Discriminations

The Democrats (or their pollsters) seem to have decided that the way to sell health care reform is to describe it not as a money-saver but as a “moral imperative.”

After the funeral for Ted Kennedy, former President Bill Clinton and former Vice-president Al Gore spoke at the Tennessee Democratic Party’s annual Jackson Day dinner. Inevitably, both men could not resist the lure of discussing health care reform....

Clinton and Gore are leaping back into the spotlight to salvage President Barack Obama’s plans and try to preserve Democratic leads in Congress despite plummeting poll numbers. What’s new is their concerted arguments using moral imperatives and, in Gore’s case, the Bible....

As reported by the Politico, “Playing off the focus of the Kennedy funeral on the Gospel of Matthew’s parable of Jesus taking care of ‘the least of us,’ Gore thundered that the country has ‘a moral duty to pass health care reform. This year.’”

Setting the theme, a few days ago Vice President Biden “spoke of a “moral imperative” to improve the U.S. healthcare system and also the need to get soaring healthcare costs under control.” On August 21 the Los Angeles Times reported that “Obama laid out a ‘moral’ imperative for revamping the nation's healthcare system.” In the New York Times Magazine on Sunday Tom Daschle said the Democrats “need to do a better job of making this issue a moral imperative.” Moreover,

A new campaign organized by Christian, Jewish and Muslim organizations united behind health care reform as a moral imperative is taking up this cause.

I could go on, but you get the idea. But I wonder whether the media get it. The media did, either begrudgingly or scornfully, report objections to Pelosi, Reid, et. al. calling those who object to the president’s proposal (whatever it is) un-American Swastika-wearing mobsters, but I’ve yet to see any media awareness that saying a certain policy is a “moral imperative” inescapably implies that opposition to it is immoral.

That should work ... if voters like being told they’re immoral, and it should go a long way toward countering the widespread notion that liberals are preachy,self-righteous, condescending prigs who consider themselves morally superior to those who presume to disagree with them.

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Racist? Maybe, maybe not, but this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education accuses its prestigious Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States of suffering at least from “a form of implicit bias.”

The NRC assessment “stands as the authoritative source on the quality of American doctoral programs,” and, at least on the surface, appears to be thorough and definitive. As the authors of the Chronicle article point out,

[i]t surveyed institutions, programs, faculty members, and doctoral students on a wide range of issues, including faculty diversity, productivity, research focus, educational background, and advising load; doctoral-student admission criteria, financial support, health benefits, completion rates by race/ethnicity and gender, time to degree, and training and mentoring received; and faculty perceptions of the quality of doctoral programs at other universities in their disciplinary fields. The council even included questions regarding postdoctoral positions and the way they are defined in local settings.

In the spring of 2008, the NRC reported an impressive array of response rates to their multipronged assessment of doctoral programs: a 100-percent response rate by universities to the 29-page institutional survey, a 97-percent response rate by doctoral programs to the 34-page program survey, an 86-percent response rate among faculty members to the 19-page faculty survey, and a 72-percent response rate among doctoral students to the 18-page doctoral-student questionnaire. At our institution alone, the University of California at Berkeley, we estimate that participation in the study resulted collectively in the filling out of roughly 30,000 pages of questionnaires by faculty and administrative-staff members and doctoral students. Such lofty response rates are all the more remarkable in light of the fact that participating universities bore the significant cost of responding to the exhaustive data-collection phase, and actually paid the NRC to help support the effort.

What then, you may well ask, is the problem? According the the critique in the Chronicle, it’s what’s not included.

But something is missing from this influential report: a diverse range of fields that accurately reflects the breadth of academe and its research-doctorate recipients. Our analysis of Ph.D. fields that will be included and excluded from the NRC’s assessment, viewed in light of demographic patterns of recent degrees granted, suggests that the selection deemed worthy of assessment may suffer from a form of implicit bias.

.... African-American, American Indian, and Mexican-American people, as well as women, are disproportionately likelier to have received Ph.D.’s in fields that are not included in the NRC’s assessment, relative to white men and Asian-American people. For example, 54 percent of African-American women, 49 percent of American Indian women, 43 percent of Mexican-American women, 42 percent of African-American men, and 34 percent of women in general were awarded doctorates in fields not currently assessed by the NRC. In contrast, only 10 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander men, 18 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander women, 19 percent of white men, and 19 percent of men in general received Ph.D.’s in fields excluded from the assessment.

“What accounts,” the critical authors ask, “for this seemingly odd pattern of doctorates awarded to people in various demographic groups by fields included and excluded in the current NRC assessment?”

The exempted fields—including education, business, social work, psychological counseling, library science, home economics, and subfields of the health and agricultural sciences—share a professional and applied orientation as opposed to a basic research one. Many also emphasize public scholarship, a tradition that favors the interweaving of intellectual pursuit with social improvement.

The exclusion of fields favoring public scholarship helps to explain the large demographic disparities among recipients of Ph.D.'s from fields included in and excluded from the assessment. A growing body of literature supports the premise that underrepresented minority and female scholars are disproportionately likely to channel their efforts into academic endeavors that are configured to directly benefit the larger society and local communities.

The NRC explained that business schools did not want to be included and that “for many schools of education it was difficult to separate education research from specializations in applied areas of school administration, curriculum, etc.” Still, it wouldn’t be surprising, or evidence of “implicit bias, if the NRC decided on perfectly legitimate academic grounds to exclude programs heavily devoted to “the interweaving of intellectual pursuit with social improvement.”

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“The Least Surprising Correlation Of All Time” has been UPDATED.

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It’s now been several days since I’ve stood on Roger Clegg’s shoulders to post something, and regular readers are no doubt missing him. Not to worry: here he is (or was a couple of days ago), deftly skewering yet another “Diversity in Science” report, this one from Grinnell College. Now that I’ve sent you there I don’t have to plagiarize borrow his points, but I do have a point or two of my own to add.

First, here is how the Inside Higher Ed article about the Grinnell report begins:

Katie Lee, 22, loves surgery — performing it, that is. Studying biology at Grinnell College, she discovered that the procedure gives her “intrinsic joy.”

Yet she views the logical next step, a career as a surgeon, with uncertainty. As a woman, she’s been told she lacks the “don’t feel, just do” personality that seemingly characterizes the male-dominated field. As an Asian-American, she is considered a minority on campus but not, others have told her, in the sciences.

Lee, who graduated in May, spent four years confronting those obstacles as a member of the Grinnell Science Project, which has encouraged women and members of minority groups to pursue science and engineering since 1992....

Well, by now you can probably predict what follows. But just in case:

Starting in the late 1980s, some faculty noticed that women and members of all racial minority groups were strikingly absent from biology, physics, chemistry, computer science, math and related departments. “The problem was that many minority students were interested in careers in the sciences, particularly professional careers ... and they would come in with a lot of enthusiasm to try and major in these fields and then run into all sorts of [academic] difficulties in the first few years,” said Mark Schneider, a physics professor and the first director of the Grinnell Science Project. “They ended up changing majors to something outside of the sciences and actually doing fine and graduating from Grinnell.”

Several incidents, including sexual jokes made by male researchers in her lab, have caused Lee to question her surgery aspirations. “It’s hard to become a female surgeon just because you’re in this social environment where it’s still male-dominated, it’s still a field that is in many ways masculine,” she said. “I’ve thought about that and whether I’d want to go through that. I don’t know.”

I obviously don’t know Ms. Lee, and she may well become a marvelous surgeon. But through my daughter, Jessie, the Caltech graduate student in applied physics, I have met a number of young women pursuing science careers, and I can’t imagine one of them who would have been deterred by anyone pointing out what kind of “personality” they do or don’t have or by the prospect of entering a “masculine” field or even by the prospect of having to hear “sexual jokes.”

On the other hand I suspect that any of them — or for that matter, any reasonable person — might well have had second thoughts about continuing in a field where as freshmen or sophomores they ran “into all sorts of [academic] difficulties.” And I have serious doubts about the wisdom of attempting to remove the obstacle of “[academic] difficulties” by watering down the introductory courses, making them “a kind of leveling of the experience” for everyone, as Grinnell has done:

One of the Grinnell Science Project’s major components is a pre-orientation week for incoming female or minority students with a demonstrated penchant for science. The campus invites 60 to 90 students to arrive before classes start in August, familiarize themselves with the campus, meet science faculty and attend mock courses. The week is meant to give them a head start on feeling at home, said Jim Swartz, a chemistry professor. “When the rest of the new students arrive on campus, rather than feeling like they are marginal here, [participants in the program] are actually the experts,” he said.

Professors have also restructured introductory courses with the intention of making them more accessible generally, which they say has fostered a welcoming environment for women, minority and first-generation students as an effect. For Clark Lindgren, a biology professor and former director of the Grinnell Science Project, that course has been Biology 150. Officially introduced in fall 2000, the semester-long introductory course must be completed by aspiring biology majors before they advance. Students learn by employing research techniques -- from reading scientific literature to designing experiments -- in sessions that blend lecture and lab work. No course can substitute for Biology 150, not even AP Biology.

“For everybody, this is new and it provides a kind of leveling of the experience for all of the students,” Lindgren said. “So it’s not disenfranchising certain students who have had a certain background and didn’t have the same opportunities to be exposed to more traditional biology.”

Given all the effort to make everything more “accessible” and “welcoming” to women, minorities, etc., I’m sure they must feel less “marginal.” But does anyone stop to think that all this bending over backwards for preferred groups might make those who have, say, been “exposed to more traditional biology” (or physics or chemistry) courses feel less welcome? Why should students eager for more advanced work have to suffer through required “accessible,” “leveling” courses?

Here’s an anecdote with some relevance to this discussion. When Jessie was a 14-year old sophomore at Bryn Mawr she looked forward to and then eagerly enrolled in an Astrophysics course for the second semester at Swarthmore, a sister institution. Her dean had tried to discourage her by telling her, in effect, that the Swarthmore courses were too hard, that the Swarthmore students were grinds, but she would not be deterred. Imagine, then, her mother’s and my surprise when she told us after the first week that she had dropped the course in favor of a differential equations class at Swarthmore.

“Why?” we asked, dumfounded, since she’d been looking forward to it so much.

“Because,” she replied, “there were only four students in the class, and one of them was a History major who hadn’t had any college physics. I don’t want to take any course,” she continued,” “whose pace will be slowed down waiting for someone to learn the basics.”

Now you might say Jessie (who skipped high school and entered college at 13) is not typical, and of course you’d be right. Or almost right, for I have found that she is reasonably typical of one group that, as I’ve mentioned, through her I’ve encountered: young women undergraduate and graduate students in the hard sciences.

One final thought: all of the hand-wringing, we-must-do-more reports on how to attract or retain more women in science make a big deal about the baleful influences of such vaguely cultural influences as what women are told (either overtly or subtly) about their nature, their personality, the debilitating effect of having to endure sexual humor, etc. Potential women scientists, in short, are portrayed as intensely sensitive to these cultural cues about what is appropriate for them to do. But if that is true, if these women are so susceptible to viewing themselves as others are said to view them, isn’t it also reasonable to suspect that a generation of women who have been subjected to the help and concern and assistance offered to them by all those well-meaning liberals who treat them as victims of baleful male influences might actually be induced to think of themselves as victims, as passive, fluttering leaves blowing in the prevailing winds of “unwelcoming,” “inaccessible” science?

Why is that good?

