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By Gregory Taggart, October 31, 2013 2:48 pm

So a friend asked me to check Moynihan’s thesis against vote tallies for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, another piece of landmark legislation. I don’t know about my friend, but the vote(s) on that bill stunned me. A greater number of Republicans voted for the bill than did Democrats. There were a number of votes (parliamentary procedure is beyond my ken, so I won’t go into them) but basically on both sides of Congress, 80% of Republicans voted for the bill and between 61% and 69% of Democrats went for it, depending on the vote.*

And the Moynihan thesis? It holds here as well. A bi-partisan majority of 73% passed the bill in the Senate. A bi-partisan majority of 70% voted “yea” in the House (on the the Senate version of the bill).

*Of course, Democrat numbers would have been better had it not been for their Southern siblings who voted 8 – yea, 107 – nay on the bill.

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By Gregory Taggart, October 31, 2013 1:17 pm

In a previous post, I discussed the regulations HHS promulgated in June 2010 to implement the Affordable Care Act. I failed to mention that buried in the issue of the Federal Register that contains those regulations, you’ll find the following chart:

You can find the chart and relevant discussion of both group and individual plans on pages 35,552 to 34,553 of this document. Interim-Final-Regulations_HHS-OS-2010-0015-0001_3

Forbes magazine claims that in these pages and with this chart, “Obama Officials [said] In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare.” I’m not sure if Forbes’s analysis is accurate, but there’s no doubt that Obama officials knew that lots of people with group and individual health insurance were going to lose their grandfathered status, and thus the health insurance that they presumably liked, by the end of 2013.

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By Gregory Taggart, October 31, 2013 9:52 am

In a previous post, I told the following story about the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s advice to the Clintons:

Twenty years ago, when he was trying to persuade Bill and Hillary Clinton that universal health care was a politically unrealistic goal, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan repeated one insistent warning: Sweeping, historic laws don’t pass barely.’They pass 70-to-30,’ he said, ‘or they fail.’ [Rahm Emanuel gave President Obama similar advice.]

Later I began to wonder, what was the vote on the original Social Security bill? Medicare and Medicaid?

Social Security:

The Ways & Means Committee Report on the Social Security Act was introduced in the House on April 4, 1935 and debate began on April 11th. After several days of debate, the bill was passed in the House on April 19, 1935 by a vote of 372 yeas [including 81 of 102 Republicans], 33 nays, 2 present, and 25 not voting. . . .

The bill was reported out by the Senate Finance Committee on May 13, 1935 and introduced in the Senate on June 12th. The debate lasted until June 19th, when the Social Security Act was passed by a vote of 77 yeas [including 16 of 25 Republicans], 6 nays, and 12 not voting. (Emphasis added)

Medicare and Medicaid:

H.R. 6675, The Social Security Admendments of 1965, began life in the House Ways & Means Committee where it passed the Committee on March 23, 1965 (President Johnson issued a statement in support of the bill after the favorable Committee vote) and a Final Report was sent to the House on March 29, 1965. The House took up consideration of the bill on April 7th, and passed the bill the next day by a vote of 313-115 [including 70 out of 140 Republicans] (with 5 not voting).

The Senate Finance Committee reported the bill out on June 30th and debate began on the Senate floor that same day, concluding with passage on July 9, 1965 by a vote of 68-21 [including 13 out of 32 Republicans] (with 11 not voting). (Emphasis added)

For those without a calculator, Social Security passed with 86% of the vote in the House and 81% in the Senate. Medicare passed with 71% of the vote in the House and 70% in the Senate. Both bills had strong, bi-partisan support. In contrast, the Affordable Care Act garnered just 50.57% of the vote in the House and 60% in the Senate–without a single Republican vote.

I repeat, it was hubris that killed the beast.

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By Gregory Taggart, October 30, 2013 11:44 am

Here’s the relevant provision in the Affordable Care Act, a provision that President Obama touted again and again and again and again:

(a) No changes to existing coverage
(1) In general Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed to require that an individual terminate coverage under a group health plan or health insurance coverage in which such individual was enrolled on March 23, 2010.[42 USC Sec. 18011 (a)(1)] (Emphasis supplied)

Nope, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t require you–the individual–to terminate that health insurance plan you like. Nope, you don’t even have to get up from the couch. Your friendly federal government, in the form of regulations promulgated by Health and Human Services, will terminate it for you, if your insurance provider or group plan:

