Daily Archives: December 15, 2005

We’re number one!

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We're no 1.gifUnfortunately, I’m not talking about Texas winning the BCS National Football Championship.
Rather, the American Tort Reform Association has named the Texas Rio Grande Valley and Gulf Coast region as the number one “judicial hell-hole” for 2005. The ATRA describes a judicial hell-hole in the following manner:

Judicial Hellholes are places that have a disproportionately harmful impact on civil litigation. Litigation tourists, guided by their personal injury lawyers, seek out these places because they know they will produce a positive outcome – an excessive verdict or settlement, a favorable precedent, or both.

Hat tip to Walter Olson for the link.

We don’t really want true health insurance

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medical tools.jpgClear Thinkers favorite Arnold Kling has been doing extensive research on health care finance issues over the past couple of years and, as noted in this insightful TCS Daily op-ed, he is coming to the conclusion that one of the main problems with the U.S. health care finance system is that most Americans simply do not want to pay for true health insurance:

What we are left with, then, is that people do not want real health insurance. I would gladly take a health insurance policy with a $10,000 deductible per individual, and I suspect that many of my wise, risk-averse TCS readers would, too. But we are in a tiny minority! Most people do not want to be responsible for the first $10,000 in medical expenses, and most people believe that an insurance policy that is expected to pay no claims 95 percent of the time is a bad deal.

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The extinction of the one-iron

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oneiron_275.jpgI’ve been looking at hybrid golf clubs this holiday season as a possible gift for one of my relatives, so I enjoyed this this Jason Sobol article on the demise of the one-iron, which is one of the most difficult golf clubs to hit well and the reason why the easier-to-hit hybrid clubs are replacing the one-iron in most golfers bags. Sobol notes the late Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times sportswriter Jim Murray‘s classic lament about the futility of hitting a one-iron:

“The only time I ever took out a 1-iron was to kill a tarantula, and I took a 7 to do that.”

New study links Alzheimer’s to diabetes

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Alzheimer's.jpgA new Brown University Medical School study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease supports a growing body of clinical evidence indicating that Alzheimer’s may be a new form of diabetes. The study found that brain levels of insulin and related cellular receptors fall precipitously during the early stages of Alzheimer’s and that insulin levels continue to drop progressively as the disease becomes more severe. Previous posts on Alzheimer’s-related matters are here.

Spitzer: “But I got him with the strawberries . . .”

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Spitzer44.jpgCapt queeg.jpgDoes anyone else get the sense that NY attorney general Eliot Spitzer is becoming Captain Queeg-like in his pursuit of former American International Group CEO, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg?
The latest revelation in the Lord of Regulation’s relentless campaign against the former AIG executive Greenberg is the serious charge that Greenberg and other former AIG executives cheated the Greenberg-controlled charitable foundation — the Starr Foundation — through “self dealing” in the handling of the estate of AIG founder, Cornelius Vander Starr. Spitzer’s report on the matter contends that Greenberg’s self-dealing deprived the Starr Foundation of assets that “would now be worth more than $6 billion.”
Well now, those are serious charges. But a couple of small details were left out of Spitzer’s typically boisterous media release on the charges. First, the Internal Revenue Service, a New York state court and the New York attorney general’s office had previously approved the transactions that Spitzer now characterizes as improper “self-dealing.” But even more incredibly, Spitzer is complaining of allegedly fraudulent transactions that occurred 35 years ago!

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