Saturday, September 19, 2009

SPORTS: New Rules for Baseball

All major sports in the United States are seeing their audience shares decline. Even the mighty NFL. Major League Baseball has had its share of problems for some time. So here are some new rules that could be adopted to create a new league based on the "time-tested" Flotarian major leagues...

Here's how we roll in Flotaria. I'm calling it the USBL. Let me know if you wish to be an investor...

The United States Baseball League will be a fast and furious fan-friendly form of baseball using a point system and lasting only 7 innings.

USBL rules are the same as MLB rules except for the following:

Hits: Any batter who reaches base scores 1 point for their team.
This includes walks and being hit by a pitch.
Batter must give pitcher room. Umpire can award a strike if batter is ruled intentionally trying to be hit by a pitch.

Runs: Any player reaching home is awarded 3 additional points.

This means a Home Run is worth 4 total points.

Game Length: Regulation game length is 7 Innings long with a “5th Inning Stretch”.

Pitching Clock: Pitcher will have 20 seconds to throw each pitch from the time the batter enters the batter’s box.
Clock resets each time the batter steps out of the batter’s box.
Violations of this rule result in a Ball.

League Ownership will be community and fan-based. Ownership will be sold to individuals on a per share basis however individuals will be limited to the number of shares they can own.
Initial share offerings will be to individuals who reside within major media markets of each home team. Only after a specified period of time will shares be offered to individuals outside these media markets.
Ownership will confer voting rights on all owners. Owners will be able to vote on General Manager candidates as well as Team President.
Owners shall be able to run for the Board of Directors which shall nominate the GM and President candidates to the owners for election. At least three candidates must be chosen for each position anytime a vacancy occurs.
Share ownership shall not pay dividends to owners.
Share ownership shall not confer season tickets, however season tickets will come at a 10% discounted rate to all owners.

Player Salaries and Roster Requirements: All players will be represented by their own Players Union.

A salary cap will be set for all teams by negotiation between Player Union and Team representatives.

The cap will have an automatic increase for each year by a percentage agreed upon by the Salary Cap negotiating teams, to be reviewed every five years.

All changes to this Constitution require unanimous vote of the Board of Directors and 2/3 majority of all voting Owners.



I welcome your comments.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

POLITICS: A Secret Weapon for the President

President Obama should play hard ball with the Blue Dogs on the public option. They owe him big time. And they'll line up behind a successful health care program in the future--just like they do behind Social Security and Medicare today.

On the other hand they will be the first to fall if the Democrats fail and have a repeat of 1994. So, I think they have a huge incentive to play ball that isn't being exploited...

But if all else fails and he ends up signing a bill that has no public option and no other way to control costs and ensure quality of care, then I have a secret weapon that he should unleash on the GOP and the Blew-it Dogs.

Use the presidential signing statement to enact Medicare For All (we all know that in his heart that's what he really wants--he said it himself).

After all you know they deserve it.

I think the president should state that health care reform is a matter of national security. And as soon as he does it he can send legislation down to the congress to ban the use of any further politicized signing statements (but that is a topic for another post).

Mr. President, give the Republicans a taste of their own medicine and then make sure that medicine can never be used again. In one fell swoop we could ensure the health of the American people and protect the constitution from further erosion.

I welcome your comments.

POLITICAL ECONOMY: After the Speech, The Real Work Begins...

In a masterful speech to a joint session of Congress the president made a forceful call for universal health care. While I would have liked him to be more firm on his commitment to a public option or some other cost-saving and quality-ensuring measure, the speech will very likely change the momentum in the debate. Clearly aimed at shoring up independent voters who had shifted against him over the course of the summer, the speech should make the political points it set out to score. In addition, the president clearly aligned himself with some of the more promising aspects of the various health care bills that have been or are about to be passed in congress.

Having said that, he also embraced a few ideas that take him a step backwards. There remain some very basic problems with the president's approach to universal health care. And in truth the speech was short on specifics. Just what exactly is in the "basic care" package everyone will be entitled to? How much will be too much before the public subsidy kicks in for those cannot afford it? In the end, it is hard to know exactly what "the plan" really looks like, how well it will really work, or what it might actually cost. And the frustrating part is that health care is delivered reliably to millions of people in countries similar to the United States every day.

We know what works. But instead of doing that, because of an irrational fear of the government, we are embarking on an untested experiment in keeping private insurers healthy while gambling with the health of American citizens. The Reagan legacy is still with us, and the president has not taken the opportunity he was given to end it, nor have the Democrats in congress.

So, all hopes of finally putting the Reagan philosophy in its rightful place (the dust bin of history) rest on the success of health care reform. And there are real reasons to be fearful for the chances of success. The problem is primarily economic not political. But it will become political, I fear, and that is where the real problem exists. Without a vehicle to control costs and ensure quality, like a public option could provide, prices are likely to (continue to) sky rocket and quality of care likely to stay at the lowest possible floor companies can get away with.

The problem is complex in the details, but simple in broad outline:

Requiring insurance companies to take all who apply and force everyone to buy coverage will result in profit losses to the insurance companies that they will have to make up somewhere. Now, some of this can be made up from the premiums of young healthy people who are not now insured and presumably would be under the new requirements. But will these new young folks actually enroll and will that cash make up for the losses of the other high risk folks who would otherwise not get insurance? The Congressional Budget Office doesn't seem to think so.

