Why Health Insurance Companies Are Mad As Hell

Via Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, this may be one reason why health insurance companies are digging in and spending tons of cash since Labor Day:

Take a look at what's happened to the share prices of the six largest publicly-traded health insurance companies since Labor Day, which was about the point at which the Democrats appeared to regain their footing -- at least up to a point -- on health care.

Losing $9.9 billion in six weeks? Money talks, and bullshit walks.

Cash for Clunkers and Foreign Car Models

As the Cash for Clunkers program rolled on, there were some complaints that foreign auto models were selling at a much quicker pace than American-made cars. This led to a typical line of comments, particularly by folks who oppose any manner of government stimulus program, about how Cash for Clunkers wasn't doing much to help Detroit automobile manufacturers.

Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight.com has done his usual bang-up job of crunching the numbers and comes up with the graph below.

Notice, if you will, that the three major US auto makers - Ford, Chrysler, and GM - have significantly fewer of their available models that qualify to be purchased under Cash for Clunkers. So caught up in the massive profits of SUVs and trucks that they failed to hop on the fuel efficiency bandwagon, American manufacturers produced few vehicles that met the Cash for Clunkers required minimum of 22 miles per gallon.

Let's hope that this serves as yet another wake-up call for Detroit, and that they begin to crank out quality, high-mileage cars and SUVs. I'm ready for a new car - my Jeep was paid off in January - and if I want to buy American, I still don't have a lot of choices.

Link

GOP Road to Recovery

Nate Silver has an interesting take on a graph that demonstrates the Republican alternative to Obama's budget.

Nate Silver on Republicans

Nate Silver, the boy with the big brain at FiveThirtyEight.com, has a thoughtful piece titled Why Does a Person Become a Republican?

The genesis of the article was an experience Nate had on the Metro train as he was enroute to the CPAC convention, home to bipartisan presentations like "Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System" and buffoons like Joe the Plumber positing that if he was in Congress, he would be slapping people that weren't in the process of being shot for their lack of support for our troops.

I won't bore you with the details of Nate's experience - you can go read it yourself - but suffice it to say it's an example of mindless bureaucracy, the kind we experience on a daily basis, which is the main point of Silver's lament:

Still, I walked away today, having just been in a sea of conservatives who left me speechless, and thought: this is one tiny example of a major reason people become Republicans. Disgust, anger, annoyance with government interaction (ever wait in line at the DMV?) is distorted within an emotional prism, and suddenly someone is receptive to an anti-government message. What just happened becomes explainable by a larger narrative, and now you have somewhere to channel that disgust. People don't like to have loose disgust. It has to be funneled into a rational and ready explanation, a larger story. It helps a person feel they're regaining control over their environment.

When CPAC attendees gather to glory in their hatred of government, the thing Grover Norquist wants to drown in a bathtub, they are insisting that government is the problem. That it cannot be efficient, and that the side effect is to steal from you (who are good and have earned it) to redistribute to others (who haven't).

Nate's proposition makes a lot of sense, and certainly explains some of the rabid, vitriolic dialogue coming out of the CPAC gathering, which is eerily similar to collections of footage from John McCain's failed 2008 presidential campaign.

What remains to be seen is whether more sane elements of the conservative moment, if there are any left, can retake the messaging machine, or if Republicans will continue their very public contraction into being a regional party based in the deep south.

The Two Progressivisms

Nate Silver, the wunderkind of the 2008 presidential election cycle and chief wonk at FiveThirtyEight.com, has an interesting piece on the two types of progressivism. Take a look and see if you can determine which type is associated with Barack Obama's approach to governing.