Month: March 2010

Questions For Our Jewish Readers

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So this meetup between Obama and Netanyahu didn’t go…er…so well, from what I am reading. Some things I read tell me that this may alienate Jewish voters from Obama in the next election, or from the Democrats in the midterms.

I don’t have a lot of contact with many Jewish folks here in the wilds of Wisconsin, so I would like to ask those who may have more daily interaction with those of the Jewish faith a few questions.

If you are Jewish, does this latest episode make you not want to vote for Obama/Democrats if you voted for them before? If you have friends that are Jewish, is this what you are hearing from them?

I think that relations will keep souring with Israel as Obama’s term goes on – do you think that this will affect him in the 2012 presidential election?

Thanks!

But the evidence is right there – right there! – in front of you.

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(paraphrasing a conversation)

Me: Hi, I’m calling about my AMA dues notice?
AMA representative: Yes?
Me: I’m not a member currently. I’d like to be removed from your mailing list, please. I don’t plan on becoming a member any time soon, so I don’t need the dues notices.
AMA representative: Okay.

****

From the AMA website a couple of days before the vote: “Washington, D.C. – After careful review and consideration, the American Medical Association (AMA) today announced its qualified support for the current health reform bill as a step toward providing coverage to all Americans and improving our nation’s health system.”

Also from the AMA website (where they have a counter “counting down” to the 21% Medicare Physician cuts with the admonition to “take action now”:)

“Resolving the problem now is the fiscally responsible course to take. Relying on past methods of postponing the immediate crisis will only increase the cost of a permanent repeal. Congress can no longer afford to kick the can down the road.”

Does anyone want to explain the above statement to me? Seriously, I’m trying to understand what the organization might mean with that statement about fiscal responsibility – as they ask members to call and complain about cuts to physician medicare payments. What was that about CBO scoring again? I’m a dunce at all of this, so I ask for help from the readership! It’s a real question….

Energy Futures Holdings (EFH) Revisited

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Energy Futures Holdings (EFH) is a large utility based in Texas that used to be TXU. They were taken over by private equity in one of the largest buyouts during the “peak year” of 2007. I wrote about them here as they began to have problems repaying their monstrous pile of debt which mainly comes due in 2014. If you go to this file on EFH’s web site and go to page 12 you can see the $20B in debt coming due on that date (EFH is privately held and thus does not have a stock ticker but since their debt is publicly held they do have analyst presentations).

The New York Times wrote an article on the EFH buy out titled “Power Players, Unplugged” on February 28, 2010. While we may take the NY Times to task from time to time on politics in general I find their business writing to be of high quality.

They sum up the deal as so:

The buyout was, in effect, a gargantuan bet that natural gas prices would keep climbing; instead, plunging prices coupled with a hobbled national economy have cut into the cash the company generates.

Investors who bought $40B of TXU’s bonds and loands – including legendary wise men like Warren Buffett – have seen huge losses as most of the bonds trade between 70 and 80 cents on the dollars. The other $8B used to finance the buyout came from the private equity investors themselves… analysts say that this latter stake currently has little value.

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Industry Leanings In Things Political

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Data analysis guru and fellow Pythonista Drew Conway of Zero Intelligence Agents linked to Ideological Cartography, a blog whose author, Adam Bonica, posts interesting visualizations of political data. This post (Ideologically aligned and ideologically divided industries) had some interesting visualizations of the left-right ideological leanings of people in various industries as revealed by their campaign contributions (all data is from 2008):

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Bubble-icious — American History and Political Subsidies

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As someone who’s written several times (here and here) about the course of modern health care (its inherent complexity and cost), I’ve been watching the latest moves in US health care funding with a great deal of interest.

From the introduction of antibiotics to the breakthroughs in transplant surgery, medicine in the 20th century was in a position to provide dramatic improvements in health care (both quality of life and length of life) at relatively modest cost. Many consider it a golden age in medicine. My personal belief is that medical care is about to hit another burst of creativity and success (but at much higher cost-to-benefit) as non-invasive imaging, micro-surgery, diagnostic testing, and DNA-propelled pharmaceutical customizations kick in. I may be wrong, but I think my beliefs are a reasonable extrapolation of the trends in medical care since the end of the 1970s “silver bullet” period of medicine.

So what do my guesses about modern medicine mean in a new era of greater tax subsidies for US health care? An era which, by necessity, must politicize health care further. It got me to thinking about the hidden subsidies during earlier periods of American history, powered by the domestic political systems of the time, and driven by citizen/voter appetites. And it got me thinking about the law of unintended consequences.

After a few minutes scribbling on the back of an envelope, I came up with the following:

US Bubbles Over Four Centuries

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