And, as he has hinted at previously, the president once again reiterated his desire for the public option to actually be a "not-for-profit" option that will be funded only by the premiums it collects. This would undermine one of the chief cost control features of a public option: not needing to advertise for healthier and wealthier clients. But if the structure is dependent upon premiums then the option will depend on getting those wealthier, healthier patients on roll and there goes a big chunk (but not all) of your cost saving.

Don't get me wrong, I could care less about the budget deficit. There is simply no evidence that the deficits do any damage to an economy until you get into truly stratospheric numbers--far from where we are right now. Government debt is not paid on the backs of our children as so many often claim and it does not cause interest rates to rise. In fact a deficit can create enormous economic growth. Right now we are probably hurting our economic growth significantly by not running much larger deficits. It could cause inflation and a devaluation of the currency if it gets too out of hand and is spent on non-productive things. But we are not in that territory now. Cost savings matters to me because it matters to everybody else. Politicians of both stripes have bought into this fairy tale and that belief has real consequences.



For instance, a truly troubling part of the speech is when the president added that if the cost reductions he is counting on do not materialize, cuts in spending will be enacted to bring the expenditures into balance. The Congressional Budget Office does not believe his plan will cut costs in the long run and neither does simple logic. So to achieve some mythic balance of the budget, that has never been proven to have any beneficial economic effect, he is going to cut needed government services to pay for a massive tax payer give away to the insurance industry. This is not a good idea.

Let us hope that this is simply an idle threat that is never acted upon. The same logic that is likely with a "public option trigger"--that the trigger would never be pulled no matter how bad things get for the uninsured--might also apply to such cuts. After all they would take place after 2013 and would need to be voted upon.
That might never happen.


In the end, the president's speech was masterful politics, but the economics behind it remain murky and questionable.

But one thing seems likely. The president is back in the game and momentum is on his side. The votes are there in congress. Now it is up to us to put the pressure on.


Check back soon for my secret weapon I will offer the president...

I welcome your comments.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

POLITICS: The Public Option is the Only Option

Alright, first post and we already have a debate going. I think I am going to like this blogging thing!



Here is my problem with the argument that we should pass any bill even if it does not have a public option. The current bills up for debate have no real cost control built into them. On the contrary, depending on which one you are looking at, they will probably increase costs. In general here is what is on the table:

1) Require everyone to buy private insurance.

2) Require insurance companies to cover all who apply.

3) Subsidize individuals and families that can't afford their premiums.



Now, it's an unqualified good to cover everyone regardless of preconditions. Bravo for that. But, forcing everyone to buy insurance is not going to be popular. And how are insurance companies likely to respond to having to cover everyone? Trust me, they already know.

If there are no controls on what insurance companies can charge as part of the bipartisan or even "monopartisan" bill (placating Blue Dog Democrats) then they are likely to raise the premiums on the folks that they would have denied coverage to under the old rules. Many of those folks won't be able to pay for their premiums, and thus the government will kick in with the subsidy. In that case we will have secured a very lucrative profit center for already wealthy insurance companies at public expense. So what you would have is all the costs of (in fact a lot more of the costs of) a government program without any of the real benefits.



Republicans will be able to come back and point out the sky-rocketing cost of such a system. Not to mention that you will create a stigmatized subsidy not unlike Medicaid, food stamps or AFDC (and we all know how well that turned out--AFDC was highly unpopular and killed by the stroke of a Democratic president's pen).



Now given those circumstances, it might be that the political winds will shift in favor of a public option to control those costs and reign in the insurance companies. That's one possibility. But the more likely possibility, it seems to me, is that the GOP will rail against government inefficiency and the subsidy program will be eviscerated to the point that it no longer covers everyone. And worst of all, if it all really goes south it could set back efforts to extend government intervention in the economy on the behalf of the poor and middle class another generation. Right Wing talking heads of all ilk will Swift Boat it into being a symbol of government ineptitude that "proves" the government that governs least governs best.



So, I would rather see a loss for the Democratic party than a loss for the progressive philosophy. After all, a Democrat with the economic policies of Richard Nixon would be considered radical today, but in the zeitgeist of that time period he was considered quite conservative. We should be about changing the political zeitgeist, not just winning an election. And who is to say that the cost controls wouldn't blow up before 2012? Maybe I am presenting a false dichotomy, but from up here on the "exalted heights" of Flotaria, that's how I see it!



The public option is the only option.



Actually, I have a secret weapon that the president could use to get us the policy that we really need: a single-payer, Medicare For All bill. But I am saving that for after his speech.



I welcome your comments.

Monday, September 7, 2009

POLITICS: Awaiting the President's Address

With the political winds shifting hard against him, President Obama will face the nation in just a matter of hours. The question is will he sell us down the river and cave into the "Republocrats" (A weird hybrid beast of Republican, Democrat and Plutocrat all thrown into one!) or will he stick to his guns and finally give the American people true universal health insurance?

It all depends on the Public Option. Without it, the reform that passes could actually be worse than doing nothing. With it, we have a real shot at meaningful health reform. The president must make the public option a deal breaker. There should be no bill without it.

Strange that those who are frothing at the mouth over this aspect of the plan forget that the most popular and effective aspects of our current health care "system" are the government run parts: Medicare and the VA system, for instance.

Of course the super rich are pretty happy too...

An interesting question will be if the president and his team think that *any* victory is sufficient or if they actually need to pass something that works.

Let's hope it's the latter.

Here is my prediction: if they do not include a robust public option, the policy will fail to cover everyone and fail to control costs. Then the GOP will be able to turn around and trounce the Dems by arguing that government never works and the health care bill will be proof of their argument.

They'll be right.

Policies designed to fail will pretty much fail every time.