The Last Item On The Bucket List

If I ever have more money than brains AND outlive my wife and kids, then MAYBE I might try this...


wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

An Unlikely Trio Compare Baseball And Healthcare

Any time you see an editorial on health care co-written by former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Democratic Senator John Kerry, you have to sit up and take notice. Then when you see the third collaborator is Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane, you figure maybe you ought to see what they are saying. In a New York Times op-ed last fall, they did just that. The unlikely trio called for a reformed health care system driven by "robust comparative clinical evidence."

Some points they made:

• This season, the New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers and New York Mets — the three teams with the highest payrolls, a combined $486 million — are watching the playoffs on television, while the Tampa Bay Rays, a franchise that uses a data-driven approach and has the second-lowest payroll in baseball at $44 million, are in the World Series.
• For decades, executives, managers and scouts built their teams and managed games based on their personal experiences and a handful of dubious statistics. This romantic approach has been replaced with a statistics-based creed called sabermetrics.
• A doctor today can get more data on the starting third baseman on his fantasy baseball team than on the effectiveness of life-and-death medical procedures.
• Studies have shown that most health care is not based on clinical studies of what works best and what does not — be it a test, treatment, drug or technology. Instead, most care is based on informed opinion, personal observation or tradition.
• Just as baseball success today is reliant on wisely using key data, they argue, appropriate data can revolutionize the health care system, saving lives and money.

It is not the answer to the industry’s problems, but it makes for an interesting read.

Social Security Humor

As a follow up to our post, The Mother Of All Bailouts, I bring you a cartoon courtesy of Investor's Business Daily's

Michael Ramirez (click on the image for a larger image):

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

As a former Economics major in college ("Yuck!" according to my daughter, who is a freshman this year), I understand that numbers - in particular statistics - can be made to say just about anything. Here is a great example: I read an article that compared the number of government jobs to construction and manufacturing jobs (click on the images for a larger version).

The chart above shows the monthly employment levels since 1969 in: a) the construction and manufacturing sectors combined (blue line), and b) government (red line). Since 1969, government employment almost doubled from 12 million in 1969 to almost 24 million today, as manufacturing and construction jobs have remained flat and have recently fallen, to the point that there are now more workers employed by government than are employed in the manufacturing and construction sectors.

If you know me, you know my political leanings are a little to the right of center. So obviously, this graph was custom-made for my argument that "Government is getting too big. We need to scale back the intrusion of the government into our lives. Blah, blah, blah... Vindication and a sense of superiority was mine. I was basking in the light of being right (pun intended)...

Then, in the same article, there was this graph:
As the chart shows, there has been a general downward trend in government employees as a percent of total payrolls since the mid-1970s, from more than 19% in 1975 to below 16% by 1998, with a slight reversal of the trend since 2000.

How could this be? This is not what I wanted to hear. I liked the story better when I only had the first graph. The 'full story' does not suit my agenda. But alas, as much as we hear about the growth in government, it seems like the jobs data tell a different story - But I still don't think 1 job out of 6 should be on the government payroll.

Note: One explanation for the top chart is that there have been so many productivity gains in manufacturing that we can produce increasingly higher levels of output over time with fewer and fewer manufacturing workers?

Double Standard?

We ran across this story recently;

New Jersey county rolls out plan to curb skyrocketing healthcare costs.

New Jersey's Today's Sunbeam (1/7, Clark) reports that on Jan. 6, Salem County, NJ, "freeholders announced" the rollout of "a health insurance opt-out plan for county employees, who could see a bigger paycheck while saving the taxpayers thousands." The plan comes as officials try "to curb the skyrocketing costs of health coverage." Under the plan, "instead of paying an average of nearly $400 per policy each month, the county would split the amount with the employee 60/40. That 40 percent would go right into the worker's paycheck, officials said." According to Freeholder Beth Timberman, the measure "is a 'win-win' for both the workers getting extra cash and the taxpayers seeing a tremendous savings."

So If am reading this right, the county is trying to get the employees to opt-out of the county's health insurance plan. And they are going to entice them to do so by splitting the money the county would have paid for the insurance. Ok.

A couple of questions come to mind:

• So what about the problem of all the uninsured people in America? As I read this, they are encouraging the employees to either a) do without insurance or b) get it on their own in the individual market.
• Suppose this was a big, faceless, evil, profit-mongering corporation doing this? Wal-Mart comes to mind. Remember the outrage over the story that so many of Wal-Mart's employees did not have health care? Never mind the real numbers (or reasons), they were raked over the coals.

Imagine a Wal-Mart executive saying, "If our employees opt-out of our health plan, we will give them 40% of the amount we would have contributed to the health premium. We think it is a 'win-win' for both the employees getting the extra cash and our shareholders."

Irony - Update

Several weeks ago, I posted a blog entry titled, Irony. You can read it here.

I gave the customer service manager the benefit of the doubt and emailed him after the holidays. Heck, I even waited until January 5th, in case he was taking extra time off. My email was short and to the point, indicating that I never heard from him. Guess what? Yep. Over a week later and I am still waiting for him to call me...

At this point, I wonder if he is ever going to call.