John McClain, the Houston Chronicle’s National Football League writer, apparently believes that the NFL is a bit like Garrison Keillor’s fictional Minnesota town Lake Wobegon, where “all of the children are above-average.” In today’s Chronicle here and here, McClain rates 23 out of the 32 NFL teams as having better than average selections at this past weekend’s NFL Draft.
Houston-based Service Corporation International, the world’s largest funeral and cemetery company, announced late last week that it had entered into a memorandum of understanding to settle the securities class action lawsuit that has been pending in U.S. District Court in Houston against SCI and certain of its current and former officers since January 1999. The suit alleges that SCI made misrepresentations concerning its prearranged funeral business and other financial matters. The settlement is for $65 million, with SCI’s insurers ponying up $30 million of the settlement payment.
Randall Parker over at FuturePundit points to an interesting Erin Anderssen and Anne McIlroy article in the Canadian Globe And Mail that summarizes recent research on child development and human violence. They report that Richard Tremblay has found that two year old babies are more physically aggressive than teenagers or adults but are simply too uncoordinated to do much damage to others:
Consequently, are human beings born pure, as Rousseau argued, and tainted by the world around them? Or do babies arrive bad, as St. Augustine wrote, and learn, for their own good, how to behave in society?
Richard Tremblay, an affable researcher at the University of Montreal who is considered one of the world leaders in aggression studies, sides with St. Augustine, whom he is fond of quoting.
Dr. Tremblay has thousands of research subjects, many studied over decades, to back him up: Aggressive behaviour, except in the rarest circumstances, is not acquired from life experience. It is a remnant of our evolutionary struggle to survive, a force we learn, with time and careful teaching, to master. And as if by some ideal plan, human beings are at their worst when they are at their weakest.
St. Augustine was obviously much closer to the truth.
Read the entire post, as Mr. Parker includes a number of interesting links relating to the subject of this research. Hat tip to Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolutions for the link.
This NY Times article reports on a couple of remarkable public meetings just outside London last week in which radical Islamic fascist clerics suggested that Tony Blair should be killed and that an Islamic flag should be hanging outside No. 10 Downey Street. The article notes as follows:
Stoking that anger are some of the same fiery Islamic clerics who preached violence and martyrdom before the Sept. 11 attacks.
On Friday, Abu Hamza, the cleric accused of tutoring Richard Reid before he tried to blow up a Paris-to-Miami jetliner with explosives hidden in his shoe, urged a crowd of 200 outside his former Finsbury Park mosque to embrace death and the “culture of martyrdom.”
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On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his adherence to Osama bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed Mr. bin Laden’s offer of a truce ? provided that all foreign troops are withdrawn from Iraq in three months ? Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that play host to them, the sheik said.
“All Muslims of the West will be obliged,” he said, to “become his sword” in a new battle. Europeans take heed, he added, saying, “It is foolish to fight people who want death ? that is what they are looking for.”
One chapter in Sheik Omar’s lectures these days is “The Psyche of Muslims for Suicide Bombing.”
Call me old fashioned, but I am appalled that these clerics — one of who is already under investigation for a serious crime — could spew this type of subversion without apparent qualm. The reason they can get away with it is explained later in the article:
Though the British home secretary, David Blunkett, has sought to strip Abu Hamza of his British citizenship and deport him, the legal battle has dragged on for years while Abu Hamza keeps calling down the wrath of God.
Despite tougher antiterrorism laws, the police, prosecutors and intelligence chiefs across Europe say they are struggling to contain the openly seditious speech of Islamic extremists, some of whom, they say, have been inciting young men to suicidal violence since the 1990’s.
The authorities say that laws to protect religious expression and civil liberties have the result of limiting what they can do to stop hateful speech. In the case of foreigners, they say they are often left to seek deportation, a lengthy and uncertain process subject to legal appeals, when the suspect can keep inciting attacks.
That leaves the authorities to resort to less effective means, such as mouse-trapping Islamic radicals with immigration violations in hopes of making a deportation case stick. “In many countries, the laws are liberal and it’s not easy,” an official said.
Houston was Mudville on Sunday.
First, incessant rains since Friday afternoon in Houston have played havoc with the Shell Houston Open. Third round play in the golf tournament was suspended late Sunday morning, and the third and fourth rounds will now be completed on Monday.
