Posts Tagged ‘Politics’
Sarah Palin vs Friedrich Nietzsche
Tags: America, Culture, Health Care, Politics
… or the war against freedom of thought
Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I don’t care where you stand on the recent health care debate in America. Both sides have valid points, albeit driven by completely different ideologies.
The problem with the debates on either side was that the argument wasn’t driven by rational principles, as you are well aware.
Using the heart to battle the mind
America had some tough questions to answer: why was it no longer sports the most competitive free market in the world (Switzerland now holds that crown after its health care restructuring in 1994) and why was the cost vs benefit ratio is the lowest in the developed word. It is the last nation in the developed world not to offer comprehensive health care (instead it imposes yearly and lifetime caps, making it inadequate as disaster insurance) and meddles more in the doctor patient relationships than most Northern European nations (insurance companies restrict free access to doctors and limit the prescriptions and treatments available). That is not to say that all was bad with American health care, but that the world had changed, and a change in the system was required.
This was America’ s call for a rational debate, comparing its strengths and weaknesses to that of other countries and finding a uniquely American answer that could reform the bad while keeping the good.
Instead, stake holders rushed to Washington to write big checks in order to guarantee their annual returns despite their shortcomings in performance.
And that crippled an honest debate. Since we could no longer indulge in objective analysis, something else had to be done.
Battle lines were drawn between both political parties trying to protect their stakeholders, instead of an open debate about why the system couldn’t deliver uncapped health care at 2/3rds of the cost as is the case in many nations, or why American health insurers don’t have to compete as ferociously as in some European countries. Emotional words such as ‘socialized health care’ were trumped up, ignoring the fact that America subsidizes its health care to a higher degree than some European countries. ‘Death panels’ were invented, despite the fact that there were no death panels in any other countries. ‘Rationing health care’ was presented as a doom and gloom scenario, despite the fact that yearly and lifetime caps make America’s health care system the most rationed health care system in the world. ‘Skyrocketing costs’ were predicted, despite the fact that America’s health care is the most expensive in the developed world, burdened by the highest administration cost. Tort reform was ignored as was the reason why tort reform is complicated: there are only 2.4 doctors per 1000 citizens compared to 4 doctors per 1000 citizens in Europe, leading to grueling work hours for doctors and the highest medical malpractice in the developed world. ‘Interference in the doctor patient relationship’ was boosted despite the fact that America is one of the only countries in the developed world where you couldn’t freely choose the doctor you go with and one of the only countries where insurers could meddle in your prescriptions and treatments. ‘Innovation is under threat’ said political actors despite the fact that America is only the most innovative system in terms of cancer treatments and relied on European donations of the swine flu vaccine because its markets failed to create the volume requested. Political actors also pointed to the fact that America is the most responsive system in the world, but failed to mention why that was: because many of its citizens either have no access to health care or lose that access when their yearly cap runs out (resulting in bankruptcy and loss of access to the health care system). America is the most responsive system in the world (only marginally so, but still), but only because so many people can’t actually afford health care. ‘Free markets must be protected’ was the battle cry, despite the fact that America is far from the most competitive health care system in the world, protecting insurers from full on competition and allowing oligopolies to from by state mandate. One political party had to pass reform no matter what to survive, the other had to kill it no matter what to triumph.
None of these arguments were presented as rational arguments. They were there as slogans, to raise the emotional temperature, to instill fear.
Because when we feel frightened, when we feel we are about to lose something, we lose the ability to think. Emotional arguments mainly served to obscure the real challenges we face.
And that is where politicians failed the American people. They failed to present us with pragmatic options, instead tried to defend the stakeholders by injecting so much emotion in the debate that we lost the ability to conduct a rational review in answering the complicated but worthwhile question: how can we improve the cost vs benefit ratio for the American consumer?
In the end, the biggest winners were the stakeholders…
But knowing Sarah Palin, one of the actors who injected a lot of anger and emotion into the debate, she would have written off Nietzsche’s quote by pointing out the man went mad and that his philosophical works were adopted by the Nazi’s, essentially blocking any thought about the validity of his argument…
Tags: America, Culture, Health Care, Politics
Is televised news still news?
