While the Administration head fakes and declares the public option “dead” (meaning it either won’t come to life quite as soon as they had hoped, or perhaps that it will but will be “private” in the most technical sense imaginable), others in the dextrosphere and beyond advocate competing reforms of their own. Many good ideas there, but I think they can be distilled to three:

1. Remove the tax code provisions that favor employer-paid health care over health care paid for by the individual.
2. Don’t buy insurance to cover risks you can afford to bear yourself.
3. Don’t sell “insurance” to cover “risks” that are certain to happen.

The first issue is a tax problem so simple even Congress could fix it. That is to say, they could “fix” it if they were serious about “fixing” health care in the sense that you take your car to get it “fixed,” rather than their current interest in “fixing” it more in the sense of “I’ll fix that dirty, rotten so-and-so.” Currently, health insurance provided by your employer is tax-free from square one, while health insurance and health services paid for by you only become tax deductible above 7.5% of your AGI. I have yet to hear anyone articulate a sound (or even unsound) reason why that should be so. Remove that disparity, and now it’s just as cheap for you and your employer to negotiate whether you want it to provide more health benefits, or less health benefits and cash instead. If employers can negotiate group rates that make it worthwhile to get health benefits from work without today’s tax advantage, great. If they can’t, we’ll take the extra cash and use it to buy our own health insurance, thankyouverymuch.

The second issue is not limited to tax or public policy. People are risk-averse, and have a tendency to buy overpriced extended warranties on electronics that will become obsolete, and pay higher premiums to avoid deductibles on the insurance policies they legitimately need. Insurance, like gambling, is a losing bet in the long run; the casino always wins. Whatever insurance you buy, find out that company’s loss ratio. That’s how much you can expect to get back on your dollar, and trust me, it will be south of 100%.^* A losing bet makes sense if you’re buying peace of mind to protect you against those risks which, while remote, would utterly wipe you out of they materialized. But if you’re insuring against risks that would merely annoy you and/or set you back a bit, you’re a sucker. In a word, buy “stuff that would kill me insurance,” not “stuff that sucks insurance.” Lots of things suck. Deal with it.

As to the third point, let me start by saying that while the fact that a purported “insurance” contract covers services you are certain to need may strain the definition of “insurance,” that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad idea. The question is, does your “insurance” offer you some other, non-insurance reason to go through a health care insurer? If your HMO can negotiate a volume discount you’d never get on your own, or if it can negotiate other terms that are more favorable to its members than to the general public, that might be a reason to use a health insurer for routine medical care as well as catastrophic risks. But if these reasons aren’t there, you’re probably better off going it alone, and only insuring against catastrophic medical conditions that would otherwise wipe you out.

Which brings me to the subject line: health savings accounts. If your employer offers one, look into it. It’s the closest thing to free enterprise medicine there is … for now?

^*Interestingly, some insurers do have a combined ratio above 100%, which sounds like they should be losing money, but they aren’t because they make up the difference in investments. The expenses don’t help you as a consumer, though; only the loss component makes it back to you.

The latest hysteria on driving and cell phones is that talking on a cell phone while driving is supposedly just as dangerous as driving under the influence. This claim is based on a series of recent studies purporting to show that drivers talking on cell phones are four times more likely than the rest of us to cause an accident. Matt Richtel of the New York Times puts it this way:

Extensive research shows the dangers of distracted driving. Studies say that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, and the likelihood that they will crash is equal to that of someone with a .08 percent blood alcohol level, the point at which drivers are generally considered intoxicated.

Note the insidious passive voice. Rather than having the guts to come out and say “I, Matt Richtel, personally consider a driver with a .08 BAC to be intoxicated because X, Y and Z,” he simply dodges the issue and makes “generally considered” by that unknown “them.” No need to back up the allegation; just label it as accepted wisdom and be done with it.

