Category: Law
Early data on ACA enrollees
Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Matthews report:
Early signals suggest the majority of the 2.2 million people who sought to enroll in private insurance through new marketplaces through Dec. 28 were previously covered elsewhere, raising questions about how swiftly this part of the health overhaul will be able to make a significant dent in the number of uninsured.
Insurers, brokers and consultants estimate at least two-thirds of those consumers previously bought their own coverage or were enrolled in employer-backed plans.
The data, based on surveys of enrollees, are preliminary. But insurers say the tally of newly insured consumers is falling short of their expectations, a worrying trend for an industry looking to the law to expand the ranks of its customers.
I would emphasize that we still don’t really know quite what is going on here. But the view that everything is now in the clear simply is not warranted by the available evidence.
Hat tip goes to Megan McArdle.
Back to the Amazon future (sign me up)
Amazon.comAMZN +0.43% knows you so well it wants to ship your next package before you order it.
The Seattle retailer in December gained a patent for what it calls “anticipatory shipping,” a method to start delivering packages even before customers click “buy.”
There is more here. And here are our previous posts on Amazon.
The pointer is from @MattYglesias.
Scottish independence: the bottom line
Christopher Pissarides, professor of economics at the London School of Economics, said being part of the Union gives a small economy like Scotland assurance that help will be forthcoming if something goes wrong.
“The last thing any Scot should wish is to give up the support potentially available from the UK (England?) for support from the European Union under Germany’s rules,” he said.
Here are related opinions:
Philip Rush, chief economist at Nomura investment bank, said: “Higher taxes on income would push many wealthy individuals and some companies they work for south of the Border, harming Scotland’s economy.”
Keith Wade, chief economist and strategist at Shroders, said “massive wrangling” between Holyrood and Westminster over tax and spending would be required for a currency union to work “to avoid a rerun of the euro crisis”.
“When combined with the considerable uncertainty over whether Scotland can remain in the EU, Scottish businesses would start to head south,” he said.
There is more here.
Will we be bailing out the insurance companies?
Megan McArdle has the latest:
This is the plan that Republicans hope to cleverly foil by framing the risk-adjustment provisions [of ACA] as an insurer bailout and repealing them. As designed, the risk-adjustment mechanism was supposed to be revenue-neutral, and that is how the Congressional Budget Office scored it in their last estimate. But unless the demographics of the exchanges improve pretty quickly, the three temporary risk-adjustment programs are probably set to transfer a large hunk of cash to the insurance companies. That’s what the administration, and the insurers, want to happen; it’s how they are going to keep the insurers on board for 2015. Phil Klein at the Washington Examiner points out that Humana Inc.’s latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission warns of a “more adverse than previously expected” mix of customers enrolling through the exchange — but it doesn’t change its earnings forecast for 2014. So either it thinks its losses will be trivial relative to overall earnings or Humana thinks the chances of a bailout from the administration are basically 100 percent.
There is more here, including background context if you are not up to speed on this issue.
Maryland as guinea pig for health care price controls
Sarah Kliff reports:
The Obama administration is set to announce Friday an ambitious health-care experiment that will make Maryland a test case for whether aggressive government regulation of medical prices can dramatically cut health spending.
Under the experiment, Maryland will cap hospital spending and set prices — and, if all goes as planned, cut $330 million in federal spending. The new plan, which has been under negotiation for more than a year, could leave Maryland looking more like Germany and Switzerland, which aggressively regulate prices, than its neighboring states. And it could serve as a model – or cautionary tale – for other states looking to follow in its footsteps.
“You can put Maryland in the company of Massachusetts and perhaps Vermont as the three states furthest out in trying to invent a new future for cost accountability in health care spending,” added Harvard University’s John McDonough. “Success creates a model that other states will want to look at emulating. And failure means it’s an option more likely to be crossed off the list.”
