w/no vision,” tweeted Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist.
“I don’t want to rebut him point by point. I would just say to you, I don’t believe that we have millions and millions of people in this country that don’t want to work,” said Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
Florida is flooded with potential Republican presidential candidates, the top two being Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush. That’s reasonable — except, have you noticed that things in Florida always have a tendency to get a little weird? Is it an accident that the woman at the center of the Petraeus scandal — the one with the financial troubles and the glamorous twin — is from Tampa? This week former Gov. Charlie Crist officially repudiated reports in a London paper that he and the twin used to date.
For Republicans, the mood after the election was so bad that — I know you will be shocked to hear this — a Republican Party official in Texas advocated leaving the Union. “We must contest every single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity,” wrote Peter Morrison, treasurer of the Hardin County Republican Party. “But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our opportunity.” (To be fair, you can’t judge an entire state by one county political official. Although Bud Kennedy, a columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, pointed out that Morrison had once been chosen to help screen public school textbooks for the State Board of Education.)
Romney supporters couldn’t believe that they had lost fairly. The Maine Republican chairman was breathlessly reporting that “dozens, dozens of black people” had mysteriously shown up to vote in rural areas.
Now things are calmer — perhaps because, if they want to, Republicans can just blame everything on Romney’s poor campaign skills. Really terrible skills! Maybe the worst presidential candidate in American history! Well, possibly not worse than Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who got only 8 percent of the electoral vote against Thomas Jefferson. But Thomas Jefferson had the Louisiana Purchase. If Barack Obama had bought Manitoba, Republicans would have understood his winning.
And actually not quite as bad as John McCain, who got fewer electoral votes when he lost in 2008 than Romney just got. But at least McCain has gone on to provide service to the country in the Senate, such as his current attempts to warn the nation that we haven’t been told enough about what happened during the tragic attack on Benghazi.
McCain was so desperate to sound the alarm that he missed a classified briefing on Benghazi to hold a press conference complaining that he had not been given enough information. Which clearly he hadn’t. He knew nothing! Nothing whatsoever! And what was the administration going to do about that?
“It is essential for the Congress to conduct its own independent assessment,” said the senator, demanding that Congress form a special committee to look into Libya. This would be a double benefit, helping to inform all the members who missed their normal committee briefings while also addressing the continuing national crisis over the shortage of congressional committees.
Afterward, McCain was his normal even-tempered self. (“Because I have the right as a senator to have no comment and who the hell are you to tell me if I can or not?”) But you did have to wonder. McCain. Then Romney. Now, all these guys from Florida and Paul Ryan, who when last heard from was blaming his ticket’s defeat on the “urban” vote.
Somewhere, there’s a right-wing Michael Dukakis waiting for the phone to ring.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/collins-anybody-notice-a-pattern.html [with comments]
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Social and Anti-Social Media
A news feed of President Obama participating in early voting on Oct. 25, 2012 in Chicago.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
By RICHARD PARKER
November 15, 2012, 9:16 pm
On election night, it became the most re-tweeted photo [ http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-most-retweets_b29141 ] in the history of social media: a picture of President Obama hugging his wife, Michelle.
But the dissemination of that iconic image is only the tip of a far larger iceberg that sank Mitt Romney. Yes, demographics helped Obama beat him. But so did the changing landscape of media consumption. The very groups — young women, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian-Americans — that made the difference are among the fastest adopters of social and mobile media.
The Obama campaign understood and rode this convergence of demographics and media, even as Karl Rove spent $300 million on television advertising [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/04/karl-rove-crossroads-2012-election_n_2072744.html ] that helped garner nearly two-thirds of white males only to find himself, to his everlasting surprise, on the losing side of the national election.
Republicans may lament that this is not their father’s country but more to the point this is not their father’s marketing either. Irreversible change in the country’s demography collided with irresistible change in the consumption of media. While older white males get their information from television the people who made the difference are on Twitter, Tumblr and smart phones generally. They may even be making decisions about politics differently than their predecessors and there will only be more of them entering the market and the electorate.
In 2008, much of the after-action analysis of social media was of the “gee-whiz” variety — Obama outperformed McCain in this new medium! — yet the precise effect was not exactly clear, other than that it helped win over younger voters. It relied, to a large extent, on sheer volume. The Obama team out-staffed, out-emailed and simply swamped the McCain effort with dozens as many Twitter followers and 400 percent more followers on Facebook.
But the Obama effort in 2008 built more than buzz; it created conversions, according to academic research [ http://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/?p=1627 ] performed by Jennifer Aaker, a business professor at Stanford, along with researcher Victoria Chang. The campaign built 5 million supporters on social networks, had 2.5 million followers on Facebook, and 50 million viewers watched 14 million hours of video on YouTube, which was then pretty new. This translated into huge offline results: 230,000 events and $639 million raised from 3 million donors. On Election Day, every supporter with a mobile phone number the Obama campaign had in its database got three text message reminders to vote. Obama won by more than 8 million votes.
Of course, an exhaustive study of Obama’s social media in 2012 has not yet been conducted — it’s only a matter of time — but the initial reporting indicates a similar performance. The president’s team, with the head-start of a huge database of supporters, just out-muscled Romney’s campaign. By September 2012, Obama’s Facebook page had 1.2 million likes — while Romney’s had just half as much, according to Inc.’s Meaghan Ouimet [ http://www.inc.com/maeghan-ouimet/social-meda-campaigns-election-2012-obama-romney.html ]. Obama had twice as many YouTube likes, comments and views as Romney —and easily 20 times as many re-tweets as the Republican nominee. Interestingly, the Obama campaign has not yet been all that eager to share its social media victory strategy, though Pro Publica is busy [ http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-so-far-about-obamas-big-data-operation ] trying to crack the story.
The difference in content and effort created results. Women for Obama, run by the Obama team on Facebook, created a story line mixing text and graphics: It was about the rights of women, their desire to control their own health care and their voting power. Only when that narrative was engaging users did the Obama campaign make the ask, getting them to donate, call or vote. “We Vote, We Decide” was posted right before the election and the page had 1.3 million likes. On the other hand, Moms for Mitt, run by the Romney campaign, had less thematic construction, featuring photos of volunteers, images of Romney and his running mate, and posts urging the “moms” to vote or make calls. It netted just 93,000 likes.
Generally speaking, social media has not proven itself able to change someone’s mind as much as it is capable of putting together communities of like-minded people. We don’t know the correlation of “liking,” say, on Facebook with voting behavior. But putting people together who are like-minded allows them to take other actions: to reach out to more friends online or to join old-school telephone drives and events and also to take more committed actions, like raising money. Obama raised $147 million from small donors who chipped in $200 or less, nearly three-and-a-half times as much [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-22/obama-winning-social-media-if-hashtagwars-really-matter.html ] as Romney. The barrage of constant e-mails from both campaigns also likely didn’t change minds. It was just the kind of consistency — however irritating — that reminded people to donate and then to vote.
This is about more than media. The Obama campaign correctly understood that to reach certain cohorts most effectively it would have to move beyond traditional media to the media that most resonates with Hispanics, young women, African-Americans and even Asian-Americans. Consider Latinos. The 50.5 million Hispanics in the country have higher usage rates of mobile and social media [ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/1/whites-trail-hispanics-blacks-adopting-mobile-devi/?page=all ] than Anglos. African Americans and Hispanics have adopted Twitter at faster rates than whites or Anglos.
Consider women, too, of various ethnic backgrounds, who have embraced smart phones faster than their non-Hispanic white counterparts. More than three in five women who are of African American, Hispanic or Asian-American had a smartphone in 2011, compared to just one in three white women, according to Nielsen [ http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports-downloads/2011/us-americas-multicultural-women.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NielsenReportsDownloads+%28Nielsen+Reports+and+Downloads%29 ].