Mr. Richtel have backed up his generally considered accepted wisdom by noting that .08 as a threshold is the law in most states today. However, that’s a fairly development, which was fueled more by aggressive lobbying by neoprohibitionist MADD than by any actual scientific developments. As recently as 20 years ago, .15 was the norm in most states, and a driver with a BAC of only .08 would not have been considered legally drunk in any state (at least, not based on his BAC – if they can prove you’re under the influence, they can charge you on that basis no matter how low your BAC). Then we all went MADD in the 1990s and voilà, now every driver with a .08 BAC is now considered legally “drunk,” whether or not he is, in fact, drunk. And now that every state has followed suit (under intense coercion by the federal government, but never mind that) and some states are talking of twisting the screws even further, it’s now accepted wisdom that everyone with a BAC of .08 is drunk.

Here is where one hysteria fuels another. Now that we’ve redefined “drunk” to include a large segment of drivers who are not in fact drunk, cell phone alarmists can now argue that talking and driving is just as dangerous as driving “drunk.” Which is probably true, in a sense. Some drivers with a BAC of .08 really are drunk; presumably, they are the reason this class of “drunks” causes four times as many accidents as the rest of us. Many more of these de jure drunks are de facto non-drunks; presumably they account for the fact that .08 BAC “drunks” cause only four times more accidents than the rest of us, rather than the much larger differential one might expect if they were all truly impaired. Ditto for cell phone conversations; some of us keep our calls short, avoid topics that are likely to get us deeply engrossed in the conversation, and generally avoid talking on the phone at all when traffic conditions are tough. Others just get on the phone and gab away, paying little attention to surroundings. Guess which group is causing the accidents?

Lastly, the evidence does seem to be clear that hands-free devices, while handy, are useless when it comes to preventing distraction-related accident. The risk isn’t that you’ll see a road hazard and waste too much time ditching your phone. The risk is that you won’t notice the conditions at all until it’s too late. Returning one last time to the tired DUI analogy, states that ban drivers from using hand-held cell phones while allowing them to use hands-free ones makes about as much sense as raising the DUI limit back to its traditional .15 threshold for those who drink fine wine or premium beer, while lowering it to .05 for those who drink Thunderbird or Coors.

Michael Medved argues that the phrase “abortion rights” is biased in favor of abortion because the use of the word “rights” presupposes that abortion is in fact a right. I say, the language police has made a false arrest. For one thing, abortion is a right, both as a matter of state law (recall that even famously anti-abortion South Dakota rejected two separate referenda to outlaw elective abortion in recent years), and, courtesy of a string of screwball court decisions dating back to Roe (or, arguably, Griswold), as a matter of “constitutional” law, as well, so it is indeed reasonable to debate whether abortion should be a right, it would strain logic to argue that it isn’t. Second, as polarizing as the abortion issue is, it’s damned near impossible, if not impossible, to describe that controversy in any terms that won’t manage to piss someone off. Calling abortion rights advocates “pro-abortion” pisses them off because they supposedly don’t support abortion, only a woman’s right to choose one (unless that woman happens to reside in China, in which case they support the Chinese government’s right to choose it for them). And of course it doesn’t help when pro-lifers and pro-choicers call their respective enemies “baby killers” or “anti-choice.”

I say, either call both groups by their own preferred designations (pro-life vs. pro-choice) or call them both by a single, objective, neutral term that neither side would necessarily choose for itself, but which neither could seriously argue is inaccurate, either. “Abortion rights” would seem to meet that standard. After all, it’s not as though we’re arguing over what is or isn’t an abortion (OK, maybe in some cases, but not generally). We’re arguing over what rights pregnant women, their unborn children, the fathers, and society in general should have with respect to abortion.

I suppose I should support this proposal, as California’s budget really is a mess and the next idea may be worse, e.g., a tax on expatriates who renounced their citizenship three years ago. Still, at the risk of mixing potheads and logic, I’m curious as to how this is supposed to work. Nadene Herndon non-explains:

We’re marijuana consumers. Instead of being treated like criminals for using a substance safer than alcohol, we want to pay our fair share.

