It is practically a sport in Sacramento to guess the future political path of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Today’s column by Dan Walters on that subject and the possibility of the governor challenging Senator Barbara Boxer in 2010 would be utterly unremarkable, but for the headline:

Dan Walters: Could we see Arnie vs. Barbie?

Barbie?!!!  Are you kidding me?  You just called a distinguished female Senator a plastic, vapid, biologically impossibly shaped children’s toy.  That is offensive not only to Senator Boxer, but all women.  It has no business appearing in the newspaper.

This is clearly coming from an editor at the Sacramento Bee, given that Senator Boxer is only called “barbie” in the headline of Walter’s column, not the body.  Amy Chance is listed as the Political Editor, however she told me via email that the copy desk writes the headlines.  My inquiry, as to who is responsible, is being passed along to the copy desk chief.  Hopefully, I will have a name eventually as to the actual person in charge.  However, this clearly had to pass by several people before making it into the paper.  The paper itself is responsible for the headline making to print, more than any one person.

What exactly is the Bee implying about the Senator?  Is it that she cannot stand up to that hunk of man, action star governor?  Is the Bee insulting her intelligence?  Or is it both?  The article mentions California’s other Senator, Diane Feinstein, who is also a woman.  Was this smear intended for both Senators, or just Senator Boxer?  Both of our Senators are both political trailblazers, having fought this kind of language since the beginning of their careers.  It is sad that in 2007, we are still seeing this type of language used to talk about women in political office.

The article is already prompting misogynistic comments.  SacBee user “pistach” has the top comment right now, below the article calling Senator Boxer an “air head”.  I guess a barbie’s head is hollow and thus is filled with air.  That makes sense.

This headline has no business in a respectable newspaper.  It is something I would expect to be coming from a right-wing blog trying to start trouble, not the Sacramento Bee.  I hope that the public editor, Armando Acuna, addresses this issue promptly.  You can contact him at  (916) 321-1250 and [email protected].  I have already contacted him and requested that the paper offer an official apology to Senator Boxer and air the issue publicly, as his responsibility as a public editor.  This was a severe error in professional judgement and one that should never be repeated.

(cross-posted from my recently neglected Ruck Pad)

My free two week trial to the SacBee’s CapitolAlert just expired.  It is time to take a look at what exactly they are offering and why this venture is doomed to fail.  I have to admit, I am a little reticent to actually write this, for fear they pick up on some of my criticisms and make the thing better.  See, I want them to fail.  Like most bloggers I despise paywalls.

The Bee, like most newspapers is attempting to find an online revenue model to make up for the declining revenue streams in print.  The impact of Craigslist, shrinking circulation numbers and other problems have been well documented.  Most newspapers are taking a long hard look at how they are going to survive.  The LAT has generated more than a few headlines with their own online shakeup, as of late.

The Bee decided to play to their strengths as a capitol area newspaper and make a buck on their political coverage.  The concept of creating premium coverage in itself is not a terrible idea, but I am of the strong opinion that there should be a way around the charge by watching an ad like Salon does.  I understand the need to make money and believe me, as a professional blogger, I really do rely on journalists for my work.

Not only did the Bee not create a way around the paywall, but they put the price point way outside of most people’s range.  Only lobbyists and organizations will be able to afford the $499 a year price tag.  Even then, I don’t believe that they have put together an attractive enough service to warrant paying even a 1/10th of that cost.

For $499 a year, you get the honor of getting an email every night at 8 pm that has a bunch of teasers from tomorrow’s newspaper columns.  You do not have the option of getting the full articles emailed to you, nor is there direct links to the articles in the body of the email.  It takes way too long to get to them.  If you are going to charge people that much money, there needs to be much more attention payed to convenience.  The morning email is no better.  I suspect that they fear that emails will be too easily forwarded around and they will lose out on potential customers, but I contend they will lose more by putting out a crappy product.