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Profiling in the woods?

DENVER (AP) - A federal warning to beware of campers in national forests who eat tortillas, drink Tecate beer and play Spanish music because they could be armed marijuana growers is racial profiling, an advocate for Hispanic rights said Friday.

The warnings were issued Wednesday by the U.S. Forest Service, which is investigating how much marijuana is being illegally cultivated in Colorado’s national forests following the recent discovery of more than 14,000 plants in Pike National Forest.

“That’s discriminatory, and it puts Hispanic campers in danger,” said Polly Baca, co-chairwoman of the Colorado Latino Forum....

Forest Service officials said they believe illegal immigrants are being brought to Colorado by Latin American drug cartels for mass cultivation of marijuana.

Pointing to “campers” who speak Spanish, drink Mexican beer, etc., does sound like profiling. To avoid it perhaps the Forest Service should have issued a simple factual, non-profiling statement along the lines of the following:

The U.S. Forest Service has determined that illegal immigrants from Latin America brought to Colorado by drug cartels are growing marijuana in national forests in the state. Please contact authorities if you see any.

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Greg Mankiw, Harvard economist, finds the inference often made (such as by the New York Times Economix Blog) from the correlation shown on a graph between parental income and SAT scores “The Least Surprising Correlation of All Time.” It tells us nothing, he says, “about the causal impact of income on test scores.”

The faulty inference, he writes, is a good example of “omitted variable bias.”

The key omitted variable here is parents’ IQ. Smart parents make more money and pass those good genes on to their offspring.

Suppose we were to graph average SAT scores by the number of bathrooms a student has in his or her family home. That curve would also likely slope upward. (After all, people with more money buy larger homes with more bathrooms.) But it would be a mistake to conclude that installing an extra toilet raises yours kids’ SAT scores.

It would be interesting to see the above graph reproduced for adopted children only. I bet that the curve would be a lot flatter.

There is extensive data on the other side of that coin, identical twins raised in different families, and even Nicholas Kristof begrudgingly recognizes that

a series of studies seemed to indicate that I.Q. is largely inherited. Identical twins raised apart, for example, have I.Q.’s that are remarkably similar. They are even closer on average than those of fraternal twins who grow up together.

No doubt there is also data showing that the SAT scores of twins raised apart are remarkably similar, but I don’t have time to look for it now.

UPDATE [30 August]

Reader Linda Seebach points to a fascinating follow-up to several criticisms of the Greg Mankiw post discussed above by Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution. Those criticisms, by Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias, and this one by Brad DeLong, all seek to minimize the influence of IQ, pointing to additional evidence showing strong correlations of college success and parental income.

“All this is good,” Tabarrok argues,

but none if it gets at the heart of the matter because there are a lot of way that heredity/genes could explain the income/education correlation; IQ is only one possible mechanism, personality (e.g. conscientiousness) is another possibility.

The type of evidence that we need to resolve this question is adoption studies. Fortunately, such studies have been done and indeed I have presented the data before in my post Nature, Nurture and Income. Let’s do so again.

Which he proceeds to do, with great effect. (But read the comments of many who are not persuaded.)

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Helene and I are now enjoying the pleasures (and political annoyances) of San Francisco, house-sitting once again (we’ve done this for several summers) for an old Stanford friend of mine. (For those of you who remember and are concerned about Mosby The Wonderdog, don’t worry. To free us for house-sitting in San Francisco we have a friend serving as a live-in dog-sitter in Crozet.)

Just before leaving Charlottesville we attended a Meet & Greet with Bob McDonnell, the Republican candidate for governor in the election to be held this November. He is even more impressive in person than on TV or in his ads, and if the current trend continues (a recent poll had him ahead 51 – 37) he’ll be the next governor. Speaking of polls, the Washington Post reported on Aug. 16 that, based on its poll, McDonnell was ahead 47 – 40. Although that number was widely reported, it was based on registered voters. One had to read the article closely to see that among those the article described as “those who say they are certain to vote in November” McDonnell was ahead 54 — 39. (And one had to delve into the internals to see that “those who say they are certain to vote in November” are described only as “likely” voters.)

After the Meet & Greet McDonnell (or more likely, his staff) sent out a nice email to those who had attended to call or write if we “have any ideas or want to get involved to help us win.”

As readers of this blog know all too well, I have plenty of ideas, and insist on sharing them even without being asked. So Bob, since you did ask, here are a couple of things you could and hence should do.

First and foremost, you should pledge to introduce legislation along the lines just suggested by my friend Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, and also a Virginia voter (I never said that all my good ideas were original; in fact, many of my best ideas are borrowed):

Earlier this summer, the Arizona legislature put onto the 2010 ballot an initiative that would amend the state constitution to ban preferences and discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex in state and local employment, contracting, and education — including racial and ethnic admission preferences to state universities.

It’s not always possible for state legislatures to put constitutional amendments on the ballot, but there’s nothing to stop any state legislature from banning such discrimination by passing a simple statute. The essential language would be the same and has been adopted by four states already (California, followed by Washington, Michigan, and Nebraska).

Republicans have all too often run from embracing a measure as popular as this for fear of being called racist (for demanding official colorblindness!), but Bob seems to have the courage of his convictions. A good way to prove it would be promising to introduce, and when governor introducing, legislation to require the commonwealth to treat all its citizens without regard to their race, gender, or ethnicity.

Moreover, there would be an immediate campaign-relevant boost for taking such a stand now because the Democratic nominee, Creigh Deeds, just announced, in Charlottesville, his support for expanding discriminatory state policies. One item on his press release stated as governor he would “Increase state contracting for small, women and minority-owned (SWaM) businesses.”

He would, that is, dole out some state contracts based on the race and sex of the contractors. So, Bob, you could begin your effort to rid Virginia of state-sponsored discrimination by denouncing your opponent’s embrace of it and pledging to make sure that all state contracts are awarded on the basis only of qualifications and low bids, an approach that not only honors the core value of treating all citizens without regard to their race (a principle Democrats used to embrace way back when) but also has the great political appeal of saving taxpayer money. Why pay more for projects just because they are performed by “women and minority-owned (SWaM) businesses”?

As Roger Clegg has shrewdly observed:

... why do race, ethnicity, and sex need to be considered at all in deciding who gets awarded a contract? It’s fine to make sure contracting programs are open to all, that bidding opportunities are widely publicized beforehand, and that no one gets discriminated against because of skin color, national origin, or sex. But that means no preferences because of skin color, etc. either--whether it’s labeled a “set-aside,” a “quota,” or a “goal,” since they all end up amounting to the same thing. Such discrimination is unfair and divisive; it costs the taxpayers money to award a contract to someone other than the lowest bidder; and it’s generally illegal to boot....

Now, the churlish among you may think it unseemly of me to have borrowed yet another idea from Roger Clegg, but allow me to say in my defense that I’ve yet to exceed my quota of Clegg-inspired ideas for one post ... mainly because I don’t believe in arbitrary and artificial quotas.

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Here’s another blow to affirmative action:

In a recent court settlement, four police officers who were denied promotion five years ago were vindicated on all the points of their complaint, with retroactive effect....

The legal proceedings had been instituted by four forensic scientists and on Monday the case was settled by granting all the requests they asked for back in November 2004: immediate promotion, which was formerly refused due to the colour of their skin, as well as full compensation with retroactive effect, as if they had indeed been promoted at that time.

The police department “had decided to leave key positions vacant rather than appointing white candidates.”

Oh, I forgot to mention that the police department is in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the ruling was based on principle that municipalities in this country would be wise to consider if they contemplate leaving positions unfilled because no suitable minority candidates are available.

A written legal opinion was requested from Advocate John Grogan SC, one of the country’s top labour law practitioners for the case, which stated that affirmative action “must achieve something, preferably something that would protect or help those who were previously disadvantaged”.

“How can it be claimed that any previously disadvantaged candidate is helped or protected by leaving a post vacant?” asked Grogan.

Good question.

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The Washington Post’s Dan Balz reports today on the left’s growing doubts about Obama.

The “immediate cause for the rebellion,” he writes, is fear that the public option will be sacrificed, but that has given way to “broader criticisms,” such as: “Is Obama tough enough to defeat the interests arrayed against health-care legislation?”

What “interests” would those be? The AMA? Hospitals? Big Pharma? The AARP? Last time I looked (about 30 seconds ago), all the “interests” I could think of were supporting Obama’s proposals (whatever they are). And when’s the last time you saw an ad opposing the legislation sponsored by the insurance industry?

Would someone from the left please provide a list of the “interests” blocking Obama’s reform?

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In an oh so gingerly fashion, Robert Pear of the New York Times describes a number of reasons why a reasonable person might believe that President Obama’s health-care/insurance (or whatever) reform would probably lead to rationing of services, especially to the old.

Bills now in Congress would squeeze savings out of Medicare, a lifeline for the elderly, on the assumption that doctors and hospitals can be more efficient.

President Obama has sold health care legislation to Congress and the country as a way to slow the growth of federal health spending, no less than as a way to regulate the insurance market and cover the uninsured.

Mr. Obama has also said Medicare and private insurers could improve care and save money by following advice from a new federal panel of medical experts on “what treatments work best.”

The zeal for cutting health costs, combined with proposals to compare the effectiveness of various treatments and to counsel seniors on end-of-life care, may explain why some people think the legislation is about rationing, which could affect access to the most expensive services in the final months of life.

The effect of Pear’s article, however, whether intended or not, is to reinforce Obama’s claims of “misconceptions,” “bearing false witness,” etc., that he is ostensibly qualifying. First, his title (though that may have been the responsibility of some editor), “A Basis Is Seen for Some Health Plan Fears Among the Elderly,” even aside from its evasive, weasely passive voice (“Is Seen” by whom?), asserts that there is a basis only for “some” fears. Other fears are presumably totally without foundation.

Next, in his lede Pear reports that “Medicare beneficiaries and insurance counselors say the concerns are not entirely irrational.” Do those unnamed worthies thus believe “the concerns” are almost but not quite entirely irrational? Mainly but not altogether irrational? That they are all (or only some) based on just enough evidence (a smidgen? a little? some?) to keep them from being entirely irrational?

What exactly is Pear attempting to report here? Does he, does the New York Times, think the Swastika-wearing mobsters who are suffering from “misperceptions” and who are “bearing false witness” are nuts or not?

Not, I guess (but I’m not sure), entirely.

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According to Rich Lowry, pretty damn stupid. Read the whole thing to see 22 leading examples

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President Obama repeated twice — once in his interview on Michael Smerconish radio show and again in his pep talk to partisans at the DNC — that it is a “misconception” to claim that his proposed health-care reform (or health insurance reform, or whatever it is) would cover illegal immigrants. On the Smerconish show, for example, he claimed:

This has been an example of just pure misinformation out there. None of the bills that have been voted on in Congress, and none of the proposals coming out of the White House propose giving coverage to illegal immigrants -- none of them,” he said. “That has never been on the table; nobody has discussed it. So everybody who is listening out there, when you start hearing that somehow this is all designed to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants, that is simply not true and has never been the case.

And, added the Los Angeles Times (from which the above quote comes) for good measure,

The House bill, H.R. 3200, excludes anyone who is not a legal resident of the United States from coverage of extended insurance provisions. Section 246 reads, “Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.”