Second, the Rockets blew a four point lead in the final minute and a half of overtime and lost to the Lakers 92-88 in their NBA Playoff game. The Rockets are now down 3-1 in the best of seven series, and almost certainly will be eliminated in the next game on Wednesday in L.A.
Finally, the Stros wasted a brilliant pitching performance from Wade Miller and lost to the Rockies in the final game of their series, 4-1. The Stros now move on to Pittsburgh for a three game set with the Pirates starting Tuesday before coming home for a weekend series with the Reds.
This David Brooks NY Times books review discusses Ron Chernow‘s new book, “Alexander Hamilton.” Hamilton is the architect of American capitalism, and Mr. Brooks’ review concludes that Mr. Chernow has written the best biography yet of this fascinating but underappreciated man. For example, Hamilton’s youth was no picnic:
When Alexander Hamilton was 10, his father abandoned him. When he was around 12, his mother died of a fever in the bed next to his. He was adopted by a cousin, who promptly committed suicide. During those same years, his aunt, uncle and grandmother also died. A court in St. Croix seized all of his possessions, sold off his personal effects and gave the rest to his mother’s first husband. By the time he was a young teenager, he and his brother were orphaned, alone and destitute.
Incredibly, however, Hamilton overcame his tortured youth quickly to excel in the American revolutionary society and government:
Within three years he was a successful businessman. Within a decade he was effectively George Washington’s chief of staff, organizing the American revolutionary army and serving bravely in combat. Within two decades he was one of New York’s most successful lawyers and had written major portions of The Federalist Papers. Within three decades he had served as Treasury secretary and forged the modern financial and economic systems that are the basis for American might today.
Finally, Mr. Brooks notes that the vicious political rhetoric of our day has its roots in Hamilton’s legendary disputes with Thomas Jefferson:
Though they were historic, Hamilton couldn’t have enjoyed his years at the Treasury Department. These days we think our politics are nasty and partisan. But our discourse looks like a Platonic symposium compared with the vicious fighting that marked the early Republic. While they were secretaries of treasury and state, Hamilton and Jefferson waged internecine warfare that was, as Chernow notes, of ”almost pathological intensity.” Members of each man’s camp wrote abusive newspaper essays against the other. The secretary of state proposed Congressional legislation censuring the secretary of the Treasury. The Jeffersonians fabricated crude lies about Hamiltonian embezzlement schemes.
This fight was about what sort of country America should be, and what sort of people should govern. Hamilton embraced the urban, enterprising virtues: vigor, drive, competition. Jefferson dreamed of a country that would be pastoral, egalitarian and decentralized. Hamilton won the battle, but not the affections of posterity.
Hamilton has always been one of the most fascinating and enigmatic of the Founding Fathers. In many ways, he is the most quintessential American of them all. As such, I am looking forward to reading this interesting new book.
Roger Clemens won his fourth straight National League game as the Stros beat the Colorado Rockies on Saturday for the second straight day, 8-5. The Astros are now 7-1 on the road in the young season, and they go for the series sweep behind Wade Miller on Sunday afternoon.
The ‘Stros beat the Rockies 13-7 in a typical Coors Field game on Friday night or, as Astros’ color man Jim DeShaies put it, “the Astros went on a 10 to 2 run to take control of the game.”
Games at Coors Field are often quite strange. Yesterday, the grounds crew worked all day to remove four inches of snow from the field that had fallen on Thursday night. Because of the high altitude, the baseball flies further when hit. Pitchers are well aware of this, so they tend to pitch more defensively, which usually makes matters worse for them. Sometimes, a pitcher will look like he is dominating a hitter for several pitches and then suddenly, the hitter will whack the next pitch into the adjoining county. So, when watching games at Coors, you just have to get used to that type of thing.
Mike Lamb had a career game for the ‘Stros with four hits and six RBIs, and Brandon Duckworth gave up five hits and four runs in five innings (that’s like giving up three hits and a run in seven innings anywhere else) to pick up the win. Denver native Brad Lidge struck out the last four Rockies batters of the game, which is tantamount to striking out the entire lineup anywhere else.
The Rocket goes for his fourth win today in his second career start at Coors.