-eliminat[es] of all or substantially all benefits to diagnose or treat a particular condition,

-increase[s] . . . a percentage cost-sharing requirement (such as . . . [your] coinsurance . . .),

-increase[s] . . . a fixed-amount cost-sharing requirement other than a copayment (for example,deductible or out-of-pocket limit). . . if the total percentage increase in the cost-sharing requirement . . . exceeds the maximum percentage increase (as defined in paragraph (g)(3)(ii) of . . . [S]ection 54.9815–1251T),

-increase[s] . . . a fixed-amount copayment [by greater than essentially the medical inflation plus $5.00],

-impose[s] . . . [or] decrease[s] an overall annual limit on the dollar value of benefits, [or]

-[if an employer] decreases its contribution rate [essentially, by more than 5%].

(Some emphasis and incidental formatting/punctuation supplied)

Those who are gluttons for punishment can read HHS’s summary of the sordid details here. If you want to read the fine print, click on the link at the very end of the summary. (Oddly, the other links, or at least the ones I tried, don’t work.)

Or you can read my copy here (scroll down until you find the yellow highlights). Have fun: Interim Final Regulations_HHS-OS-2010-0015-0001

A final comment. The HHS regulation makes sense. The Affordable Care Act is supposed to deliver better healthcare–supposed to. And the regulation is an attempt to deliver on that promise to those with existing plans that they like and want to keep. Each of the reasons for terminating your coverage makes sense if you accept the premise that the requirements represent a safety net, a blockade to prevent your health insurance company from reducing your benefits. But that’s not how President Obama sold the Act. As the videos linked to above demonstrate, he promised unequivocally that you could keep your health insurance, no if, ands, or buts, and knowing full well that you probably would not be able to.

Would the Act have passed if he had been up front about this? I don’t think so.

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By Gregory Taggart, October 30, 2013 9:51 am

I’ve been watching the Sebelius/Obamacare hearings this morning. The Secretary keeps reminding us that the ACA is the law of the land. Her choir members on the dais use their solos to remind viewers that Republicans should be rooting for the ACA rather than gloating over the website’s failures. And they may be right.

But then there’s this: the ACA passed on the barest of majorities. In the House, the vote was 219-212–with not a single Republican saying yes. In the Senate, it was 60-39, again with no Republican (Senator Jim Bunning, R-Ky, did not vote). If you prefer your votes in terms of percentages, the vote in the House was 50.57% to 49.43%, in the Senate, 60% to 39% (and that vote ignores the shenanigans the Senate employed to act before Scott Brown joined that august body). Add all the ayes together, and you’ll find that 50.15% of Congress voted for the law, and 46.92% said no. And with that and President Obama’s signature, the Affordable Care Act did, in fact, become the law of the land, and the Federal government assumed control of 1/6th of the economy of the United States.

All that to say this, or rather, to repeat an anecdote about Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and some advice he gave President Bill Clinton:

Twenty years ago, when he was trying to persuade Bill and Hillary Clinton that universal health care was a politically unrealistic goal, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan repeated one insistent warning: Sweeping, historic laws don’t pass barely.’They pass 70-to-30,’ he said, ‘or they fail.’

Moynihan was not alone in this opinion. The Politico story continues:

Four years ago, when he was trying to persuade Barack Obama that he would pay a terrible price for jamming health care reform through a reluctant Congress on a partisan vote, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel begged his boss to settle for a vastly scaled-down plan.

If the Affordable Care Act fails, it will not be because Republicans opposed it. It will be because Democrats ignored the advice of Moynihan and Emanuel: massive, historic legislation requires massive, bipartisan support. If you don’t have it, you suffer the consequences.

Hubris. It was hubris that killed the beast.

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By Gregory Taggart, October 29, 2013 2:08 pm

He was cuter when he wasn’t such a thug.

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By Gregory Taggart, October 22, 2013 2:05 pm

Third, we are doing everything we can possibly do to get the websites working better, faster, sooner. We got people working overtime, 24/7, to boost capacity and address the problems. Experts from some of America’s top private-sector tech companies, who’ve, by the way, have seen things like this happen before, they want it to work.

They’re reaching out. They’re offering to send help. We’ve had some of the best IT talent in the entire country join the team. And we’re well into a tech surge to fix the problem. And we are confident that we will get all the problems fixed.

President Obama, yesterday in the Rose Garden.

Yeah, but . . .