For Maryland, the new rules build on past success. Since the mid-1970s, it has been the only state to set the prices that hospitals charge patients. Typically, hospitals negotiate with each health insurer individually, leading to disparate rates. In Maryland, all customers — whether a private insurance plan, public program or uninsured patient — pay the same price. Researchers estimate the system has saved $45 billion for consumers over four decades and prices have grown more slowly in the state.
I am glad there is an experiment, but I’m also glad I live in Virginia. And there is of course a problem with drawing inferences from such experiments. A small area can institute price controls without much discouraging health care innovation, but perhaps the larger area cannot.
Will your next car Google you?
Cecilia Kang and Michael Fletcher have a new article with a variety of interesting observations, here are some bits:
A tablet, running Google’s Android operating system, will pop out of the dashboard. The device can be passed around so passengers can find YouTube clips and order songs and audio books from the Google Play store for the car’s entertainment system.
Prefer Dunkin’ Donuts over Starbucks? Google may be able to decipher that by driving behavior and deliver the appropriate ads to an e-mail account or smartphone.
…The executives added that Google, not the automaker, would control any personal data generated by the car. And, they said, the information would be stored in servers, not the actual vehicles, to safeguard the data in case the car is stolen or sold.
…Much of the data that Web-connected cars generate may seem mundane — the route someone takes to work, where they are at a certain time, whether their car needs a tire alignment or more coolant — but they can be lucrative to companies in the business of closely targeted marketing.
“If you are a business that provides services to someone in that car, you have a captive audience for an hour a day,” Smith said. “Think about how much anybody would like to have a captive marketing audience for an hour a day. It is a gold mine.”
Much of the new discussion concerns new Audis, but of course such innovations may spread to other cars as well. Ads emanating from the car radio are old news, so what other mechanisms of ad delivery will be found? And will drivers be lured with free services (which?) for being willing to hear or view or smell such ads? I miss the old days of the open window and the eight-track tape.
Robert Laszewski (and Ezra Klein) on where Obamacare stands right now
This is a very good interview, read the whole thing, here is one bit from Laszewski:
There’s a big misconception that this is about young people. That’s baloney. It’s about healthy people. A healthy 20-year-old might only pay a $100 premium. You want healthy 40 and 50-year-olds. The big problem right now is really total enrollment. We only have about 10 percent of the uninsured in here. Insurers think you need more like 70 percent of a pool of people to sign up.
Here is another:
I have an interesting answer for that. I think the mandate is almost worthless because the word is getting around that they can’t really collect it. And by year three, it’s really a lot of money. I think there’ll be real pressure to just get rid of it. I don’t think you can force people to buy this insurance. If they don’t want it there’ll be a political groundswell to get rid of it. So in my mind the individual mandate is kind of irrelevant to this.
And another:
…I do have a concern that people are looking at these plans and not finding value. Some people are looking at paying 10 percent of their income for plans with huge deductibles, and then you have politics of Obamacare and the bad press of the launch and if you put all those things in a bag and mix them up, I am really concerned that the uninsured who are healthy are not finding Obamacare the value they hoped it will be. That’s the real risk for Obamacare.
Read the whole thing, for Ezra’s responses too.
Jewish persecutions and weather shocks
There is a recent paper by Robert Warren Anderson, Noel D. Johnson, and Mark Koyama, and the abstract is this:
What factors caused the persecution of minorities in medieval and early modern Europe? We build a model that predicts that minority communities were more likely to be expropriated in the wake of negative income shocks. Using panel data consisting of 1,366 city-level persecutions of Jews from 936 European cities between 1100 and 1800, we test whether persecutions were more likely in colder growing seasons. A one standard deviation decrease in average growing season temperature increased the probability of a persecution between one-half and one percentage points (relative to a baseline probability of two percent). This effect was strongest in regions with poor soil quality or located within weak states. We argue that long-run decline in violence against Jews between 1500 and 1800 is partly attributable to increases in fiscal and legal capacity across many European states.
