Those who know me know I'm a grumpy old man trapped inside a young but aging body. And so here goes my Andy Rooneyesque comment.

In the 2004 Nevada presidential caucuses (held on February 14th), a total of 9,000 people caucused in the entire state. No, that was not a typo. No, I did not forget some zeroes. 9,000 people.  Yes, a total of 0.3 percent of Nevada's population bothered to show up to decide who their party's presidential candidate should be.

Some argue that by moving up the Nevada caucuses, the turnout will increase.  For example, the Nevada Democratic Party says it expects “three or four times” that number. (Hazaaa!!! 36,000 people!)   Even if that optimistic projection comes true, that's still only 1.5 percent of the state's population.  That tells me that the only people who are going to show up to caucuses tomorrow are the die-hard supporters of a particular candidate , not a representative sampling of the state.

So, please tell me, why do we care what 9,000, or even 36,000 people in a politically apathetic state have to say?

Gavin Newsom wasn’t the only one who got engaged on New Years Eve. On a warm and breezy balcony overlooking the Caribbean Sea somewhere approaching Roatan, Honduras, I asked Brian Leubitz to be my husband.

And he said yes.

But unlike Gavin Newsom’s impending marriage, ours is not legally recognized by the State of California. At least not today.

I know that Mark Leno and the growing group of fair-minded California legislators will prevail in their effort to have a Marriage Equality Bill signed into law.  We may have to wait until our current, pathetic, homophobic excuse for a Governor is replaced.  But Brian and I are not going to wait until that happens.  Our lifelong commitment will be recognized by our friends and family now.  And we will continue to demand that it be recognized by the State of California.

Oh, and speaking of demands.  I also demand that the San Francisco Chronicle run a front-page correction regarding a story it ran four years ago. Writing about the frenzy that took place after Gavin Newsom ordered the San Francisco County Clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the Chronicle reported:

Others didn't get married because they plain weren't ready for the scary prospect of lifelong commitment.

Or, like Brian Devine, they asked and were rebuffed. “I said, 'You know, this would be a really good political statement' and he looked at me like I'm a clod,” Devine said. “He said he would not get married to me because I was not romantic.”

Upon reading this four years ago, I was devastated.  How would I ever find a man when the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that I'm not romantic?  As it turns out, the article wasn't about me. There is another gay Brian Devine – apparently a nonromantic clod – who lives just a few blocks away from me. I actually sat next to the other Brian Devine at the GLAAD Media Awards a few years back.  It was his proposal – not mine – that was rebuffed.  But try convincing potential suitors of that.  Luckily, I found someone – Brian – who doesn't know how to use Google. But Phil Bronstein, I'm still waiting for that  apology.

P.S. The headline is inspired by one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists: I Wanna Get Married by Nellie McKay.  The song starts at 2:25, although the inane banter of the hosts of the View (who apparently don't understand irony) is priceless.

Today I filed a lawsuit against Kaiser Foundation Health Plan demanding that Kaiser stop its illegal practice of rescinding health insurance policies.  The lawsuit was filed on behalf of all California residents whose coverage Kaiser rescinded in the last four years.  We are seeking an injunction requiring that Kaiser immediatley stop its illegal rescission practice and reinstate all of the people whose coverage it wrongfully rescinded in the past.

California health insurers have been engaged in the wrongful act of retroactively rescinding people’s health insurance for years.  For those of you not familiar with this practice, it goes something like this:  When you apply for individual coverage, you are required to complete an application.  The application contains several broad, ambiguous, and technical questions regarding your health history.  For example, some applications ask if you have ever had a headache.  Assuming you make it through the application process, you had better hope you don’t need coverage.  If you do, the insurance company likely will scour your medical records looking for any “symptom” of that condition.  If they find even a hint, they likely will retroactively rescind your coverage, leaving you without any insurance.  And to top it off, they will send you a bill for the “non-member price” of the healthcare you received while you were insured by them.

For example, in the case we filed today, Kaiser claimed that the individual should have know that freckles on his are were a symptom of skin cancer.  Because he did not disclose that he had an “undiagnosed skin lesion” at the time he applied for coverage, Kaiser rescinded his health insurance after he was diagnosed with cancer.  Kaiser also threatened to “refer this incident to law enforcement for further action.”

Lisa Girion at the Los Angeles Times has written several outstanding investigative pieces about health insurer’s practice of rescinding coverage.  For example, she reported that HealthNet paid bonuses to its employees based on the number of policies they were able to rescind:

Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed Thursday showed.

Four months ago, the Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights wrote a letter to the California Department of Managed Health Care, the agency charged with regulating health plans.  The FTCR said:

It has been nearly a year since your Department indicated that the practice is rampant in California among all insurers but only one other company, Kaiser, has even been fined for illegal cancellations. Reports investigating the practices of other companies have been delayed.

Patients cannot afford for you to allow another company’s rescission policy to leave more Californians uninsured, uninsurable and facing unpayable medical bills. The longer your Department delays the draft rules, the more complicit your Department becomes in the illegal behavior.

Yet, illegal rescissions continue to this day.