More than three in four Asian-American women believe that smartphones improve their lives, while just one in four is inclined to say the same thing about the most tried and trusted medium in American politics: Television.
The Obama campaign spent a fortune on traditional advertising, too, some of which also targeted, women and Latinos. The Democrats, though, leavened their communications spending with other media, like any smart marketer today. Which brings us to Republicans and their reliance on television. Not only did they think the demographic coalition that turned out in 2008 was a fluke, but they were preaching, through the television set, to their own choir. Less than one-in-five adults under 30 watch cable television news, according the Pew Research Center [ http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2368/news-media-digital-print-television-social-networking-sites-mobile-devices-tablets-smartphones-blogs-email-cnn-twitter-magazines ], while over half of people over 65 do.
Many of these insights are drawn from the world of market research, not political campaigns, and they’re fast becoming fairly common knowledge. Market research is actively helping companies embrace, say, the $1 trillion Hispanic market, as opposed to threatening to get people to “self-deport.” In business it’s about addition, not subtraction. In California, Alan Zorfas, the president of the market research firm Motista, found a way to explain how President Obama — on the wrong side of so many traditional polling measures, like right-track-wrong track and the economy — was able to defy gravity. Different cohorts simply liked him, thought he was cooler or believed he truly empathized with them, regardless of his track record. “Obama is an Apple,” Zorfas told me, “while Romney is a Dell.”
All of this suggests not only that a key shift has long since gotten underway in demographics and media, but also that younger voters make decisions differently. They are constantly informed, messaged and reinforced by their deluge of text and Twitter messages — all coming from their friends, families and co-workers — hundreds if not thousands of times a day. While Obama lost a few points off his overall white vote, he still swamped Romney [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83510.html ] among all people under 30, the first and fastest adopters of social media, by 5 million votes (even though fewer younger voters turned out than in 2008). As if to underscore the Democratic edge, even after the polls closed in Virginia, the Obama campaign was still texting volunteers [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/politics/july-dec12/linesatpolls_11-06.html ] to make sure everyone in line stayed and voted.
Right now, the Republican Party is talking a lot about immigration, Marco Rubio and copying Obama’s get-out-the-vote effort — all of which suggests a profound misunderstanding of what really happened in 2012 and could set the stage for a repeat in 2016.
Richard Parker is the president of Parker Research in Austin, Tex. His commentary is syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/social-and-anti-social-media/ [with comments]
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Samuel Alito, Supreme Court Justice, Takes On Citizens United Critics
US Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr. participates in the courts official photo session on October 8, 2010 at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC.
( TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images)
By MARK SHERMAN
11/17/12 11:35 AM ET EST
WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is defending the court's 2010 decision in the Citizens United case that helped fuel hundreds of millions of dollars of spending by independent groups in the just-concluded campaign season.
Alito told roughly 1,500 people at a Federalist Society dinner this week that the First Amendment protects political speech, whether from an individual or a corporation. His comments to the overwhelmingly conservative and Republican crowd were part of his broader analysis of arguments put forth by the Obama administration in recent years that Alito said would curtail individual freedoms in favor of stronger federal power.
He said opponents of the 5-4 decision have conducted an effective, but misleading, public relations campaign by stressing that the court extended free speech rights to corporations.
He even praised opponents' pithy cleverness, noting such bumper stickers as "Life Does Not Begin at Incorporation."
But Alito rattled off the names of the nation's leading newspapers and television networks, all owned by corporations and possessing acknowledged rights to print and say what they wish about politics and government.
"The question is whether speech that goes to the very heart of government should be limited to certain preferred corporations; namely, media corporations," he said. "Surely the idea that the First Amendment protects only certain privileged voices should be disturbing to anybody who believes in free speech."
It was not the first time Alito has taken on critics of the outcome in the Citizens United case. At President Barack Obama's State of the Union address soon after the court's ruling in January 2010, the president said the court "reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections."
Alito, sitting with five other justices, was seen to mouth, "Not true."
The justice in his speech Thursday also briefly dealt with high court cases involving religion, private property, surveillance, immigration and health care. In the latter case, of course, Alito was among four justices who dissented from the ruling that upheld Obama's health care overhaul.
But he noted that, even in the health care ruling, the court rejected administration arguments in favor of congressional power at the expense of the states and individuals.
Taken together, Alito said, the views put forth by the government begin to suggest a vision of society "in which the federal government towers over people." He noted that in several cases, not a single justice endorsed the administration's arguments.
He also humorously recounted his experience at Yale Law School in the early 1970s when he was a student of constitutional law professor Charles Reich, who by then was more interested in American counterculture than the law.
He quoted from Reich's bestselling "The Greening of America," in which the author painted a frightening picture of a disintegrating society and called the era a "moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, most extreme peril."
Here, Alito paused and, to the delight of a crowd dismayed by Obama's re-election, added, "So our current situation is nothing new."
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Conservative justices routinely speak at Federalist Society gatherings, including the yearly fall meeting in Washington.
Thursday's black-tie dinner at a Washington hotel cost $175 a plate, or for $550 a participant could attend the dinner and three days of speeches and panel discussions featuring a host of federal judges, conservative and liberal legal scholars and leading Supreme Court lawyers.
Some critics have said the justices are crossing an ethical line when they allow their names to be used by the group to help sell tickets to the event. Alliance for Justice, a not-for-profit group that advocates for liberal court nominees, said Alito showed "insensitivity to the need for a justice's ethical behavior to be above reproach" by doing just that.
Ethics guidelines for federal judges other than Supreme Court justices say judges should steer clear of fundraising efforts and not allow the prestige of their office to be used to drum up ticket sales.
Federalist Society president and chief executive officer Eugene Meyer said the critics have their facts wrong.
"This annual event is not a fundraiser. We have not hoped to raise funds from it, and, in fact, we lose a little money on every meal we serve," Meyer said.
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While Alito was talking about the counterculture, other justices were dipping into pop culture.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor made her second appearance on "Sesame Street," joining muppet Abby Cadabby to talk about the word "career."
Abby, the 3-year-old daughter of the Fairy Godmother, said she hoped to be a princess.
"Pretending to be a princess is fun, but it is definitely not a career," Sotomayor said.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found herself in an unusual place for high court justices, among Glamour magazine's Women of the Year. "The judiciary is not a profession that ranks very high among the glamorously attired," she told the audience as the magazine honored the women at Carnegie Hall in New York. Ginsburg also noted that she might have been the second woman to join the high court after Sandra Day O'Connor, but she was the first honored by Glamour.
Among the other honorees was Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO hit series "Girls." As it happens, Dunham made another annual list that also included a Supreme Court justice.
Dunham and Chief Justice John Roberts (an unlikely pair, no?) are members of Esquire magazine's 2012 roster of Americans of the Year.
Roberts was recognized for his vote to uphold the health care law. The magazine said the outcome allowed Roberts to "preserve the court's institutional integrity" by joining with the four liberal justices and avoiding a wholly partisan and ideological split.
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Online:
Supreme Court: http://www.supremecourt.gov
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/17/samuel-alito-supreme-cour_n_2150018.html [with comments]
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Kevin MacDonald, Cal State Professor, Under Fire For Alleged White Supremacist Beliefs (VIDEO [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kwfrFNYioE (next below; same video embedded)]
Posted: 11/16/2012 3:33 pm EST Updated: 11/16/2012 5:22 pm EST
California State Univeristy, Long Beach psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, a man the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the "neo-Nazi movement's favorite academic [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/kevin-macdonald ]," continues to rile community members with language that some say espouses white supremacist and neo-Nazi beliefs.
MacDonald prefers the description "white advocate." As a director of the new political party American Third Position (AP3), he believes that immigration (both illegal and legal) must be stopped in order to preserve American society.