Tags: 1964, CNN, Crossfire, Culture, Daily Show, Fox, Free Market, John Stewart, Marshall McLuhan, McDonalds, Neil Postman, News, Politics, Ted Turner, TV
The medium is the message
This famous phrase was first introduced in Marshall McLuhan‘s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Marshall McLuhan
In it, Marshall argues that the medium influences how the message is received.
A basic example is a light bulb: although it does not contain a message, it is a medium that has profoundly changed our society. It makes it easy to create spaces during nighttime that allow for social interaction that would otherwise be prohibited by darkness.
In as much that the medium of the light bulb changes society, so does the medium of television. The content might at first glance appear to be the same as that of newspapers, but the very fact that it is delivered via the medium of television alters the content significantly. For instance, on TV, the news cannot be reread, but it goes much further than that.
Each medium has its own specific limitations and requirements
Amusing ourselves to death
Neil Postman takes smoke signals as an example in his book ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death‘:
Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence (or other philosophical concepts), and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. It’s form excludes the content.
In the same way that smoke signals find it problematic to communicate philosophical ideas, television finds it quite the task to transmit information such as news. Inevitably, the content is altered by the medium, either by omission or alteration.
Why? Well, television starts with huge overheads: an expensive studio, broadcasting system, network of journalists around the world all equipped with expensive recording devices make the business of television news very expensive. To make things worse, TV is mostly paid for by advertisers, meaning that the TV station needs to attract a large enough viewership to attract these advertisers. This requires TV to appeal to the largest possible denominator. That means that TV has a bias built in towards entertainment, the best way to please a large cross section of the population. But making news entertaining also means making it more accessible, less complex and as a result less serious, less rational, less relevant and less coherent. Even worse, in order to keep viewers loyal, their personal ideologies and emotions are analyzed, and the debate is centered on raising the emotional temperature to give a sense of peril, urgency, indignation and instill a need to ‘follow the situation’.
Israel, Lebanon and Armageddon?
In August 2006, the news media covered the conflict between Israel and Lebanon. CNN’s graphic alternated between “Armageddon?” and “Apocalypse now?” and feature a story by Paula Zahn discussing a website that assigns a numerical value to the likelihood that we might be facing Armageddon a any given day.
Fox News interviewed a Priest as part of its “Armageddon” feature. The interviewer posed his question to the priest as followed:
I get so many conversations, on the street too, that this is imminent. When people say this is imminent, what are we talking about, a year? Six months? Nostradamus says August of 2006. But is it 18 years from now? What is it, father?
A clear example of news choosing the sensational over the even remotely factual.
On Good Morning America, Robin Roberts interviewed a Christian guest who felt it apt, in light of the Lebanon / Israel conflict, to advise:
There’s no alternative, you either accept Jesus or you’re going to go through terrible times.
Robin Roberts response was:
That’s why mom always says you’d better get right. You’d better get right in these times we’re living in.
Unbiased, factual reporting is near death in America.
In dark times, people often succumb to doomsday stories and need believe in something supernatural in the face of their despair. That is why in war times, churches are packed. But these aren’t dark times. In fact, we currently live in the most peaceful period in human history, the only problem is, if you watch the news, you’d think the world is going through one of its biggest calamities in human history…
And all that because the medium doesn’t attract high viewer numbers when it leads people to think, but instead needs people to feel, hence they tap into their fears, hopes and believes, no matter how false. And news degrades correspondently.
Simply ‘being’ versus being responsible
Is any of this particularly bad?
Of course not. Now that we know the limits and bias of the medium, we can regard it as such.
But here is a problem that constantly rears its head in societies: in defending the parts, we forget their relationship with the whole. Stakeholders, marketers, lawyers etc. will tell you that television in itself cannot be blamed for the poor distribution of news. In as much that McDonalds cannot be blamed for the state of physical health of a nation. But if the nation predominantly ate McDonalds meals, it would pretty soon overwhelm the health care system and lead to earlier deaths. In other words, if McDonalds becomes a prominent source of food for the nation, it needs to be viewed through that lens, not just on the merits of being a single food company.