Let’s leave it to the lawyers to decide whether “nothing ... shall allow” is in fact an outright prohibition. A bigger problem, ignored by the president and his fawning defenders (see the MSNBC report, linked above, of his DNC remarks), is that, as I’ve recently noted, two House committees voted down by party line votes two Republican amendments that would have required verification of eligibility. So, on one hand, you’ve got the president’s and his supporters’ repeated accusations of “misperception,” and on the other you’ve got arguments, with evidence, such as the following:

The health care reform bills Congress is considering would not require people who sign up for government health care programs to verify their eligibility. That opens the door for millions of illegal aliens and other non-citizens to receive medical services paid for by taxpayers, a panel of experts from the conservative Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and The Heritage Foundation said Wednesday.

“This takes an unprecedented step in opening up the U.S. welfare system to illegal immigrants,” Robert Rector, senior fellow on domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation, told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington.

“We have had a system of identity checks that largely prevents adult illegal immigrants from getting onto these means-tested welfare programs,” Rector continued, but the Democrats refused to allow those same identity checks to be added to the health-care reform bills.

Rector said people signing up for government-run health care programs would not have to substantiate that they are in this country legally. “The health care reform legislation turns that on its back and tramples it into the dust,” Rector said. “It basically says, ‘We will not verify, we will not check, we have a complete open door for every illegal immigrant, current and in the future, to simply enroll and receive benefits under this program.’

According to James Edwards, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies,

“They make it easy to enroll new people in government-run health programs with what amounts to built-in willful ignorance about characteristics which would be disqualifying, such as being here on a temporary VISA or being under one’s sponsorship requirements, or being here illegally,” Edwards added....

Edwards said two amendments proposed in the House to require verification of citizenship and other qualifications were voted down and that Senate legislation also lacks any kind of verification provision.

“Congressman Dean Heller (R-Nev.) offered an amendment in the Ways and Means Committee to correct that, but it was defeated along party lines,” Edwards said. “Senate legislation omits the same eligibility verification requirements that would ensure that only lawful immigrants and U.S. citizens benefit under these programs."

Edwards noted that during the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s markup, Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.) offered an amendment that would require a check on immigration and citizenship status of those being signed up for Medicaid. “It would apply the same verification standards and use the same existing verification system that’s in the Medicaid statute. This taxpayer protection amendment lost on a largely party line vote, by a single vote,” Edwards said.

But wait; there’s more Illegal aliens are exempt from fines imposed on citizens and legal residents!

The Senate Finance Committee has released only an outline of its health care plan -- not a full draft -- and that outline penalizes U.S. citizens and legal residents while allowing illegal aliens access to free health care, Edwards said.

“The Finance Committee outline, like ... the House bills, mandates that individuals must carry health insurance or else face a fine,” Edwards said. “The Finance outline says that illegal aliens will be exempt from that individual mandate. It sets up a system where you’ve got Americans and legal immigrants who have to have coverage or else pay a fine,” Edwards said. “But illegal aliens would escape the mandate and any fine for not being insured.

If you subsidize something, of course, you tend to get more of it.

Panelists said the current health care legislation could, in fact, not only benefit illegal aliens but actually encourage more people to come into this country illegally. Rector called it a system that would establish “transnational welfare outreach.”

“In short, the health reform plans that are on the table will create new incentives, at least marginally, for illegal immigration,” Edwards said. “They’ll reward illegal aliens by giving them health care at no expense to themselves and they’ll further weaken the important public charge doctrine that has long served our national immigration policy so well.”

Let us also note, as James Taranto did yesterday (quoting an article from Roll Call last month), that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus believes illegals would be covered:

A CHC member, who requested not to be identified, said the group is urging Pelosi to ensure that everyone -- including illegal immigrants -- will be able to receive services as part of comprehensive reform.

“We’re pushing to include everyone in the health care bill. Everyone,” said one CHC member.

Asked if CHC leaders will ask Pelosi to specifically spell something out in the bill to address illegal immigrants, the Member said no. Rather, the Member said the CHC simply wants to make sure the bill -- as drafted -- doesn’t prohibit illegal immigrants from accessing care.

“Sometimes if you don’t say something, something happens,” said the Hispanic lawmaker.

The president also repeated to the Smerconish and DNC audiences that another of the persistent “misconceptions” perpetrated by those whom he had earlier accused of “bearing false witness” is that his proposed health-care/insurance (or whatever) reform would pay for abortions. But here, even the White House’s and MSNBC’s (but I repeat myself) favorite clueless “fact checker” at the Associated Press seemed unable to avoid the truth altogether, although he did try to sidestep it:

THE POLL: 50 percent expect taxpayer dollars will be used to pay for abortions; 37 percent don't.

THE FACTS: The House version of legislation would allow coverage for abortion in the public plan. But the procedure would be paid for with dollars from beneficiary premiums, not from federal funds. Likewise, private plans in the new insurance exchange could opt to cover abortion, but no federal subsidies would be used to pay for the procedure.

Opponents say the prohibition on federal money for the procedure is merely a bookkeeping trick and what matters is that Washington would allow abortion to be covered under government-subsidized insurance.

Obama has stated that the U.S. should continue its tradition of “not financing abortions as part of government-funded health care.” Current laws prohibiting public financing of abortion would stay on the books.

Here is part of a sensible discussion of the abortion issue in today’s Washington Post by Michael Gerson:

Abortions would be funded out of the premiums that come from individuals, not money from taxpayers. But this is a cover, if not a con. By the nature of health insurance, premiums are not devoted to specific procedures; they support insurance plans. It matters nothing in practice if a premium dollar comes from government or the individual -- both enable the same coverage. If the federal government directly funds an insurance plan that includes elective abortion, it cannot claim it is not paying for elective abortions.

In fact, any national approach to this issue is likely to challenge the current social consensus on abortion. The House bill would result in federal funding for abortion on an unprecedented scale. But forbidding federal funds to private insurers that currently cover elective abortions (as some insurers do) would amount, as pro-choice advocates note, to a restriction on the availability of abortion. Either way, government will send a powerful, controversial social signal.

I would pointedly repeat, “Whose Misconceptions?” except that I don’t think the president suffers from misconceptions. He knows perfectly well what he is proposing and what he hopes will pass. He mentioned, again, on the Smerconish show that he was unwilling to compromise on “core principles,” one of which is that “Americans who don't have health insurance should get it.” Similarly, in his remarks to religious leaders on Wednesday he emphasized:

I believe that nobody in America should be denied basic health care because he or she lacks health insurance, and no one in America should be pushed to the edge of financial ruin because an insurance company denies them coverage or drops their coverage or charges fees they can’t afford for care that they desperately need....

In his July 22 news conference President Obama said “This is not just about the 47 million Americans who don't have any health insurance at all.” In his Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “Town Hall” on August 11 he repeated (except for a missing million this time):

I don’t have to explain to you that nearly 46 million Americans don’t have health insurance coverage today. In the wealthiest nation on earth, 46 million of our fellow citizens have no coverage. They’re just vulnerable. If something happens, they go bankrupt or they don’t get the care they need.

Do you really think he doesn’t know that the “46 [or 47] million Americans” who don’t have health insurance includes a substantial number of illegal immigrants? I don’t either.

So if he doesn’t think illegal immigrants would be covered under his proposal, why does he keep repeating a number that includes them?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

MSNBC reports a NBC poll that, it claims, finds that “Misperceptions abound on president's health overhaul initiative.”

Leaving aside the problem of how there can be misperceptions of a proposal that does not yet actually exist, what does NBC/MSNBC think these misconceptions are? Here are some of the presumed misconceptions mentioned in the article:

• “A plurality believes Obama’s health plan would worsen the quality of health care”;

• “Forty-five percent think the reform proposals would allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care for the elderly”;

• “Majorities in the poll believe the plans would give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants.”

• “... would lead to a government takeover of the health system.”
  

Are these the sort of conclusions that a news organization should report as “misperceptions”? There is heated debate about all of them. Critics make these charges, and defenders reply with charges, as the president just did, of bad people “bearing false witness.” Does NBC really think it is qualified to be the final arbiter of who is right here?

If it does, this article about its poll did not give anyone good reasons to agree. I’ve already weighed in on the “death panel” debate, arguing that much of the criticism is hyperbole but not a lie. Typically, this NBC report satisfies itself that there is no “death panel” in the bill, without even mentioned the proposed IMAC board, whose only reason for existence would be to restrict what services are provided. And here is what Nat Hentoff, no conservative, says about end of life rationing:

No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama’s eventual master health care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview (quoted in Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake, he says, a “very difficult democratic conversation” about how “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care” costs.

Would Obama’s reform (whatever it turns out to be) lead to a “government takeover”? Who knows, but it would if Democrats like Rep. Anthony Weiner get what they want, “an outright public takeover of the U.S. health-insurance industry.”

And why does NBC declare that it a “misconception” to claim that Obama’s reform (whatever it is) would provide coverage for illegal immigrants? Only this: “that nonpartisan fact-checkers say [it is] untrue about the legislation that has emerged so far from Congress.” Here, presumably, is one example, as reported by the Associated Press:

THE POLL: 55 percent expect the overhaul will give coverage to illegal immigrants; 34 percent don’t.

THE FACTS: The proposals being negotiated do not provide coverage for illegal immigrants.

For some reason what these non-partisan experts are say is eerily close to (a paraphrase of?) what Obama says:

The president said the bill would not provide health insurance for illegal immigrants, or as he called them, “illegal aliens.” “That's not true. There’s a specific provision in the bill that does not provide health insurance for those individuals.”

Really? “Although the bill contains a section that excludes illegal aliens from coverage, there are no provisions within the bill requiring beneficiaries to show their citizenship status.” If the president and his party do not want illegal immigrants/aliens to be covered, why did the Democrats in lockstep vote down amendments in two committees that would have required verification of legal status before receiving benefits under the new reform? According to Rep. Lamar Smith (R, Tex), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, writing in The Hill:

The Democrats’ bill in the House, H.R. 3200, contains gaping loopholes that will allow illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer-funded benefits. And these loopholes are no accident.

The legislation contains no verification mechanism to ensure that illegal immigrants do not apply for benefits. Republicans offered an amendment to close this loophole — it would have required verification using the existing methods that are already in place to verify eligibility for other federal benefits programs. But, when they were asked to put the language of the bill where their words were, in a party-line vote, House Democrats rejected the amendment to require verification and close this loophole.

The bill also leaves open the possibility that if one citizen family member is eligible for benefits, then the entire family — including illegal immigrants — is also eligible for the benefits.

If Americans aren’t already concerned enough about the astronomical costs of the healthcare proposal, this taxpayer-funded benefit for lawbreakers should sound the alarms.

In the House Energy and Commerce Committee,

Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.) offered an amendment in the markup that would have ensured the laws barring illegal aliens from legally signing up for Medicaid would also apply to the new government run healthcare system that Democrats are determined to construct.

The amendment was defeated 29-28 on a party line vote, except that 5 Democrats voted with the Republicans in favor. And in the House Ways and Means Committee:

Democrats moved one step closer to giving free health insurance to the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal aliens when they successfully defeated a Republican-backed amendment, offered by Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., that would have prevented illegal aliens from receiving government-subsidized health care under the proposed plan backed by House Democrats and President Barack Obama.

The House Ways and Means Committee nixed the Heller amendment by a 26-to-15 vote along straight party lines, and followed this action by passing the 1,018-page bill early Friday morning by a 23-to-18 margin, with three Democrats voting against the plan.