Kaiser’s rescission practice is flatly illegal.  California law prohibits insurers from engaging in “post-claims underwriting,” which is what Kaiser is doing.  Moreover, California law prohibits Kaiser from relying on any statements made in an application that is not attached to the policy.  Kaiser does not attach copies of applications to its policies, so it is prohibited from rescinding coverage based upon statements made in them.

Chutzpah. As in Carole Migden.

An article on the the West Marin-focused blog Sparsely Sage and Timely discusses Carole Migden's recent meeting with a group of people campaigning to protect the White Deer from slaughter by the Pt. Reyes National Seashore. But:

Unfortunately, the majority of guests had little chance to spend much time discussing their concerns with Migden. Instead they mostly had to content themselves with listening to a loud, brash, sometimes-witty, and sometimes-abrasive performance by their state senator.

Ah, yes. That's the Carole we all know and . . . . Well, know.

The lead story on the SF Chronicle's website is an article singing the praises of California Real Estate blogger Patrick Killelea who runs the site Reality Parser.

The gist of the article is how smart Killelea is because he saw the burst of the California housing bubble coming.  Nevermind the fact that his prediction was eight years too early.  In fact, he was so smart that he didn't buy a house in Berkeley in 1999 because the market was just too overpriced.

How smart was Chicken Little's decision?  Read the flip

The article describes how smart Killelea was by not buying a house at the height of the dot-com bubble:

In 1999, he and his wife tried to buy a house in Berkeley at the height of both the dot-com bubble and housing mania.

“It all felt rigged,” he said. “Everything was set up to get me to overbid and not do an inspection; basically throw caution to the wind. It just felt really wrong. I felt like a sheep among wolves.”

After being consistently outbid, the couple decided to rent instead. They found a charming Menlo Park two-bedroom on a tree-lined street for $2,700 a month. After a couple of years when the rental market softened, they asked for a rent reduction and now pay $2,350. “I would be paying out and losing about three times as much” to own the equivalent house, he said. “In some big urban areas like Manhattan and the Bay Area, it may never be cheaper to own” than rent.

His theory is that people are better off not buying a home.  Instead, they should rent and use the money that they “save” to invest in other ways. 

Killelea does contract programming work but said he can take off months at a time from his $100-an-hour software gigs because he took his savings from renting instead of buying, invested in the stock market and did quite well. His last job ended in March and he's just thinking about looking for a new one.

Now wait a minute.  There's no dispute that there's been a slow-down in the California housing market this year.  But does that really mean that families shouldn't buy houses that they can afford because the market is too “overpriced”? 

Let's take Killelea's own story as an example.  He was scared to buy in Berkeley in 1999 because, at the height of the dot-com boom, he was worried that prices were too high.  Well, as it turns out, in 1999, the median price of a home in Alameda County was $289,000.  Had Mr. Killelea purchased that home, he probably would have put 20 percent ($57,800) down and would have financed the remaining 80 percent with a mortgage paying interest at around 7 percent.

Last month, even after all the problems in the economy, the mortgage market, and the housing sector, the median price of a home in Alameda County is $660,000.  

If Killelea had bought that median home in Alameda County in 1999, at the height of the dotcom boom when everyone was sure that home prices had peaked, it now would be worth $371,000 more than he paid for it. And because he only needed to put a 20 percent down payment, that translates to a 641% rate of return on his money.

If Killelea considers an eight-year return of 641 percent to be shabby, then god bless him. Killelea says he did “quite well” by investing in the stock market instead of buying a home.  How well?  Well, if he had invested the same $57,800 in the S&P 500, he would have realized a return of about 17 percent (about $10k) in the same time period.    “Quite well,” or just about keeping up with inflation?  I don't think anyone is retiring early based on stock investments in 1999.  Personally, I would rather have the $371,000 profit over the $10,000 profit.  Call me crazy. 

There are many problems in our housing market, many of which were caused by irrational speculation.  And many counties in California and across the country have been hit much harder than the Bay Area.  But that doesn't mean that people who can afford to shouldn't buy a home to live in. 

I hope Killelea is not actually convincing Californians to make the same stupid decision he made by not buying a home they can afford.  And it is irresponsible for the San Francisco Chronicle to report such irrational alarmism without any real counter-argument.

It is widely expected that Schwarzenegger will again veto Mark Leno's Gender Neutral Marriage Bill.  And if he does, he will claim that the bill violates the homophobic “will of the people,” as expressed in the 2000 Proposition 22. 

Leno's intellectual response on the flip.

Mark Leno responded to this argument in an article in the SF Chronicle.  He said:

Civil rights for any group should never be put to a vote of the people. This is how we prevent the tyranny of the majority over the minority.

 Looking back through history:

In 1964, voters overwhelmingly overturned the state's Rumford Fair Housing Act, which banned racial discrimination in home sales and apartment rentals. In 1959, when the Legislature voted to allow interracial marriage in California, Leno said, it came in the face of a nationwide 1958 Gallup Poll that showed better than 90 percent of white voters were opposed to allowing blacks and whites to marry.

If only we had a Governor who was sophisticated enough to know that you don't put civil rights to a popular vote.  Leno for Governor 2010!