In the Matt-Ezra debate over whether too hot or too cold is worse, this Irishman has to side against the blustery winter.
Law and Literature syllabus 2014
The first class is today! Here is my reading list:
The New English Bible, Oxford Study Edition
Glaspell’s Trifles, available on-line.
Billy Budd and Other Tales, by Hermann Melville.
The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, edited and translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott.
Conrad Black, A Matter of Principle.
Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Novels and Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, volume 1.
I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov.
Moby Dick, by Hermann Melville, excerpts, chapters 89 and 90, available on-line.
Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.
Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman.
The Pledge, Friedrich Durrenmatt.
Haruki Murakami, Underground.
Honore de Balzac, Colonel Chabert.
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49.
M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath.
Alan Moore, V for Vendetta.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl.
Some additions to this list will be made as we proceed. We also will view a few movies on legal themes, I will be back in touch on these.
I am likely to use A Separation and Memories of Murder as two of the movies, along with a new release depending on schedule.
Fertility decisions and the escape from slavery
Hope really does matter, as outlined in a recent paper (pdf) by Treb Allen of Northwestern, with the formal title “The Promise of Freedom”:
This paper examines the extent to which the fertility of enslaved women was affected by the promise of freedom. Because women derived greater pleasure from children when they were free, increases in the distance to freedom (which lowered the probability of escape) should reduce fertility. Exploiting the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the particularity of U.S. geography, I demonstrate a strong negative correlation between fertility and the distance to freedom. This negative correlation is stronger on larger plantations, but disappears when the father of the child is white. The correlation varies with the difficulty of the route, and a similar correlation is not present for white children or for slave children born prior to the Fugitive Slave Law. The negative correlation suggests that despite the small number of successful escapes, the promise of freedom played an important role in the everyday lives of slaves.
There are more interesting papers by Allen here., including on the gravity equation and location theory. Allen is one of the most interesting young economists today, yet he remains undercovered. Here is Treb on “Equilibrium distribution of population if the surface of the world was shaped like a cow.”
How the job of policeman is changing
Here is one bit from an interesting article:
Minnesota has long led the nation in peace officer standards; it’s the only state to require a two-year degree and licensing. Now, a four-year degree is becoming a more common standard for entry into departments including Columbia Heights, Edina and Burnsville. Many other departments require a four-year degree for promotion.
It’s not a rapid-fire change, but rather an evolution sped up by high unemployment that deepened the candidate pool and gave chiefs more choices. Officer pay and benefits can attract four-year candidates. Edina pays top-level officers $80,000; Columbia Heights pays nearly $75,000.
Nowadays, officers are expected to juggle a variety of tasks and that takes more education, chiefs said. Officers communicate with the public, solve problems, navigate different cultures, use computers, radios and other technology while on the move, and make split-second decisions about use of force with a variety of high-tech tools on their belt. And many of those decisions are recorded by squad car dashboard cameras, officer body cameras and even bystanders with smartphones.
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank Kirk Jeffrey.
Where in the United States are the largest shadow economies?
US shadow economies: A state-level study
Travis Wiseman
Constitutional Political Economy, December 2013, Pages 310-335Abstract:
Recent studies of shadow economies focus primarily on cross-country comparisons. Few have examined regional or state-level variations in underground economic activity. This paper presents estimates of the shadow economy for 50 US states over the period 1997-2008. Results suggest that tax and social welfare burdens, labor market regulations, and intensity of regulation enforcement are important determinants of the underground economy. Among the states, Delaware, on average, maintains the smallest shadow economy at 7.28 % of GDP; Oregon, on average, has the second smallest shadow economy at 7.41 % of GDP; followed by Colorado, averaging 7.52 % of GDP, rounding out the three smallest shadow economies in the US West Virginia and Mississippi, on average, have the largest shadow economies in the US as a percent of GDP (9.32 and 9.54 %, respectively).
