Cash for Clunkers

Well, summer's over, and I have renewed my promise to pay more attention to this blog.  I have been catching up with Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw's blog, and found this reference to an article by Jeff Jacoby, a Boston Globe columnist about the Obama Cash for Clunkers program.

The program not only advanced the timing of purchases that would have been made anyway to receive a government subsidy, it also required the destruction of the thousands of used cars that were turned in.  As a result, the price of used cars had increased because of the reduction in their supply .  Edmunds estimated that the price of a three year old used car had increased by more than 10%.  A classic case of a regulatory folly.

Democrats Want to Kill Medicare Advantage

I wrote several blog posts in February and March explaining why Democrats hate Medicare Advantage.  To see them, look in the archives for those months.  Simply put, this was a program designed to encourage private alternatives to the traditional government Medicare program.  It provided lower costs to consumers and, at the same time, superior service.  The trade-off was that consumers had to deal with the doctors and hospitals on the insurer's list -- they gave up some freedom of choice.

The Wall street Journal has now published an interesting opinion article,  entitled Farewell, Medicare Advantage, which describes the attempts of the Administration to blame the inevitable cuts in the Medicare Advantage program on the insurance companies, rather than on the costs cuts required by the healthcare legislation.  It also notes some of the studies showing that Medicare Advantage improved the quality of medical care.  Thus, the Journal says:

"According to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, the Advantage HMOs that serve 15% of all seniors in Medicare cost on average two percentage points less for the same benefits than the traditional program, without fiat pricing.
Using government data, the insurer trade group AHIP estimates that Advantage beneficiaries in California spend 30% fewer days in the hospital than fee for service, 23% fewer days in Nevada. These successes and others have come about because Advantage allowed insurers and providers to collaborate, pay for value and coordinate care."

The article is well worth reading.  It is unfortunate that the Democrat's general antagonism to private enterprise leads them to  cut a program that provides major benefits to a quarter of all Medicare enrollees.

More Recognition of Increasing Cost of ObamaCare

Karl Rove has an excellent column this week in the Wall Street Journal about the inevitable increases in costs that will result from the ObamaCare bill.  He talks about the same Congressional Budget Office estimate that I blogged about two weeks ago -- it increased its estimate of costs by $115 billion more than it assumed when the bill was passed.  He also makes the interesting forecast that the government will seek to keep the Medicare Advantage plans from announcing their 2011 increases until after the election.  It's well worth reading, and there are 416 comments (most not very coherent) as of today.

Followup on Net Neutrality -- AT&T Adopts Tiered Pricing Structure for Cell Phones

Last week, I discussed in a lengthy post the current disputes about the pricing of joint products, including internet service.  I noted that the entire net neutrality fight was a dispute between heavy and more moderate users of internet bandwidth.  The latest news is that AT&T has attempted to do something to apply appropriate pricing so that bandwidth hogs are not subsidized by the rest of us.  David Pogue, the NY Times technology guy explains the new pricing structure.

Merchant Fee Battle Continues in House

According to one recent comprehensive trade press article, the battle over the merchant fee provisions in the Senate Finance bill is continuing in the House.  The article notes that while small merchants are the public face for merchants, it is really the large merchants that are doing lobbying and will benefit most from the legislation.

The article notes the consequences of one of the bizarre provisions of the bill.  The "reasonableness" requirement for merchant fees will not apply to banks with $10 billion or less in assets, to 99% of the banks in the country.  As the article explains:

"Meanwhile, merchant acquirers are trying to figure out how to make the back-office changes necessary to implement Durbin’s provisions should they become law. The measure would exempt from possible regulation the interchange income of financial-institutions with $10 billion or less in assets—a group Durbin said includes 99% of banks and credit unions. The amendment instructs the Federal Reserve to assess what would be “reasonable and proportional” debit card interchange based on the processing costs incurred. That means there could be one set of interchange rates for a few large debit card issuers and another set for all the others—on top of existing rates based on transaction volume and merchant type."

So the Senate has proposed to regulate the debit card charges of only the largest banks.  It has apparently given no thought to the competitive distortions this would impose on the debit card industry.