Hate to break it to ya, toots, but until the law changes, at the federal and state levels, you are criminals. Not saying you should be, just noting tautologically that the law is, um, the law. No law, however, prevents anyone from paying the state whatever amount they think their fair share is, so any pothead who wishes to help with the budget (and hasn’t frittered his money away on pot) is free to do so now.

As to “safer than alcohol,” let’s just say that while weed may be less likely to *kill* you, it’s more likely to harm you in other ways, such as making you eat too much or destroying your … um … I forgot … oh yeah, memory. And while moderate alcohol consumption has all sorts of apparent health benefits, there’s no evidence that any amount of mota is good for you.

Lastly, the notion that a tax on weed could ever make a significant dent on the California budget is laughable. What do these people think marijuana would go for on the market if it were just another legal plant? Would they tax it at an insane rate to match today’s black market prices, thereby preserving the black market as a competitor (and all the victimful crimes that go with it)? Or would they tax it like alcohol, in which case they’d barely generate any revenue?

Patrick Tracy Burris compiled a rap sheet a mile long in five states (Florida, North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia) before murdering 5 innocent people in a sixth (SC), and finally committing suicide-by-cop in the state that enabled all five killings by allowing him out on parole. State Law Enforcement Division Reggie Lloyd waved a copy of his criminal record in a press conference saying “Look at this. This is like 25 pages. At some point the criminal justice system is going to need to explain why this suspect was out on the street.” No kidding, particularly given that the principal offense he was serving time for was being an habitual felon. If being an “habitual” anything doesn’t disqualify one from parole, what on earth does? And why do we never hear from the people on the parole board in cases like this? Shouldn’t journalists be on them like white on rice, asking them what on earth they were thinking then, and why they still consider themselves fit to serve on parole boards now?

Meanwhile, during that same week, in some small California town you’ve never heard of, a 63-year old peach farmer was found alive and well by his wife when she returned home after running some errands. Four days following that non-incident, an 83-year-old woman in the same community invited her 50-year-old daughter over for tea. The two had a friendly chat, during which no one broke in, tied them up, shot them to death or disturbed them in any way. And the day after that, some middle aged man and his 15-year-old daughter worked at their family business, which they closed down for the day at the usual time without incident to re-open the next day. All because California’s answer to Patrick Tracy Burris is rotting in prison, courtesy of the much-maligned Three Strikes Law. We need that same law in the Tarheel State yesterday. And we owe our neighbors to the south a huge apology for the murders of five innocent people that we could and should have prevented.

I had originally planned a full-blown meta-fisking of JRM’s uncommonly silly fisking of Radley Balko’s recent Reason/Culture11 article on the war on drugs, but I see Radley himself has beat me to the punch and made most of the points I would have made (and some that I did make, namely that the mere fact of overall police shootings being down since 1996 is congruent with the overall drop in crime being down for the same period, not evidence for or against Radley’s premise). And Radley doesn’t need me to defend him; after all, he’s got the traffic while I’m just some dim-witted, quick-tempered, angry douchebag that nobody reads.

So rather than defending Radley (though he’s clearly got the better argument here) I’ll just say this: drugs have become a religion on both sides. On the one hand, drug prohibitionists have an annoying tendency to ignore the fact that prohibiting a substance causes the price to skyrocket, thereby creating the motive underlying most “drug-related” crime. On the other, legalization and decriminalization advocates have an equally annoying tendency to ignore the fact that repealing the prohibition (or reducing enforcement efforts) on that same substance would cause the price to plummet, thereby causing recreational use (and, inevitably, abuse) to increase. It seems as though one side of the debate can’t wrap its head around the law of supply and demand, while the other fails to grasp the law of … errrr … supply and demand. For those who do understand that raising the price of anything is bound to deter someone from doing it, it seems to me there are only three defensible positions on the legalization or prohibition of any particular drug, to wit:

1. Drug X [a variable, not a nickname for Ecstasy or any other particular drug] is so bad that it is worth reducing our civil liberties and accepting more violent crime in return for fewer people using it.
2. Drug X is bad, sure, but most people who don’t use X now have the good sense to stay away from it even if it were legal and as cheap as aspirin, so saving 3 addicts a year is NOT worth reducing our civil liberties and accepting all that crime associated with the black market.
3. Drug X is very bad, and banning it almost certainly benefits society on balance by any objective measure, but dammit, this is still supposed to be a free country, and if people want to muck up their own lives without hurting others, that’s nobody’s business but their own. [See this comment for a mirror image of this argument.]