The Democratic plan will embrace Obama’s vision of bringing free government medical care to more than 45 million uninsured people in America – a significant portion of whom are illegal aliens.

My point here is not that the truth of the matter is that Obama’s proposal (whatever it is) would in fact provide health care coverage to millions of illegals (and, by virtue of that coverage, attract millions more illegals to take advantage of it) — although I believe that is true — but rather that NBC, once again, has demonstrated unmitigated gall in presuming to declare that one side of a hotly debated political issue is guilty of “misconception,” on the basis of no evidence stronger than the assertions of those on the other side.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

In “The Rising Stakes of Obamaphobia” our old target, Penn anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr., argues that much antagonism to Obama is, well, phobic. Not all of it, you understand, but the criticism offered by (like that offered by?) Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, et. al. As an example,

there has even been talk (media-covered talk) about an Obama-led Democratic conspiracy to create “death panels” charged with determining which sick Americans will be given the privilege of government-dispensed health care.

Another example:

Americans’ current “run on guns” isn’t just about a potential change in national policy around gun control and the right to bear arms. Some of it also seems to be predicated on an uptick in right-wing militias and their renewed calls for a “race war.” Part of it is about a kind of “racial paranoia” linked to economic insecurities, a racial paranoia that pivots on a growing social movement around reactionary racial politicking. (The way “race” functioned in the Sotomayor confirmation hearings was one example of what this reactionary racial rhetoric sounds like today. The fallout from the Gates-Crowley Affair was another.)

You get the idea.

Actually, according to Prof. Jackson, you don’t get the idea. So many people read his column as arguing that criticism of Obama is at best phobic and at worst racist (or is that reversed?) that he has now written a second column to respond to those readers, “The Rising Stakes of Obamaphobia, Part 2.”

“Some readers,” he begins,

want to interpret my previous "Obamaphobia" post as yet another "far Left" attempt to dismiss any and all criticism of Obama as racist. These are readers primed for an ideological fight. And it is a fight on their own terms, not the ones I offered up.

Part of the problem, I think, is that some self-deputized "culture warriors" want to drag everyone else into their fight club. There should be no place beyond the fray, above the partisan muck.

Read the two columns yourself, if you can (they may require subscription; I’m never quite sure), and decide for yourself whether Prof. Jackson’s analysis of “Obamaphobia,” parts coming and going, is “beyond the fray, above the partisan muck.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife, Helene, was on Glenn Beck at 5:00 PM today talking about how the AARP has betrayed its members by supporting (its denial notwithstanding) Obamacare. I think the program will be repeated in many markets at some ungodly hour (2:00 AM?) and maybe again over the weekend. It’s worth recording and watching if you’re not up at those hours.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

... some of you may be interested in this perceptive letter that recently appeared in the Daily Progress.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife, Helene, is one of an apparently quite large number of people who received a surprising, unsolicited, and hence disturbing email from David Axelrod attempting to extol the virtues of President Obama’s proposed health care health insurance reform, whatever it is at the moment. Like the other recipients, she wondered where the White House got her email address since she has visited no White House web sites.

Now, according to Fox News, the mystery is solved, sort of.

The White House for the first time Sunday seemed to acknowledge that people across the country received unsolicited e-mails from the administration last week about health care reform, suggesting the problem is with third-party groups that placed the recipients’ names on the distribution list.

In a written statement released exclusively to FOX News, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said the White House hopes those who received the e-mails without signing up for them were not “inconvenienced” by the messages.

“The White House e-mail list is made up of e-mail addresses obtained solely through the White House Web site. The White House doesn’t purchase, upload or merge from any other list, again, all e-mails come from the White House Web site as we have no interest in e-mailing anyone who does not want to receive an e-mail,” the statement said. “If an individual received the e-mail because someone else or a group signed them up or forwarded the e-mail, we hope they were not too inconvenienced.”
....
“We are implementing measures to make subscribing to e-mails clearer, including preventing advocacy organizations from signing people up to our lists without their permission when they deliver petition signatures and other messages on individuals’ behalf,” he said.

So, the culprits are those “advocacy organizations” who have forwarded names and email addresses to the White House without requests from or permission of the forwardees.

Very interesting, since the only “advocacy organization” with which Helene has been involved is the AARP, with which, in fact, she has been so involved rousing rabble on its web site that many of her posts and other submissions have been deleted, as have the posts of some co-rabble rousers there with whom she has organized several online groups. No doubt purely by co-incidence, many of her fellow AARP opponents of health whatever “reform” also received the White House/Axelrod spam email. Thus the AARP, it seems pretty clear, must have provided the White House with Helene’s email address as well as the addresses of some of her online associates there.

But wait. How could the AARP be an “advocacy organization” for the president’s proposed health reform (whatever it is) when the organization took the dramatic step recently of issuing a statement contradicting the president’s claim of AARP support for his policy?

Since the AARP, as all of its sentient members know, has in fact been supporting the president, perhaps he (make that He) can be excused for claiming its support. Whatever its leaders say for public consumption, it has certainly been acting like an “advocacy organization.” Whether or not its tax status allows for the sort of advocacy in which it has been both openly and surreptitiously engaged, its behavior has enraged many of its members ... and created a large and growing number of former members.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Now even the Washington Post reports that the Obamamantra — “If you like your doctor ... if you like your current health plan...” — is a promise that can’t be kept, no matter how often it is repeated.

President Obama promises that, if health-care reform is enacted, people will be able to keep their current coverage.

“I keep on saying this but somehow folks aren’t listening: If you like your health-care plan, you keep your health-care plan. Nobody is going to force you to leave your health-care plan,” he said Saturday in a town hall meeting in Grand Junction, Colo., much as he said Friday in Belgrade, Mont., and earlier in the week in Portsmouth, N.H.

However, under legislation drafted by House and Senate Democrats, that would not necessarily be true.

Employers can drop their current coverage. A worker’s current coverage may well not be available in the new “exchange” that will be created. The new “exchange,” in short, will force many employees to exchange their current coverage, which they like, for new coverage, which may not be to their liking.

In short, the “if you like your doctor ...” promise is quickly being relegated to the same heap that contains promises to add 46 million people to the health rolls without increasing the deficit or debt and that a few hundred billion dollars can be wrung from Medicare without rationing — excuse me, attenuating — benefits or services to geezers

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In Obama at Portsmouth: ‘Civil Rights’ for the Sick I criticized President Obama’s constant refrain about insurance company “discrimination,” noting that

[t]his charge of insurance company discrimination is intended, no doubt, to make health care reform — now presented as merely health insurance reform — seem like simply another anti-discrimination law, a civil rights law for the sick

Now, almost as though I had invented him, comes Jonathan Alter of Newsweek with a simplistic argument that Obama needs to “reframe the debate” and sell “Health Care As A Civil Right.” Sure, he writes, the public option and dumping on Big Pharma and regulating insurance are all important (unlike the attempt to “bend the cost curve,”),

[b]ut these worthy goals have overshadowed the moral principle of nondiscrimination....

The only thing that should be unbreakable in a piece of legislation is the principle behind it....

The core principle behind health-care reform is—or should be—a combination of Social Security insurance and civil rights. Passage would end the shameful era in our nation's history when we discriminated against people for no other reason than that they were sick....

While we’re at it why don’t we also declare a civil right to government-provided automobile insurance and end the shameful practice of discriminating against bad drivers by charging them more.

I would have more respect for Alter’s devotion to “the moral principle of nondiscrimination” if he opposed discrimination wherever it raises its ugly head. But not only does he not do that, he in fact supports discrimination in the service of causes he likes, such as affirmative action. For example,

Senior Editor and Columnist Jonathan Alter writes that the debate over affirmative action in education boils down to whether universities should be free to pass judgment or be told by the government how to choose.

Universities, he believes, should be able to discriminate on the basis of race without being told by the government to stop.

Some “moral principle.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) purports to prove what all liberals already know: all of us are biased, whether we think so or not.

Now comes a new study, Strong Claims and Weak Evidence: Reassessing the Predictive Validity of the IAT, challenging the reliability of the IAT, at least as its been interpreted (HatTip to reader Linda Seebach, via Marginal Revolution).

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For better or worse much of the debate over health care health insurance reform has concerned “death panels,” which opponents of the president’s reform proposals think notorious and supporters think non-existent. Sarah Palin’s attack on these alleged “death panels” on Facebook ratcheted up the debate, and her criticism has brought renewed attention to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an influential health care advisor to President Obama and also brother of Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff.

In a recent entry on Facebook Palin pointed an accusing finger at Dr. Emanuel, quoting a few passages that bother her from some of his academic writing:

Dr. Emanuel has written that some medical services should not be guaranteed to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens.... An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” Dr. Emanuel has also advocated basing medical decisions on a system which “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”

President Obama can try to gloss over the effects of government authorized end-of-life consultations, but the views of one of his top health care advisors are clear enough. It’s all just more evidence that the Democratic legislative proposals will lead to health care rationing.... [Citations omitted]

Palin is not alone in pointing to Dr. Emanuel as a leading source of the anti-geezer rationing and service denial that critics see in the president’s proposals. Writing in the New York Post in an article titled “Deadly Doctors,” health care expert and former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, noting that Dr. Emanuel “believes that ‘communitarianism’ should guide decisions on who gets care,” pointed to the same quote used by Palin and others:

He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. '96).

Now, after having been singled out as virtually Dr. Death, the evil genius responsible for the Death Panels, Dr. Emanuel has decided to fight back. In interviews with the Washington Post and Chicago Sun Times, he fires back at his critics, but a close examination of his more controversial writings suggests that many of his cartridges are blanks.

The Sun Times article yesterday, by Washington Bureau Chief and columnist Lynn Sweet, was in fact a sweet puff piece: Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm's brother, fights death panel health care smears. “Ezekiel Emanuel,” it began,

is a noted oncologist, bioethicist, older brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, an Obama administration health policy adviser -- and the target of smears by Sarah Palin and other critics of Democratic health care legislation. He’s now fighting back....

Emanuel is no “Dr. Death,” though he has published a lot on end-of-life issues. He is an opponent of legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide.

In recent weeks, Emanuel has been accused -- falsely -- of advocating those so-called death panels you may have been hearing about in the swelling coverage of raucous town hall meetings and debate over President Obama’s health care overhaul measures pending in Congress.

And what did the good doctor say?

“I think it is pretty absurd and surreal, really. It’s completely twisting my writing, and I venture to say that most of the people who are commenting probably have not read them in detail, since certainly death panels are very far from anything I’ve ever advocated. I’ve been an opponent of euthanasia, and I have dedicated 25 years of my career to improving care for patients who are facing the last months and weeks of their life,” Emanuel said.

“As far as rationing goes, it’s nothing I’ve ever advocated for the health system as a whole, and I’ve talked about rationing only in the context of situations where you have limited items, like limited livers or limited vaccine, and not for overall health care.”
....
Emanuel said articles in medical journals he wrote did not, contrary to Palin’s suggestion, suggest that treatment be withheld from children like her Down syndrome baby, Trig, and that the use of selective quotes created a distorted picture.

In his interview with the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, to appear tomorrow (Aug. 16), Dr. Emanuel once again accused his critics of misreading his articles, quoting him out of context, etc.

So how did all this get started?

You’re asking me? I’m just the victim here. All I know is the New York Post ran a article attacking me. I think lots of people decided it might be an easy way to kill health-care reform.