Professor Ribstein over at IdeaBlog has assembled a bright and provocative program for his conference on “Uncorporations” at the University of Illinois College of Law this weekend. The ubiquitous Professor Bainbridge has a working paper and is giving a talk on whether courts should scrap veil-piercing theories, and there are nine other working papers on various topics relating to personal liability in the context of corporate and limited liability partnership law. All of the working papers that are being discussed at the conference are online and can be reviewed here. If you are involved in business law, I highly recommend that you take some time and review these creative and insightful papers.
Pierre Lemieux, who is an economist with the University of Quebec in Outaouais and with the Independent Institute in California, has written a revealing op-ed in today?s Wall Street Journal ($) regarding the hidden costs of Canada?s nationalized health care finance system and the devastating effect those costs are having on the quality and timeliness of Canadian health care:
The Canadian system is built around a compulsory public-insurance regime that provides most medical and hospital services free. Of course, it is not free for the taxpayer, who finances the system at a rate of 22% of all taxes raised in Canada. The Canadian government pays about 71% of total Canadian health care expenditures, compared to 44% paid by the government in the U.S. This translates into public health expenditures of 6% of GDP in Canada and 7% in the U.S. ? a rather small difference. More than three-quarters of the difference in total expenditures is due to higher private expenditures in the U.S. Why are private health expenditures so low in Canada? The main reason is that they are illegal, which gets us to the heart of the system’s hidden costs.
Canadian public health insurance is not only compulsory, it is also monopolistic. The system is administered by provincial governments under strict guidelines imposed by federal law and federal subsidies. Private insurance covering publicly insured services is illegal. Physicians are forbidden to accept private payments above the fees billed to the government. Hospitals are public or non-profit, and tightly regulated. Physicians’ fees are determined — or “negotiated” — by provincial agencies. Prices of drugs are controlled. In short, the public supply of medical services is rationed, and there is little private alternative. Hence the apparent low cost of the system.
The hidden costs include the poor quality of services, and the costs imposed on customers (aptly called “patients” in this case) who have to wait in queues.
Quality is subjective and can only be evaluated through consumer choices, but the government won’t let consumers make choices and vote with their feet if they are not satisfied. Anecdotal evidence of questionable quality is everywhere. In a recent piece in Montreal’s Gazette, a Canadian related her own experience, and contrasted the “kindness, discretion and professionalism” of staff in U.S. hospitals, with the frequent rudeness of unionized personnel in the Canadian system.
Long waiting lines are a fixture of the system. The Fraser Institute, a Vancouver think tank, has calculated that in 2003, the average waiting time from referral by a general practitioner to actual treatment was more than four months. Waiting times vary among specialties (and, less wildly, among provinces), but remain high even for critical diseases: The shortest median wait is 6.1 weeks for oncology treatment; excluding radiation, which is longer. Extreme cases include more than a year’s median wait for neurosurgery in New Brunswick. The median wait for an MRI is three months. Since 1993, waiting times have increased by 90%.
Waiting lines impose a real cost, which is approximated by what individuals would be willing to pay to avoid them. Waiting costs include health risk, lost time (especially for individuals whose time is most valuable), pain and anguish. Socialist systems are notoriously oblivious to anguish, discomfort, humiliation and other subjective factors which bureaucrats cannot measure or don’t value the same way as the patient does.
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Liberalization proposals are met by the “two-tier system” bogey man — that if choice is allowed an unequal system will develop. But if directly paying a doctor is illegal, there are legal ways to jump the queues. As pointed out by Professor Livio Di Matteo of Lakehead University in Ontario, what now exists is a three-tier system. The very rich (like Robert Bourassa, the late Premier of QuÈbec) go to the U.S. for rapid, personalized, high-tech treatments. The second tier is made of “the well informed and aggressive, who can push their way to the front of the treatment line.” The poor and those with no connections get stuck in the queue.
At least two Indian groups are now considering building private clinics or hospitals on their land ? just as other sorts of illegal-elsewhere trade thrive on Indian reserves. Yet, Canadians who patronized such clinics would still be prohibited from purchasing private insurance to cover the service, leaving the opportunity only to the wealthiest.