There are (gated?) versions of the paper here. For the pointer I thank Rob Raffety who I believe in turn is relying on Kevin Lewis. This pdf, by the way, offers data on the generally larger shadow economies of Europe.
Cihan Artunç is studying legal pluralism in the Ottoman Empire
Here is the abstract from his job market paper, he is from Yale:
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, non-Muslim Ottomans paid large sums to acquire access to European law. These protégés came to dominate Ottoman trade and pushed Muslims and Europeans out of commerce. At the same time, the Ottoman firm remained primarily a small, family enterprise. The literature argues that Islamic law is the culprit. However, adopting European law failed to improve economic outcomes. This paper shows that the co-existence of multiple legal systems, “legal pluralism,” explains key questions in Ottoman economic history. I develop a bilateral trade model with multiple legal systems and first show that legal pluralism leads to underinvestment by creating enforcement uncertainty. Second, there is an option value of additional legal systems, explaining why non-Muslim Ottomans sought to acquire access to European law. Third, in a competitive market where a subpopulation has access to additional legal systems, agents who have access to fewer jurisdictions exit the market. Thus, forum shopping explains protégés’ dominance in trade. Finally, the paper explains why the introduction of the French commercial code in 1850 failed to reverse these outcomes.
There is further interesting work at the link.
Green Wednesday: Colorado pot shops are opening today
Meanwhile, back in the so-called real world, Colorado is pursuing its legalization experiment to a logical conclusion:
Police were adding extra patrols around pot shops in eight Colorado towns that plan to allow recreational sales to anyone over 21 on Jan. 1. Officials at Denver International Airport installed new signs warning visitors their weed can’t legally go home with them.
And at a handful of shops, owners were scrambling to plan celebrations, set up coffee stations, arrange food giveaways and hire extra security to prepare for potential crowds and overnight campers ready to buy up to an ounce of legal weed.
While smoking pot has been legal in Colorado for the past year, so-called Green Wednesday represents another historic milestone for the decades-old legalization movement: the unveiling of the nation’s first legal pot industry.
Here are further details on Green Wednesday., including this: “Federal law says the drug’s possession, manufacture, and sale is illegal, punishable by up to life in prison…” I wonder if this experiment in federalism will survive our next Republican President. My prediction has long been that this kind of legalization will not persist, but the chance I am wrong has been rising.
Out-of-staters, by the way, can purchase only a quarter ounce at a time and are not supposed to carry the pot outside Colorado borders. There is also this:
Colorado projects $578.1 million a year in combined wholesale and retail marijuana sales to yield $67 million in tax revenue, according to the Legislative Council of the Colorado General Assembly. Wholesale transactions taxed at 15 percent will finance school construction, while the retail levy of 10 percent will fund regulation of the industry.
Happy public domain day!
I received this email from James Boyle at Duke:
Dear Tyler, An early Happy New Year to you and your family — I hope all is well? You may remember our annual survey of the stuff that would be entering the public domain if we had the copyright laws from 1976.
The list this year is a particularly scrumptious one. The mouseover of the book covers is another pleasure.· Samuel Beckett, Endgame (“Fin de partie”, the original French version)· Jack Kerouac, On the Road (completed 1951, published 1957)· Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged· Margret Rey and H.A. Rey, Curious George Gets a Medal· Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat· Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley, The Untouchables· Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays· Walter Lord, Day of Infamy· Studs Terkel, Giants of Jazz· Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley, The Three Faces of Eve· Ian Fleming, From Russia, with Love· A.E. Van Vogt, Empire of the Atomhttp://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2014/pre-1976
Movies:
The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Farewell to Arms, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 3:10 to Yuma, 12 Angry Men, Jailhouse Rock, Funny Face, An Affair to Remember, Nights of Cabiria and The Seventh Seal..
(Is this list depressing when set against 2013?)
In the world of fine arts, Picasso’s Las Meninas set of paintings… only themselves legal because no copyright covered Velazquez’s.. would also be entering the public domain.