So, what else do you get for your $499 a year?  Well, they are yanking Dan Weintraubs’ ground breaking blog and placing it behind the paywall.  The immediate effect is that his readership will plummet.  While, he does often have unique tidbits of information, the current proliferation of reporter bloggers means that won’t happen all that often.  Anything that is really interesting behind that paywall will not take long to be spread around the rest of the blogs.  It only means a bit of a lag time.  I really do not have much confidence that Walters will really get into the new school of media and create unique content for the web.  Perhaps Weigand will have some gossip, but that is not particularly of interest of me.  The hiring of Shane Goldmacher means that we lose two reporter bloggers in this deal.  Then again, Salladay has come into his own, so I am not that worried.

The last thing that they are offering is a calendar and information on what is going on in and around the capitol.  Most political professionals already subscribe to the Capitol Morning Report, which is a quality publication that comes in an easy to read email every morning.  Everyone knows to send their information to them and it is unlikely that the CapitolAlert will surpass it, especially with their reticence to deliver their content in email form.  Their roundup of political coverage does nothing new from what Rough & Tumble does or Frank’s opinion collection.  In fact, I think it is less user friendly than both.

After using the service for two weeks, I have no desire to even figure out a way to get a log in to it.  I went back less and less each day.  It was just too hard to get at the content.  In the days of RSS readers and email subscriptions having to poke around through a bunch of links for not that much exclusive content just isn’t worth it.  They may have done a bunch of research and did some cute marketing, but this thing is a dud.

http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/31655.html

Appointed early in 2005 after former Secretary of State Kevin Shelley resigned under fire, McPherson has restored integrity, civility and order to an office that had descended into chaos under Shelley.

This is an unfortunate mistake from what I would otherwise view as the major newspaper of politics in this state. Somehow the certification of diebold voting machines that lots of people recognize as faulty isn’t a big deal for them. They say some nice things about his style, but McPherson’s substance is tainted.

The Sacramento Bee, despite the sad state of its Op-Ed columns, seems to do pretty well in its actual reporting.  For example, here’s a handy thumbnail sketch of the competing proposals for infrastructure spending. [Graphic will open in new window]

Now we know what the fuss is about, at least at a high level.

As a quick follow-up to my post about Daniel Weintraub’s self-insurance advocacy, I offer a challenge.  Weintraub’s employer has an editorial today concerning the price of health care:

Avistan as a colon cancer medicine has been costing about $50,000 a year. The cost of the same medicine as a breast and lung cancer treatment is expected to be $100,000 a year.

The dosage will be higher for these treatments, but the incremental increase in manufacturing cost is minimal. So what’s going on?

Genentech is signaling that the higher price to treat breast cancer reflects the higher value society places on fighting this disease. That’s different; the usual pharmaceutical industry response is that the high prices are necessary to recover the research and development costs.

That’s the free market in action, Mr. Weintraub.  Breast cancer is pricier than colon cancer.  Now, I don’t know anything about Mr. Weintraub’s financial situation, or his family’s.  But let’s imagine that his wife, mother, or sister is looking at a minimum $100K bill just for this pharmaceutical treatment for breast cancer.

I wonder if he’d so glibly to dismiss health insurance then?  Or is Mr. Weintraub’s family so rich that they would never feel a $100K bill for a drug?  If so, he doesn’t have much business lecturing the rest of us about how we ought to pay out of pocket for our medical care.

I’m beginning to understand the roles of the full-time Op-Ed writers at the Sacramento Bee. Dan Walters plays Dan Broder without the gravitas, while Daniel Weintraub plays a diet version of John Stossel. Today, we’ll have a quick look at Weintraub’s most recent oeuvre: an ode to his power to imagine a world without health insurance in response to Carole Migden’s introduction of a bill to require large corporations to provide health insurance.