The second fallacious thought mode is expressed in the very unit of effort used in estimating and scheduling [a programming job]: the man-month. Cost does indeed vary as the product of the number of men and the number of months. Progress does not. Hence the man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth. It implies that men and months are interchangeable.

When a [programming] task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging.

Frederick P. Brooks, “The Mythical Man-Month.”

And for good measure.

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By Gregory Taggart, October 21, 2013 4:50 pm

Without comment, other than to say that as good as my street contacting was 40 years ago in Brazil–Rio, Vitoria, and Joao Pessoa–I was no match for what these NYC missionaries did.

And that scripture at the end? It’s from The Book of Mormon:

And moreover, I would desire that ye should consider on the blessed and ahappy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are bblessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out cfaithful to the end they are received into dheaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness. O remember, remember that these things are true; for the Lord God hath spoken it. (Mosiah 2:41)

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By Gregory Taggart, October 21, 2013 12:15 pm

The Economist says there’s Trouble at the Lab. Nick Brown Smelled Bull. What’s going on here? Where’s the rational, reasoned thinking we are told is the hallmark of science?

According to The Economist,

This [that too many scientists use inappropriate statistically techniques] fits with another line of evidence suggesting that a lot of scientific research is poorly thought through, or executed, or both.

Nick Brown would surely agree. The BS he smelled involved applied positive psychology and

A butterfly graph, the calling card of chaos theory mathematics, purporting to show the tipping point upon which individuals and groups “flourish” or “languish.” Not a metaphor, no poetic allusion, but an exact ratio: 2.9013 positive to 1 negative emotions. Cultivate a “positivity ratio” of greater than 2.9-to-1 and sail smoothly through life; fall below it, and sink like a stone.

The theory was well credentialed. Now cited in academic journals over 350 times, it was first put forth in a 2005 paper by Barbara Fredrickson, a luminary of the positive psychology movement, and Marcial Losada, a Chilean management consultant, and published in the American Psychologist, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the largest organization of psychologists in the U.S.

Brown, a 52-year old part-time master’s student at an obscure London university with a degree in computer science, would have none of that.

In what world could this be true? he wondered

So off he went. The story of his campaign against this particular piece of bad science is well worth the read.

Like Brown, I am not a scientist. I’m not even particularly well-schooled in the subject. But I follow it. I read my share of articles on the subject. I read a few blogs that deal with it. I even have friends who are scientists. Accomplished ones, in fact. Sadly I’ve also read my share of Facebook posts touting science as the Holy Grail and at the same time disparaging faith and religion. Well, these two articles should give pause to those who place their faith in science. For as The Economist says, quoting Dr. Bruce Alberts, editor of Science,

[S]cientists themselves . . . “need to develop a value system where simply moving on from one’s mistakes without publicly acknowledging them severely damages, rather than protects, a scientific reputation.” This will not be easy. But if science is to stay on its tracks, and be worthy of the trust so widely invested in it, it may be necessary.

Apparently the emperor isn’t the only one in need of some new clothes. Richard Dawkins, call your office.

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By Gregory Taggart, October 21, 2013 10:09 am

George Will (who, by the way, is speaking at BYU tomorrow) nails it in his October 18, 2013, column:

[Barack Obama] and some of his tea party adversaries share an impatience with Madisonian politics, which requires patience. The tea party’s reaffirmation of Madison’s limited-government project is valuable. Now, it must decide if it wants to practice politics.

Rauch hopes there will be “an intellectual effort to advance a principled, positive, patriotic case for compromise, especially on the right.” He warns that Republicans, by their obsessions with ideological purity and fiscal policy, “have veered in the direction of becoming a conservative interest group, when what the country needs is a conservative party .”

A party is concerned with power , understood as the ability to achieve intended effects. A bull in a china shop has consequences, but not power, because the bull cannot translate intelligent intentions into achievements. The tea party has a choice to make. It can patiently try to become the beating heart of a durable party, which understands this: In Madisonian politics, all progress is incremental. Or it can be a raging bull, and soon a mere memory, remembered only for having broken a lot of china. Conservatives who prefer politics over the futility of intransigence gestures in Madison’s compromise-forcing system will regret the promise the tea party forfeited, but will not regret that, after the forfeiture, it faded away. (Emphasis supplied)

(Wills’s visit reminds me of a couple of other media luminaries who stopped by to chat when I was at BYU, including to David Halberstam, in the Marriott Center, and Bob Woodward, in the Wilkinson Center Ballroom. I read Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest as a consequence of his visit.)