According to the OC Register, part of AP3's mission statement [ http://www.ocweekly.com/2010-01-21/news/long-beach-state-kevin-macdonald-american-third-position-party/ ] reads: "Government policy in the United States discriminates against white Americans ... white Americans need their own political party to fight this discrimination."
MacDonald's affiliation with AP3 has intensified scrutiny of the professor, especially by the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL has a magazine devoted solely to MacDonald, according to the Register.
On its website [ http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kevin_macdonald/affiliations.asp ], the organization describes connections between MacDonald and other "white advocates," writing:
The degree to which he is revered by some extremists is probably best illustrated by an April 2007 comment made on Stormfront, the world's largest Internet forum for white supremacists and anti-Semites, which said, "To me, Dr MacDonald is much more than a psychology professor at California State University. He is the leader of White people today. He should be the president of a nation, our nation, not a prof [sic]."
MacDonald stands firm in his positions, noting in an interview with KCAL9 [ http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/11/05/csulb-professor-under-fire-for-white-supremacist-beliefs/ ] that white citizens will be a minority in the U.S in 2042.
"I think the white middle class is scared economically," MacDonald said. "They're concerned about the future of the country. Underlying it, there is a fear of the future. When whites are a minority, there is a concern the country won't be the same anymore."
According to Long Beach Patch, MacDonald has fended off several termination attempts [ http://longbeach-ca.patch.com/articles/professor-s-white-supremacist-comments-rile-again-long-beach-cal-state-long-beach-nazi-neonazi-white-rights-against-immigration-new-political-party-kevin-macdonald-rick-gloady-immigration-anti#youtube_video-12072685 ] since he started teaching at Cal State, Long Beach in 1985. He has had his classes boycotted [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve_R7Sd8goM (next below)]
A tenured full professor at a California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), MacDonald has an extensive publishing record of anti-Semitic writings that have made him a favorite of Neo-Nazis. For years, many including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), have asked, why in the world is he teaching at a public state university, in a part of the country known for its racial and ethnic diversity?
MacDonald's hateful writings warrant the university taking a much more decisive stance about him as a member of its faculty. Is it not possible that students, faculty, staff and others at CSULB feel that their freedom of expression is restricted by having someone with such anti-Semitic, white supremacist views among them?
Earlier this month, university spokesman Rick Gloady said in a statement that the school respects "the right of faculty to engage in research in pursuit of knowledge and to offer different points of view." But, he added, "the personal and academic opinions presented by Kevin MacDonald do not represent the opinions or beliefs of the university or the faculty as a whole. While the university defends academic freedom and freedom of speech, it is important to note that Dr. MacDonald's views are entirely his own."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/kevin-macdonald-white-supremacist-cal-state_n_2146252.html [with comments]
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Life, Death and Deficits
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 15, 2012
America’s political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas — beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity. But there are others.
And right now the most dangerous zombie is probably the claim that rising life expectancy justifies a rise in both the Social Security retirement age and the age of eligibility for Medicare. Even some Democrats — including, according to reports, the president — have seemed susceptible to this argument. But it’s a cruel, foolish idea — cruel in the case of Social Security, foolish in the case of Medicare — and we shouldn’t let it eat our brains.
First of all, you need to understand that while life expectancy at birth has gone up a lot, that’s not relevant to this issue; what matters is life expectancy for those at or near retirement age. When, to take one example, Alan Simpson — the co-chairman of President Obama’s deficit commission — declared that Social Security was “never intended as a retirement program” because life expectancy when it was founded was only 63, he was displaying his ignorance. Even in 1940, Americans who made it to age 65 generally had many years left.
Now, life expectancy at age 65 has risen, too. But the rise has been very uneven since the 1970s, with only the relatively affluent and well-educated seeing large gains. Bear in mind, too, that the full retirement age has already gone up to 66 and is scheduled to rise to 67 under current law.
This means that any further rise in the retirement age would be a harsh blow to Americans in the bottom half of the income distribution, who aren’t living much longer, and who, in many cases, have jobs requiring physical effort that’s difficult even for healthy seniors. And these are precisely the people who depend most on Social Security.
So any rise in the Social Security retirement age would, as I said, be cruel, hurting the most vulnerable Americans. And this cruelty would be gratuitous: While the United States does have a long-run budget problem, Social Security is not a major factor in that problem.
Medicare, on the other hand, is a big budget problem. But raising the eligibility age, which means forcing seniors to seek private insurance, is no way to deal with that problem.
It’s true that thanks to Obamacare, seniors should actually be able to get insurance even without Medicare. (Although, what happens if a number of states block the expansion of Medicaid that’s a crucial piece of the program?) But let’s be clear: Government insurance via Medicare is better and more cost-effective than private insurance.
You might ask why, in that case, health reform didn’t just extend Medicare to everyone, as opposed to setting up a system that continues to rely on private insurers. The answer, of course, is political realism. Given the power of the insurance industry, the Obama administration had to keep that industry in the loop. But the fact that Medicare for all may have been politically out of reach is no reason to push millions of Americans out of a good system into a worse one.
What would happen if we raised the Medicare eligibility age? The federal government would save only a small amount of money, because younger seniors are relatively healthy and hence low-cost. Meanwhile, however, those seniors would face sharply higher out-of-pocket costs. How could this trade-off be considered good policy?
The bottom line is that raising the age of eligibility for either Social Security benefits or Medicare would be destructive, making Americans’ lives worse without contributing in any significant way to deficit reduction. Democrats, in particular, who even consider either alternative need to ask themselves what on earth they think they’re doing.
But what, ask the deficit scolds, do people like me propose doing about rising spending? The answer is to do what every other advanced country does, and make a serious effort to rein in health care costs. Give Medicare the ability to bargain over drug prices. Let the Independent Payment Advisory Board, created as part of Obamacare to help Medicare control costs, do its job instead of crying “death panels.” (And isn’t it odd that the same people who demagogue attempts to help Medicare save money are eager to throw millions of people out of the program altogether?) We know that we have a health care system with skewed incentives and bloated costs, so why don’t we try to fix it?
What we know for sure is that there is no good case for denying older Americans access to the programs they count on. This should be a red line in any budget negotiations, and we can only hope that Mr. Obama doesn’t betray his supporters by crossing it.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
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Related
Health Law Has States Feeling Tense Over Deadline (November 15, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/health/health-law-has-states-feeling-tense-over-deadline.html
Related in Opinion
Times Topic: Economy
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/economy/index.html
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/opinion/life-death-and-deficits.html [with comments]
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Companies go surgery shopping
Dr. James Caillouette of the Hoag Orthopedic Institute in Irvine discusses a hip replacement procedure with Mary Anne Ramey of San Diego.
(Allen J. Schaben, Los Angeles Times / November 7, 2012)
Employers are sending workers on all-expenses-paid trips to top-performing hospitals that agree to low, fixed rates for surgery.
By Chad Terhune, Los Angeles Times
November 17, 2012, 5:00 a.m.
Carol and Ed Vogel enjoyed a weeklong all-expenses-paid trip to a Newport Beach resort last month, and they're scheduled to return in a couple of weeks.
The Nevada couple didn't need frequent-flier miles or credit card rewards to get free airfare and hotel stay as well as $1,000 in spending money. It was all because of Carol Vogel's ailing hips and an employer's frustration with the high cost of U.S. healthcare.
Her husband's employer, newspaper publisher Stephens Media, sends employees and their family members needing hip and knee replacements to a handful of hospitals across the country, including one in Orange County, that agreed to a low, fixed rate for surgery and scored well on quality of care.
This year, grocery giant Kroger Co. has flown nearly two dozen workers to Hoag Orthopedic Institute in Irvine and several other hospitals across the U.S. for hip, knee or spinal-fusion surgeries in an effort to save money and improve care. Starting in January, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will offer employees and dependents heart, spine and transplant surgeries at no cost at six major hospital systems across the nation, with free travel and lodging.