Weintraub spends several paragraphs talking about how great the market is for delivering things like food, cars and houses, and painting a grim picture of how awful it would be if one’s employer controlled one’s access to those goods. That’s all true. The (regulated) market is really good at delivering those kinds of goods: lots of choices, fairly good information that regular folks can understand easily enough, prohibitions on adulteration and deceit, and generally, enough time to process the information one does get. One might note in passing that the regulation of these markets was fought hammer and tongs by the industries affected.

Then Weintraub gets to the nub of his argument:

[more on the flip]

While individuals once managed their health insurance themselves, paying for it out of their wages, employers began doing that for them during World War II as a backdoor way to increase compensation in an era of government-imposed wage and price controls. The custom stuck, the government rewarded it with tax breaks and today more than 60 percent of us have our health care managed through work.
…
Maybe, instead of trapping us into having our health care managed by others, we should emulate the ways we have more successfully provided food, shelter and transportation to almost everyone who needs it.

Individual choice. Individual responsibility. Voluntary transactions. And targeted help for the few who cannot afford to buy what they need on the wages they earn, with the burden of financing that assistance falling on all of society, not just on a few.

That all sounds great, don’t it? Forcing people to pay for their own medical care will provide great value for the dollar, and will keep prices down. Except that it’s utter hokum. First of all, Weintraub confuses the health insurance risk pooling allowed by the purchase of insurance through employers with “employer control”. While I’m not a fan of the current patchwork private insurance system, I hardly think that it amounts to “employer control”.

Second, the relevant markets for comparison are medical insurance vs. auto insurance and home insurance, not medical services vs. cars and houses. Medical services are potentially open-ended expenses that it’s hard to plan for. So are car accidents and fires. Cars and houses are known expenses that you can plan for; nobody buys “car-buying insurance” just in case someone unexpectedly forces you to own a new car.

You buy insurance in advance, because you don’t know when you’ll need it. The chances are that not everyone needs the payout at the same time, and the insurance company makes enough profit investing your money that it works for everyone. What employers provide with regard to medical insurance purchases is risk pooling and a form of bulk discount, neither of which you can get as an individual. In that sense, right at the outset, Weintraub’s comparison is inapt. People of moderate and more-than-moderate means do purchase their own medical insurance, either directly or risk-pooled through their employers. Poorer people get Medicaid, the elderly get Medicare (and supplemental insurance if they can afford it). That’s precisely the system that Weintraub proposes for spending on medical expenses, so apparently his whole beef is with the concept of health insurance.

Third, Weintraub pulls a classic Republican rhetorical trick: the hearkening back to the halcyon days of the Greatest Generation. Things were so much better back then. Except that medical science has advanced a great deal since 1941. We can do much more to save people with much more serious illnesses and injuries than we could in those golden-lit days of yore. And of course those new services mean that medical costs are higher. It’s not an apples to apples comparison to suggest that middle-class people can pay for the best medical service today (if they even could before World War II).

Last, if we were to compare apples to apples, medical spending is just plain different than most kinds of individual spending, even very large ticket items. It’s almost impossible to make truly informed decisions. The stakes are often life and death. The expenses are not optional.

• How much medical spending is too much? How much is too little? How do you know? Is that pain in your chest gas or a heart attack? Are you willing to bet your next mortgage payment on the answer?
• What is the best course of cancer treatment? The cheaper one, or the more expensive? You have to make that decision inside of a month, because your wife’s life depends on it. And so does your children’s college fund. And your house.
• Your son has a chronic illness. You can afford to pay for his care, but only by selling the house that your parents left to you. Of course, eventually you will become eligible for the subsidy that Weintraub believes the poor should receive.

Weintraub has an oddly active imagination. He imagines that health care is a largely optional service. He imagines that it’s possible for an individual heartsick with worry can be an informed consumer of health care, a field in which even the practitioners are hard-pressed to keep up with new developments. He imagines that health care costs would not bankrupt even upper middle-class families.

In fact, the only place that Weintraub’s imagination fails him is that he seems unable to imagine what it would be like for people to try to deal with a health emergency without insurance.