The New York Post quoted a 1996 article you wrote saying that some people believe health-care resources shouldn’t go to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens.” What was your point?

I was examining two different, abstract philosophical positions to see what they might offer in the context of redoing the health-care system and trying to reduce resource consumption in health care. It’s as abstractly philosophical as you can get on a practical question. I qualified it in 27 different ways, saying it wasn’t my view.

Now I’m certainly no bioethicist, and maybe my reading skills are as poor as Dr. Emanuel asserts, but I have read closely what seem to be the two most salient articles, and I think in these interviews the doctor is blowing smoke.

First, let’s look at “Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet,” The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 26, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec. 1996), which is online here. It is true that this article is heavily philosophical and that it presents and evaluates a number of methods of allocating health care resources, but it’s premise is that the United States “has repeatedly failed to enact universal health coverage” because of an ethical defect:

the reason the United States has failed to enact universal health coverage is not primarily political or economic; the real reason is ethical — it is a failure to provide a philosophically defensible and practical mechanism to distinguish basic from discretionary health care services.

The article attempts to cure that ethical defect by laying out just such “a philosophically defensible and practical mechanism to distinguish basic from discretionary health care services.” After evaluating and dismissing several approaches to separating basic from discretionary health services, Emanuel presents his own “communitarian” or “civic republicanism” solution, which is worth quoting at slightly greater length than his other critics have done:

This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity — those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations — are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia. A less obvious example Is is guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason.

How anyone can read this article with this conclusion and believe Emanuel when he says now that it “wasn’t my view” that limiting health services to those who are not and cannot become “participating citizens,” who do not “promote the continuation of the polity,” is beyond me. Does he really think that his critics are unwilling or unable to read?

A much more recent article, “Principles For Allocation Of Scarce Medical Interventions,” The Lancet, 31 January 2009, presents this same view in much more detail. Once again, various approaches to allocating scarce medical resources are evaluated —

We evaluate eight simple allocation principles that can be classified into four categories: treating people equally, favouring the worst-off, maximising total benefits, and promoting and rewarding social usefulness

— and once again, all are rejected.

First-come, first-served is flawed in practice because it unwittingly allows irrelevant considerations, such as wealth, to affect allocation decisions, whereas a lottery is insufficient but not flawed. Similarly, sickest-first allocation is inherently flawed, whereas the youngest-first principle, though insufficient, recognises the important value of priority to the worst-off. Both utilitarian principles — maximising lives saved and prognosis — are relevant but insufficient, and usefulness and reciprocity are relevant where irreplaceable individuals make serious sacrifices, such as those during public health emergencies.

Because these approaches, and others I didn’t mention, don’t work, Emanuel et. al. come up with their own: “the complete lives system.” This system, they note, “prioritises younger people,” although it “supports modifying the youngest-first principle by prioritising adolescents and young adults over infants.” Why?

Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments. Similarly, adolescence brings with it a developed personality capable of forming and valuing long-term plans whose fulfilment requires a complete life.

This focus on “investments” gets to be a bit dicey for liberals like Emanuel, but not to worry; they account for it.

Importantly, the prioritisation of adolescents and young adults considers the social and personal investment that people are morally entitled to have received at a particular age, rather than accepting the results of an unjust status quo. Consequently, poor adolescents should be treated the same as wealthy ones, even though they may have received less investment owing to social injustice.

They don’t tell us how to choose between a poor older adolescent adult in whom little has been invested and a younger adolescent or adult in whom much has been invested.

They also consider prognosis, since doing so “forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognoses.” Old people with poor prognoses don’t even figure in the equation (Bye Bye, Grandma). However, “[s]aving the most lives is also included in this system,” you’ll be glad to hear, “because enabling more people to live complete lives is better than enabling fewer.” These guys aren’t bioethicists for nothing.

Finally,

the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated..

Don’t you just love that attenuated? “Sorry, Grandma, we’re not rationing your care. All we’re doing is attenuating your chances relative to someone younger.”

To those of us who aren’t sophisticated bioethicists, this “priority curve” may seem like age discrimination, but not to worry. Emanuel and friends assure us it is not. Listen to their reason:

Age-based allocation is ageism. Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.

So, ageism is not ageist. Got that? [D]enying services to old people because they are old — excuse me, “because they have had more life years” — is not age discrimination? Your future health care (and you grandmother’s), as InstaPundit would say, is in good hands.

What Dr. Emanuel says he said is so opposite from what he actually said that I might have begun to question my own ability to read, except that Sarah Palin and Betsy McCaughey (whom Emanuelites will dismiss as mindless partisans) are not the only ones to read him as I do. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, who likes Emanuel’s “communitarian vision,” quotes with approval the now-well known quote about denying health care services to those whose dementia prevents them from participating appropriately in our society, and adds:

Emanuel is setting up a contrast: our health care system today treats everyone equally — as if they ought to have equal access to every possible procedure or treatment. To most of us, the status quo seems intuitively right. Everyone is equal — equal under God -- Emanuel doesn't say this, but he might as well — and therefore it would be evil to make distinctions. What Emanuel is arguing, here, is that this liberalism substitutes one goal — equality — for another — a healthy society — and that substitution may be responsible for the limited choices that policy-makers confront.

Mickey Kaus also reads Emanuel the same way, although unlike Ambinder, whom he quotes, he concludes:

Well, if you put it that way ... I’m for equality! For a health care system that “treats everyone equally,” even if it’s expensive. Against a system that would deny “services ... to individuals” who won’t ever achieve “full and active participation .. in public deliberations.”

Now none of this means Dr. Emanuel supports “death panels,” but it pretty clearly does mean that his denials in the current interviews about what he’s said should be taken with more than a grain of salt. It is also true, as the invaluable Mickey Kaus has also pointed out, that too much of the “death panel” conversation has concentrated on the end of life consultations rather than on the proposed IMAC panel, the government-appointed but “independent,” i.e., not responsible to Congress, board that would tell hospitals and doctors about what services are basic, etc. Thus when President Obama repeats, as he now seems to do almost endlessly and did again yesterday in his radio address, that only “[t]hose who would stand in the way of reform” are worried about “bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor,” he may be correct in the most limited, spatial way. The bureaucrat to worry about will not be standing between patient and doctor; he will be hovering over the hospital, the doctor, and the patient telling them all what the government will pay for and what it won’t.

Finally (really), because this is a blog about discrimination, I need to relate Dr. Emanuel’s health care “communitarianism,” i.e., his subordination of individual rights to the needs of the community, to the “communitarianism” that is at the root of much racial preference theory. Mickey Kaus noted, in the first of his posts linked above, that civic republican communitarianism is a version of modern liberalism popularized (to a degree) by the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel. As some of you with long memories may recall, we have encountered Sandel and his theory here a couple of times, way back in 2003, in discussing how preferentialists have abandoned individual rights in favor of group rights (discriminating against individual whites and Asians isn’t discrimination because whites and Asians as a group suffer no undue hardship).

One particularly obnoxious example occurred in Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1995, when the request by parents of two Asian-American kindergartners who wanted the girls to enroll in a French immersion program at another school was denied. School officials told the parents, as I quoted from a Washington Post article, that “their departure from Takoma Park would further deplete the number of Asian students there.”

One of the parents told the board that there were no more Asians in the school where her daughter wanted to transfer than there were where she was enrolled and thus that allowing her to transfer would not have any negative impact on diversity. Paul L. Vance, the Superintendent, replied to the board ... “that nothing in the school system’s policy permits ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ by hurting the diversity of one school to help it at another.”

What is even more striking than this offensive policy is the defense of it by “diversity” advocates. For example, one of the arguments made by Gary Orfield, at that time Director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation (now at UCLA), who had written a report critical of Montgomery County for backsliding in its diversity efforts, was that no one has a right to go to the school of his choice. This argument, I noted in the post just linked,

echoes a common refrain from liberal apologists of diversity. Here, for example, is the eminent “communitarian” Harvard philosopher, Michael Sandel, making essentially the same point.

Here lies the far-reaching assumption underlying the diversity argument for affirmative action: admission is not an honor bestowed to reward superior virtue. Neither the student with high test scores nor the student who comes from a disadvantaged minority group morally deserves to be admitted. Provided the criteria of admission are reasonably related to a worthy social purpose, and provided applicants are admitted accordingly, no one has a right to complain.

The moral force of the diversity argument is that it detaches admissions from individual claims and connects them to considerations of the common good. (“Picking Winners,” THE NEW REPUBLIC, December 1, 1997, p. 17)

“Both Orfield and Sandel, I concluded,

confuse not having a right to attend the school of one’s choice (which is true) with not having a right not to be excluded based on race (which is not true). What a sad and bedraggled thing liberalism has become.

Dr. Emanuel’s ridiculous argument that discriminating against people because of how old they are, “because they have had more life years,” is not age discrimination and his support for “attenuated” health services for the old and others unable to participate in society to the degree deemed necessary by IMAC or some other board does nothing to make it less sad and less bedraggled. And his futile attempts in these recent interviews to deny that he said what he said suggest that in this administration even the resident ethicists are not above dissembling and misrepresentation.

UPDATE [16 August]

Tom Maguire documents the zig of Obama’s own contribution to the rational belief in “death panels” (“or cost oriented trade-offs for end-of-life care”) and then his zag away from his earlier position, with each zig and zag dutifully followed in lockstep by the New York Times.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:10 PM | Permalink | Say What? (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Reader Fred Ray points to a hard-hitting attack by Jules Crittenden against an editorial opposing preferential treatment in the Boston Globe, which Crittenden calls a “Lefty Rag” and others refer to simply as the New York Times outpost in New England.

Oh, wait. “No, not race, gender or sexual-orientation preferences,” Crittenden explains. “Don’t be ridiculous.” What it slams is “civil service police preferences for that other much-abused minority, Military-Americans, in a bigoted, ill-informed editorial that plays on some of the worst stereotypes about veterans....

Why? Well, the editorial explains, because “there is ... the potential for giving preference to veterans who might lack education or be suffering from stress or aggression issues.” And besides, preferential treatment “isn’t necessary for the most deserving veterans and serves to push out more suitable candidates.”

Do you think the Boston Globe opposes preferences for other minority groups for similar reasons? Your guess, I’m sure, is as good as mine.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:11 AM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Here’s another article on Pajamas Media that I really like. I encourage you to read it.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:52 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amazing! A state law banning illegal immigrants from in-state tuition actually seems to work!

In 2006 over 70% of Arizona voters passed Prop. 300, “rendering undocumented Arizona students ineligible for in-state tuition rates or state scholarships.” Now comes the Arizona Republic with a report documenting that the new law is working as intended, to the dismay of those who opposed it, and, it appears, the author of the Republic’s report. (HatTip to Inside Higher Ed) Note, for example, that “Extra” in the Republic’s headline. Doesn’t that imply “more than they should be paying”? But whether “Extra” or not, they are paying more than would be if they were treated the same as legal state residents.

More than 3,400 community college students and nearly 300 university students paid nonresident tuition because they couldn’t prove they were in the country legally. Thousands more university students never had their immigration status checked because they didn’t seek in-state tuition or state-funded financial aid.
Because nonresident students pay more than the actual cost of providing their education, Arizona’s colleges and universities actually profited from illegal immigrant students.

Advocates for illegal immigrants are not pleased.