Credit Cards and Internet Service: Joint Products Continue to Raise Controversy

    When I practiced law, I spent much of my time defending a computerized reservation system (CRS) against claims of monopoly pricing.  After four years of litigation, we won a four-month jury trial, in which the jury found that we weren't a monopoly, and weren't engaged in unjust pricing.  Now, the same economic issues involved in the CRS litigation are again front and center in two current regulatory disputes.

    The basic economic issue with CRSs arose from their nature as what economists call "joint products." This is defined by Wikipedia as "two or more products, produced from the same process or operation, considered to be of relative equal importance"   The CRS produced a reservation transaction that equally benefited the airline that provided service and the travel agent who made the booking (and ultimately the consumer).   Since it is recognized that cost allocation of common cost is entirely arbitrary, the pricing of CRS services was controversial for many years.  In the early days of CRS, travel agents paid a little, many airlines got a free ride, and the vendors lost substantial amount of money.  The vendors were able to get significant booking fees from some smaller airlines, who complained of discrimination.  After the CAB adopted regulations requiring nondiscriminatory fees, all airlines were required to pay booking fees, and the CRS's became highly profitable.  The vendors then engaged in intense competition for placement in travel agencies, which resulted in competing away some of the profits generated from airlines in increasing discounts to travel agents.

    The battle over pricing of joint products is now again being fought in Washington -- this time over Internet services and credit cards.  Both are joint products.  The Internet is similar to the classic example of a joint product -- a newspaper.  Indeed, it is so similar, that it is quickly displacing newspapers.  The Internet connects suppliers and users, both of whom contribute to the cost of the systems.  Users pay fees to the telephone or cable company that provides Internet service.  Websites also pay fees for their connection to the Internet, and offset these fees by collecting revenue from advertisers, or sometimes subscription fees from viewers.
  
    Some vendors use substantially more bandwidth than others.  Sites such as YouTube that provide video or movies are obviously intensive users who absorb tremendous amounts of Internet capacity.  The whole "net neutrality" issue arose when network providers suggested that they might charge more for high consumers of bandwidth.  This was quickly labeled discrimination by vendors that might have to pay more, and the battle has been fought under the appealing banner of "net neutrality."  But it is really a battle over pricing -- heavy consumers are trying to avoid a pricing structure that reflects their impact on the network.  They want all users priced equally, thus forcing light users to subsidize bandwidth hogs.  It is not very reasonable to require users who use the Internet for e-mail and browsing news articles to pay as much for their Internet service as young people who use the Internet for watching movies and playing games.

    The credit card issue is similar.  Credit cards are a joint product, providing equal benefits to both merchants and users.  Again, the traditional pricing structure charges both beneficiaries.  Subscribers usually pay annual fees, plus interest of bills were paid in a timely manner.  Merchants also paid in the form of discount fees, equal to a small portion of the amount charged by the consumer.  MasterCard and Visa  discount fees were usually somewhat less than 2%, while American Express charged more -- sometimes 3% for merchants, and even higher for smaller companies such as restaurants. 

    Merchants have fought for years to restrict these fees, and have recently found some success.  In early May,  the Senate adopted an amendment to the Financial Reform bill that would require merchant fees for debit cards to be "reasonable and proportionate" to the actual cost of processing these transactions.  (The amendment does not apply to credit card fees.)  Of course, this runs right into the question of how to allocate the common costs of a joint product.  The House bill does not contain a similar provision, so the amendment may not survive the conference committee.

    It does seem that merchants may be paying too much, not because their prices exceed some cost standard, but because credit card companies are competing away much of their revenue from merchants to attract new consumers.  Rewards cards are the prime example of credit card vendors using revenue from merchants to give points that consumers may use to redeem merchandise, or even simply to pay consumers one or two percent of the total amount charged.  Of course, in the current economic environment, the card companies are suffering tremendous losses, and can reasonably argue that they need to maximize revenue from both merchants and consumers in order to survive.

    I will do some more research on both credit card and net neutrality issues, and continue to blog on these questions.

