[Cross posted from Corrente.]

It's simple. You do the math on savings and you look at how the insurance companies are going to behave, given their incentives*. From Bill Moyers Journal on May 25, 2009:

BILL MOYERS: I want to get your thoughts on President Obama's plan. As I read it, it's very difficult, at this moment, to know the details of it.

DR. SIDNEY WOLFE: 'Cause there aren't any details.

BILL MOYERS: There aren't any details. But he seems to be advocating a public option that would compete with the private insurance-driven sector, as a way of lowering the cost. What do you think about it? Is that- am I reading his plan correctly?

DR. DAVID HIMMELSTEIN: Well, most of the cost savings he's talking about are really illusory, I think. And my research group has done most of the research work on administrative costs in health care. And the administrative costs he's talking about saving are a tiny fraction of the potential savings under single-payer. 'Cause hospitals have to keep their bureaucracy, if you're dealing with hundreds of different plans.

[Cross posted (and slightly revised) from Corrente.]

[This post honors Elizabeth Warren on Mother's Day! At least somebody's trying to take care of us.-- lambert]

Go listen. Then read the comments. Here's a partial transcript I made; the relevant portion starts at 6:00; I start transcribing at 9:00:

ADAM DAVIDSON: What it feels to me is what you missing is that -- I think we put aside your pet issues. We put them aside. We put them aside until this crisis is over.

ELIZABETH WARREN: The cr-- What you're saying makes no sense. Now come on. [interpolate Davidson sputtering and attempting to interrupt throughout.] It makes no sense. On an emergency basis, on one day, one week, one month, there's no doubt in my mind we've got to step in, we've got to make sure we have a functioning banking system. I think I've said that like nine times now. Of course we've got to have a functioning banking system.

DAVIDSON: Wait a minute. I want to make you go farther. I want to make you madder before I --

ELIZABETH WARREN: No no no. [Davidson snickers] We're now at what -- we're now seven, eight months into this. And it's the second part of what you said. We can't do anything about the American family until this crisis is over? This crisis will not be over until the American family begins to recover. [More Davidson sputtering.] This crisis does not exist independently --

DAVIDSON: That's your crisis.

ELIZABETH WARREN: No it is not my crisis! That is America's crisis! If people cannnot pay their credit card bills [Davidson tries to interrupt] if they cannot pay their mortgages --

[Cross-posted on Corrente.]

Here's the post in its entirety. 2004-05-09, from Corrente's old site on blogger:

Sunday, May 09, 2004

Abu Ghraib tortures: Who let the dogs out?

Maybe there is a smoking gun.

.

Well. It will be rather difficult for the MWs, the Sabbath Day Gas Bags, and the WhiteWash House, Inerrant Boy and poor old Donald "Wolf Meat" Rumsfeld to portray the torture at Abu Ghraib as individual failures after these photos.

MWDs (Military Working Dogs) are worked as part of a team.

[Cross-posted at Corrente. -- lambert]

Let's look at Obama's two tech appointments. As it turns out, both are health care technocrats. Bloomberg:

Obama also named Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s secretary of technology, as his chief technology officer to “help the country meet its goals from job creation, to reducing health care costs, to protecting the homeland.”

The good news on Chopra. TechPresident's a little breathless:

A few quick observations about this choice. First, it looks like very good news for the transparency movement, as well as those of us looking for an open-minded leader willing to experiment with new forms of collaborative governance. For example, back in early 2007, under Chopra's leadership, Virginia was one of the first states to move, with Google's help, to make its state websites more searchable and thus more accessible to ordinary citizens. The state has also been in the forefront of efforts to create robust web services tracking the giant government stimulus spending package enacted by Obama, and as fed-watcher Christopher Dorobek points out, Chopra is well aware of and supportive of citizen-led watchdog efforts like Jerry Brito's StimulusWatch.org. ...

Under Chopra (and it must be mentioned, his boss Governor Tim Kaine), the state also launched a highly interactive website that collected more than 9000 suggestions from residents on how the stimulus monies might be spent. "Relative to calls and letters, it's fairly safe to say this is probably a tenfold increase in civic participation by allowing people to click on a button, submit their ideas and engage with their governor," Chopra told a local paper back in March.

I think Chopra's got a big, big blind spot here, which I'll get to in a moment. Now let's look at Chopra on health care. Here's a video (via The 463) of Chopra before the Congressional Internet Caucus conference in September 2008. The health care stuff starts at 24:00 minutes in:

[Cross posted at Corrente.]

The best writing is always in the sports section, isn't it? Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free Press:

It will not save us. No basketball game can do that. No matter who wins Monday night, Tuesday morning the jobs still will be gone, the factories still silent and empty, the houses still for sale or abandoned altogether. The out-of-town media who see a national championship tonight at Ford Field as some uplifting salve for downtrodden Detroit are a bit misdirected.

It’s not our mind-set we’re trying to change.

It’s yours.

Because this bash Motown is hosting is not meant to be a pity party. We don’t want sad headshakes on your way out of town. As Tom Izzo said today, “There are a lot of cities out there that have problems; this is ours.” And he’s right. This is our city, but it’s your America. What the rest of the nation is suffering, we went through first. And if our leaders aren’t wise, what we’re enduring now, you may endure next.

You can’t cut off your manufacturing arm and expect to build. You can’t outsource everything and expect to lead the world. And you can’t treat blue-collar industry as a bunch of dumb rivetheads who need the government to run them, while allowing the banking world to do as it pleases with taxpayer money. ...

It will not save us, this game, we know that. But for a brief moment, we have the nation’s attention. Whatever stories get written, let them talk about pounding away, doing things right, asking only a workman’s due, but asking nothing less. Let them talk about family and perseverance and what it can accomplish. Let them talk about traditions worth celebrating and preserving.

That way, no matter what the final score, they’ll be talking about the basketball team AND the state it occupies. The Spartans want to make a memory out of what you’re witnessing here. The rest of us don’t want you to forget.

And now, for the bankster's view, we turn to Ben Bernanke and a chorus of economists:

[Cross posted from Corrente.]

You know, I'm old-fashioned. When I read the words "live blog," I think of a blog that, to the best of the blogger's ability, faithfully records events as they happen, for the record, in near real time -- and doesn't censor anything. The White House, apparently, takes a different view.

Dr. Jess Fiedorowicz, M.D., is a board-certified psychiatrist and clinician investigator in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa. Dr. Fiedorowicz also won the lottery for a ticket to the White House's Iowa Health Care forum -- after Iowa's (Democratic!) Governor Chet Culver, most shamefully, had tried to sell the tickets to corporate sponsors! Dr. Federowicz participated in the protests outside the hall, and also spoke inside the hall at the forum. As reported by Reuters India*:

Dr. Jess Fiedorowicz, a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa Hospitals who was with the protest group, told the meeting a majority of Americans support a "single payer" or government-run national health insurance program.

"Can we put it on the table for discussion?" Fiedorowicz asked Nancy-Ann De Parle, director of the White House Office on Health Reform.

"Can we study costing? Can we study feasibility of this truly universal, socially just and fiscally responsible alternate to our currently unjust and woefully inefficient system?" Fiedorowicz asked. Many in the crowd applauded.

And yet -- and I know this wil surprise you -- Dr. Fiedorowicz appears nowhere in the White House "live blog" of the event! Is Reuters wrong? Let's go to the tape (or in this case, the YouTube):

This is a test post for a comment I am about to post.