Connie Anderson, who advocates for immigrants for the Valley Interfaith Project, said out-of-state tuition is prohibitively expensive for most immigrants, leaving eager high school graduates with nothing to do. Many of them were brought to Arizona as children and don’t know any other home.

“We’re sidelining the best of our kids and wasting human talent,” Anderson said.

Her organization is promoting federal legislation that would grant legal residency to some people who were brought illegally to the United States as children.

It would seem hard to deny, however, that the law is in fact accomplishing what those who voted for it intended.

The millions of dollars in savings has freed up money for programs for legal residents, said State Treasurer Dean Martin, who as a state senator in 2006 sponsored the legislation referring Proposition 300 to the ballot.

“The state was literally subsidizing illegal behavior,” Martin said....

Martin said the state subsidizes education because college graduates earn more money and eventually pay back the state with their higher income taxes. But illegal immigrants cannot legally work in the United States so they can’t pay back the state’s investment.

“When we’re talking about college students, we’re not talking about children anymore,” Martin said. “At this point, you are responsible for following the law yourself.”

In addition, since societies tend to get more of what they subsidize, subsidizing the higher education of illegal immigrants is one factor that encourages more illegals to come.

We are now facing this same issue in the debate over healthcare health insurance reform, since the House Energy and Commerce Committee rejected, by a margin of one vote, a Republican amendment that would have required states to bar Medicaid services to illegals.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:07 AM | Permalink | Say What? (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, sociologists have finally discovered something we argued in the Sears case over thirty years ago. (My long discussion of EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Co., 628 F. Supp. 1264 (1986), 839 F.2d 302 (1988), can be found in the last three-fourths of this post.)

Inside Higher Ed reports this morning on a paper by Prof. Donna Bobbitt-Zeher of Ohio State University that

links women's and men's college majors with earning gaps by gender, after graduation. And even as the earning gaps nationally have declined, the study says, the share of the gap attributable to college major has grown....

When controlling for all available factors, Bobbitt-Zeher found that the choice of major explained 19 percent of the income gap between college-educated men and women for the high school class of 1999, nearly twice as much of an impact as could be documented for the class that graduated 20 years earlier.

The operative phrase here is “When controlling for all available factors.” I’m going to assume now that you’ve just re-read — or, failing that, just read for the first time — my post on the Sears case linked above. If you have you will know that in that case the EEOC assumed — or more accurately, took as an article of faith — that men and women were equally interested in, qualified for, and available to take all jobs at Sears. Thus it began with an expectation that all positions would split 50-50 between men and women. That assumption, faith, expectation was then qualified by “controlling for available factors,” such as representation in the relevant labor pool, hours available to work, experience, distance willing to travel from home, etc., etc, all of which had the effect of reducing the 50-50 expectation. Yes, all “available factors” reduced the percentage of women one (or at least the EEOC) would “expect” to find in the positions at issue, such as big ticket commission sales.

Significantly, however, the EEOC’s case was built on the residual assumption (faith, expectation) that any remaining gap between the percentage of women in a position that it, after controlling for “all available factors,” expected to find and the actual percentage of women in those positions could be explained only by employer discrimination. The EEOC’s argument, in short, made no concession to the common sense observation that “all available factors” that could be measured by statisticians did not exhaust the universe of factors that could explain why men and women made up different percentages of the employees in different positions.

It’s hard, for example, to do a regression analysis on interest. Sears did, however, present extensive evidence that the distribution of women among the various departments at Sears closely tracked the percentage of women who owned their own businesses — about the same percentage of women sold hardware at Sears, for example, as owned their own hardware stores.

I mention all this ancient history not to suggest that Prof. Bobbit-Zehrer is wrong — on the contrary, I think she is right — but simply to guard against relying too heavily on her numerical conclusion, which sounds more firmly objective than it can be. I’m convinced that a great deal of whatever income gap remains between men and women (and the exact amount, if any, is itself highly controversial, limited as it is by the limited number of “availabe factors” that can be controlled for) can be explained by the majors women choose in college. I’m just not convinced that it’s 19%.

To revert to Sears (you can see why friends who knew me during the five or so years I worked on that case quickly got bored by my incessant discussion of it), Prof. Bobbit-Zehrer actually reminds me a bit of one of the EEOC experts we encountered, even though her analysis here is persuasive and the EEOC expert's was not. In fact, Sears even presented evidence on choice of college major.

Consider this argument from Prof. Bobbit-Zehrer:

In her presentation, Bobbitt-Zeher acknowledged that it is not possible to know the extent to which women are making a completely free choice about their majors, or whether there are encouragements (or discouragements) that are sending more women in certain directions and more men in others.

In seriously considering the possibility that women are not masters of their own fates, that they do not make “completely free choice[s]” about their major but are channeled into women’s work by forces beyond their control, she echoes the testimony of the EEOC expert witness, historian Alice Kessler Harris. In my Sears post linked above I quoted something on the case that I had written in 1985, which I’m going to quote here because I suspect that, despite my instruction, some of you will have not gone back to read or re-read it. “The EEOC’s position,” I wrote,

was that employer discrimination is the sole explanation for the employment patterns of women. Readers may be forgiven for thinking I exaggerate, but the government’s historian, Alice Kessler-Harris, submitted written testimony actually stating that “where opportunity has existed, women have never failed to take the job offered.... Failure to find women in so-called non-traditional jobs can thus only be interpreted as a consequence of employers’ discrimination.” Kessler-Harris further testified that responsibilities for family and children placed no greater burden on women than men workers, and that women’s own choices and interests have nothing to do with the jobs they take. In fact, she was so hostile to the idea that the system leaves women any room at all to choose that she insisted on placing the terms “choice” and “women’s interests” in quotes, and even went so far as to deny that women themselves choose their own major subjects in college or that women business owners choose the types of businesses they own. [Emphasis added]

Naturally, Prof. Bobbit-Zehrer considers women’s choice (or “choice,” as Alice Kessler Harris and the old and perhaps future EEOC would say) of college major as a problem to be solved.

[Her] paper argues that these patterns -- especially given that choice of major is increasingly responsible for economic differences among men and women -- need more attention....

.... “[E]ducation still contributes in a meaningful way to social disadvantage for women. Indeed, it contributes more than it did in the past. Of particular concern is the importance of gender segregation in fields of study, which is shown here to increasingly contribute to the gender income gap....”

She noted that efforts by many in higher education to recruit more female students into science programs should help, but she said that these efforts may also need a push by, for example, increasing efforts to hire more women as faculty members in these departments.

Of course, part of the job of getting women into the right majors involves getting more men into the wrong ones.

But she also noted the “complexity” of the situation, and suggested that promoting economic equity for men and women may require changes in attitudes across the board.

“As women go into men’s majors, that’s part of it, but men need to go into other majors, too, and as women go into some majors, men sometimes don’t want those majors anymore,” she said.

I’ve recently said everything I have to say, and more, about social engineers “falling ass over teakettle into the gender gap in science” and other subjects, and don’t really need to add anything to that discussion here. Except one thing: if I were a woman, I would be offended by anyone who assumed I am not capable of making up own mind about what I want to major in, just as, if I were black, I would be offended by those who thought that I need preferential treatment in order to succeed.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

At a fundraiser for Virginia Democratic candidate for governor Creigh Deeds last Thursday, President Obama told his critics to shut up and get out of his way. “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking,” he said. “I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess.”

Perhaps the time has come for the Talker-in-Chief to consider taking his own advice. Take his repeated assurances that his health reforms will not require any cuts in either Medicare or Medicaid. In his radio address yesterday, for example, the president said the argument that his reforms would “cut Medicaid” was an “outlandish rumor” that’s “simply not true.” Similarly, in his remarks at the AARP on July 28 he attempted to refute the

misperception that's been out there that somehow there is any discussion on Capitol Hill about reducing Medicare benefits. Nobody is talking about reducing Medicare benefits.

Nobody is talking about reducing Medicare benefits? Really? Nobody? Then what in the world is the Washington Post referring to this morning when it reports that

[p]roposals to squeeze more than $500 billion out of the growth of Medicare over the next decade have fueled fears that his effort to expand coverage to millions of younger, uninsured Americans will damage elder care.
....
From the raw numbers, it appears seniors are the net losers under bills approved by three House committees last week. The legislation trims $563 billion out of Medicare's growth rate over the next 10 years while pumping in about $320 billion....

But you don’t have to believe the Washington Post (I know I often don’t). But do you believe ... President Obama himself? (Don’t answer that.) In a June 2, 2009, letter to Senators Kennedy and Baucus (HatTip to Legal Insurrection), the president wrote:

I am committed to working with the Congress to fully offset the cost of health care reform by reducing Medicare and Medicaid spending by another $200 to $300 billion over the next 10 years, and by enacting appropriate proposals to generate additional revenues. These savings will come not only by adopting new technologies and addressing the vastly different costs of care, but from going after the key drivers of skyrocketing health care costs, including unmanaged chronic diseases, duplicated tests, and unnecessary hospital readmissions.

To identify and achieve additional savings, I am also open to your ideas about giving special consideration to the recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created by a Republican Congress. Under this approach, MedPAC's recommendations on cost reductions would be adopted unless opposed by a joint resolution of the Congress. This is similar to a process that has been used effectively by a commission charged with closing military bases, and could be a valuable tool to help achieve health care reform in a fiscally responsible way.

So, the argument that Medicaid will be cut is an “outlandish rumor,” and “[n]obody is talking about reducing Medicare benefits.” But the president himself supports “reducing Medicare and Medicaid spending by another $200 to $300 billion over the next 10 years” and empowering a new board of bureaucrats (MedPac) to reduce costs even further, none of which, we are supposed to conclude, would result in any reduction of benefits even though millions of additional people would be covered.

If it’s true that “Nobody” is talking about these things, perhaps we should start referring to Obama as “President Nobody.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Writing in his column in the New York Times, Charles Blow huffed that “Belligerence is the currency of the intellectually bankrupt.”

Do you think he was referring to Speaker Pelosi’s charge that vociferous Obamacare opponents are a Swastika-wearing mob? To President Obama’s recent command to critics to shut up and get out of his way?

“I don’t want the folks who created the mess [to] do a lot of talking,” Obama said. “ I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.”

To Russ Carnahan and other Democratic Congressmen who have called in SEIU thugs to “protect” them from critics?

I don’t either.

But then, smart guys like Blow don’t have to waste their time actually arguing with critics because, well, Republicans are so dumb it’s not worth it. “Let’s face it,” he writes. “This is no party of Einsteins. Really, it isn’t.”

Presumably because they’re so smart,

Democrats should be leading this discussion. Instead, they’re losing control of it. That’s unfortunate because the debate is too important to be hijacked by hooligans.

Good point. Blow should tell that to the Hooligan-in-Chief, the Hooligan of the House, and their enforcers in SEIU, ACORN, etc.

ADDENDUM

Our dumbness seems to be a recurrent theme with Democratic high-brows. Just listen to that well-known intellectual and arbiter of high culture, Bill Maher:

Just because a country elects a smart president doesn’t make it a smart country. A few weeks ago I was asked by Wolf Blitzer if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn’t put anything past this stupid country.