And that’s where we are with television news: it has become the predominant medium to deliver news to the people. The recent rise of blogs has not really changed this, blogs came at the expense of newspapers, not television. And blogs have their own limitations.
We know that to create a healthy and effective democracy, we need to create platforms for open discussion of important issues in a way that is rational, coherent and serious enough to look at a problem from a 360 degree angle. Every situation and every solution has its price, and we need to be aware of the trade-offs in order to make rational decisions that benefit society.
But such a discussion takes time, can be tedious and as a result, is a poor format for television, with its need to entertain.
Television instead relies on emotive sound bites, accompanied by flashy graphics and sensational video footage and story segments short enough to be interrupted by sponsored messages.
This excludes thoughtful news, as thinking doesn’t entertain much, and shifts the focus to feeling, which is a great tool to offer entertainment.
The real cost of business
Again, the problem isn’t television, but the role it has taken in our society as the main vehicle of information and the public discourse that flows from it. When television stations defend their news programs on the basis that you can’t attack the medium because of its abuse just as much as you can’t attack McDonalds because some people eat themselves to death, that defense seems disingenuous and a false attempt to shut someone up with false logic. What is criticized is not the medium, but the role it has come to play, whether it wanted to or not.
We criticise the effect on society and ask for a responsible acknowledgement of this fact, in order to help society to stay healthy. When the CEO defends the medium, he is essentially burying his head in the sand, never a responsible or rational strategy, despite the fact that from the point of view of the head, no danger can be spotted! His argument is essentially the same as arguing that fire is a medium in itself, and that its discovery should not be held responsible for the evolution of mankind. We cannot ignore the relationship between the medium, its usage and the eventual effects on society.
To take the McDonalds example again. In a free market system, the cost of the burger is decided by the parts of the sum + profit. Overheads, materials and profit incentive. However, no-one looks at the costs of eating the burger itself. Equal as to smoking cigarettes, there is a health cost associated with eating burgers, that might translate in medical costs. Shouldn’t society calculate this cost in, via Tax, into the purchase price? The more you eat or smoke, the more you contribute to the potential health costs that would result from your behavior. Otherwise, how will we compensate or even account for this cost?
Should television news not be held responsible for their claims to be news, and be asked to contribute? If you claim you inform the population, should you not be held responsible to inform the nation? Should it not be held responsible for its real effect on society instead of being allowed to hide behind the maxim that it is not their product, but the abuse that is at fault?
John Stewart questions the media machine live on crossfire
October 15 2004. John Stewart appears on Crossfire, a discussion show that supposedly represents both left- and right-wing views on political issues. Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson had no idea how their show would be dismantled, live, on air. John Stewart immediately goes on the attack, seizing his opportunity to make a point about the limits of media but more so the falsehood of its representation of itself, exposing the show as a vapid, partisan punditry vehicle that tries to pass itself as a serious discussion show.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE[/youtube]
John’s main charge to the hosts of Crossfire was
You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.
The question implied in this statement is: should the concept of serious news and show business not be easily distinguishable between each other? The hosts of the show seemed incapable of understanding that their entertainment show shouldn’t masquerade itself as a topical news show.
In other words, if you call yourself a debate show, you have the duty to debate and explore the issue rationally from all angles. You cannot instead create an entertainment show that exploits the controversy of the issue to create strong feelings in the viewers that make the show entertaining. Because that doesn’t educate, it doesn’t solve anything. All it does is give the viewer the illusion of debate, of being informed, while in reality he is just as unwise about the issues afterward than beforehand, but can perhaps pretend to be more informed…
And it is this provision of the illusion of consuming news that is the most hurtful to America. Because it kills the need for further inspection. It creates a docile nation in danger of not thinking outside of the box, outside of the information that is offered, outside of their emotions or their comfort zone.
That is why John Stewart remarks:
We need the help of the media [...] and they’re hurting us
The reaction of the hosts is quite revealing as well. One tries to defend the format by defining heated partisan exchanges as ‘debate’, while the other host tries to put John back in his role as a comedian, instructing him to be funny and expressing disappointment at his humorlessness. Ironically, he confirms by these very statements that the show is ‘a stage’, a theater where each is invited to play his or her assigned role.