Airlines Cancel First Flights Bacause of New DOT Delay Rules

When DOT adopted new rules that airlines counld not delay flights before take-off for more than three hours before facing draconian DOT penalties. carriers and others warned that they would have every incentive to cancel the flights before the deadline, rather than become liable to millions of dollars in penalties.  Consumer groups rejected this possibility.  Now that the rule has become effective we are receiving reports of the first cancellations.  Surprise -- corporations react to economic incentives.

Obamacare Projected Costs Increase by $115 Billion; Wipe Out Alleged Savings

The hard light of reality has finally wiped out all the alleged cost savings from the healthcare bill.  The Congressional Budget Office has identified $115 billion in additional costs in administration and other areas.  As reported by ABC:


"The director of the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the health care reform legislation would cost, over the next ten years, $115 billion more than previously thought, bringing the total cost to more than $1 trillion.
The revised figure is due to estimated costs to federal agencies to implement the new health care reform bill – such as administrative expenses for the Internal Revenue Services and the Department of Health and Human Services -- and the costs for a "variety of grant and other program spending for which specified funding levels for one or more years are provided in the act."
CBO had originally estimated that the health care reform bill would result in a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion from 2010-2019; this revised number would eliminate most of that savings"

Health Care Bill Limits Deductibility of Medical Expenses

So much for the claim that President Obama won't raise taxes on incomes of under $250,000.  One little-noticed provision of the health care bill changes itemized deductions to reduce the deductibility of medical expenses.  As explained in a timeline published by the national Council of State Legislatures, starting in fiscal 2013, the legislation "increases the adjusted gross income threshold for claiming the itemized deduction for medical expenses from 7.5 percent to 10 percent. Individuals age 65 and older would be able to claim the itemized
deduction for medical expenses at 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income through 2016. [Sec. 9013 of H.R.3590]

I haven't seen this reported anywhere.  In 2013, you won't be able to claim medical expenses unless they exceed 10% on adjusted gross income.  For Seniors, the threshold will increase in 2017.

Here is the actual language of Section 9013:

SEC. 9013. MODIFICATION OF ITEMIZED DEDUCTION FOR MEDICAL
EXPENSES.
(a) IN GENERAL.—Subsection (a) of section 213 of the Internal
Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by striking ‘‘7.5 percent’’ and
inserting ‘‘10 percent’’.
(b) TEMPORARY WAIVER OF INCREASE FOR CERTAIN SENIORS.—
Section 213 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended
by adding at the end the following new subsection:
‘‘(f) SPECIAL RULE FOR 2013, 2014, 2015, AND 2016.—In the
case of any taxable year beginning after December 31, 2012, and
ending before January 1, 2017, subsection (a) shall be applied
with respect to a taxpayer by substituting ‘7.5 percent’ for ‘10
percent’ if such taxpayer or such taxpayer’s spouse has attained
age 65 before the close of such taxable year.’’.
(c) CONFORMING AMENDMENT.—Section 56(b)(1)(B) of the
Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by striking ‘‘by substituting
‘10 percent’ for ‘7.5 percent’ ’’ and inserting ‘‘without regard
to subsection (f) of such section’’.
(d) EFFECTIVE DATE.—The amendments made by this section
shall apply to taxable years beginning after December 31, 2012.

Health Care Bill Substantially Increases Premiums

One of the alleged benefits of the health care bill is that insurance companies will no longer be able to deny coverage  to persons with pre-existing conditions.  There have been numerous anecdotal stories of persons who lose their jobs, but can't get other coverage because they already have cancer or some other serious illness.  Nowhere in the health care debate did any member of Congress or the Obama administration, so far as I could discover, admit that this additional benefit would substantially increase insurance premium costs, not only for those with a pre-existing condition, but also for everybody in the insurance pool.

