Our Teenager-In-Chief?

The Bumbler 45000

Protesting the newly inaugurated administration in Washington is something most people will shy away from.  They'll turn down the volume and work on their hobbies.

Others will hold up a mirror to the inevitable ineptitude of what strikes me as a teenager-who-thinks-he's-got-it (hey, I'm a big boy, the answers're so simple, just apply power and..., whoops I broke it).

Naturally, I won't be obsessing; but neither will I be oblivious.  Instead, I'm rolling out a newly acquired gadget, the Bumbler 45000, which will keep track of the hash being made in DC.

Unfortunately, the 45000 doesn't register anything over 45%.  So, to turn the machine off, the new administration will have to get its approval number up to at least 45%, in which case I'll turn the thing off.

Presently, the 45000 registers a modestly gloomy 38000-40000.  For the coming month I look for a slight uptick to 41500, due to the inevitable goodwill a new beginning engenders.  And whenever I think it warranted, I'll repost this with an adjusted setting.

The reason I'm fiddling with this gadget is that I intend to suggest, from time to time, a way forward.

RE my initial advice to essentially add a lottery to Obamacare and call it Trumpcare:  Due to the lottery's draw, the new signers-up--mainly young and healthy--would be just what the ACA needed to work better.  In fact, the $3-4 billion spent on the lottery each year would likely pay for itself, over time, with lower premiums.  The upshot: something like a 44500 reading as everyone gasped at Mr. Trump's brilliant first step forward.

So, what about the gadget's lower readings, you ask?  This is what I'll call a Default Win.  That's because the lower the reading, the likelier a purge of flunkies.  The worst case scenario is that the Bumbler 45000 never makes it above 40000, nor below 30000, and the teenager sticks to his initial team out of a sense of loyalty.

To be fair, I'll also ID anything that looks like a smart move.  For example, because our teenager wants to fight "the establishment"--a likely con (What else are you going to say when appointing fat cats to high office?), there are potential seeds for a success or two.  So far, the consensus is that there's at least one grown-up in the cabinet: the 'mad dog' at Defense.  Update: Add VA Secretary nominee to this list.

Unflinching Projection for the end of January: 41500

Feel Like A Million

If Trump Were Brilliant

I was reading Kevin Drum's #1 rated blog this morning, and got to thinking about his take on ObamaCare.

Drum argues that everything about the Affordable Care Act is popular--with Democrats, Independents and even Republicans, except of course for the Individual Mandate that requires everyone to have insurance.  But what if that one exception could be given a Trumpian spin, such that everything else is left alone.  If that were possible, everyone wins.  Trump is the unifier;  Republicans go along to avoid the ineluctable contradictions of "replacing" ObamaCare; Democrats are willing to let Trump bag a gob of glory if their vision is preserved; and a B program is upgraded to B+.

And how could that be possible?  Everyone knows that one of the ineluctable contradictions of replacing ObamaCare is that once you remove the Individual Mandate, the pool of insured people in any particular plan skews sicker and sicker, as costs rise and healthier customers exit.   If you're one of the last 25- or 35 -year-olds to have insurance in a plan, premiums will likely have already doubled, tripled or quadrupled, and can be expected to rise even further, meaning you can't afford insurance, even if you still wanted it.

Feel Like A Million?
But what if we simply sweeten the recipe with an outlandish, Trumpian gesture?  What if all those angry young men who resent being forced to buy something they sense they don't need had a self-interested reason to buy it, even if they only did so grudgingly?

Ah, you say, but what do young people really want?  Cash.  What if Trump proposed that a contest be run to encourage a healthy citizenry.  Winners would receive a million dollars--thus the slogan, Feel Like A Million.  Each congressional district would have ten winners a year, drawn randomly from among those who had insurance.  436 x 1,000,000 x 10 = $4.36 billion.

But how is this a contest, rather than a lottery?  Winners would be guaranteed $100,000.  To get the full $1,000,000, winners would have to have visited their doctor at least once over the past year, and discussed various preventive healthcare options like vaccinations, cancer screening, smoking cessation, etc.  They wouldn't have to do anything, just have a talk with their doctor about their health and how they might improve it.  A winner's insurer would of course be paying for the preventive care, and thus have a record of it taking place, which would trigger the larger payout should that individual's name be chosen.

You may not like the money-for-nothing, Trumpian feel here.  And research is skeptical as to whether preventive medicine really does pay for itself.  But does any of that matter?  Remember, everyone wins.  Even the cost of up to $3-4 billion (not the full 4.36, since some winners would've skipped the doctor visit, and could only claim $100,000), would likely pay for itself.  How?  Because those being attracted to health insurance in 2018 won't be the sick; they've already signed up.  It would be the young people who feel so healthy that they pay the tax penalty for not having insurance.  And the more that healthy people sign up, the less insurers need charge in order to break even; and, yes, insurers are limited in the percentage of revenue they can keep for profits, overhead, etc., so that $3-4 billion would likely pay for itself with generally lower premiums the following year.

Redesigned Website

Hey, it looks different!

In with the new year....  I'm trying out this different design and layout.

Just browsing this blog's controls, I found out quite a bit about where my traffic comes from.  Seems Russian readers accounted for a plurality of visitors last month.  France was third after the US.  Portugal, Germany, Brazil and Poland trailed far behind.  When I looked at visits for the last 7 years, I found it was the US with a majority, followed by France (about a quarter of that), Russia, Germany, Poland, Portugal after that, then Malaysia, Sweden, Romania, and Ukraine for the top ten.

And last month's most-popular-articles list correlated with a list of most recently published.  Seems the way-back-machine, where I had links to all previous posts--on the right-hand margin--wasn't being used, so I axed it.  I also did away with the "about me" section.  If you want contact information and a little bit about me, click my name at the bottom of any given post.

All in favor of a happy new year?