The Shallow End of the Information Pool

I'm getting very tired of journalists who don't understand insurance and don't understand websites, yet feel free to write authoritatively, or at least pompously, about health care reform.

Here's David Brooks in the Times today:  "Obamacare, as originally envisioned, mandated that people join the system in order to redistribute money from the healthy and young to the sicker and older."

That's true as far as it goes, Dave.  But what about a 22-year-old man who gets blind drunk one Saturday night and on the way home drives his car into a telephone pole?  Is he better off with health insurance or without health insurance?

When I was at Cigna there was a million-dollar baby getting ready to hit the lifetime coverage limit.  Without coverage, the baby was going to die.  Is the baby old?  No, just sick.

(While I'm at it, is it a good thing that we got rid of lifetime coverage limits?  Or a bad thing?)

Insurance spreads risk across the entire risk pool.  Yes, older people are more likely to have predictable -- and expensive -- chronic conditions.  It is also the case that many of the sick old are over 65 and on Medicare, which means they are not part of the Obamacare risk pool.

Bottom line:  everybody benefits from having health insurance.

Maybe Lying Is Starting to Stop Working

Nearly ten years ago I had a car accident. My wife and I had just finished bringing the groceries into the house.  I got in the car to put it in the garage.  This involves driving several blocks, so I pulled up and stopped at the intersection, where there was a red light.  I was in the left lane.  In front of me, straddling two lanes, was a contractor's truck.  He was well forward of where he should have been, across the crosswalk, and poking a bit into the intersection.

We in Philadelphia are accustomed to shoddy driving, particularly by contractors.  I didn't think much of it.  Then the truck -- we still had a red light -- began to move.  Backwards.  Quite rapidly.

"I didn't want to block the box," he told me after he'd buckled a good part of the right side of my car.  Philadelphia had recently started a public information campaign about not blocking intersections.

We traded insurance information.  I called the police.  He left before the police arrived -- you can do that in Pennsylvania. I figured it was no big deal, since he'd already admitted that he was at fault.  The police report had my story.

And then, a few days later, I learned that his story had changed.  He hadn't moved.  I ran into him.  I spent a fair amount of time on the phone with my insurance company and his.  They both said it was his word against mine.  The arbitration split the costs between us, and I was out a couple of hundred unnecessary dollars. 

I've known my insurance agent for a very long time.  He tried to comfort me.  He told me that, in the insurance world, people lie with great frequency.  I actually knew that.  It had just never happened to me before.  I confess I was a bit stunned.

Lying, of course, is not confined to car accidents in Philadelphia.  Indeed,  it has become a major spectator sport.  I sometimes think that it will replace baseball as the national pastime.

Just look at National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who told Congress that the NSA wasn't doing massive data sweeps on American citizens.  Then Edward Snowden proved him wrong.  And Clapper apologized, saying he had responded to a question with the "least untruthful answer possible."

There's something about a personal declaration of moral bankruptcy. 

It's not just the Obama administration.  Apparently there's now an anti-Obamacare web video that shows Uncle Sam peering between a woman's legs at a gynecologist's office.

This from the people who brought us the state-mandated transvaginal ultrasound.  And so add hypocrisy to the charge of mendacity.

There's an old song from the Vietnam War, "The Ballad of the Green Berets."  I never liked it, because it's pretty jingoistic.  But there's a line in there -- "Men who mean just what they say."

I'm comforted by the thought that lying may be starting to stop working.  My contractor with his truck gouged me for a few hundred bucks, and got away with it.  Mr. Clapper will keep his job -- apparently lying to Congress is okay if you have the right job.  But the NSA's whole surveillance program is under serious assault, and American intervention in Syria is quite dead -- a casualty of George W. Bush's lies about Iraq.  Obamacare seems quite healthy, despite the assaults.  The budget battles continue, and the cover stories are unraveling.

Joseph Goebbels, one of the leaders of Nazi Germany, popularized the theory of the big lie:  Say something really wacky, and keep saying it, and sooner or later people will start to believe you.

I think that's over.  Or at least, I think it's beginning to be over.

Send in the Englottogastors

I’ve hated the term wordsmith since I first saw it in a help-wanted ad in the New York Times, probably in the 1960’s.  It wasn’t the reference to craft – I often analogize writing to carpentry.  It was the flatness of the term.  There’s no resonance.

They were defining us – the bosses and their HR lackeys.  All of them with exquisitely shiny tin ears.

So I’ve decided to fight back.  Fond as I am of writer, editor – speaker, even – these times call for stronger stuff.  So, let’s send in the englottogastors.  Let them cleanse us of the wordsmiths, and possibly also the content managers, the repurposers, the people who brought us the squiggly macron (which I believe once again is the tilde).

It’s quite a few years ago now that I first ran across the englottogastors in Aristophanes’ The Birds.  The term made me laugh then, and it still does.

I remember mentioning it at the time to my daughter, Alicia.  But I made a mistake.  I thought they were eglottogastors.  Alicia loved it.  Later, I had doubts, went back and checked the text, and brought her the news.  It didn’t go well.  She preferred eglottogastors.  Ten-year-olds can be like that.  (Alicia says, “I still think eglottogastors sounds better.”  Hey, I’m not arguing.)

Anyway, the englottogastors show up in line 1694 ff., where the chorus is saying mean things about people like Gorgias, who make their living by wagging their tongues, rather than working with their hands.

Gorgias was one of the first practitioners of something called rhetoric, the art of persuasion.  I personally think that Aristophanes felt somewhat threatened by these rhetoric people.  After all, they were muscling in on the territory of the playwrights, who’d had a pretty clear field up until then, when it came to the wordsmith thing.

Aristophanes clearly intended englottogastor as a term of opprobrium.  But the odd thing, if you think about it, is that Aristophanes was himself an englottogastor.  He filled his belly by wagging his tongue – or, more accurately, causing actors’ tongues to wag.

So I say, let’s adopt the term with pride.  Fix bayonets and charge.  The same thing the Obama people have done with Obamacare.

I think it can apply to anyone who makes a living working with words – writers, lawyers, politicians – actors, certainly. 

Let us rejoice in this ridiculous appellation.  I think I may even get some new business cards printed.