It's all part of a growing movement by employers fed up with wildly different price tags for routine operations. In response, businesses are showering workers with generous incentives — including waiving deductibles or handing out $2,500 bonuses — to steer them to these top-performing providers offering bargain prices.
Bundled deals are common for phone service, cable TV and travel. But an all-in-one price marks a radical departure for the conventional fee-for-service medical industry in which doctors, hospitals, labs and other providers typically bill separately for each part of a procedure. Then they tack on even more if complications and unexpected costs arise.
"You expect to see the hotel, airfare and car bundled together on Expedia," said Susan Ridgely, a senior policy analyst at Rand Corp., a nonprofit think tank in Santa Monica. "We want to stop paying by the widget in healthcare."
By bringing a steady stream of new patients, the arrangement can also be a good deal for the doctors and hospitals involved.
Federal and state officials are catching on as well. Medicare and some Medicaid programs are pushing for more of these all-inclusive prices for the most common procedures, from surgeries to maternity care for low-income mothers, to eliminate some of the huge disparities in U.S. healthcare costs and reward high-quality providers with more patients.
These programs are generally voluntary so patients can still opt for care closer to home, although it may cost them more.
At Kroger, employees may pay 10% out of pocket if they choose one of the company's 19 select hospitals, compared to 25% to 50% out of pocket for other nearby medical centers.
Carol Vogel, a 64-year-old writer in Minden, Nev., said she was skeptical about flying to another state for surgery until the human resources manager explained how much she stood to save.
In Newport Beach "this was 100% paid for," Vogel said. If she stayed closer to home in Nevada, "I would have been out $8,000 or $9,000 easy on my insurance."
She said she's pain-free in her left hip for the first time in years, so she scheduled an implant for her right hip later this month, followed by a free stay at Island Hotel, an oceanfront resort in Newport Beach.
"This is like the honeymoon we never had," she said. "Are you kidding me?"
At Kroger, 21 patients have traveled for surgery this year, and none have experienced complications or been readmitted to the hospital, said Theresa Monti, a company vice president for employee benefits. She said Kroger pays about $30,000 on average for those knee and hip replacement surgeries, 15% less than what it pays at other hospitals.
"It's a new concept, and some people have a hard time getting their arms around the idea of traveling for surgery," Monti said. "We are looking for any opportunity we can to encourage the use of the highest-quality healthcare while holding the line on costs."
BridgeHealth Medical Inc. in Denver is one of a handful of firms that assists employers, insurers and patients with the logistics of surgery shopping. Earlier efforts to persuade employers to send patients to India and other overseas destinations for cheaper care never took off. So BridgeHealth now has negotiated fixed rates with about 45 U.S. hospitals.
Chip Burgett, an executive vice president at BridgeHealth, said employers still come out ahead financially, even after footing thousands of dollars in travel expenses. His firm has negotiated rates on knee and hip replacements as low as $19,000.
Last year, the California Public Employees' Retirement System limited what it would pay for knee and hip replacement surgeries to $30,000 because its hospital bills ranged from $15,000 to $110,000 with no discernible difference in quality. It found 45 hospital systems willing to stay within that amount, and its average price per surgery dropped 30% to $23,113.
"There is a lot of excess margin in healthcare and plenty of room in the pricing of these hospitals," Burgett said. "Hopefully this drives true competition in healthcare and it's not just based on how many helicopters a hospital has."
While employers are leading the way right now, experts say Medicare could have the biggest impact. Federal officials are looking to test these all-in-one prices with hospitals in California and other states.
Some consumer advocates have raised concerns about patients traveling long distances for surgery and taking them away from their regular doctors. Cindy Meyers, benefits manager for Stephens Media in Las Vegas, said it has been difficult in some cases to find local doctors to provide follow-up care for patients who traveled elsewhere.
But she said the overall experience has been positive for her company, which insures about 1,500 people across several states.
"It's a great benefit for us cost-wise, and our employees feel comfort in knowing this doctor specializes in just what they need," Meyers said.
James Caillouette, surgeon in chief at the 70-bed Hoag Orthopedic Institute and an advocate for bundled payments since 2008, said not every patient is a suitable candidate for this arrangement.
First, he requests their medical records and talks to the patient by phone. He rules out patients who may be at higher risk for complications from surgery.
Post-surgery complications matter not just for the patient but also to the doctors and hospital because they pose a risk for additional treatment costs. Some bundled deals include warranties spelling out what complications the medical providers are responsible for. Medical studies show that complications can cost $7,600 per patient.
Hoag Orthopedic Institute's bundled fees for knee and hip replacement range from about $20,000 at an outpatient surgery center to roughly $30,000 or more in the hospital. The surgery location depends largely on the patient's medical condition.
Caillouette said his patients usually spend one or two nights in the hospital and then return to their hotel. A physical therapist visits them there most days, and Caillouette makes house calls to the hotel as well. Most patients fly home after a week in Orange County.
"Now there's one bill, and employers can budget for it," Caillouette said. "This has the potential to be a game changer."
chad.terhune@latimes.com
*
Related
California speeds revamp of health insurance market
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-calif-healthcare-react-20121108,0,6188013.story
More employers embrace high-deductible health plans to pare costs
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-employer-health-plans-20121114,0,5287831.story
California works to get word out on health insurance exchange
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-health-reform-outreach-20121114,0,5179757.story
Medicare paid $1.5 billion in improper therapy claims in 2009
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-medicare-billing-20121113,0,1025628.story
*
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bargain-surgery-20121117,0,7716044.story [ http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bargain-surgery-20121117,0,7250543,full.story ] [with comments]
===
Judge Blocks Birther Lawsuit In Vermont
11/16/2012
A Vermont state judge has blocked a birther lawsuit to disqualify President Barack Obama from the state's ballot, while birther queen Orly Taitz claims a "superhuman effort" in the birther movement.
Vermont Superior Court Judge Robert Bent ruled Wednesday that H. Brooke Paige's suit to remove Obama from Vermont's presidential ballot in last week's election was invalid since Paige filed the suit in state court and not federal court, the Burlington Free Press reports [ http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20121115/NEWS03/311150036/Vermont-judge-tosses-natural-born-citizen-anti-Obama-lawsuit ]. Paige, who unsuccessfully sought a U.S. Senate seat this year, claimed that Obama was not a citizen since neither of his parents were citizens.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/birther-vermont_n_2146210.html [with comments]
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Chris Collins, Republican New York Rep.-Elect, Attends Democratic Caucus Meeting
11/17/2012
New York Rep.-elect Chris Collins kicked his congressional career off with a bit of confusion.
Collins, a Republican, was seen running out of a Democratic caucus meeting on November 14, according to Roll Call's Heard on the Hill [ http://www3.hoh.rollcall.com/dude-wheres-my-caucus/ ].
A Democratic staffer told Roll Call Collins asked her what meeting he was attending. When she told him it was the Democratic Caucus, Collins reportedly exclaimed, "Oh sh*t, I'm in the wrong meeting."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/17/chris-collins-_n_2151633.html [with comments]
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Governor Christie: It's Bad Enough I Said The Word "Twinkie" Behind This Podium
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJXyipuHlao
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By GAIL COLLINS
Published: November 16, 2012
It appears that Mitt Romney was a terrible presidential candidate.
O.K., some people have known that ever since the story broke about strapping his dog on the car roof. But now we seem to be reaching a consensus.
First, there was that matter of losing the election. Then this week Romney told some of his donors that while he was pursuing the “big issues,” President Obama had purchased the support of blacks, Hispanics and young people with goodies like college loans and health care reform. College-age women, Romney claimed, traded their votes for “free contraceptives.”
Show them a birth control pill and they’ll follow you anywhere.