As noted by Harvard professor Patricia Dantzon, another hidden cost of the Canadian system comes “from forcing everyone to have the same level and type of insurance,” whatever their individual preferences are.
One last cost should not be ignored: the loss of personal responsibility and the habit of dependence on the state. Opinion polls show that Canadians are generally proud of their public health insurance. Indeed, for most people, any basis for comparison has been made illegal. Auberon Herbert, a libertarian Member of Parliament in late 19th century England wrote, “If government half a century ago had provided us all with dinners and breakfasts, it would be the practice of our orators today to assume the impossibility of our providing for ourselves.”
This insightful piece dovetails with a discussion that I have been having with fellow Houston blogger Milton over at Trivial Pursuits regarding the flaws in America?s health care finance system and how self-insurance could be deployed to improve competition between health insurance products currently in the marketplace. One example of self-insurance that is an attractive alternative to many current health insurance products is the woefully underpublicized Health Savings Account (?HSA?) concept that was enacted into law last year. To introduce the concept, it is helpful to review how American health care costs are currently financed.
Every dollar that an employer pays in employee health insurance premiums avoids income and payroll taxes. For the employee with average income, this generous tax subsidy means that government is effectively paying for almost half the cost of the employee?s health insurance.
On the other hand, if the same employer tries to deposit that same dollar into a savings account for the benefit of the employee from which the employee could control the payment of medical expenses, then the government taxes the dollar and grabs almost half of it before it reaches the savings account.
Accordingly, America?s tax laws provide a generous subsidy for third-party insurance and none for individual self-insurance. In so doing, our tax laws promote use of third-party bureaucracies to pay for even minor discretionary health care expenses despite the fact that such expenses would be managed much more efficiently if patients paid them on their own.
The new health savings accounts address this defect in the health care finance system, at least to an extent. The legislation gives deposits into HSAs the same tax advantages as those granted to an employer?s health-insurance premiums. In so doing, individual self-insurance can now compete with third-party insurance on the same financial basis and individuals can now control some of their financial investment in health-care without a tax penalty.
However, even more importantly, the HSA legislation addresses in a rational manner the knotty social issue — that is, how do we allocate dollars between health care and other goods and services? Or stated another way, how do we decide which medical procedures are worthwhile and which ones are not? There are basically three ways:
● In countries such as Canada with nationalized health insurance, government makes the decisions (either directly or indirectly) in an arbitrary, inefficient, and often unfair manner;
● The second method is to restrain spending using the techniques of managed care. Over the past 15 years of increasing managed care in the American health care finance system, most of us have experienced, at best, the irritation, and, at worst, the capriciousness of having employers and large insurers ration health care for us; and
● Finally, the third option is to allow individuals to make their own choices between health care and other uses of their money through vehicles such as HSAs.
In that connection, the HSA is the most flexible health care finance product currently on the market. HSAs allow individuals and their employers to make deposits each year equal to their health insurance deductible (there is currently a limit on the size of the deductible and a supplemental insurance policy is required to cover catastrophic illness or injury expense in excess of the amounts deposited in the HSA). The funds in the HSA grow tax free and the funds may be used to pay such things as health care expenses that would not otherwise be covered by third party insurance, insurance premiums while the owner of the account is changing jobs, and health expenses during retirement.
However, the new law is not perfect. For example, as noted above, the maximum amount that can be deposited into an HSA in any year is currently somewhat limited. Consequently, the combined cost of depositing funds in the HSA and paying for the supplemental insurance that is required can turn out to be more expensive than simply buying a third party policy with a relatively high deductible.
Moreover, products such as HSAs are only part of the solution to the problems in America?s health care finance system. From my vantage point, some sort of nationalized insurance or federally-backed private insurance is still going to be necessary for people who simply cannot afford to fund HSAs or buy private insurance, and for people with severe medical problems who cannot afford the costs attendant to those problems. In regard to these groups, the tough issue is how do you ration the health care? Or, stated another way, there must eventually be a political consensus on the limitations of such federally-insured health care. Otherwise, we simply have created another federal program that balloons into yet another governmental financial debacle.
However, for those of us fortunate to be reasonably healthy and productive, the concept of HSAs is a viable alternative to higher cost private health insurance. I encourage you to examine the product as an alternative to your current health insurance policy.