OK. It’s official. David Leonhardt is a convert, even one who can’t quite leave his past behind. In is NY Times selection for Economics book of the year he picks Shannon Brownlee’s Overtreated. (If you want to hear me and Shannon having a good gossip about the American health care system, see here).

Leonhardt can’t quite shake his Stephen Colbert-like past (the market has spoken so it must be true). He still says this:

As I’ve written before, there is nothing wrong with devoting a large chunk of our economy to medical care. Since the 1950s, doctors have made incredible progress against diseases that were once inevitably fatal. That progress is probably the finest human achievement of the last half century. If we weren’t wasting so much money on overtreatment, it would be a lot easier to repeat the achievement over the next half century.

Of course, and it’s been pointed out ad nauseam here, those results were achievable at a much lower cost than we’ve paid, and the difference could have been spent on something with a higher economic return (or in invading any middle eastern countries we haven’t got to yet).

But it’s great to have Leonhardt on board, at least for the Wennberg thesis. Now he just has to convince the rest of the NY Times editorial board.

The National Federation of Independent Business, which says it has 350,000 members with active lobbyists in 50 states, warned politicians and policy makers on Wednesday not to impose new health-benefit obligations on small employers. The group said in a statement of principles that “a health care system built on employer mandates or on pay-or-play taxes is unacceptable.”

***

In its statement of principles the federation called for universal health care, with a government safety net to help the neediest obtain coverage. But it opposed proposals to place health care under an umbrella of Medicare-style “single payer” financing. Government safety nets should not be allowed to “crowd out private insurance and care,” the federation said.

Yup, it’s the math challenged folks at the NFIB staking out their territory–hating the current system, fraudulently demanding universal health care and opposed to any solution.

The incredible thing is that a single pool/social insurance system would be incredibly positive for small business—especially if based on progressive taxation. First, the number one impediment to people starting small businesses is job-lock due to fears over losing health insurance. Second, most small businesses don’t make that much money, so a social insurance scheme would only “hurt” the very few very wealthy small business people. Somehow that group manages to politically dominate the discourse at the NFIB—when they’re not shilling for the richest families in America, that is.

My real analysis of the NFIB was done over at Spot-on last year. It’s well worth a read as it spells out the math on why a universal health care system funded by progressive tax would be a godsend for most small businesses. But sadly they just can’t ideologically get their heads around it.

Every so often I read an article that (I hope) confirms what we know is right. Remember “Trading
Places”? Dan Akroyd is stripped of his upper-class environment and fails. Eddy Murphy is plucked form the gutter and succeeds, and the experiment “proves” that it’s “nurture not nature.”

In this op-ed, All Brains Are the Same Color, psychology professor Richard Nisbett shows that IQ scores are remarkably influenced by the environment in which kids are brought up, and race has basically nothing to do with it. After he demonstrates that fairly conclusively, Nisbett gets to the punchline:

What do we know about the effects of environment?

That environment can markedly influence I.Q. is demonstrated by the so-called Flynn Effect. James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors. And if such factors could produce changes over time for the population as a whole, they could also produce big differences between subpopulations at any given time.

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On November 24, 2007 Senator Clinton announced her "Plan to Help Children and Families Affected by
Autism." While the Senator should be commended for finally paying attention to the
issue in her presidential campaign and while other candidates should take note, her plan isn’t really a plan at all.

The "plan" calls for spending 700 million dollars to primarily fund research "to identify
causes of autism and monitoring its impact across the country. The Combating Autism Act of 2006, which Clinton co-sponsored, appropriates 500 of that 700 million. Therefore, the plan really only calls for an additional 200 million. Meanwhile, not one penny of that original 500 million has been spent.  Perhaps the Senator needs
to look first into seeing that her original policy gets implemented.
In fact, Senator Clinton should lead the charge in Congress to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act(IDEA); this would go a long way in solving the issue of "encroachment" that
school districts across the nation are facing.

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Susan Blumenthal updates us on World Aids Day which was last Saturday.