However, the New York Times as run in an interesting article on a laboratory state that already has a requirement that insurance cover pre-existing conditions.  That state is New York, which already has among the highest insurance rates in the country.  See New York Offers Costly Lessons on Insurance
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/nyregion/18insure.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all

The article explains the problem:

Premiums for individual and small group policies have risen so high that state officials and patients’ advocates say that New York’s extensive insurance safety net for people like Ms. Welles is falling apart.
The problem stems in part from the state’s high medical costs and in part from its stringent requirements for insurance companies in the individual and small group market. In 1993, motivated by stories of suffering AIDS patients, the state became one of the first to require insurers to extend individual or small group coverage to anyone with pre-existing illnesses.
New York also became one of the few states that require insurers within each region of the state to charge the same rates for the same benefits, regardless of whether people are old or young, male or female, smokers or nonsmokers, high risk or low risk.
Healthy people, in effect, began to subsidize people who needed more health care. The healthier customers soon discovered that the high premiums were not worth it and dropped out of the plans. The pool of insured people shrank to the point where many of them had high health care needs. Without healthier people to spread the risk, their premiums skyrocketed, a phenomenon known in the trade as the “adverse selection death spiral.”

As a result, "Since 2001, the number of people who bought comprehensive individual policies through HMOs in New York has plummeted to about 31,000 from about 128,000, according to the State Insurance Department."

 A further result is that the Governor of New York is now proposing to reregulate insurance rates. 

We now have two state laboratories, New York and Massachusetts, that have shown the disastrous results of many of the requirements in the health care legislation.  It is unfortunate that Congress did not pay any attention to them before passing the legislation.

Health Bill Substantially Increases Costs

It has been sickening in the health care debate to watch so many Democrats parrot the claim that the Congressional Budget Office has found that the health reform legislation will reduce the cost of healthcare.  Everybody knows that the CBO numbers are based on the provisions of the bill submitted, which contain numerous devices designed to produce the CBO result, even though they are unrealistic projections.  A recent article in the New York Times has spelled this out.  See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opinion/21holtz-eakin.html?scp=3&sq=Real%20cost%20%20%20%20%20Health%20care&st=cse.  The article, entitled "The Real Arithmetic of Health Care Reform", by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, spells out the gimmicks and regulatory games used to produce the CBO scores.  Primary among these was the inclusion of ten years of revenue and only six years of costs in the CBO estimate, but there are numerous others, including games with corporate tax payments.  Douglas-Eakins doesn't even mentiont the"Doc-fix".  This is the more than $200 billion required to eliminate the scheduled cut in Medicare payments to doctors that would result from a formula created in legislation in 1997.  This is an essential element of the health reform bill that was in the original House bill, but because it was moved into a separate piece of legislation, Democrats claim that it doesn't have to be counted in the cost of the health reform package.  It's amazing how they can say this with a straight face.  We are in for higher costs, higher taxes, and reduced service for Medicare patients.


The reconciliation bill is particularly harsh on Medicare Advantage programs, cutting $202 billion from the program used by 25% of all seniors. http://insurancenewsnet.com/article.aspx?id=174426  Medicare Advantage payments will be frozen in 2011, but will feel the full brunt of the decrease in 2012, after the 2012 election.  This will obviously make Medicare Advantage plans much less attractive, since it will eliminate any financial advantage that they now have over traditional Medicare.  The Democrats will achieve their goal of eliminating private insurance company competition with the traditional Medicare program.

Obama Health Plan Cuts Benefits for Quarter of All Seniors (Medicare Advantage III)

    My previous two posts discussed the details of the Medicare Advantage plans and the Administration's plans to cut them substantially in order to provide additional funding for its health-care proposal.  As Rep. Paul Ryan charged at the Health Care Summit, this is double counting in the sense that the administration has claimed that we need to reduce Medicare expenses substantially simply for Medicare to become solvent.  However, this particular reduction will have no effect on Medicare savings, because it is intended to he used to offset other costs of the health bill.  In any event, the savings are only $14 billion (see my Medicare Advantage I post).  Nevertheless, the Administration points to this as one of the major areas of savings that will offset the costs of providing health insurance to an additional 30 million people.

    The administration never admits that these particular cost savings affect a quarter of all Medicare users.  As noted in my previous post, 24% of all Medicare recipients use Medicare Advantage plans.  I suspect that, if they were fully aware of this, seniors would be even more upset about the Obama proposals than they are now  Moreover, these proposed cuts are not merely intended to save cost.  I believe that they are based on a philosophical difference with the entire concept of private plans in Medicare.  This plan was adopted in 2003 by a Republican administration and CongressI encourage the maximum use of marketplace incentives and government programs.  The plan has worked very well -- there are now millions of consumers Medicare Advantage plans who have received the benefits of competition.  Such competition will even affect the basic Medicare program which will have to respond to the loss of so many consumers.  These proposed cuts, therefore, are, in reality, an attack upon the entire concept of the marketplace.

