Timely news on a passing....

The death of Michael Jackson led to the artist having the top three selling albums. He doesn't top the Billboard Top 200, since catalog albums are ineligible for that chart, but this was the first time in history a catalog title was the top-selling record in the country. One of those three albums was Thriller. That surprises me; doesn't everyone already own that album? (I bought last year's 25th Anniversary edition, last year.)

Meanwhile, Iowahawk memorializes the passing of a similar superstar:

Millions of fans from around the globe gathered along Sunset Boulevard to pay final respects to California today, as a slow moving funeral procession transported the eccentric superstar state's remains to its final resting place in a Winchell's Donuts dumpster in Van Nuys. The self-proclaimed 'King of Pop Culture' died last week at 160, in what coroners ruled an accidental case of financial autoerotic asphyxiation. The death sent shock waves across the world and sparked an outpouring of grief by rabid fans.

As always, it's Iowahawk, so read the whole thing!

Keeping perspective

Printed in its entirety is one of the entries from a past weekly politics summary from The Economist.

Britain complained to the United States that it was not consulted about a deal under which four men held at Guantánamo Bay were sent as refugees to Bermuda, a British territory. Hundreds of locals demonstrated against the decision to admit the men, all Uighurs from western China. The Uighurs went fishing.

Health care issues discussed

For those with a true interest in learning the details of health insurance, and the various tradeoffs that come with goals like universal coverage and restricting underwriting, take a look at the issue papers released by the nonpartisan experts at the American Academy of Actuaries. The fact that there are tradeoffs is something that should be mentioned from Day 1 of any debate on the health care issue.

The first step to fix health care

Virginia Postrel makes a sensible suggestion, similar to something I've long thought.

"Nearly 30 percent of Medicare’s costs could be saved without adverse health consequences."

The report also suggests that we know what the problems are, listing the usual suspects:

We spend a substantial amount on high cost, low-value treatments.
Patients obtain too little of certain types of care that are effective and of high value.

Patients frequently do not receive care in the most cost-effective setting.

There is extensive variation in the quality of care provided to patients.

There are many preventable medical errors that lead to worse outcomes and higher costs.

Our system is complex and we have high administrative costs.

Think about this for a moment. Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let's see what "better management" looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country.

This is not a completely cynical suggestion. Medicare is, for instance, a logical place to start to design better electronic records systems and the incentives to use them. But you do have to wonder why a report that claims that Medicare is wasting 30 percent of its spending thinks it's making a case for making the rest of the health care system more like Medicare.

Many massive government programs are sold in this manner. For example, in the Medicare prescription drug coverage debate, you might remember a suggestion that giving someone a drug now would prevent an expensive surgery later. That is certainly true in some cases, but if you give 50 million people $1000 in drugs and prevent 1000 surgeries costing $100,000, is that really sensible?

So, before we turn over health care to the same group that ruins health care for our veterans, let's implement the many suggestions for making health care more efficient and which will decrease medical errors. Let's compare the savings we observe over, say, three years, to government predictions of savings. If they're off by more than 20%, this current administration should shelve its goals, because they will have been demonstrated to have failed.

(I recognize that these savings may be hard to measure. But even so, these successes should be obvious enough to sell the Democrats' vision. However, that will only apply if the successes are real.)

As an addition to this debate, please read this article by Postrel, and how she's glad to have lived in the American health care system, over a particular state-controlled system.

The Chicago way

Many people around the blogosphere (I'm using Gateway Pundit here) are reporting that a suspicious number of the closed Chrysler dealers are Republican supporters, or supporters of Obama's opponents. That dealerships should close is expected, but these closures don't appear to be tied to market saturation or lack of profitability.

How will die-hard Obama supporters spin this one?

Glee

Watched the debut of this new Fox series. It looks promising. The debut following the final episode of American Idol makes sense, given the show's topic, and the decision to release versions of the songs performed by the cast on the series will hopefully be profitable for the network, iTunes, and the songwriters alike.

The biggest surprise was hearing a fairly obscure song, and a song I like (Annie's Chewing Gum) used in one of the scenes.

Edit: Billboard Magazine, in its May 30 issue, has an interview with one of the show's creators. It mentions that first episode included an incredible 20 songs. That's a lot of rights to secure!

Still want to blame the mortgage industry?

Since I first posted about Edmund Andrews' book, more information has come out about the author, namely that his second wife filed for bankruptcy, then a second time, almost as soon as she legally could.

Andrews has been admirably open about many of the poor decisions and the wishful thinking that led him deep into debt. Nonetheless, he has laid much of the blame onto irresponsible bankers and mortgage brokers. The missing bankruptcies substantially undermine this basic narrative arc of Andrews' story. Particularly in his book, the bankers are the villains, America's current troubles are the inevitable denouement of their maniacal greed, and the Andrews household stands in for an American public led, by their own greed and longing and hopeful trust, into the money pit.

It's hard to argue that Ms. Barreiro was forced into bankruptcy by crazed subprime mortgage lenders in 1998. Greedy bankers certainly didn't keep her and her first husband from paying their taxes.

Megan McArdle is keeping up with the story, and has Andrews' response, and a response of her own, in a later post.

One person's financial crisis

Megan McArdle points to this New York Times article about a economics reporter who got in economically over his head. An expensive house with a liar loan, spending on overpriced luxuries, overdraft protection, paying one credit card with another... it's all there.

Megan comments that writers and journalists are particularly impacted by a need to live a high status life with an income that's certainly not high.

This is what David Brooks calls "status-income disequilibrium", and unless you are among that happy breed of writers who is married to someone with a high-paying job, or who has a trust fund, you feel it keenly. Everyone you write about makes more than you. Most of the people you know make more than you. And you come to feel that shopping at the farmer's market, travelling to Europe, drinking good coffee, are minimum necessities. Your house is small, your furniture is shabby, and you can't even really afford to shop at Whole Foods. Yet you're at the top of your field, working for one of the world's top media outlets. This can't be so.

This post is most worth reading for the comments. Megan's commenters are absolutely brutal, mostly criticizing this $120,000 a year professional for his horrible decisions (divorce, not talking finances with his new wife, buying a house they couldn't afford, etc.). I agree with them, since I'm in the opposite situation.

Consider I'm not married, living in a home less than 2x salary, with no credit card debt, money in retirement accounts, a cushion in the bank, etc. My main TV dates back to college, and is nearly 15 years old. I keep computers for about 6 years. I have a lightweight jacket that I had in high school. These are all things that function just fine, and don't need to be replaced. But even when I do spend money, I do it sensibly.

For my avocation of playing role-playing games, there are weekend-long conventions across the country, where players can gather to play these games. (GenCon is the biggest and best-known.) I could attend one pretty much every weekend, with a smaller number being more desirable, as they run brand new events. But the reality of cost intrudes on the fantasy of role-playing games.

Conventions have entry fees and ticket costs that vary, but might run from $20 for an event at a college, $40 for a larger event, and $70-$100 for the largest. But travel costs, particularly hotel costs, could significantly add to that.

In college, I was normally restricted to local events, day trips only. Only when I could find a group of people willing to share a hotel room, four to a room, could I afford to go to an out-of-town event for the weekend.

Just out of school, I could afford to travel to more events, even flying to some when reasonable airfare was available. But I attended those events where lodging costs were low. That could be staying with friends or family, getting a group for the hotel, or taking advantage of free rooms for volunteering for a majority of the convention. (Someone has to run so 4-6 people can play.)

As my income increased, I could better afford to travel, even being able to eat the cost of a solo hotel room. But I didn't spend like this when I was earning a fraction of my current salary. I was raised far better than that.