Romney said all this in a private conference call, so he couldn’t have suspected that it would wind up in the media. There is no precedent whatsoever for reporters getting hold of remarks presidential candidates make to private groups about the inherent greediness of American voters.
Nevertheless, quite a few Republicans thought it was a bad idea to insult the integrity of American youth and minorities at a moment when everybody agreed that the electoral future belonged to American youth and minorities.
“Romney, take responsibility for being flawed candidate, w/delusional campaign w/no vision,” tweeted Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist.
“I don’t want to rebut him point by point. I would just say to you, I don’t believe that we have millions and millions of people in this country that don’t want to work,” said Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
Florida is flooded with potential Republican presidential candidates, the top two being Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush. That’s reasonable — except, have you noticed that things in Florida always have a tendency to get a little weird? Is it an accident that the woman at the center of the Petraeus scandal — the one with the financial troubles and the glamorous twin — is from Tampa? This week former Gov. Charlie Crist officially repudiated reports in a London paper that he and the twin used to date.
For Republicans, the mood after the election was so bad that — I know you will be shocked to hear this — a Republican Party official in Texas advocated leaving the Union. “We must contest every single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity,” wrote Peter Morrison, treasurer of the Hardin County Republican Party. “But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our opportunity.” (To be fair, you can’t judge an entire state by one county political official. Although Bud Kennedy, a columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, pointed out that Morrison had once been chosen to help screen public school textbooks for the State Board of Education.)
Romney supporters couldn’t believe that they had lost fairly. The Maine Republican chairman was breathlessly reporting that “dozens, dozens of black people” had mysteriously shown up to vote in rural areas.
Now things are calmer — perhaps because, if they want to, Republicans can just blame everything on Romney’s poor campaign skills. Really terrible skills! Maybe the worst presidential candidate in American history! Well, possibly not worse than Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who got only 8 percent of the electoral vote against Thomas Jefferson. But Thomas Jefferson had the Louisiana Purchase. If Barack Obama had bought Manitoba, Republicans would have understood his winning.
And actually not quite as bad as John McCain, who got fewer electoral votes when he lost in 2008 than Romney just got. But at least McCain has gone on to provide service to the country in the Senate, such as his current attempts to warn the nation that we haven’t been told enough about what happened during the tragic attack on Benghazi.
McCain was so desperate to sound the alarm that he missed a classified briefing on Benghazi to hold a press conference complaining that he had not been given enough information. Which clearly he hadn’t. He knew nothing! Nothing whatsoever! And what was the administration going to do about that?
“It is essential for the Congress to conduct its own independent assessment,” said the senator, demanding that Congress form a special committee to look into Libya. This would be a double benefit, helping to inform all the members who missed their normal committee briefings while also addressing the continuing national crisis over the shortage of congressional committees.
Afterward, McCain was his normal even-tempered self. (“Because I have the right as a senator to have no comment and who the hell are you to tell me if I can or not?”) But you did have to wonder. McCain. Then Romney. Now, all these guys from Florida and Paul Ryan, who when last heard from was blaming his ticket’s defeat on the “urban” vote.
Somewhere, there’s a right-wing Michael Dukakis waiting for the phone to ring.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/collins-anybody-notice-a-pattern.html [with comments]
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Social and Anti-Social Media
A news feed of President Obama participating in early voting on Oct. 25, 2012 in Chicago.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
By RICHARD PARKER
November 15, 2012, 9:16 pm
On election night, it became the most re-tweeted photo [ http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-most-retweets_b29141 ] in the history of social media: a picture of President Obama hugging his wife, Michelle.
But the dissemination of that iconic image is only the tip of a far larger iceberg that sank Mitt Romney. Yes, demographics helped Obama beat him. But so did the changing landscape of media consumption. The very groups — young women, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian-Americans — that made the difference are among the fastest adopters of social and mobile media.
The Obama campaign understood and rode this convergence of demographics and media, even as Karl Rove spent $300 million on television advertising [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/04/karl-rove-crossroads-2012-election_n_2072744.html ] that helped garner nearly two-thirds of white males only to find himself, to his everlasting surprise, on the losing side of the national election.
Republicans may lament that this is not their father’s country but more to the point this is not their father’s marketing either. Irreversible change in the country’s demography collided with irresistible change in the consumption of media. While older white males get their information from television the people who made the difference are on Twitter, Tumblr and smart phones generally. They may even be making decisions about politics differently than their predecessors and there will only be more of them entering the market and the electorate.
In 2008, much of the after-action analysis of social media was of the “gee-whiz” variety — Obama outperformed McCain in this new medium! — yet the precise effect was not exactly clear, other than that it helped win over younger voters. It relied, to a large extent, on sheer volume. The Obama team out-staffed, out-emailed and simply swamped the McCain effort with dozens as many Twitter followers and 400 percent more followers on Facebook.
But the Obama effort in 2008 built more than buzz; it created conversions, according to academic research [ http://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/?p=1627 ] performed by Jennifer Aaker, a business professor at Stanford, along with researcher Victoria Chang. The campaign built 5 million supporters on social networks, had 2.5 million followers on Facebook, and 50 million viewers watched 14 million hours of video on YouTube, which was then pretty new. This translated into huge offline results: 230,000 events and $639 million raised from 3 million donors. On Election Day, every supporter with a mobile phone number the Obama campaign had in its database got three text message reminders to vote. Obama won by more than 8 million votes.
Of course, an exhaustive study of Obama’s social media in 2012 has not yet been conducted — it’s only a matter of time — but the initial reporting indicates a similar performance. The president’s team, with the head-start of a huge database of supporters, just out-muscled Romney’s campaign. By September 2012, Obama’s Facebook page had 1.2 million likes — while Romney’s had just half as much, according to Inc.’s Meaghan Ouimet [ http://www.inc.com/maeghan-ouimet/social-meda-campaigns-election-2012-obama-romney.html ]. Obama had twice as many YouTube likes, comments and views as Romney —and easily 20 times as many re-tweets as the Republican nominee. Interestingly, the Obama campaign has not yet been all that eager to share its social media victory strategy, though Pro Publica is busy [ http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-so-far-about-obamas-big-data-operation ] trying to crack the story.
The difference in content and effort created results. Women for Obama, run by the Obama team on Facebook, created a story line mixing text and graphics: It was about the rights of women, their desire to control their own health care and their voting power. Only when that narrative was engaging users did the Obama campaign make the ask, getting them to donate, call or vote. “We Vote, We Decide” was posted right before the election and the page had 1.3 million likes. On the other hand, Moms for Mitt, run by the Romney campaign, had less thematic construction, featuring photos of volunteers, images of Romney and his running mate, and posts urging the “moms” to vote or make calls. It netted just 93,000 likes.
Generally speaking, social media has not proven itself able to change someone’s mind as much as it is capable of putting together communities of like-minded people. We don’t know the correlation of “liking,” say, on Facebook with voting behavior. But putting people together who are like-minded allows them to take other actions: to reach out to more friends online or to join old-school telephone drives and events and also to take more committed actions, like raising money. Obama raised $147 million from small donors who chipped in $200 or less, nearly three-and-a-half times as much [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-22/obama-winning-social-media-if-hashtagwars-really-matter.html ] as Romney. The barrage of constant e-mails from both campaigns also likely didn’t change minds. It was just the kind of consistency — however irritating — that reminded people to donate and then to vote.
This is about more than media. The Obama campaign correctly understood that to reach certain cohorts most effectively it would have to move beyond traditional media to the media that most resonates with Hispanics, young women, African-Americans and even Asian-Americans. Consider Latinos. The 50.5 million Hispanics in the country have higher usage rates of mobile and social media [ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/1/whites-trail-hispanics-blacks-adopting-mobile-devi/?page=all ] than Anglos. African Americans and Hispanics have adopted Twitter at faster rates than whites or Anglos.