Medicare Advantage II -- History and Costs

    Congress created the current Medicare Advantage program as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, the same statute that also created the Medicare drug program (Part D.)  Medicare Advantage is also referred to as Part C.  Medicare has included service by private providers since 1972, when Congress allowed health maintenance organizations (HMOs) to provide coverage for Medicare beneficiaries.  In 1997, Congress and the Clinton Administration created the Medicare Plus Choice program, in a desire to expand the availability of health plan options.  This program was not successful.  The new statute enable Congress to impose caps on HMO revenue and authorized Medicare to adopt new regulations on private plans.  This resulted in 900 pages of regulations.  As a result, the number of private health plans in Medicare dropped by more than half -- from 346 and 1998 to 151 by 2003.  Therefore, many areas of the country had no access to private health plans.

   The 2003 legislation reversed much of this policy.  It reversed the price caps and approved additional funding to encourage private plans to return to Medicare.  The result has been an enormous increase in private plans, so that in 2009, 24% of all Medicare recipients were participants in Medicare Advantage programs.  Medicare Advantage plans provide substantially greater benefits than Medicare at approximately the same price to the consumer.  Its pricing structure enables them to provide additional services, or to reduce costs that are charged under Medicare, such as for the Part D program.

    (Much of the above history is drawn from The Success of Medicare Advantage Plans: What Seniors Should Know, by Robert E. Moffitt, published by the Heritage Foundation on June 13, 2008.  The very recent Report to Congress: Medicare Payment Policy, issued by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MEDPAC) in March 2010 is also very useful.  See particular, pp. 261 et sec.)

     Since no great achievement goes unpunished in Washington, the Medicare Advantage program has drawn criticism from Democrats, primarily that its cost is more than the cost of the regular Medicare program.  Thus, theMEDPAC report states:

By some measures, the Medicare Advantage (MA)
program appears to be successful, but excessive payment
rates preclude the program from achieving desired
efficiencies. MA enrollment continues to increase, MA
plans are widely available to beneficiaries, and plans
provide enhanced benefits for their members. However,
taxpayers and beneficiaries in traditional FFS Medicare
subsidize these benefits, often at a high cost.

Medicare Advantage costs are, in fact about 12% higher than normal Medicare costs.  But the above statement contains numerous errors.  First of all, this is not a straight apples-to-apples comparison.  Medicare Advantage provides substantial additional benefits, which, presumably, increase its costs.  Nor does the cost comparison say anything about efficiency, since we are not comparing the same services.  Based on my experience, Medicare Advantage seems much more efficient, since it does not inundate consumers with a blizzard of paperwork.  Moreover, there is no basis for claims of cross subsidization.  Congress adopted a particular policy of supplemental payments to Medicare Advantage plans in order to encourage their development.  There is no evidence that it deprived traditional Medicare patients of services they would otherwise have received.  Indeed, in 2009, 23% of beneficiaries were enrolled in Medicare and its plans, and the payments for Medicare Advantage amounted to 23% of total Medicare spending (in 2008, according to a paper on the Medicare Advantage payment system, issued byMEDPAC in October 2009).

    The Medicare pricing structure is as follows:

1.  Medicare establishes a benchmark figure for each county, representing the average cost of fee-for-service payments per person.  This benchmark is a bidding target.

2.  Plans then bid to offer Medicare  (Parts A and B) coverage to Medicare beneficiaries.  The data is presented as the price to cover an average or standard beneficiary, and includes administrative costs and profit.  

3.  If the bid is below the benchmark, the plan receives a base rate equal to its bid.  Importantly it also receives an additional payment from Medicare in the form of a rebate, which equals 75% of the difference between its bid and the benchmark.  The plan then must return the rebate to its enrollees in the form of supplemental benefits or lower premiums.

4.  If the bid is above the benchmark, the plan receives a base rate equal to the benchmark, and the enrollees have to pay an additional premium and equals the difference between the bid and the benchmark.

