Category Archives: Uncategorized

Health Insurance – Caveat Emptor

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One of the problems with buying health insurance is that it's one of the most complicated purchase any one of us will make in any given year. With the advent of Obamacare scores of people will be buying insurance on an open market for the first time – versus opting from a limited set of options from an employer – and that means the complexity of the process will have an ever greater impact in the coming years. That's what makes this story on Planet Money so scary:

Any day now — assuming the government manages to fix HealthCare.gov — millions of people will start shopping for health insurance.

Will those shoppers know what they're doing? More to the point, if you're one of those shoppers, will you know what you're doing?

Here's a quick quiz, courtesy of economists George Loewenstein and Saurabh Bhargava, who study what people know (and what they think they know) about health insurance. The economists have used longer versions of these quizzes in their research…

While the share of people who answered each question correctly varied, the vast majority of people who took the quizzes got at least something wrong.

And this isn't just some academic artifact: Bhargava and Loewenstein are leading an ongoing study of some 50,000 real-world choices that people make when shopping for insurance — and found that 65 percent of the time, people choose plans that are more expensive than other options but don't provide more benefits.

You should go take the quiz. You might be surprises at how much you think you know that you really don't.

Amendment One Advocate Taking on Tillis for Republican Senatorial Nomination

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There's an interesting article at Atlantic.com about the Rev. Mark Harris' run for the Republican nomination for the Senate seat currently held by Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan.  Rev. Harris was instrumental in getting Amendment One passed and is looking to use the same grassroots organization he used in that fight to boost his Senate run:

Now Harris is attempting to unseat Hagan in the Senate, vying to win the Republican nomination with assistance from his band of grassroots allies. He announced his Senate candidacy this month, and has the potential to give state Senate House Speaker Thom Tillis a serious challenge in the Republican primary.

Harris has sent early signals that he'll build his Senate campaign infrastructure out of that same grassroots organization that fought against gay marriage. He has already brought on Republican activist Mary Frances Forrester, who spearheaded the Amendment One campaign, and Rachel Lee Brady, who worked for the pro-Amendment One group Vote Marriage NC. That could be helpful in injecting cash into the relatively unknown first-time candidate's campaign and could help propel Harris to the Republican nomination…

The article goes to point out why the state-wide fight for Hagan's seat might not be as easy as the Amendment One results would seem to indicate:

Amendment One was on the ballot during last year's May primary, when there were no competitive statewide contests, not the general election when the presidential campaign and a heated gubernatorial race boosted turnout. As is typical of primary elections, the electorate was much older and much more conservative than in a typical general election, but the excitement around Amendment One exacerbated those differences. Over three-quarters of voters in the primary election were over the age of 50, according to Lake Research Partners, a Democratic polling organization that worked with same-sex marriage proponents during the primary. That electorate was "enormously" helpful in getting Amendment One passed, pollster Celinda Lake said, and could be a boon to Harris in getting through the Republican primary.

The Democrats are going to be in a dogfight to retain control of the Senate so you can expect to see lots of national money injected into this campaign since Sen. Hagan's seat is seen as one of the most closely contested in the country. Things are gonna get interesting around here in the very near future.

“In Second Grade They Have a Dream. In Seventh Grade They Have a Plan.”

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The title of Nicholas Kristof's column – Profiting From a Child's Illiteracy – gives you a clue about his take on the unintended consequences of America's anti-poverty programs:

THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability…

This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire…

About four decades ago, most of the children S.S.I. covered had severe physical handicaps or mental retardation that made it difficult for parents to hold jobs — about 1 percent of all poor children. But now 55 percent of the disabilities it covers are fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation, where the diagnosis is less clear-cut. More than 1.2 million children across America — a full 8 percent of all low-income children — are now enrolled in S.S.I. as disabled, at an annual cost of more than $9 billion…

THERE’S no doubt that some families with seriously disabled children receive a lifeline from S.S.I. But the bottom line is that we shouldn’t try to fight poverty with a program that sometimes perpetuates it.

A local school district official, Melanie Stevens, puts it this way: “The greatest challenge we face as educators is how to break that dependency on government. In second grade, they have a dream. In seventh grade, they have a plan.”

Complex problems beget complex solutions, or no solutions at all. As a society we long ago made a commitment to help those who needed a hand up, but we've struggled with how to do it without giving them a handout. If you read the full column you'll find that Kristof sees some programs – maybe not so coincidentally they are non-government programs – targeted at children that have shown promise. Unfortunately we don't seem to have the political leadership we need to make these programs a reality on a large scale – and it's appearing increasingly doubtful that we'll see that kind of leadership in this country any time in the near future.

Trader Joe’s Big Brother

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I remember reading an article (I think in Wired magazine) years ago about the parent company for Trader Joe's, but I'd forgotten about it until I saw this Freakonomics post:

The company is called Aldi and, though I’d seen one or two of its stores in the past, I didn’t even know it was a grocery store. Then I read this very interesting Wall Street Journal piece about the company’s ambitious new plan for the U.S., which calls for 75 new stores this year. The article claims that Aldi is so good at selling cheap goods that WalMart couldn’t compete with it in Germany.

So, for those of you waiting with bated breath for Trader Joe's to announce a store opening in Winston-Salem or Greensboro, you can already shop at its big brother's stores.  Here's a handy-dandy list of locations for you.

I’d Have Gone With Triniteen

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Anyone else seen this?

I thought it was an Onion piece when I came across it, but from what I can tell it's real. I really don't think they could have come up with a worse name for their movement(?) if they tried.

Related thought: I seem to remember someone in high school (I went to a Lutheran HS from 10th to 12th grade) proposing to go trick-or-treating as the Holy Ghost, but it's been so many years it's just as likely a figment of my increasingly-faulty memory.