Consider women, too, of various ethnic backgrounds, who have embraced smart phones faster than their non-Hispanic white counterparts. More than three in five women who are of African American, Hispanic or Asian-American had a smartphone in 2011, compared to just one in three white women, according to Nielsen [ http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports-downloads/2011/us-americas-multicultural-women.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NielsenReportsDownloads+%28Nielsen+Reports+and+Downloads%29 ].
More than three in four Asian-American women believe that smartphones improve their lives, while just one in four is inclined to say the same thing about the most tried and trusted medium in American politics: Television.
The Obama campaign spent a fortune on traditional advertising, too, some of which also targeted, women and Latinos. The Democrats, though, leavened their communications spending with other media, like any smart marketer today. Which brings us to Republicans and their reliance on television. Not only did they think the demographic coalition that turned out in 2008 was a fluke, but they were preaching, through the television set, to their own choir. Less than one-in-five adults under 30 watch cable television news, according the Pew Research Center [ http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2368/news-media-digital-print-television-social-networking-sites-mobile-devices-tablets-smartphones-blogs-email-cnn-twitter-magazines ], while over half of people over 65 do.
Many of these insights are drawn from the world of market research, not political campaigns, and they’re fast becoming fairly common knowledge. Market research is actively helping companies embrace, say, the $1 trillion Hispanic market, as opposed to threatening to get people to “self-deport.” In business it’s about addition, not subtraction. In California, Alan Zorfas, the president of the market research firm Motista, found a way to explain how President Obama — on the wrong side of so many traditional polling measures, like right-track-wrong track and the economy — was able to defy gravity. Different cohorts simply liked him, thought he was cooler or believed he truly empathized with them, regardless of his track record. “Obama is an Apple,” Zorfas told me, “while Romney is a Dell.”
All of this suggests not only that a key shift has long since gotten underway in demographics and media, but also that younger voters make decisions differently. They are constantly informed, messaged and reinforced by their deluge of text and Twitter messages — all coming from their friends, families and co-workers — hundreds if not thousands of times a day. While Obama lost a few points off his overall white vote, he still swamped Romney [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83510.html ] among all people under 30, the first and fastest adopters of social media, by 5 million votes (even though fewer younger voters turned out than in 2008). As if to underscore the Democratic edge, even after the polls closed in Virginia, the Obama campaign was still texting volunteers [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/politics/july-dec12/linesatpolls_11-06.html ] to make sure everyone in line stayed and voted.
Right now, the Republican Party is talking a lot about immigration, Marco Rubio and copying Obama’s get-out-the-vote effort — all of which suggests a profound misunderstanding of what really happened in 2012 and could set the stage for a repeat in 2016.
Richard Parker is the president of Parker Research in Austin, Tex. His commentary is syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/social-and-anti-social-media/ [with comments]
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Samuel Alito, Supreme Court Justice, Takes On Citizens United Critics
US Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr. participates in the courts official photo session on October 8, 2010 at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC.
( TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images)
By MARK SHERMAN
11/17/12 11:35 AM ET EST
WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is defending the court's 2010 decision in the Citizens United case that helped fuel hundreds of millions of dollars of spending by independent groups in the just-concluded campaign season.
Alito told roughly 1,500 people at a Federalist Society dinner this week that the First Amendment protects political speech, whether from an individual or a corporation. His comments to the overwhelmingly conservative and Republican crowd were part of his broader analysis of arguments put forth by the Obama administration in recent years that Alito said would curtail individual freedoms in favor of stronger federal power.
He said opponents of the 5-4 decision have conducted an effective, but misleading, public relations campaign by stressing that the court extended free speech rights to corporations.
He even praised opponents' pithy cleverness, noting such bumper stickers as "Life Does Not Begin at Incorporation."
But Alito rattled off the names of the nation's leading newspapers and television networks, all owned by corporations and possessing acknowledged rights to print and say what they wish about politics and government.
"The question is whether speech that goes to the very heart of government should be limited to certain preferred corporations; namely, media corporations," he said. "Surely the idea that the First Amendment protects only certain privileged voices should be disturbing to anybody who believes in free speech."
It was not the first time Alito has taken on critics of the outcome in the Citizens United case. At President Barack Obama's State of the Union address soon after the court's ruling in January 2010, the president said the court "reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections."
Alito, sitting with five other justices, was seen to mouth, "Not true."
The justice in his speech Thursday also briefly dealt with high court cases involving religion, private property, surveillance, immigration and health care. In the latter case, of course, Alito was among four justices who dissented from the ruling that upheld Obama's health care overhaul.
But he noted that, even in the health care ruling, the court rejected administration arguments in favor of congressional power at the expense of the states and individuals.
Taken together, Alito said, the views put forth by the government begin to suggest a vision of society "in which the federal government towers over people." He noted that in several cases, not a single justice endorsed the administration's arguments.
He also humorously recounted his experience at Yale Law School in the early 1970s when he was a student of constitutional law professor Charles Reich, who by then was more interested in American counterculture than the law.
He quoted from Reich's bestselling "The Greening of America," in which the author painted a frightening picture of a disintegrating society and called the era a "moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, most extreme peril."
Here, Alito paused and, to the delight of a crowd dismayed by Obama's re-election, added, "So our current situation is nothing new."
*
Conservative justices routinely speak at Federalist Society gatherings, including the yearly fall meeting in Washington.
Thursday's black-tie dinner at a Washington hotel cost $175 a plate, or for $550 a participant could attend the dinner and three days of speeches and panel discussions featuring a host of federal judges, conservative and liberal legal scholars and leading Supreme Court lawyers.
Some critics have said the justices are crossing an ethical line when they allow their names to be used by the group to help sell tickets to the event. Alliance for Justice, a not-for-profit group that advocates for liberal court nominees, said Alito showed "insensitivity to the need for a justice's ethical behavior to be above reproach" by doing just that.
Ethics guidelines for federal judges other than Supreme Court justices say judges should steer clear of fundraising efforts and not allow the prestige of their office to be used to drum up ticket sales.
Federalist Society president and chief executive officer Eugene Meyer said the critics have their facts wrong.
"This annual event is not a fundraiser. We have not hoped to raise funds from it, and, in fact, we lose a little money on every meal we serve," Meyer said.
*
While Alito was talking about the counterculture, other justices were dipping into pop culture.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor made her second appearance on "Sesame Street," joining muppet Abby Cadabby to talk about the word "career."
Abby, the 3-year-old daughter of the Fairy Godmother, said she hoped to be a princess.
"Pretending to be a princess is fun, but it is definitely not a career," Sotomayor said.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found herself in an unusual place for high court justices, among Glamour magazine's Women of the Year. "The judiciary is not a profession that ranks very high among the glamorously attired," she told the audience as the magazine honored the women at Carnegie Hall in New York. Ginsburg also noted that she might have been the second woman to join the high court after Sandra Day O'Connor, but she was the first honored by Glamour.
Among the other honorees was Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO hit series "Girls." As it happens, Dunham made another annual list that also included a Supreme Court justice.
Dunham and Chief Justice John Roberts (an unlikely pair, no?) are members of Esquire magazine's 2012 roster of Americans of the Year.
Roberts was recognized for his vote to uphold the health care law. The magazine said the outcome allowed Roberts to "preserve the court's institutional integrity" by joining with the four liberal justices and avoiding a wholly partisan and ideological split.
*
Online:
Supreme Court: http://www.supremecourt.gov
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/17/samuel-alito-supreme-cour_n_2150018.html [with comments]
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Kevin MacDonald, Cal State Professor, Under Fire For Alleged White Supremacist Beliefs (VIDEO [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kwfrFNYioE (next below; same video embedded)]
By Meredith Bennett-Smith
Posted: 11/16/2012 3:33 pm EST Updated: 11/16/2012 5:22 pm EST
California State Univeristy, Long Beach psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, a man the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the "neo-Nazi movement's favorite academic [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/kevin-macdonald ]," continues to rile community members with language that some say espouses white supremacist and neo-Nazi beliefs.