The overwhelming majority of bids are below the benchmark.  In 2006, 95% of Medicare Advantage plans bid below the benchmark level (Heritage paper, above, page 6).

    Medicare Advantage plans have, obviously, been a great success, providing superior services at less then or the same cost as traditional Medicare.  It has achieved results intended by Congress in 2003.  But, a Democratic Congress wants to reduce these benefits, and use the "savings", not to fix Medicare finances, but to develop a new program for younger people -- the Obama health plan.  The Democrats present this in terms of cutting waste, but as explained above, there is nothing wasteful in Medicare Advantage -- the additional cost covers additional services, which are greatly beneficial to Medicare consumers.

Medicare Advantage I

I have been hearing so much in the current health care debate about how expensive Medical Advantage plans are, and how the Democrats expect to save enormous amounts of money by cutting them back to the level of fee-for-service payments that I decided to do some of my own research.  My conclusion is that they may cost slightly more than ordinary Medicare, but they provide substantially more benefits.  In addition, the savings that would be achieved by eliminating Medicare Advantage would amount to $14 billion at most, a very small proportion of the suppose of $500 billion in costs that the administration is proposing to squeeze out of Medicare.  ( According the to Medicare Payment Advisory Commission Final Report, March 2010, p. 260, "In 2009, Medicare spent roughly $14 billion dollars more for the beneficiaries enrolled in MA plans than it would have spent if they had stayed in FFS Medicare.")

I have a personal interest in this.  I am a member of a Medicare Advantage HMO plan that provides excellent service, at lower costs to me than my previous plans under vanilla Medicare.  It receives the basic Subpart B premium that I pay, but also covers all my premiums under the Subpart D drug plan.  This saves my wife and me about $900 per year.  In addition, the Medicare Advantage plan is also more generous in covering costs of hospitalization, charging a maximum of $125 a day in the first five or six days, with all the additional costs absorbed by the insurance.  Medicare has an exemption of approximately $1100, that the patient pays for each impatient hospital visit, no matter how long.

Moreover, Medicare Advantage is a lot more efficient and easy  to use than basic Medicare.  Under standard Medicare, I would receive a separate bill for each activity.  I would ignore the initial bill because it would be no way of knowing how much I actually owned.  The doctor would submit his bills to Medicare at a list price that was unrelated to any amount that Medicare would allow.  Medicare would then adjust the price to its standard cost for my procedure, and I could not be charged for more than this price.  It would then reimburse the doctor for 80% of the cost, and I would ultimately get a bill from the doctor's billing office.  These would be for negligible amounts, for example, six dollars or $10, for which I would then have to write a check and deposit in the mail at the cost of a stamp.  The amount of paperwork is enormous, and must impose substantial administrative costs on every doctor's office.

In contrast, under my Medicare Advantage plan, I make a co-pay of $10 for every visit to my primary care doctor, and $30 for each visit to a specialist, and that's it.  No further bills.  I don't know how complex the billing system is between doctors and insurance companies, but I suspect it is simpler, because the companies can deal on the basis of capitation, and not just fee-for-service.

Of course, there are trade-offs for me.  I am not free to choose any doctor, but most go to doctors on insurance company's list.  However, when I investigated this issue before signing up, I found that my primary care doctor and four of my five specialists were in the plan.  It is also a local plan covering the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which means that I cannot go outside this area for routine treatment.  If I have an emergency out of town, I am covered, but not otherwise.  From a consumer's point of view, my Medicare Advantage plan is far superior to standard Medicare, and I am very unhappy that the Democrats propose to destroy this benefit.  Their rationale has nothing to do with superior service, or efficiency, but simply with the fact that the average cost to the government per Medicare Advantage patient is 10% greater than per Medicare patient.  Subsequent posts on this subject will consider the history of Medicare Advantage, and the reimbursement structure for insurance companies, and whatever else may come to mind.

The Real Difference between the Democratic and Republican parties

I receive all sorts of emails commenting on political issues, and ordinarily wouldn't post them on the blog.  However, as a lawyer, I enjoyed this one -- it even has an element of truth in it.