The interview had a lasting effect on Crossfire, and CNN President Jonathan Klein cited John Stewart when he announced cancelling the show:
I think he made a good point about the noise level of these types of shows, which does nothing to illuminate the issues of the day
Can television save itself from itself?
Considering the huge overheads, the need to make money, money predominantly coming from advertisers who demand high viewing numbers and the statistical reality that high viewing numbers can only be achieved by offering entertainment, can television news ever succeed at being real news?
John Stewart seems to think so. That is why he appeared on Crossfire and advocates for reform in television. So does Ted Turner, the founder of CNN who is highly critical of the channels new direction.
This author is left to wonder…
Controlling the message
Recent deregulation has permitted centralization of media power: only six mega-corporations (Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corp, Bertelsmann and General Electric) own more than 90% of all all news channels (including newspapers, magazines, internet, film, radio, television and cable media).
This raises the question: can the news still work as the voice of the people, with a news media increasingly driven by the bottom line and pressure by ideologically driven media moguls?
Tags: 1964, CNN, Crossfire, Culture, Daily Show, Fox, Free Market, John Stewart, Marshall McLuhan, McDonalds, Neil Postman, News, Politics, Ted Turner, TV
How the enemy needs war to stay alive
Tags: 11262008, 2008, Al-Qaeda, America, Fareed Zakaria, John McCain, Mumbai, Politics, Terrorism, War
When watching GPS with Fareed Zakaria on the Mumbai massacre I was struck by a testimony in his feature.
Mumbai attacks
A young terrorist is instructed by his controller in Pakistan to set a room ablaze. The controller understood that if the Taj Mahal was on fire, this would offer a more dramatic visual. The visual of Taj Mahal on fire would garner media attention and strike fear in the heart of the West, witnessing the might of this one terrorist cell.
It struck me that the controller had not ended with corrupting the mind of this young terrorist, brainwashing him to kill dozens of innocent people before deliberately giving his own life to his ‘cause’. He was also intending to stir up feelings of hatred and fear in the hearts of the Indians who watched this on television.
It reminded me of an Al-Qaeda statement posted on the al-Hesbah Web site during the presidential elections. It said if al-Qaeda wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, ‘impetuous’ Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
‘This requires presence of an impetuous American leader such as McCain, who pledged to continue the war till the last American soldier,’ the message said.
‘Then, al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming elections so that he continues the failing march of his predecessor, Bush.
When a small group chooses to attack a behemoth, nothing much can happen when the behemoth decides to simply ignore the small group and keeps it at arms length. The only hope the smaller group has is that the behemoth starts chasing it, and that the smaller group can stay alive long enough to exhaust the behemoth and then strike it when it is weak.
Al-Qaeda can never win from the US in a conventional way. But it can trick us into wearing down our military personnel, exhausting moral and depleting the coffers as we fight a financially imprudent war.
Perhaps it isn’t just the young peasants who are brainwashed to become jihadists. Perhaps we are all ‘brainwashed’ to enter into a full-blown war against a small number of enemies who have strategically positioned themselves in 7 countries that the US could never truly tame nor occupy without fatal costs to its economy or standing in the world. And perhaps, when we rely on the prudent way to dealing with this ‘small enemy’ by choosing to fight it through intelligence agencies alone, Al-Qaeda will step up its efforts to produce a terrorist attack on American soil again, because it knows it can only win when it can get the behemoth to chase it instead of having the Behemoth keep it at arms length.
Tags: 11262008, 2008, Al-Qaeda, America, Fareed Zakaria, John McCain, Mumbai, Politics, Terrorism, War
The heroism of Hamilton
Tags: 1787, Alexander Hamilton, America, Founding Fathers, Heroism, History, James Madison, Politics, The US Constitution
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton isn’t remembered all too well in American history, but he was a politician who had a remarkable gift that is oh, so lacking among many politicians, both then and today.