I wonder if Maher thinks Minnesotans were dumb to elect that other influential high-brow, Al Franken, or perhaps simply that in doing so Minnesota was un-American.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Having come into office promising unprecedented transparency, having bills online for days before signing to give the public a chance to respond, unprecedented distance from lobbyists, etc., the Obama administration, according to a report in the New York Times (in fact, everything that follows is from the New York Times),

• made a back-door, secret deal with the pharmaceutical industry to limit its costs in return for its early support of healthcare reform,

• but did not prevent House and Senate committees from ignoring that deal in their draft legislation,

• which led Big Pharma to threaten to abandon its support unless the White House reaffirmed its original deal,

• with the result that “White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion,”

• as a result of which “House and Senate Democrats loudly protested that they would not be bound by any such agreement to remove clauses allowing government negotiation of drug prices under Medicare — something Democrats have sought for years,”

• following which “Several Senate Democrats said Friday that, in a private meeting, White House officials had told them there was no such deal, sowing yet more confusion,”

• which led the White House to contend for two days that “the Senate Democrats had misunderstood the White House aide’s comments,”

• after which “the White House appeared Friday night to back away,”

• claiming later Friday that it “had not intended to confirm that the deal ruled out price negotiations.”
  

Got that? Good.

On Wednesday, former Congressman Billy Tauzin, chief lobbyist for Big Pharma, told the New York Times:

“We were assured: ‘We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal,’” Billy Tauzin, the former Republican House member from Louisiana who now leads the pharmaceutical trade group, said Wednesday. “Who is ever going to go into a deal with the White House again if they don’t keep their word? You are just going to duke it out instead.”

So, is Tauzin now duking it out? Of course not.

On Friday night, however, the drug industry lobby appeared to line up once again with the White House, perhaps satisfied that the White House had at least ruled out the price rebates in the House bill.

Asked about the White House statements, Ken Johnson, a senior PhRMA official, said, “All of the questions about what was in the agreement distract from our shared goal of making sure everyone has access to health care coverage.”

The country’s in good hands....

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Day before yesterday I began a discussion of “An Amazing ‘Structural Inequality’ Argument by noting that

I’ve been writing this blog quite a while now, and one of the effects of that is that I’m rarely surprised any more by extreme or even bizarre arguments in favor of racial preferences, special treatment based on race, etc. But I’m about to share with you a justification of criminal behavior, and an official pass given to that behavior, based on an argument of “structural inequality” (as discussed at length here and here) that had even me gasping in disbelief.

Well, what shocked me then was as nothing compared to Paul Krugman’s column in today’s New York Times. According to Krugman, opponents of President Obama’s healthcare health insurance reform are “reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.”

Whaaaaat? Did he really say that? In the New York Times? Yes, believe it or not, he did. And wait; there’s more:

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

So, if us geezers are afraid of having to pay more for less care, of having our care rationed, of having needed procedures denied by federal bureaucrats (one I recently had, for example, cortisone injection for back pain, has been severely restricted in Britain), of inviting in more illegals to benefit from our involuntary largesse, we are now swastika-waving members of an angry racist mob?

And if you disagree with Krugman? Well then, you’re no doubt an anti-semite as well as a racist.

Finally, if, like me, you regard Krugman’s race-on-the-brain dementia as more than a little “fishy,” you can always report him to flag@whitehouse.gov, the Obama office that has been created to monitor purposeful disinformation.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Inside Higher Ed reported yesterday that the University of Maine and a GWI, a telecommunications partner, are applying for $32 million of federal stimulus money to expand its high-speed network to 10 sites not now on its system.

Great, you think. Maine no doubt needs the expanded network, and building it will put people to work.

But wait a minute. Everyone is not pleased.

FairPoint Communications is objecting to the University of Maine System’s participation in a bid for stimulus funding, saying it would lose customers to the university’s proposed broadband network expansion....

... FairPoint wants $20 million to complete its infrastructure and offer a 90-percent availability rate by 2011, said Jeff Nevins, a spokesman. He said that since the University of Maine System is tax-subsidized, the stimulus funds would lend its broadband network an unfair edge in the telecommunications market.

“We question the fact that we are going to be in competition as a private business with a publicly funded, publicly supported institution,” Nevins said. “That’s the issue, is that these are public monies that are going to compete with private enterprise.”

The Obama administration, of course, did not invent the concept of using public money to compete with private enterprise (remember TVA?), and it is not doing that only with “stimulus” money (think healthcare health insurance reform). But “stimulus” money is supposed to stimulate the economy by creating jobs. If the University of Maine is awarded these “stimulus” funds at the expense of FairPoint, no net new jobs will be created. The employment produced under a UM project would also have been produced under a FairPoint project. The only effect of awarding the project to the University would be allowing, yet again, a public entity to expand at the expense of private industry.

After only six months of Obama, why is this no longer surprising?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:43 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A reader, “E,” sent the following, which seems worth posting as is.

In the game of elite college admissions with race preferences, Asian Americans pay the highest “bill” or price by being the only non-preferred group in the schema of race based Affirmative Action used by the politically correct racist admissions committees in their discrimination against Asian American applicants. The facts are clear and convincing and the evidence is compelling in support of this.

An example of the bar being set higher for Asian Americans in admissions to American medical schools is given below with the FACTS.

Data from the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) for U.S. Medical School Applicants 2005-2007 (3 years).

1. An Asian American with a GPA of 2.8 to 2.99 and a MCAT score of 36 to 38 has a 36.8% chance of being admitted to a U.S. medical school.

2. A White with a GPA of 2.8 to 2.99 and a MCAT score of 36 to 38 has a 40.7% chance of being admitted to a U.S. medical school.

3. An African American with a GPA of 2.8 to 2.99 and a MCAT score of 36 to 38 has a 100% chance of being admitted to a U.S. medical school.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Say What? (15) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been writing this blog quite a while now, and one of the effects of that is that I’m rarely surprised any more by extreme or even bizarre arguments in favor of racial preferences, special treatment based on race, etc. But I’m about to share with you a justification of criminal behavior, and an official pass given to that behavior, based on an argument of “structural inequality” (as discussed at length here and here) that had even me gasping in disbelief.

Briefly, that argument holds that minorities will deserve preferential treatment until the “playing field” becomes level, and that the field is not level so long as minorities are “underrepresented” anywhere, so long as any racial “disparities” continue to exist. In short, it posits the continuing pervasiveness of racism even in the absence of visible racists, of pervasive discrimination even in the absence of discriminators. Its weapon of choice to fight this racist discrimination is “disparate impact” litigation.

Keep that theory in mind as you consider one of the more glaring examples of racial favoritism, at least so far, that has been committed by President Obama’s Justice Department. After surveying a number of examples of the politicization of Eric Holder's Justice Department, Jennifer Rubin wrote:

But these instances are tame compared with the Justice Department’s controversial and still unexplained decision to dismiss a default judgment obtained in a case of egregious voter intimidation. On Election Day 2008, members of the New Black Panther organization, dubbed by the Justice Department a “black-super-racist organization” were captured on videotape at a Philadelphia polling place. One wielded a nightstick. All wore the uniform and insignia of the organization. They made racial threats and hurled insults at voters. After the video made its way around the Internet, the voting rights section of the Justice Department’s civil rights division investigated. Additional evidence showed that the New Black Panthers had in Internet postings called for “300 members to be deployed” at the polls on Election Day. Bartle Bull, a veteran activist and civil rights attorney, filed an affidavit in support of the Justice Department, terming it “the most blatant form of voter intimidation I have encountered in my life in political campaigns in many states, going back to the work I did in Mississippi in the 1960s.”

A Justice Department complaint was filed on January 7, 2009, against the New Black Panthers national organization and the individuals present at the polls. Although the Justice lawyers urged the defendants (one of whom was a lawyer himself) to respond, they did not. The court then ordered the Justice lawyers to file a default judgment against the Panthers. Nevertheless, in an unprecedented move, the Justice Department in May dismissed the case against all defendants, save the single nightstick-wielding individual....

.... The decision mystified lawyers in the civil rights division as well as outside observers including the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which sent a letter of inquiry.

Read Ms. Rubin’s entire article for more information on this remarkable decision, and the Justice Department’s lame attempts to explain it, but I mention the voter intimidation and the shameful refusal to prosecute it here only as a prelude to the remarkable “structural inequality” defense I want to share, a defense that appeared this afternoon as a comment to my Pajamas Media article. The commenter is replying to another commenter. Here’s the relevant part:

First, the Black Panthers in Philadelphia.

This is a prime example of what the first truly great President in American history, Barack Obama, calls structural inequality.

The majority of polling places are in “white areas.” Thus, blacks inherently feel intimidated to go there. The gentlemen in fatigues were simply there to reassure black voters that they could carry out their constitutional right without fear of any form of reprisal. In case you don’t remember, in the south, my kind used to be hanged for trying to vote. One of them being my great grandfather. So perhaps I have a perspective on the Philadelphia incident that white girls lack.

Now it is possible that this comment is a parody, meant to reveal the absurdity of an extreme “structural inequality” argument, but I don’t think so. The remainder of the comment reinforces my belief that it is, alas, real.

Of course, it’s harder and harder these days to distinguish serious “structural inequality” arguments from heavy-handed parodies of them.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Does Your Health Care Suffer From Limited English Proficiency? has been UPDATED.

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Stuart Taylor demolishes the argument that Sotomayor and her panel’s decision denying the promotions they’d earned to Frank Ricci et. al. was required by Second Circuit and other precedents. He doesn’t merely disagree with the argument, or refute it, or argue with it; he demolishes it.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Take a look at this article that just went up on Pajamas Media. I rather like it.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has not returned to his Cambridge house after his fateful encounter with Sgt. Crowley, retreating instead to his house on Martha’s Vineyard.

On Sunday he spoke to the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival, and according to this report in the Vineyard Gazette today he had some interesting things to say.

He certainly seemed glad to be be out of Cambridge, calling Martha’s Vineyard his “refuge.”

No intrusive media here, just supportive friends who had “come by the house... brought me food ... asked me to get Barack’s autograph....”

“I think the Vineyard is the most integrated community I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “That’s why I like it here. It is racial heaven for me.”

Perhaps more surprising were remarks indicating that he may have misgivings about race-based affirmative action.

He noted that since Dr. Martin Luther King was killed in April 1968, the black middle class has quadrupled by some measures. But the percentage of black children living at or below the poverty level remained essentially the same, at around 38 per cent.

“In other words, we have two classes within the black community. The black ‘haves,’ who are perpetuating themselves and the black ‘have nots,’ who are perpetuating themselves,” he said.

And affirmative action policies which had served as a “class escalator” for some black people, now served as a way to perpetuate their class position.

“I think we need a class-based affirmative action. I grew up in the hills of West Virginia with poor white people and I can testify from my own experience the culture of poverty is color-blind,” Professor Gates said.

Martha’s Vineyard, of course, was quite pleased ... with itself, as nicely revealed by the Vineyard Gazette’s conclusion to its coverage of his talk:

So spoke a genuinely post-racial thinker, to a large post-racial crowd on a small post-racial Island.

Now, if only the rest if the country can catch up.

I think it would help the rest of enormously in our struggling effort to “catch up” with our moral betters on The Vineyard if Prof. Gates would go national with his support for official colorblindness. He could start with his friend in the White House.

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Consider the following common justifications for preferential admissions:

The students admitted ... were qualified (variant: they can “do the work.”

Only a small number of students were admitted ... (variant #1: “they only get a little push”; variant #2 “only if all else was equal”).

Admitting [these] students ... benefits the university financially via donations and state appropriations, which are in turn used for virtuous purposes such as need-based financial aid.

