Ezra Klein wrote another one of those “chart” articles that he’s so fond of, Two Charts That Should Be in Every Health-Care Discussion. (What is it with everyone thinking “healthcare” is not a word?) The second graph is not very interesting. It shows how much more the United States pays for private healthcare. But of course, everyone knows that. That’s our system. But the first chart? Oh my!

Chart #1: We Pay More Than Anyone!

The first chart shows home much the government spends on healthcare per person and compares it to other similarly rich countries. As with pretty much every chart you can create about healthcare, the United States looks really bad:

Bottom line: the government spends more on healthcare than any other country even though most of the people don’t get their healthcare from the government and 16% of the people don’t get healthcare at all!

Best Healthcare in the Word! If You Can Afford It…

“But!” the conservative will say, “The United States has the best healthcare in the world!” Well, that might be true if you are Dick Cheney. Of course, he isn’t a Medicare patient, and could have bought great healthcare elsewhere.

But for the regular guy? He doesn’t get the best healthcare in the world. Let’s take a look at the countries on the graph.

The WHO has ranked all the countries in the world. Let’s see where they stack up:

The number in parentheses is where each country ranks in how much it spends on healthcare. So we’re number one! We’re number one!

One interesting thing here: taken all together (public and private healthcare), the United States pays 70% more than the next closest country, Canada.

We pay roughly 250% more than Israel pays. All while getting much worse healthcare! We’re number one!

Afterword

There have been a lot of attacks on the WHO healthcare rankings. But they aren’t that compelling.

If you question me, check out Wikipedia. Basically, it is claimed that such rankings aren’t that accurate. This is true, but one thing is certain: the United States healthcare system isn’t head and shoulders better than other systems. And it doesn’t insure 50 million people. [At that time. –FM 25 Jan 2018] And it does this by being by far the most expensive system in the world.

And What About the Guns?!

Fox News mustache stand John Stossel has noted that our life expectancy is artificially lowered because we have so many homicides.

He says that when you take this into account, our life expectancy is higher than in “nearly every other industrialized nation.” But he just claims it, he doesn’t produce any numbers or studies or anything. But consider this: rough 2.5 million people die in the US every year. There are roughly 10,000 homicides each year. That adds 0.4 percent to our death toll. So it’s hard to see how this is going to make a huge change in our life expectancy.

Also, it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. It is just more apologetics for our failed system. I’m sure there are all kinds of special circumstances you could use for every country that would change its life expectancy. It’s also funny that Fox News would use what is primarily gun homicides to justify our terrible healthcare system.

What About Economic Inequality?

It’s possible that our homicide rate is so high because we have so much economic inequality. Would Fox News be in favor of making our economic system more fair in the name of justifying our terrible healthcare system?

Does the United States really have a worse healthcare system than Costa Rica (ranked 38 in quality and 50 in cost)? For most people, probably not. For people in the bottom half of the economy, almost certainly.

Conservatives are so cute! At least when they try to figure out why no one likes their party. It just never occurs to them that it might be, you know, their policies. Look: conservatives like their policies. It is the party of the rich that does the work of the rich. And a bunch of Christians and racists. Conservatives don’t talk about the racists for a couple of reasons. One is that it is who they are. Another is that they don’t believe in racism. Except reverse racism, where the powerless make the powerful cry. But that’s just part of doing the work of the rich. Let us say no more about racism!

But Christians? There’s something there. And Jonah Goldberg thinks he understands why Asians are not voting for the Republican Party. Back in December he wrote, The GOP: Not a Club for Christians. That’s an aspirational title, because Goldberg fully admits that the Republican Party really does act like a Christian group:

Now Goldberg doesn’t take offense to this, because he understand that he is one of them. After all, he’s the speaker. But what about a Jew or a Buddhist or a Muslim who just happened to be in the audience? He might feel like an outsider.

There is something to this, but again, this is just tinkering around the edges. The real problem is policy. But even on this issue, Goldberg shows the biggest problem the conservative movement has going forward: rigidity. He writes, “The challenge now is to figure out how to talk in a way that doesn’t cause decent and dedicated Christians to pull in like a turtle, while also appealing to non-Judeo-Christians and the nonreligious.” Even apart from the fact that all he’s talking about is “appearance,” this just isn’t going to happen. As I’ve argued before, Christians in the United States do not want equality. “Happy Holidays!” is not good enough because it doesn’t explicitly claim that Christianity (unlike all those other religions) is the Truth.

But its even worse than this. The Republican commitment to evangelical Christians dates back to Ronald Reagan. There has never been a good marriage between the libertarian and social conservative wings of the party. In fact, they, more than any other groups, ought to belong to different parties. And the Republican Party really can’t move forward in a meaningful way until they resolve this conflict. That requires offending a fair percentage of “decent and dedicated Christians.”

And that’s what I started with. There are three major categories of people who vote for Republicans: rich, social conservative, and racist. I think the third category is quickly fading—or at least I want to think that. The social conservatives still dominate who votes for the Republicans. This is why the Tea Party started in opposition to corporate welfare and the bank bailout but ended as a bunch of deficit scolds who get abortion absolutists elected.

But I repeat: conservatives really are adorable as they scurry around looking for something easy they can do to fix their demographic problems. To misquote Churchill: “Republicans can always be counted on to do the right thing… After they have exhausted all other possibilities.” I’m thinking 4-6 years, but even longer if the Democrats screw up and hand them the White House in 2016. Until then, it will be more attempts to game the electoral college, pretend to be “compassionate,” and welcome other faiths.