MacDonald prefers the description "white advocate." As a director of the new political party American Third Position (AP3), he believes that immigration (both illegal and legal) must be stopped in order to preserve American society.
According to the OC Register, part of AP3's mission statement [ http://www.ocweekly.com/2010-01-21/news/long-beach-state-kevin-macdonald-american-third-position-party/ ] reads: "Government policy in the United States discriminates against white Americans ... white Americans need their own political party to fight this discrimination."
MacDonald's affiliation with AP3 has intensified scrutiny of the professor, especially by the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL has a magazine devoted solely to MacDonald, according to the Register.
On its website [ http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kevin_macdonald/affiliations.asp ], the organization describes connections between MacDonald and other "white advocates," writing:
The degree to which he is revered by some extremists is probably best illustrated by an April 2007 comment made on Stormfront, the world's largest Internet forum for white supremacists and anti-Semites, which said, "To me, Dr MacDonald is much more than a psychology professor at California State University. He is the leader of White people today. He should be the president of a nation, our nation, not a prof [sic]."
MacDonald stands firm in his positions, noting in an interview with KCAL9 [ http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/11/05/csulb-professor-under-fire-for-white-supremacist-beliefs/ ] that white citizens will be a minority in the U.S in 2042.
"I think the white middle class is scared economically," MacDonald said. "They're concerned about the future of the country. Underlying it, there is a fear of the future. When whites are a minority, there is a concern the country won't be the same anymore."
According to Long Beach Patch, MacDonald has fended off several termination attempts [ http://longbeach-ca.patch.com/articles/professor-s-white-supremacist-comments-rile-again-long-beach-cal-state-long-beach-nazi-neonazi-white-rights-against-immigration-new-political-party-kevin-macdonald-rick-gloady-immigration-anti#youtube_video-12072685 ] since he started teaching at Cal State, Long Beach in 1985. He has had his classes boycotted [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve_R7Sd8goM (next below)]
and is the subject of a recent scathing Care2 Cause article [ http://www.care2.com/causes/why-is-a-white-supremacist-a-professor-cal-state-university.html ] that asks why he is allowed to continue teaching at the school:
A tenured full professor at a California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), MacDonald has an extensive publishing record of anti-Semitic writings that have made him a favorite of Neo-Nazis. For years, many including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), have asked, why in the world is he teaching at a public state university, in a part of the country known for its racial and ethnic diversity?
MacDonald's hateful writings warrant the university taking a much more decisive stance about him as a member of its faculty. Is it not possible that students, faculty, staff and others at CSULB feel that their freedom of expression is restricted by having someone with such anti-Semitic, white supremacist views among them?
Earlier this month, university spokesman Rick Gloady said in a statement that the school respects "the right of faculty to engage in research in pursuit of knowledge and to offer different points of view." But, he added, "the personal and academic opinions presented by Kevin MacDonald do not represent the opinions or beliefs of the university or the faculty as a whole. While the university defends academic freedom and freedom of speech, it is important to note that Dr. MacDonald's views are entirely his own."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/kevin-macdonald-white-supremacist-cal-state_n_2146252.html [with comments]
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Life, Death and Deficits
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 15, 2012
America’s political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas — beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity. But there are others.
And right now the most dangerous zombie is probably the claim that rising life expectancy justifies a rise in both the Social Security retirement age and the age of eligibility for Medicare. Even some Democrats — including, according to reports, the president — have seemed susceptible to this argument. But it’s a cruel, foolish idea — cruel in the case of Social Security, foolish in the case of Medicare — and we shouldn’t let it eat our brains.
First of all, you need to understand that while life expectancy at birth has gone up a lot, that’s not relevant to this issue; what matters is life expectancy for those at or near retirement age. When, to take one example, Alan Simpson — the co-chairman of President Obama’s deficit commission — declared that Social Security was “never intended as a retirement program” because life expectancy when it was founded was only 63, he was displaying his ignorance. Even in 1940, Americans who made it to age 65 generally had many years left.
Now, life expectancy at age 65 has risen, too. But the rise has been very uneven since the 1970s, with only the relatively affluent and well-educated seeing large gains. Bear in mind, too, that the full retirement age has already gone up to 66 and is scheduled to rise to 67 under current law.
This means that any further rise in the retirement age would be a harsh blow to Americans in the bottom half of the income distribution, who aren’t living much longer, and who, in many cases, have jobs requiring physical effort that’s difficult even for healthy seniors. And these are precisely the people who depend most on Social Security.
So any rise in the Social Security retirement age would, as I said, be cruel, hurting the most vulnerable Americans. And this cruelty would be gratuitous: While the United States does have a long-run budget problem, Social Security is not a major factor in that problem.
Medicare, on the other hand, is a big budget problem. But raising the eligibility age, which means forcing seniors to seek private insurance, is no way to deal with that problem.
It’s true that thanks to Obamacare, seniors should actually be able to get insurance even without Medicare. (Although, what happens if a number of states block the expansion of Medicaid that’s a crucial piece of the program?) But let’s be clear: Government insurance via Medicare is better and more cost-effective than private insurance.
You might ask why, in that case, health reform didn’t just extend Medicare to everyone, as opposed to setting up a system that continues to rely on private insurers. The answer, of course, is political realism. Given the power of the insurance industry, the Obama administration had to keep that industry in the loop. But the fact that Medicare for all may have been politically out of reach is no reason to push millions of Americans out of a good system into a worse one.
What would happen if we raised the Medicare eligibility age? The federal government would save only a small amount of money, because younger seniors are relatively healthy and hence low-cost. Meanwhile, however, those seniors would face sharply higher out-of-pocket costs. How could this trade-off be considered good policy?
The bottom line is that raising the age of eligibility for either Social Security benefits or Medicare would be destructive, making Americans’ lives worse without contributing in any significant way to deficit reduction. Democrats, in particular, who even consider either alternative need to ask themselves what on earth they think they’re doing.
But what, ask the deficit scolds, do people like me propose doing about rising spending? The answer is to do what every other advanced country does, and make a serious effort to rein in health care costs. Give Medicare the ability to bargain over drug prices. Let the Independent Payment Advisory Board, created as part of Obamacare to help Medicare control costs, do its job instead of crying “death panels.” (And isn’t it odd that the same people who demagogue attempts to help Medicare save money are eager to throw millions of people out of the program altogether?) We know that we have a health care system with skewed incentives and bloated costs, so why don’t we try to fix it?
What we know for sure is that there is no good case for denying older Americans access to the programs they count on. This should be a red line in any budget negotiations, and we can only hope that Mr. Obama doesn’t betray his supporters by crossing it.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
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Related
Health Law Has States Feeling Tense Over Deadline (November 15, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/health/health-law-has-states-feeling-tense-over-deadline.html
Related in Opinion
Times Topic: Economy
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/economy/index.html
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/opinion/life-death-and-deficits.html [with comments]
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Companies go surgery shopping
Dr. James Caillouette of the Hoag Orthopedic Institute in Irvine discusses a hip replacement procedure with Mary Anne Ramey of San Diego.
(Allen J. Schaben, Los Angeles Times / November 7, 2012)
Employers are sending workers on all-expenses-paid trips to top-performing hospitals that agree to low, fixed rates for surgery.
By Chad Terhune, Los Angeles Times
November 17, 2012, 5:00 a.m.
Carol and Ed Vogel enjoyed a weeklong all-expenses-paid trip to a Newport Beach resort last month, and they're scheduled to return in a couple of weeks.
The Nevada couple didn't need frequent-flier miles or credit card rewards to get free airfare and hotel stay as well as $1,000 in spending money. It was all because of Carol Vogel's ailing hips and an employer's frustration with the high cost of U.S. healthcare.