1. The Historical backdrop
In 1787 Hamilton vigorously advocated for what many considered a very monarchical government for the United States. Though regarded as one of his most eloquent speeches, it had little effect upon the deliberations of the convention. He proposed to have an elected President and elected Senators who would serve for life contingent upon “good behavior”, and subject to removal for corruption or abuse; this idea contributed later to the view of Hamilton as a monarchist sympathizer, held by James Madison (secretary of the Convention) and his friends.
James Madison
It was Madison who opposed Hamilton’s view most sagely. He argued that if you give too much power to the provinces, they’d swamp the central government (as had happened before). On the flip side, give to the national government the power to use force on a state, and you could be inviting civil war. So Madison proposed that the most stable balance of power was one where the national government had no mandates to coerce the states or in any way rival them. Both would exist for the protection of the American people.
Madison’s view was triumphant, little states were given equal representation in the upper house, the Senate, and the men of Philadelphia acknowledged in full the local interests of all the regions by giving them the widest representations in the lower house, the House of Representatives. And whatever powers were not stipulated in the Constitution were left to the States.
This sounds like a shattering defeat for Hamilton. When the Convention was over, he lamented that “no man’s ideas are more remote from the plan than my are known to be.”
2. Hamilton, the noble politician
But here we see a glimpse of what made Alexander Hamilton a great politician. He added, without a grudge: “Is it possible to deliberate between anarchy and convulsion on one side and the chance of good to be expected on the other?”
Hamilton did not complain because he had lost, instead went to work writing more than forty brilliantly essays urging the states to ratify the Constitution.
Hamilton, despite the negative light historians have at times represented him in, embodies the best qualities a politician can have in his absence of malice, or in the words of Mencken: “A steady willingness to believe that his opponent is as honorable a man as himself and may be right.”
The signing of the Constitution of the United States
Tags: 1787, Alexander Hamilton, America, Founding Fathers, Heroism, History, James Madison, Politics, The US Constitution
A Historical Perspective on Health Care
Tags: 2009, America, Health Care, History, Politics
Health Care Reform
The American health care system is entering reform as most systems in the world are facing intense pressure. As a result, it cannot turn to any model as a shining beacon, but will have to get its hands dirty trying to find a solution fit for a 21st Century world, where life spans are longer, birth rate in developing worlds decline and expenditure must be curbed. And that’s just naming the most obvious problems.
So what are the lessons America must learn?
The idea for health care insurance (see latest news on Health Care Reform) at its conception was a simple one: illness in a population is not the norm, most people are healthy most of the time. But sometimes disaster strikes, we don’t know when and don’t know who it will strike. Economies of scale can deal with this: if everybody pays a fee to an account, that pays out when disaster happens, everyone is covered.
Economies of scale also suggest that the bigger the group you include, the better you can predict risk and therefore the lower a fee you charge everyone. Simply put, take a group of 10 people and it is hard to predict how many of them will face some serious illness in their lifetime. 100 people, predictions work a tiny little better. The more you increase that number, the more predictable the model becomes.
That further brings a challenge to a Free Market model: economic models predict that where perfect competition exists, the consumer will pay bottom prices for the best and most innovative services. But health care doesn’t work in a perfect competition model: it would be too fragmented and wouldn’t be able to benefit from the economies of scale that allow it to actually be effective. As a result, health care insurance must be provided by oligopolies or monopolies (in some European countries there exists a free market solution where many insurers must compete to sell their services to a single buyer: the government. This can easily be called an inverted monopoly: the government has monopoly on demand. A perfect example of this is the Swiss health insurance model. Do read this, it’s a very interesting compromise.)
Most developed countries opted for the welfare state. This model isn’t popular because of socialistic reasons, but because of economies of scale. It is simply cheaper for one insurer to provide health care insurance than 10 insurers, due to the economies of scale.
There is however one massive problem with this model in the developed world. It works great when the majority of your population is young and vital.
Take Japan as an example. Its ‘welfare state’ was so successful that by the 1970s life expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. So the population was rapidly aging, and to exacerbate the problem, birth rate was falling. In effect, the ratio between old and young got to be the steepest in the world: 21% of its population was over 65, and it is projected that if the current trends prevail, 50% of the population will be pensioners by 2044. These trends have brought the Japanese welfare state to its knees. The problem is so formidable, the population so old on average, that even private insurers cannot present any solutions to Japan’s challenge. Life insurance companies have been fighting for their lives after the stock market crash of 1990, and 3 of its largest insurers failed.