We’ve all heard these justifications for racial preferences and preferences for legacies so often we’ve memorized them, and criticisms of them like the following are equally familiar:

In the end, these practices persist because they're a kind of genteel, behind-closed-doors corruption, veiled by the deliberate vagueness of the admissions process and given a sheen of respectability by institutions that we look to for intellectual and cultural leadership. A lot of the people in positions of power within the government and certain business circles benefitted from these policies and hope their children will too. I imagine they think of themselves as generally moral people and aren't all that interested in thinking otherwise.

Oh, wait. These justifications and this criticism are all taken from this article on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog by Kevin Carey, the policy director for Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington, and they have nothing to do with either race or legacy preferences. Mr. Carey is concerned only with the “preferential treatment [of] students with ties to trustees, politicians and deep-pocketed donors” at the University of Illinois, a controversy I discussed at some length last month, here.

In that post I quoted the following from an article from the Chicago Tribune —

The University of Illinois has refused a request by the Chicago Tribune for test scores and grade-point averages of applicants who appeared on its admissions clout lists, saying the release would violate privacy rights even if the students are not named.

— and then commented:

Insofar as the objection to “clout” preferences is based on merit, i.e., on opposition to less qualified students being admitted, then the Tribune should also be pressuring the University to release test-score and grade point averages of its entering class broken down by race and ethnicity. If it did, I’m sure the University would engage in the same stonewalling all institutions do when this data is sought....

I also quoted Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, who said ““This is a troubling situation. Admission to this great university should be based on merit, never on clout,” and concluded as follows:

If the Governor really believes that admission should be based only on merit and that all “special treatment” should be “rooted out and corrected,” he will direct his commission to investigate “any and all” special treatment, including preferences based on race and ethnicity. And if the Chicago Tribune believes that all applicants have as much a right to be treated without regard to race as they do to be treated without regard to the power or influence of their parents, it will insist on a thorough investigation of all special treatment programs at the University.

Apparently neither the Governor, his special commission, nor the Chicago Tribune really believe that merit should be the controlling principle governing admission. And neither does Mr. Kevin Carey, who concludes his piece with a very weak answer to the question he can hear rising up from his audience:

And, since you asked: No, I don't think affirmative action is a corrupt process per above. There's a difference between naked bribe-taking and contributing to larger social goals of diversity and justice.

I agree. Racial preference in admissions is not naked bribe-taking. It is,however, naked racial discrimination, a case made far better than I ever have a number of years ago (1995) by the estimable Carl Cohen of the University of Michigan in Naked Racial Preference: The Case Against Affirmative Action .

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2 Obama administration officials can't guarantee middle-class Americans won't see tax hike

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama’s treasury secretary said Sunday he cannot rule out higher taxes to help tame an exploding budget deficit, and his chief economic adviser would not dismiss raising them on middle-class Americans as part of a health care overhaul.

Query: When is the last time that administration officials (any administration) would not rule out tax increases that taxes did not actually increase?

Just asking.

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Lurita Doan has a thing or two to tell Harvard, and she does it very well in her Los Angeles Times OpEd, “On Race, Harvard Still Must Learn.”

Her father, Lucien Alexis Jr. (Harvard, 1942). Was the only black member of Harvard’s lacrosse team. When he and fellow team members arrived in Annapolis for a match with the Naval Academy in 1941, the Academy demanded that he be removed from the field, “declaring that no midshipman would take the field with a colored man.”

Tempers boiled, and the Harvard lacrosse team prepared to forfeit the game. William J. Bingham, the university’s athletic director, intervened, ordering Harvard’s coach to send my father back to Cambridge. Harvard played the scheduled match.

This episode of discrimination provoked a controversy at the time, with scalding editorials, calls for investigation by the Senate, and much criticism of Harvard in the Harvard Crimson. As Ms. Doan writes,

Almost 70 years later, it’s clear that the Harvard-Navy lacrosse game of 1941 offered a near-perfect teachable moment for the cause of equality (a cause Harvard claimed to espouse) had the school so chosen. Early on, Harvard could have shattered the grip of racial hatred by standing firm. But Harvard didn’t seize the moment. Instead, it chose the easy path.

Now, in an argument that those on the left will find counter-intuitive or even odd, Ms. Doan sees history repeating itself in the Gates affair.

Harvard’s leaders, in 1941, were not ready to see the future. Nor are they today. From his statements in the days after his arrest, Gates seems locked in the past regarding race. His first reaction was to demand preferential treatment, see himself as a victim and see his arrest as “the way a black man is treated in America.” The message he has sent is that what happened to him was purely about race, when we’re far beyond that.

If he looked around, he would discover that black men and women can and do compete equally at Harvard, and need no special protection, class or distinction. They achieve using intellect, hard work and perseverance. The world Gates inhabits, which prefers victimization and demands special treatment, is as wrong today as Harvard’s Jim Crowism was in 1941.

Obama’s “teachable moment” could have done the nation a great service by denouncing race-based distinctions of any sort. After all, he wasn’t elected because he’s black, but because Americans thought he had the wisdom, temperament and ability to serve as president. Yet neither the president nor the professor has seized the moment to take bolder steps in a discourse on race.

Instead, we have a black president who insists that the state continue bestowing preferential treatment on people because they look like him.

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I have pointed with enthusiasm to the work of Carol Swain several times before, such as here and here. Now it’s time to do so again, for her comments in a long Nashville Tennessean article that interviewed several local worthies (she teaches at Vanderbilt) exploring “how we arrived at White House ‘beer summit.’”

Asked “How does race affect your daily life?” she replied:

I am more affected by the perils of being a relatively conservative Christian woman in a secular environment where people of faith are sometimes treated with disrespect and contempt.

Asked “What's the one thing you most want people of other races to understand?” she replied:

I would like my white, Latino and Asian brothers and sisters to know that most blacks are not filled with hatred. Many of us have a God-given empathy for all human beings, including the much-maligned white male.

Asked “Has President Obama's election changed the racial dynamics in your workplace or school?” she replied: “No.”

Asked “In what ways has your race/ethnicity been a help or hindrance in your work/business/ school?” she replied:

My race, intellect, and faith have operated together as one double-edged sword. Because I am black, I am more likely to be remembered by people. But my accomplishments are more likely to be dismissed. I suspect that my faith and conservatism hurts me far more than my race.

Asked “Is affirmative action still needed, or do such policies simply need to be retooled for today's society?” she replied:

We still need strong enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. However, racial, ethnic, and gender preferences are no longer needed. In most cases, they do not benefit the most disadvantaged members of our society and they can become a crutch.

Now you don’t need to read the whole thing, but you do need to pay attention to Carol Swain wherever you run across her.

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A few days ago, noting some of the provisions in one of the pending health care bills, I asked, Is Your Health Care Culturally Incompetent?.

Now, looking at the 1018 page bill just passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on a 31-28 vote, I have one question: Was it written by anthropologists?

I ask this because of the bill’s pervasive concern with “culturally and linguistically appropriate services” (page 91), “EFFECTIVE CULTURALLY AND LINGUISTICALLY APPROPRIATE COMMUNICATION” (page 106), “DEMONSTRATION TO PROMOTE ACCESS FOR MEDICARE BENEFICIARIES WITH LIMITED ENGLISH PROFICIENCY BY PROVIDING REIMBURSEMENT FOR CULTURALLY AND LINGUISTICALLY APPROPRIATE SERVICES,” (page 405), concern with “the effect of delivering culturally and linguistically appropriate services on beneficiary access to care, utilization of services, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of health care delivery, patient satisfaction, and select health outcomes” (page 415), with the “COORDINATION OF DIVERSITY AND CULTURAL COMPETENCY PROGRAMS” (page 914), with “CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC COMPETENCY TRAINING FOR HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS” (page 915).

Pausing for a moment on this coordination of diversity and cultural competency programs, be reassured that in giving grants to meet this goal,

the Secretary shall give preference to entities that have a demonstrated record of the following:

(1) Addressing, or partnering with an entity with experience addressing, the cultural and linguistic competency needs of the population to be served through the grant or contract....

Can anyone say, “ACORN Enrichment Provision”? There are several of these.

If anything, there is even more concern with providing services to those with “limited English proficiency” (a phrase that occurs 35 times throughout the bill) than those facing cultural competency challenges.

Indeed, given the emphasis on “cultural competency,” linguistic appropriateness, and those with limited English proficiency, it strikes me as only mildly hyperbolic to suspect that the government bureaucrat standing between doctor and patient in the future will be accompanied by an “on-site interpreter” (page 401).

UPDATE [5 August 2009]

Hans Bader has much more on the “Acorn Enrichment Provisions,” etc., here. Read the whole thing. So does Mickey Kaus [Aug. 3, 11:03PM].

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On several different occasions during the past presidential campaign I made the following observation:

What a fascinating show future president Obama is putting on! It will be even more fascinating to discover whether he is:

a) Jimmy Stewart, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington;

b) Robert Redford, in The Candidate;

c) Peter Sellers (Chauncey Gardner), in Being There; or

d) Laurence Harvey, in The Manchurian Candidate.

Now comes Shelby Steele with a new nomination:

Where race is concerned, I sometimes think of the president as the Peter Sellers character in “Dr. Strangelove.” Sellers plays a closet Nazi whose left arm—quite involuntarily—keeps springing up into the Heil Hitler salute. We see him in his wheelchair, his right arm—the good and decent arm—struggling to keep the Nazi arm down so that no one will know the truth of his inner life. These wrestling matches between the good and bad arms were hysterically funny.

When I saw Mr. Obama—with every escape route available to him—wade right into the Gates affair at the end of his health-care news conference, I knew that his demon arm had momentarily won out over his good arm. It broke completely free—into full salute—in the “acted stupidly” comment that he made in reference to the Cambridge police’s handling of the matter. Here was the implication that whites were such clumsy and incorrigible racists that even the most highly achieved blacks lived in constant peril of racial humiliation. This was a cultural narrative, a politics, and in the end it was a bigotry. It let white Americans see a president who doubted them.

Mr. Obama’s “post-racialism” was a promise to operate outside of tired cultural narratives. But he has a demon arm of reflexive racialism—identity politics, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and now Skip Gates. You can only put a demon like this to death by finding out what you really believe. We should hold Mr. Obama to his post-racialism, and he should get to know himself well enough to tell us what he really means by it. As for the odd triad of Messrs. Gates, Crowley and Obama, only Mr. Crowley seems to have functioned outside his cultural narrative.

Steele should not have jumped so quickly from Wright to Gates. By doing so he omitted Obama’s nomination of the “wise Latina” Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, someone best known for her identity politics. (Sotomayor was not even the most distinguished sitting Hispanic federal circuit court judge or even the most distinguished sitting Hispanic judge on the Second Circuit, but unlike the other Hispanic circuit court judges her record is littered with examples of and paens to the very identity politics that candidate Obama promised, or seemed to promise, to move beyond.)

Actually Steele left out several other Obama “Dr. Strangelove” moments: there was, for one example, Obama’s description of the grandmother who raised him as a “typical white person,” or, for another, his reference, when he thought only friends and contributors could hear him, of rural Pennsylvanians bitterly and xenophobically clinging to their guns and religion.

Obama may not be Mr. Smith or The Candidate or Chauncey Gardner or The Manchurian Candidate or Dr. Strangelove, but like them all he usually reads from a carefully crafted script. It is only when he slips and goes off script that his real thoughts momentarily emerge.

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