Her husband's employer, newspaper publisher Stephens Media, sends employees and their family members needing hip and knee replacements to a handful of hospitals across the country, including one in Orange County, that agreed to a low, fixed rate for surgery and scored well on quality of care.
This year, grocery giant Kroger Co. has flown nearly two dozen workers to Hoag Orthopedic Institute in Irvine and several other hospitals across the U.S. for hip, knee or spinal-fusion surgeries in an effort to save money and improve care. Starting in January, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will offer employees and dependents heart, spine and transplant surgeries at no cost at six major hospital systems across the nation, with free travel and lodging.
It's all part of a growing movement by employers fed up with wildly different price tags for routine operations. In response, businesses are showering workers with generous incentives — including waiving deductibles or handing out $2,500 bonuses — to steer them to these top-performing providers offering bargain prices.
Bundled deals are common for phone service, cable TV and travel. But an all-in-one price marks a radical departure for the conventional fee-for-service medical industry in which doctors, hospitals, labs and other providers typically bill separately for each part of a procedure. Then they tack on even more if complications and unexpected costs arise.
"You expect to see the hotel, airfare and car bundled together on Expedia," said Susan Ridgely, a senior policy analyst at Rand Corp., a nonprofit think tank in Santa Monica. "We want to stop paying by the widget in healthcare."
By bringing a steady stream of new patients, the arrangement can also be a good deal for the doctors and hospitals involved.
Federal and state officials are catching on as well. Medicare and some Medicaid programs are pushing for more of these all-inclusive prices for the most common procedures, from surgeries to maternity care for low-income mothers, to eliminate some of the huge disparities in U.S. healthcare costs and reward high-quality providers with more patients.
These programs are generally voluntary so patients can still opt for care closer to home, although it may cost them more.
At Kroger, employees may pay 10% out of pocket if they choose one of the company's 19 select hospitals, compared to 25% to 50% out of pocket for other nearby medical centers.
Carol Vogel, a 64-year-old writer in Minden, Nev., said she was skeptical about flying to another state for surgery until the human resources manager explained how much she stood to save.
In Newport Beach "this was 100% paid for," Vogel said. If she stayed closer to home in Nevada, "I would have been out $8,000 or $9,000 easy on my insurance."
She said she's pain-free in her left hip for the first time in years, so she scheduled an implant for her right hip later this month, followed by a free stay at Island Hotel, an oceanfront resort in Newport Beach.
"This is like the honeymoon we never had," she said. "Are you kidding me?"
At Kroger, 21 patients have traveled for surgery this year, and none have experienced complications or been readmitted to the hospital, said Theresa Monti, a company vice president for employee benefits. She said Kroger pays about $30,000 on average for those knee and hip replacement surgeries, 15% less than what it pays at other hospitals.
"It's a new concept, and some people have a hard time getting their arms around the idea of traveling for surgery," Monti said. "We are looking for any opportunity we can to encourage the use of the highest-quality healthcare while holding the line on costs."
BridgeHealth Medical Inc. in Denver is one of a handful of firms that assists employers, insurers and patients with the logistics of surgery shopping. Earlier efforts to persuade employers to send patients to India and other overseas destinations for cheaper care never took off. So BridgeHealth now has negotiated fixed rates with about 45 U.S. hospitals.
Chip Burgett, an executive vice president at BridgeHealth, said employers still come out ahead financially, even after footing thousands of dollars in travel expenses. His firm has negotiated rates on knee and hip replacements as low as $19,000.
Last year, the California Public Employees' Retirement System limited what it would pay for knee and hip replacement surgeries to $30,000 because its hospital bills ranged from $15,000 to $110,000 with no discernible difference in quality. It found 45 hospital systems willing to stay within that amount, and its average price per surgery dropped 30% to $23,113.
"There is a lot of excess margin in healthcare and plenty of room in the pricing of these hospitals," Burgett said. "Hopefully this drives true competition in healthcare and it's not just based on how many helicopters a hospital has."
While employers are leading the way right now, experts say Medicare could have the biggest impact. Federal officials are looking to test these all-in-one prices with hospitals in California and other states.
Some consumer advocates have raised concerns about patients traveling long distances for surgery and taking them away from their regular doctors. Cindy Meyers, benefits manager for Stephens Media in Las Vegas, said it has been difficult in some cases to find local doctors to provide follow-up care for patients who traveled elsewhere.
But she said the overall experience has been positive for her company, which insures about 1,500 people across several states.
"It's a great benefit for us cost-wise, and our employees feel comfort in knowing this doctor specializes in just what they need," Meyers said.
James Caillouette, surgeon in chief at the 70-bed Hoag Orthopedic Institute and an advocate for bundled payments since 2008, said not every patient is a suitable candidate for this arrangement.
First, he requests their medical records and talks to the patient by phone. He rules out patients who may be at higher risk for complications from surgery.
Post-surgery complications matter not just for the patient but also to the doctors and hospital because they pose a risk for additional treatment costs. Some bundled deals include warranties spelling out what complications the medical providers are responsible for. Medical studies show that complications can cost $7,600 per patient.
Hoag Orthopedic Institute's bundled fees for knee and hip replacement range from about $20,000 at an outpatient surgery center to roughly $30,000 or more in the hospital. The surgery location depends largely on the patient's medical condition.
Caillouette said his patients usually spend one or two nights in the hospital and then return to their hotel. A physical therapist visits them there most days, and Caillouette makes house calls to the hotel as well. Most patients fly home after a week in Orange County.
"Now there's one bill, and employers can budget for it," Caillouette said. "This has the potential to be a game changer."
chad.terhune@latimes.com
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Related
California speeds revamp of health insurance market
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-calif-healthcare-react-20121108,0,6188013.story
More employers embrace high-deductible health plans to pare costs
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-employer-health-plans-20121114,0,5287831.story
California works to get word out on health insurance exchange
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-health-reform-outreach-20121114,0,5179757.story
Medicare paid $1.5 billion in improper therapy claims in 2009
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-medicare-billing-20121113,0,1025628.story
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Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bargain-surgery-20121117,0,7716044.story [ http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bargain-surgery-20121117,0,7250543,full.story ] [with comments]
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Judge Blocks Birther Lawsuit In Vermont
11/16/2012
A Vermont state judge has blocked a birther lawsuit to disqualify President Barack Obama from the state's ballot, while birther queen Orly Taitz claims a "superhuman effort" in the birther movement.
Vermont Superior Court Judge Robert Bent ruled Wednesday that H. Brooke Paige's suit to remove Obama from Vermont's presidential ballot in last week's election was invalid since Paige filed the suit in state court and not federal court, the Burlington Free Press reports [ http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20121115/NEWS03/311150036/Vermont-judge-tosses-natural-born-citizen-anti-Obama-lawsuit ]. Paige, who unsuccessfully sought a U.S. Senate seat this year, claimed that Obama was not a citizen since neither of his parents were citizens.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/birther-vermont_n_2146210.html [with comments]
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Chris Collins, Republican New York Rep.-Elect, Attends Democratic Caucus Meeting
11/17/2012
New York Rep.-elect Chris Collins kicked his congressional career off with a bit of confusion.
Collins, a Republican, was seen running out of a Democratic caucus meeting on November 14, according to Roll Call's Heard on the Hill [ http://www3.hoh.rollcall.com/dude-wheres-my-caucus/ ].
A Democratic staffer told Roll Call Collins asked her what meeting he was attending. When she told him it was the Democratic Caucus, Collins reportedly exclaimed, "Oh sh*t, I'm in the wrong meeting."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/17/chris-collins-_n_2151633.html [with comments]
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Governor Christie: It's Bad Enough I Said The Word "Twinkie" Behind This Podium
Published on Nov 16, 2012 by GovChristie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJXyipuHlao
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