Scurry along, little party!

I happened upon a page for the TED Talks where they try to answer the question, Is TED Elitist? The thing about elitism is that those who suffer from it don’t normally understand what the issue is. And TED is no exception. Here is their answer to the question: “Is TED elitist? In a nutshell, no. It certainly attracts people who are regarded as elite in their area of expertise. But the word ‘elitist’ implies exclusionary, and we’ve taken many steps in recent years to open up the live conferences to as broad an audience as possible.”

No one is arguing that TED (or any other group) should grab people off the street and put them on stage. “And now Homeless Bob will tell us what he thinks about recent advances in radiation therapy.” Nor is anyone saying that the talks are not widely available. Although it is worth remembering that in notable cases, TED has refused to release talks, and that does have to do with TED’s elitism.

What makes TED elitist is how they push ideas that comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. My favorite example of this is Mike Rowe of the show Dirty Jobs talking about how kids would be happier if they just accepted crummy jobs. You see, Rowe has been around a bunch of people doing crummy jobs and they were all happy. I might point out that he is around them only when the film crew is and people are actively paying attention and caring about the work they do. But the issue is deeper than that. In the one example he gave, the man owned his own farm or business (it wasn’t clear); he wasn’t some day laborer or someone working at McDonald’s. So the fact of the matter is that a young person is no more likely to succeed at these dirty jobs than are at anything else. To top it all off, should a celebrity worth $35 million really be telling kids to forsake their dreams?

This is what I wrote back in August:

TED Talks are geared toward the elites and what their interests are. Basically, it is a series by, for, and of Michael Bloomberg. And there’s nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is the implication that these talks don’t funnel the truth into a very narrow Overton Window: that occupied by the mainstream media—socially liberal but economically quite conservative.

Of course, the ultimate example of TED elitism is how the group tried to censor Nick Hanauer’s talk on income inequality. I’m sure that TED felt very comfortable booking Hanauer. He’s a billionaire, after all. But then he talked about how the rich are not job creators. The horror! Eventually TED was forced to release the video. But if Hanauer’s video had been how the rich create jobs, the video would have been released with no thought at all. And that is why TED is an elitist group. It isn’t because they feature elite speakers. It isn’t because they don’t distribute video of their talks to the prols. It is because they provide a megaphone for the interests of the elite.

Afterword

If you haven’t seen it, check out Hanauer’s excellent speech. Only an elitist could have thought this talk was controversial:

TED Talk images used under Fair Use.

As we say goodbye to filibuster reform, let us take a moment to get really clear on where the blames lays for turning the filibuster into a weapon of mass destruction. More and more when I talk to conservatives, the best they can say about how badly their party acts is the centrists’ lament: both sides do it! But that is quantitatively wrong.

About a year and a half ago, one of Kevin Drum’s readers created the following graph. It shows how the use of the filibuster has grown. The red data points indicate when the Republicans were in the minority and the blue points indicate when the Democrats were. The most obvious thing to notice is that all the increases in the use of the filibuster are due to the Republicans. A more subtle point is that the Democrats have actually reduced the use of the filibuster.

This gets to the core of the problem with the “both sides do it” meme. When the Democrats brought down the use of the filibuster in the 90s and 00s, they were given no credit for it. In addition, it didn’t change the behavior of the Republicans that followed them. Every time the the Republicans have been in the minority, they have pushed the use of the filibuster all the more.

This behavior is shameful and the Republicans should be publicly shamed. But instead, all their bad behavior is glossed over with, “Why can’t the two parties just get along?!” As this graph shows, the Democratic Party tries to get along. And the reaction of the mainstream media is still, “Why can’t the two parties just get along?!” The answer is staring right at them from the teleprompter.

Tired of hating on Harry Reid? Then click away, because I have something all new to bitch about. Today, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit came down with a sweeping interpretation of the Constitution that will basically end recess appointments. These are temporary appointments that the President makes when the Senate is in recess. Now, I’m no great fan of these, except right now when the Republicans are so committed to obstruction that they wouldn’t approve the nomination for dog catcher.

When I first started thinking about the filibuster, I thought, “Why kill it now? After all, the House is still in Republican hands. There isn’t much that is going to get done anyway!” I thought that for about a nanosecond. Then I realized: presidential nominations! Obama has hardly been radical in his appointments. Consider, for example, Mary Jo White to head SEC. About the most outrageous choice was Elizabeth Warren. But she wasn’t even chosen. That was just too controversial a nomination, so now that “radical” Warren is a lowly United States Senator.

Yet the Republicans have blocked all kinds of minor and uncontrovertial nominations. Why? For the same reason a dog licks its balls. And this is why we needed real filibuster reform. The fact that Obama will likely not be able to make any more recess appointments makes Harry Reid’s newest “handshake agreement” all that much worse.

But like I keep telling everyone: don’t worry! In two years, the Republicans will probably control the Senate. And then we can finally get some filibuster reform! Just in time for President Marco Rubio!

Update (25 January 2013 5:47 pm)

Jonathan Bernstein says more or less the same thing that I did:

But he is less hopeless. He uses this fact to encourage Reid to hold on to filibuster reform to keep the Republicans in order. He also links to an article he wrote back in December that explains the various ways that the filibuster can be reformed at any time.