The Lawyers' Party
  By Bruce Walker 

The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers’Party . 
Barack Obama is a lawyer.
Michelle Obama is a lawyer.
Hillary Clinton is a lawyer. 
Bill Clinton is a lawyer.
John Edwards is a lawyer. 
Elizabeth Edwards is a lawyer.
Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to  law school (although Gore did not graduate).
Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school.
Look at leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: 
Harry Reid is a lawyer. 
Nancy Pelosi is a lawyer.
 
The Republican Party is different. 
President Bush is a businessman. 
Vice President Cheney is a businessman.
The leaders of the Republican Revolution: 
Newt Gingrich was a history professor.
Tom Delay was an exterminator. Dick Armey was an economist. 
House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer. 
The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.
Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer?  Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976. 
 
The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers. 

Kindle Electronic Reader Discriminates Against Blind People Who Can't Read

Imagine you create a great new electronic device for people who read books.  Rather than carrying heavy books around, the consumer can simply download them to a single device which fits into a pocket book or briefcase.  Imagine that you created a version of this device with a larger screen that will be particularly useful to students who would no longer have to carry heavy textbooks, and pay hundreds of dollars for them.  What a great benefit to humanity -- efficient and easy-to-use for students who can read; and ecologically beneficial by eliminating massive amounts of paper.  Unfortunately, your government says it is illegal for use by colleges because it discriminates against people who can't read.

Amazon created the Kindle DX particularly for readers of newspapers, textbooks, and other large-format documents.  Amazon reached agreements with several universities to, in effect, serve as test sites for the use of the Kindle DX in academic environments.  Universities started to create programs that would take particular advantage of the Kindle.   Arizona State, for example, announced plans to give students in an honors course on the history of human culture Kindle DXs with 30 required books pre-loaded.  A blind student and two national organizations for the blind complained to the Justice Department that use of the Kindle violated the American with Disabilities Act because blind people couldn't read the electronic reader.  Never mind that the Kindle has a text-to-speech feature, which would actually read the book to a blind person.  As a result, four universities this week reached settlement agreements with the Department of Justice, agreeing that they will not "purchase, recommend, or promote use of the Kindle DX ... unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision."

For a good article on this, see the following from CNet -- http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10434512-1.html?tag=mncol;txt#comments.  Read the comments, also. Several note the blind have devices that convert text in books to words that they can hear. Here are a couple of the better comments:

"I cannot begin to express how stupid I think this move is. This is like recommending that we not use paper books because the blind cannot read those. Can students sue these organizations for the strain of having to carry heavy textbooks? I'm very much in favor of finding solutions to help blind or otherwise handicapped individuals access information, but it should never be done at the expense of introducing new technology that replaces other technologies (e.g., physical books) that have the same problems. It's not as though we took a step backward... but we did now with these lawsuits and settlements."

"For all the people pointing out that normal books are available for the blind--great, go get them. Having an e-text is another option for people who want it and it works for them. If it doesn't work for you, the same text is available in a print edition that you can hook up whatever braile device is needed; that option didn't go away just because some students are getting a new gadget.

Also, this isn't comparable to affirmative action, so don't even go there. I will argue that this is a terrible way of punishing the majority in favor of the minority because lots of things aren't accessible to all sorts of people with disabilities and if we stopped allowing new technology because someone may not be able to use it, we might as well give up on getting anything new. On the flip side, lots of technologies evolve after they are proven successful in the market place and end up opening new worlds to some people with disabilities."


DOJ rejected the Kindle's text-to-speech functionality because its menus were not accessible to the blind. Hopefully, Amazon can improve this, so that the DOJ will get off its back, and the vast majority of students who could actually use the Kindle will benefit from its existence.

Time to Resume Blogging

When I looked at my blog, I realized that I hadn't published anything in almost a year.  I guess I just had too many things to do -- playing golf, going to Europe, visiting grandchildren, and the numerous other things one devises for himself with when he is retired. I also wasn't very successful with the previous blog -- except for my son, I couldn't find anybody who was reading it.

However, I think it is time to start again.  Regulatory activities have just gotten crazier and crazier with the new administration, and they promised to get even worse if the health "reform" bill passes. My first article will be on a particularly odd position taken by the Department of Justice.