Note that I deliberately set this up on a drug-by-drug basis, to reflect that some drugs are far worse than others. A rational person could, for example, take the view that all currently illicit drugs are bad for you, but marijuana isn’t bad enough to be worth the costs of prohibition, while cocaine probably is and PCP almost certainly is. But I don’t think there are any other rational options as to any particular drug. Do you?

Justin Levine, who considers himself too good for comments, has a nevertheless interesting post on the difficulty of being a free market advocate these days, at least when discussing financial markets. I don’t know where I come down on the bailouts, but I do know enough to take issue with his comments about insurance:

Here is an illustrative example: Like many states, California requires you to purchase car insurance in order to drive a car.

I trust that by “many,” Justin means “nearly all.” I’m only aware of three states that don’t require drivers to carry liability insurance (NH, VA and WI) and one of those three (VA) requires non-insured drivers to pay the state an annual driving-without-insurance fee instead. The reason is clear: driving without financial responsibility is irresponsible, as it puts others at risk, not just you.

However, there is no socialized car insurance industry.

Ever try running an auto insurance company?

You have to purchase the insurance from private players who are usually able to set their own prices and terms for their product.

I trust that by “usually,” Justin means “never.” Auto insurers in California can’t sell any insurance product without filing the rates and forms with the Department of Insurance, who in turn has broad power to reject any rate they consider either too high or too low (and yes, rates do get bounced for being too low; this is part of the reason why even though A.I.G. is borderline-insolvent, its member carriers aren’t). And in the case of auto insurance, they can’t even approve a rate if they want to unless it is based entirely on the driver’s safety record, number of miles driven annually (which insurers currently aren’t even allowed to verify, though this will soon change under PAYD), the number of years driving experience, and other factors the DOI has already approved by regulation, in that order. And don’t even get me started on the Good Driver law, which all but commits the insurer to covering a particular driver “till death do us part.”

Had it not been for this law, there would have been many periods in my life where I would not have bought insurance (because my car was a worthless piece of junk, and my personal assets weren’t all that much either — so it made economic sense for me to forgo insurance and risk the costs associated with a potential accident).

So now that you have a government law/regulation forcing you to buy a product from a private industry, does it make more sense to have the government thoroughly regulate the prices and policies of that industry to make sure that the consumer is protected from predatory market practices that the government has encouraged with its initial regulation? I say yes. For this reason, I’m glad that there is a California Insurance Commissioner that helps regulate the industry.

There are many good arguments for regulating the insurance industry, but the fact that a few discrete types of insurance are mandatory under certain circumstances is not one of them. Unless, of course, Justin is seriously contending that the DOI should have authority to regulate auto liability insurance, but only up to the amount required by law, while allowing pure capitalism for all risks above the minimum amount, along with laissez-faire comprehensive and collision coverage, regulation-free homeowners insurance (routinely required by lenders, but not by the government), free-wheeling health insurance (the DOI doesn’t regulate this in California, but the DMHC does, and somebody regulates it in every state), untrammeled malpractice insurance, and no regulations on almost any other kind of insurance except maybe mortgage insurance, and then only to prevent lenders from deliberately choosing policies with exceedingly high rates since they know they won’t have to pay anyway.

But I know many who would say no. They seem to argue that as long as there is “competition” among several insurance carriers, the law forcing you to buy insurance doesn’t constitute enough of an unfair market distortion for consumers such that it warrants further government regulation. [There are also a few nitwits who would actually argue that I can just make the “free market economic choice” to not drive in Southern California. Those people and I are simply on different planets when it comes to arguing economic policy.]