So Japan acts as an omen: in the West, our population is following a similar trend, one where the population noticeably ages. Where the welfare system could be saved by the arrival of a large number of newborns, birth rate in the developed world is less than impressive and immigration isn’t bucking the trend.
As a result, countries in the developed world are looking for a privatized solution to be added to the national insurance model. When there is less money to go around, the money has to work harder. Perhaps private investment companies can help.
Take Chile as an example: brokers invest the pension contributions of Chilean workers in their own stock market. This has wielded impressive results: the annual rate of return on the Personal Retirement Accounts is more than 10%, thanks to an extremely healthy stock market that has risen by a factor of 18 since 1987.
Of course, this model, as all other models has its problems: not everyone in the system has a full-time job and the self-employed don’t have to contribute which leaves a substantial part of the population without coverage. The administrative and fiscal cost of the system are also deemed too high.
It remains however ironic that this type of radical reform did not originate in the heartland of free market economics: America, but instead was executed in Chile.
Reform in America is unavoidable. America’s hospitals vary in great degrees from state-of-the-art to challenged at best, but none can be called cheap (see the World Health Organization Report). For those who need treatment before retirement, the need a private insurance policy. It is estimated that 47 million Americans don’t have one, partly due to the structure of the system: such policies tend to be available only to those in regular, formal employment – any other scheme has a prohibitive price ticket attached to it.
[Cartoon courtesy of Seppo Leinonen. Be sure to check out his other great cartoons!]
The ultimate result is a welfare system that is not comprehensive, marginally redistributive (compared to European systems) but costs a whole heap more. Public health expenditures hover around 7% GDP while private health care is equivalent to 8.5% (in addition!)
In America, over the next 40 years, life expectancy is to rise even more, and the number of the population over the age of 65 will rise from 12% to 21%. However, according to the the 2006 Retirement Confidence Survey , only 60% of American workers say they save for retirement and just 40% has actually calculated how much they should be saving. The average worker plans to retire at the age of 65, but actually retires at 62. All these miscalculations require the tax payer to cough up one way or the other. Currently 36 million retirees receives a total of $21,000 each in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. According to one projection, left alone the cost of Medicare alone will account for 24% of all federal income tax by 2019.
Reform is necessary, and the government hopes to cooperate closely with private insurers. But leaving health care to private insurers is not entirely without risk either, considering the fragmented mosaic of responsibilities that often offers an opt-out for insurers.
Hurricane Katrina forced the myth of the well-oiled American welfare state to collapse for even the most ardent of believers. Those who choose to remain ignorant had no choice but to recognize that the current insurance models no longer cover the risks.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina 1.75 million property and casualty claims were made to the sum of an estimated $41 billion. In America, private insurance companies offer protection against wind damage, and the federal government offers protection against flooding. As a result, the assessors sent out by the insurance companies were not sent to fairly assess the damage, but instead to visit properties and find reasons why damage could be due to flooding and not wind. The objective was to limit the amount of claims that would have to be paid out. At the time, insurance companies were portrayed as evil, but this is merely human nature, men are not angels driven by altruism, but driven to thrive and survive. The insurance companies acted in a predictable fashion, and ultimately it was the system that failed, because it allowed for ambiguity, vagueness and shied away from a comprehensive solution, instead leaving in place a fragmented, ‘puzzled’ system.
The same dangers lurk in the modern health care system, as a recent, perhaps slightly alarmist documentary of PBS suggests on health care in America. A fragmented system of insurers, whose company goals are to increase the bottom line year by year (and have done so more than 400% between 2000 and 2007), a system complex enough that it can often avert responsibility at crucial moments but works just well enough on the surface for people to still want to rely on it, while in the background gobbling up so much of America’s GDP and costing employers so much that it actually threatens America’s future in the world…
The challenge for the Obama administration is formidable…
Tags: 2009, America, Health Care, History, Politics