Daily Archives: February 23, 2006

The wit and wisdom of Sim Lake

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sim lake4.jpgU.S. District Judge Sim Lake is widely-considered to be one of the best jurists in Houston, and his no-nonsense handling so far of the criminal trial of former Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling reflects why he is so well-thought of in local bar circles.
Time limitations have prevented me from sitting in on the Lay-Skilling trial as much as I would have liked to date, but I have access to the transcripts from the trial, so I’m able to keep up with what goes on in court each day. From reading the transcripts, I have found that Judge Lake’s most interesting and witty observations often occur before and after the jury is in the courtroom, such as the following exchange that occurred yesterday afternoon after testimony had concluded for the day and the jurors had been excused:

COURT: Be seated, please. (To Bruce Collins, one of Lay’s attorneys) How much more do you have left in your cross-examination?
MR. COLLINS: It’s hard to estimate. I think I’ll be done by lunch tomorrow.
THE COURT (to Skilling lawyer, Daniel Petrocelli): How much do you have, Mr. Petrocelli?
MR. PETROCELLI: I have less than a day.
THE COURT: So it’s doubtful that we will finish (on Thursday)?
MR. PETROCELLI: I don’t think so.
THE COURT: Okay. Is there anything else we need to go into this afternoon?
MR. (Prosecutor John) HUESTON: Your Honor, I’d like to suggest something, and just maybe hear that. I worked hard to keep my direct to less than a day. And I’d like to introduce the thought of some rule of reasonableness when we work to get directs confined and moving quickly, and cross just goes on for days. I think two times the amount, over two times the amount of the direct time for cross, should have been more than sufficient, and I was hoping we would be done with all of this by tomorrow.
THE COURT: Well, probably you’re not the only one who hoped that, but the government covered a lot of discrete information in a very general way that opens the — creates the need by defendants to explore in greater detail. And if you think cross-examination is beyond the scope or it’s not relevant, you can make an objection and I’ll sustain it. But it’s not appropriate, I don’t believe, to impose a timing order in a criminal case where there are liberty issues at stake and there’s a Sixth Amendment right. I will say, in response to a lot of your objections today that I overruled, that cross-examination entitles the questioner to some leeway and to ask leading questions. So fewer objections by you might move things along a little bit.
MR. HUESTON: Yes, sir.
THE COURT: Do you need to respond?
MR. PETROCELLI and MR. COLLINS: No, sir.
THE COURT: Anything else we need to take up?
MR. PETROCELLI: No, Your Honor.
THE COURT (to Mr. Hueston): And I’m perfectly willing to cut off unreasonable and irrelevant questioning, but there hasn’t been much today.
MR. PETROCELLI: Thank you, Judge.
THE COURT (to Mr. Petrocelli, I’m sure with a wry grin): But don’t take that as an encouragement. We’ll see you-all tomorrow morning.

The V.A. as a reform model for the health care finance system?

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VA_Pho59.jpgMy late father had extensive experience in providing and administering medical care in the Veterans Administration system, which he used to characterize as a good example of an unnecessary governmental program that perpetuated itself because of the vested interests of those who administer and profit from the system. “It’s a reasonably competent system for dispensing penicillen,” he once observed to me. “But you wouldn’t want to have gall bladder surgery over there.”
Thus, imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, in his generally informative series on America’s broken health care finance system, authored this Times Select ($) column in which he touts the VA system as a model for a single-payor, government-administered health care finance system in the US:

American health care is desperately in need of reform. But what form should change take? Are there any useful examples we can turn to for guidance?
Well, I know about a health care system that has been highly successful in containing costs, yet provides excellent care. And the story of this system’s success provides a helpful corrective to anti-government ideology. For the government doesn’t just pay the bills in this system — it runs the hospitals and clinics.
No, I’m not talking about some faraway country. The system in question is our very own Veterans Health Administration, whose success story is one of the best-kept secrets in the American policy debate.

Krugman goes on to extol the virtues of the VA’s integrated system, which includes the government’s superior ability to “bargain hard with medical suppliers, and pay far less for drugs than most private insurers.”
Clear Thinkers favorite Peter Gordon sums up what my father’s opinion of Krugman’s analysis almost certainly would be:

This is very cool. I imagine that nearly everything could be obtained cheaply if only the federal government were put in charge to “bargain hard.”
Silly me. I fear that the government is an expensive middleman. I fear that it is a highly politicized middleman. And I fear that with enough hard bargaining, suppliers will leave the industry — as many have ever since Medicare and Medicaid began to “bargain hard.”
Think of the many readers of the NY Times op-ed page, many predisposed to this silliness, who get their public policy economics from Krugman.

A challenge to the NCAA’s regulation of collegiate athletics

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ncaa.jpgThis post from about a year ago addressed the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s longstanding and dubious regulation of intercollegiate athletics, and now a class action antitrust lawsuit is asserting a pretty hefty damage claim against the NCAA that directly challenges the organization’s regulatory system.
This ESPN.com article reports on the antitrust suit that was filed last week in Los Angeles on the theory that the NCAA has illegally conspired to prohibit member institutions from offering athletic scholarships that cover the ìfull costî of attending a college. The NCAA dictates a standard scholarship package in the form of a ìgrant-in-aid,î which covers tuition, room and board, books and a few other related expenses. However, it does not cover expenses such as phone bills and travel expenses, which many student-athletes from families with low incomes have a difficult time financing. As the ESPN.com article notes:

[A]thletes are the only students subject to aid restrictions imposed by an agreement among universities. Talented students in music, chemistry or any other area can be bid upon by individual colleges, without limits on the total value of their scholarship packages.

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“Nine and eight”

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Tiger-Woods.jpgThe PGA Tour is in La Jolla, California for the Accenture Match Play Championship this week, and the special format of that tournament has already produced some sparks between the competitors.
For you non-golfers, match play is different from the usual PGA tournament medal play format where the golfers simply play four rounds and the winner is the player with the lowest aggregate score. Match play, on the other hand, is similar to the normal game that golfers play in which they take on one opponent over 18 holes and the player who wins the most holes — regardless of the respective players’ aggregate score — wins the match. Inasmuch as match play involves two players playing against each other rather than against the entire field, the format often gets the competitive juices of the participants flowing more than a regular Tour event, particularly in matches between two players who do not care for one another.
Well, one of those matches occurred yesterday, and it happened to involve the world’s no. 1-rated player, Tiger Woods. Stephen Ames, a journeyman Tour player who holds the distinction of being the only Tour pro ever to emerge from Trinidad and Tobago, was pitted against Woods in a first round match, and Woods and Ames — as they say on the Tour — have “some issues” with each other.

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