Not sure why those who oppose mandatory liability insurance in principle are not a completely different planet than those who openly admit they would have chosen not to carry liability insurance themselves, but if anyone who isn’t too good for comments can think of a coherent explanation why, I’d love to hear it.

Full disclosure: I work for an auto insurance company.

the L.A. Times has an interesting article on partial DNA searches, prompting three posts by Patterico (so far) and others by Eugene Volokh and Radley Balko. In a nutshell, John Puckett was convicted in 2004 of raping and murdering Diana Sylvester in 1972, mostly on account of a partial DNA match. Like many of the older DNA cases, it wasn’t possible to run a full DNA match, which is essentially failsafe, but just a partial one, which has roughly a 1 in 1.1 million chance of matching the wrong person.

Sounds pretty damning, doesn’t it? I mean really, if the odds of a false match are really 1.1 million to one, what are the chances they matched the wrong guy? Pretty high, actually, if you searched 1.1 million times. Buy enough lottery tickets, and you will win. In Puckett’s case, they didn’t search 1.1 million records but did search 338,000, resulting in roughly one-in-three odds that someone would get falsely matched, or about 1 in 4 that exactly one person would. The actual odds are a bit lower than that once you control for the uncertain odds that the killer was in fact in that database; presumably, if he was, he certainly would have gotten a hit, while the odds are only 1 in 3 that a second person also would have. Only one person was matched, so we can be certain that either Puckett was matched because he was the killer, or he got unlucky based on 1 in 4 odds, times whatever the odds were that the killer was not in the database. Without knowing the odds of the killer being in the database it’s tough to say how serious that error was in Puckett’s case, but easy to say exactly how serious it is in any case like Puckett’s where we don’t know for a fact that the defendant was the only match (or the only match to a person who doesn’t have a 100% airtight alibi): 1 in 3.

Some would argue that a partial DNA match that shows 1 in 1.1 million odds against a previously identified suspect, but only 1 in 3 odds against a suspect for whom the DNA semi-match was itself the basis of the suspicion, should not be admissible in court. I disagree. Anything that says you’re twice as likely to be guilty as innocent is highly probative of the charge. It is crucial, however, that such evidence be presented for what it is: enough to make you think he likely did it, but without other, unrelated corroborating evidence, not nearly enough to extinguish reasonable doubt.

I should note that the same math problem, known as the “prosecutor’s fallacy,” likely occurs every day even with full DNA matches. There, the error is equally lame in theory but harmless in practice. Without knowing exactly how long the odds have to be in order to surpass reasonable doubt, I am pretty confident that that number is somewhere north of 3 but south of 1 million. So if a prosecutor tells you that the odds of a false full match are 1 in 1 quintillion, but neglects to tell you that he found the guy by combing through a database of 1 million individuals, all that means is that the odds have fallen “all the way down” to 1 in 1 trillion. No big whoop.

California’s home schooling laws have sucked for as long as I can remember, but a lot of people are just now figuring that out. The Governator wants to amend the laws in question. Great idea, if he can pull it off. Otherwise, Californians who wish to home school their children basically have three options:

1. Flout the law, but do a better job raising and educating your kids than the Long family appears to have done for theirs, and trust that the Education Police will have more important things to do rather than go after you.
2. Waste a few thousand dollars and a year of your life taking worthless education classes to get a teaching credential.
3. Take advantage of a little-known U.S. immigration law that allows all Californians to immigrate here without a visa.

There’s been a fair amount of buzz in the blogosphere, with varying quality. Over at Q and O, Dale Franks has a pretty good piece, while his co-blogger McQ has a downright loopy one. Gabriel Malor strains logic conclude the law is no big deal since parents are free to file a “private school affidavit” the state is under no obligation to accept, and probably won’t. By that logic, he might as well argue that DC’s handgun ban is no big deal, either, as any DC resident can possess a handgun by becoming a cop.

Two questions for those who argue that waterboarding isn’t torture:

1. Would you support waterboarding as a punishment for any crimes?
2. If not, why not?