Brookings Institution: Lower Middle Class Will Suffer Most Under Obamacare

The chart included in the Brookings Institution team findings shows that the 2nd and 3rd deciles (lower middle class or working class) will lose the most in income redistribution from Obamacare (Affordable Care Act).

H/T Byron York

Would the City of Portland Give Bill Sizemore the Same Deal Offered to Elizabeth Nichols?

MaxRedline highlights an interesting piece of Portland legal politics.

In the aftermath of the Occupy Portland group that took over the Plaza park blocks in October-November of 2011, protesters tried to occupy banks. One of the group who was sprayed with pepper spray, Elizabeth Nichols, sued the City of Portland for use of excessive force.

When a jury decided against her, "[d]eputy city attorney David Landrum said he offered to drop the city's pursuit of costs if Nichols agreed to waive an appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals." The costs didn't include City staff time in working on the case.

What a sweet deal. One wonders if the City would have given Bill Sizemore the same chance? (The State of Oregon didn't.) Undoubtedly not, since the City doesn't like Sizemore. Just as the City wouldn't allow a group it didn't like to take over a city park for more than a month--say a group of pro-life supporters. No, those people have to get all the right permits and do everything strictly according to code.

But, the Occupy people were political friends of the City, so rules for regular folks didn't apply to taking over and trashing public property to the tune of $85,000 (not to mention the $1.29 million in police overtime costs) as happened with the Occupy Portland movement.

Apparently the same here. You get a special deal if the City likes your politics. You don't have to pay the real cost of a legal challenge, and if you agree to not press the matter, you don't have to pay anything. Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you agree with the politics of City leaders.

Missing Sonja Schmidt

Sonja Schmidt is one of the most talented and funny political commentators ever.



The last PJTV segment she did was in late 2011. Her last tweet was in June of 2012.

I couldn't find anything recent. I hope all is well with her. I miss her enough to have gone looking--and, unfortunately, not found a new Sonja venue.

Less Than a Third of Americans Believe in Evolution Due to Natural Processes

According to the PEW Research Center 60% percent of Americans say that “humans and other living things have evolved over time", but only 32% believe that human evolution is due to natural processes.

"About half of those who express a belief in human evolution take the view that evolution is “due to natural processes such as natural selection” (32% of the American public overall). But many Americans believe that God or a supreme being played a role in the process of evolution. Indeed, roughly a quarter of adults (24%) say that 'a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today.'"

Assuming that the 24% who believe God played a role in directing evolution and the 33% who believe "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time" also believe God had a role in creation, you have 57% of Americans who believe in some form of intelligent design.

White mainline Protestants (36%/36%) and white Catholics (33%/33%) are split over whether God had a part in evolution or not.  Both Black Protestants (25%/17%) and White evangelicals (18%/8%) heavily favor divine intervention.  Hispanic Catholics believe natural processes prevailed (19%/27%).

Dazzling Sunset Tonight

Corporate Greed Killed the Incandescent Light Bulb

Timothy P. Carney:

For more than a century, the traditional incandescent bulb was the symbol of American innovation. Starting Jan. 1, the famous bulb is illegal to manufacture in the U.S., and it has become a fitting symbol for the collusion of big business and big government.

The 2007 Energy Bill, a stew of regulations and subsidies, set mandatory efficiency standards for most light bulbs. Any bulbs that couldn't produce a given brightness at the specified energy input would be illegal. That meant the 25-cent bulbs most Americans used in nearly every socket of their home would be outlawed.
 . . .

Competitive markets with low costs of entry have a characteristic that consumers love and businesses lament: very low profit margins. GE, Philips and Sylvania dominated the U.S. market in incandescents, but they couldn’t convert that dominance into price hikes. Because of light bulb’s low material and manufacturing costs, any big climb in prices would have invited new competitors to undercut the giants — and that new competitor would probably have won a distribution deal with Wal-Mart.

So, simply the threat of competition kept profit margins low on the traditional light bulb — that's the magic of capitalism. GE and Sylvania searched for higher profits by improving the bulb — think of the GE Soft White bulb. These companies, with their giant research budgets, made advances with halogen, LED and fluorescent technologies, and even high-efficiency incandescents. They sold these bulbs at a much higher prices — but they couldn’t get many customers to buy them for those high prices. That's the hard part about capitalism — consumers, not manufacturers, get to demand what something is worth.

Capitalism ruining their party, the bulb-makers turned to government. Philips teamed up with NRDC. GE leaned on its huge lobbying army — the largest in the nation — and soon they were able to ban the low-profit-margin bulbs.
[emphasis added]

H/T Byron York

Study Finds Increased Oregon Medicaid Coverage Ups Emergency Room Visits 40%; No Significant Health Improvement

A team including MIT, Harvard and Columbia researchers has found that emergency room visits increase substantially when health care expands. The Oregonian's Nick Budnick explains:

"Researchers poring through hospital administrative records found that expansion of the Medicaid-funded Oregon Health Plan in 2008 led to a 40 percent increase in emergency department usage by people in the 15 months after they enrolled, according to a study released Thursday in the journal Science.

"The findings 'explode the myth that health insurance access will reduce the strain on emergency services' said an editorial accompanying the study."
[empasis added]

Expanding medical care coverage doesn't cut down on emergency room visits for conditions easily treatable in normal doctor/health care visits. The study found emergency room visit increases even "for conditions that may be most readily treatable in primary care settings."

Even more surprisingly, expanding medical care coverage does not significantly improve health of the individuals covered.

"Oregon is again starring in the debate over national health care reform after a study tracking 12,000 low-income Oregonians between 2008 and 2010 found that newly enrolled Oregon Health Plan members showed no significant physical health benefit."

Those covered did not show significant improvement over those without health care coverage in terms of "blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol. Studies show those measures can change quickly under treatment, [Harvard School of Public Health professor Katherine Baicker] said."

Still, health care costs rose 35%. "People enrolled in the Oregon Health Plan used health care more, leading to an increase of $1,172 in per-patient costs, or 35 percent."

The only upsides were:

"Those with coverage spent less out-of-pocket on their health.

"Only about 21 percent of the group with coverage reported depression, compared to 30 percent with depression in the group that was denied Oregon Health Plan coverage."
[emphasis added]

So, expect costs and emergency room visits to explode under Obamacare, with little improvement in health. And one might find that depression actually increases significantly under Obamacare especially for those with significant health problems who used to have health care plans they liked.