The Law Squaw Squabble of 2012 is about played out, I hope, so let us move on to fresh woods and pastures eye-glazing, ¿shall we? The Great Blue Nose (E-comrade ‘david’, that would be) has seen fit to open his columns to the Mass Rednecks Group’s favorite nest of bicycle-challenged theoreticians, as follows:
| I Pledge My Faith in Bureaucracy- Mass Health Reform II By Joshua Archambault | May 7th, 2012 The House version of payment reform creates a new mega agency, the Division of Health Care Cost and Quality. To be fair, the House collapses a few other state agencies into the new Division, but there is no question this entity is given far-reaching and broad regulatory power. The Division will be independent and “not subject to the supervision and control of any other” public entity. (Section 29, subsection 2(a)) The controversial federal Affordable Care Act drew negative attention for how many times the Secretary of HHS was instructed to act on major policy, roughly 700 times in 2,700 pages. The House’s bill outdoes the ACA by requiring the division to take action 163 times in 178 pages, or almost once every page. The mandate approach results in 941 instances in which the House mandates action in the bill, by using the word “shall.” A sample of the dizzying and expansive Division’s responsibilities includes but is not limited to:
(( go look for yourself ))
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The G.B.N.
then comments propriâ personâ
| This post is hilarious I love this bit, from the second paragraph: "The controversial federal Affordable Care Act drew negative attention for…" “Negative attention” from whom? For that matter, “controversial” according to whom? The lunatic teabagger fringe that regrettably has taken over the national Republican party? Or someone with something intelligent to say? "If you provide patients with cost data but their health plan is not set up to incentivize the use of low-cost high-quality providers, you will have many seeking out the most expensive folks." Good Lord, do you have any basis for such an outlandish assertion? I’d sure like to see it. It’s fascinating to me that, on the one hand, Pioneer seems strenuously opposed to any sort of government regulation of anything, yet on the other, doesn’t trust individuals to make intelligent decisions without being “incentivized” (there’s a truly creepy word) to do what Pioneer thinks they should do. This, of course, is Pioneer’s bottom line: " We must ask if we are comfortable with bureaucrats holding the reins to 18% of our state’s economy, that may not have the expertise, resources, or shared values that we do to balance the trade offs associated with government centered cost controls. They decide where billions of dollars will be directed or granted from trust funds. Do we trust their judgment and are we confident that industry influence will not sway these few government officials?" Yeah, ’cause gosh, the “free market” has done such an awesome job so far in controlling health care costs. Get the gubmint out – that’ll solve all our problems. This kind of petty, dog-whistle post [1] that says nothing at all constructive is, frankly, disappointing from an institute that tries to present itself as a serious participant in important public policy discussions. Much more to come. Oooh, I can’t wait. |
Only a specimen of nobility or gentry who "can't wait" for more of that product would venture to profess to have no clue what the word ‘élitist’ means. Myself, I can take it or leave it, but, as I said, prefer at the moment to take a little of it rather than keep picking on hapless Fauxcohontas.
Responduisset igitur Patricius:
| "seeking out the most expensive folks" (( fold here )) ought to be enough by itself to keep Paddy happy for a week. Exactly what it means may be a little uncertain, but that's OK. No matter what, it shows that whight-wing economic analysis has given up that borin' old H*rv*rd-style English prose an' prefers to sound like one of those Corporate Citizennesses who are everybody's best fake friends nowaday. Come along, O Pioneervolks, ¿can't you be content with plain ‘people’ once in a while? [*] Descending from Form to matter, I guess, tentatively, that what the Lords of the Tank mean by "most expensive persons" is "quacks with pricey new therapies." If they only meant "richvolks," after all, they would sound like Willie Sutton spying out the Boston Common for panhandling purposes. Which is not, surely, an impression that those who scab in prose for the TopPercenters ought to be creatin’. Paddy and Eye like that whole neoparagraph so well I think we shall memorize it for regurgitation on festive occasions. ¡Play it again, Sam! ¿Will transparency without the correct tools and incentives for consumers backfire? For many patients, high-cost correlates with higher quality. Of course the Attorney General’s report proved this theory wrong, but if you provide patients with cost data but their health plan is not set up to incentivize the use of low-cost high-quality providers, you will have many seeking out the most expensive folks. (The direct opposite goal of this legislation.)In a way that really *is* pretty nifty. Everybody who sets out to defend an’ extend the secrecy of the Secret Sector runs into the problem that the vulgar herd cherish the ‘transparency’ baloney with a sort of invincible witlessness. ¿How to get around this obstacle, without giving any sign that one secretly thinks it witless baloney, which could be a dangerous tip-off to the marks an' dupes? Joshua Freelord Archimbault may not have discovered THE solution, but his plan looks like an excellent start. All the better, probably, that it is not utterly original, but resembles what has been happenin' to the marked an' the duped for centuries under the general rubric of "fine print." The Corporate Citizenness does not flatly suppress those matters which the patient or victim must have been able to be aware of if the "¡Gotcha! ¡Caveat emptor!" defense is to be available to Her afterwards, She only "sets up" Her "incentivization" so that the ninety-niners make the choices She prefers, all the while never dreaming that they have been objects of Big Management. The obtrusion of seventeen pages in microscopic type proves that She has nothin' to hide, an' then, after omitting to study them thoroughly, the merely zoölogical citizen naturally checked the slightly larger an' more colourful option box under the impression that nothing was going on but sheer Freedumb of the Will. This plan was always pretty easy, an' now that the tanklords have HTML an’ Powe®Poin™ (&c. &c.) at their fingertips, it makes fallin' off a log look like rocket surgery. Over in a different corner of the Naked Privatised Square™, essentially the same game is called "push polling." This sort of thing is what it *means*, Dr. Bones, to have the privilege to be present at "the Dawning  I daresay there will prove to be limits to the effectiveness of the Archimbault Gambit, so to dub it. There usually are. For instance, I doubt that many instances of John Q. Massvolks will be lured into choosing the outstandingly inexpensive acupuncture option for a brain tumor. Still, we won't know for sure until we try, now, ¿will we? Happy days. ___ [*] Volksiness gets almost as annoying as the virile pomposity of barking "¡Absolutely!" when one means approximately "I think so." And "given up" is rather my wish than their tanklordships’ practice, for impious linguistic viennasausage like "correlate with," even "to *incentivize", lurk in the immediate underbrush. |
Happy days.
--JHM
[1] Casual expressions of disdain like that one seem to drop from the lips of the G. B. N. involuntarily. Were he consciously attending to denigration management, I assume that having spoken of the revealing of "Pioneer’s bottom line," he would leave out the dog whistle.
In any case, it does not make much sense to proclaim the *utter* worthlessness of an article to which one is prepared to devote so much of one's own time.
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