Tennessee Titans owned Bud Adams gave the Buffalo Bills the bird on Sunday. Aggressively.
That is awesome. But this quote from one of his players is even more outrageous and awesome:
"I don't know if he did it, but I condone fun things," Finnegan said, according to The Tennessean. "If he was having fun doing it, then by all means, do what you do."
The answer, essentially, was that there is no market. If Kaiser pushes prices down by $30, who notices? Maybe the HR department. But the workers don't see the difference. And other employers don't rush to change their insurance options and sign up with Kaiser. This, Kingsdale explained, is the real problem. The market doesn't need to transform every day, but you do need 10 or 15 percent of the customers willing to pursue better options for the signals to be received and the other competitors to reorient in the direction they think the market is going. But it doesn't work like that in health care. Employers are very reluctant to change insurers, and so good behavior is not rapidly rewarded.
"The price differences are not translated to the consumer," Kingsdale explained. "They go to the company. What is the typical HR officer's decision hierarchy? They have benefits that make most workers happy. The worst thing they could do is introduce a change that make 2 to 5 percent of the workers unhappy. The worst thing you can do in this market is bring change. But what kind of market is that?"
You have to feel for the guy. Two years in a row, he has almost single-handedly destroyed Michigan State's offensive gameplan. And two years in a row, he's lost.
Though I considered this the most important game of the season*, I was strangely calm after the loss. Calmness led to clarity: Dantonio is now 2-0 against the two worst Michigan teams in the last half century. His team is now 2-3, with nasty losses to Central and Wisconsin. State was 9-3 last year, with the three losses coming against the only quality opponents on the schedule, and three of the wins coming in games in which they were outgained by a substantial margin. They'll lose at least two more games this year (I predict PSU and Illinois), maybe a third (Iowa), and finish around .500--at or near their historical average.
And this is where they'll likely be as long as Dantonio is at State. Not all Dantonio's fault, true enough: Like his precessors, he's fighting State's reputation, its average to poor talent, and, more recently, its insidious culture of defeat and inexplicable collapse, and its stubborn inferiority complex.
What is Dantonio's fault: Running a circa 2000 Michigan offense with Michigan State talent in 2009. I'm a Michigan fan. I've seen this game. I know how it ends. 9-3. 10-2. 8-4. Citrus Bowl. Outback Bowl. Rose Bowl every fifth year or so, only to get smoked by [Insert PAC-10 team here].
And that's with players like Braylon and Brady and Jackson and Foote. State will be running it with guys like Dell and Stanton and Burke.
Both programs are young, but only one is rebuilding.
"Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance - where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks - the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong... Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken," - Friedrich Hayek, The Road To Serfdom (Chapter 9).
"Under Obamacare, private insurers will continue to seek profits, and it's quite possible that the new regulatory restraints imposed on them (take all comers, don't punish the sick with higher premiums, don't seek out fine-print reasons to cancel policies after policyholders get sick, etc.) will inspire them to find ever-more-ingenious ways to avoid payouts. President Obama often says that a public option will help keep the private insurers honest. What he doesn't say, but surely knows, is that private insurers' duties to their shareholders may be irreconcilable with their duties to their customers. Should that prove true, a public option would provide a necessary refuge."
If you believe the free market dogma, all things being equal, a public-run entity won't be able to compete with private insurance. Fiscal conservatives believe the dogma; so why are they so afraid of the public option?
My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising … By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.
In its origins, neoconservatism was a defense of New Deal/Great Society liberalism at home and abroad, both from the radical, countercultural left of the era and from its own design defects. The early neocons were Kennedy-Johnson liberals who believed that liberal reform should avoid naive utopianism and should be guided by pragmatism and empirical social science. The '70s neoconservatives were so focused on the utopianism of the '60s campus left, however, that most paid too little attention to a far greater threat to their beloved New Deal tradition, the utopianism of the libertarian right. Ultimately Milton Friedman and other free-market ideologues did far more damage to America than the carnival freaks of the counterculture.
