A study conducted by Morgan Stanley has found that healthcare insurance premiums are rising fast in the individual and small group market:

Health insurance premiums are showing the sharpest increases perhaps ever according to a survey of brokers who sell coverage in the individual and small group market. Morgan Stanley’s healthcare analysts conducted the proprietary survey of 148 brokers. The April survey shows the largest acceleration in small and individual group rates in any of the 12 prior quarterly periods when it has been conducted.

The average increases are in excess of 11% in the small group market and 12% in the individual market. Some state show increases 10 to 50 times that amount. The analysts conclude that the “increases are largely due to changes under the ACA.”

The analysts conducting the survey attribute the rate increases largely to a combination of four factors set in motion by Obamacare: Commercial underwriting restrictions, the age bands that don’t allow insurers to vary premiums between young and old beneficiaries based on the actual costs of providing the coverage, the new excise taxes being levied on insurance plans, and new benefit designs.

These increases are on top of those reported earlier in the year. It seems reasonable to suspect that large group premium prices will rise, too, if they ever stop being grandfathered in.

I think we should also consider the possibility that as premiums rise while fewer and fewer people are covered under self-insurance plans effectively giving breaks to the largest companies in the country will become increasingly difficult to justify politically.

Just when you’d gotten used to coping with strong Hindi accents on technical support lines:

NEW DELHI: Struggling to diversify the delivery footprint to take advantage of low-cost centres, India’s BPO industry is currently losing 70 per cent of all incremental voice and call centre business to competitors like Philippines and countries in Eastern Europe, says a report.

“It is estimated that in the ongoing decade India might lose $ 30 billion in terms of foreign exchange earnings to Philippines, which has become the top destination for Indian investors,” Assocham Secretary General D S Rawat said. Thus there is a need to reduce costs and make operations leaner across the BPO industry,” he added.

So now we’ll adjust to strong Filipino and Eastern European accents. I recall an incident, maybe a dozen years ago, in which after finding the accented English of the obviously Russian support person on the other end of the support line just too opaque I addressed him in Russian. The poor guy practically became hysterical.

Episodes of this kind

The Obama administration announced Monday that planned cuts to Medicare Advantage would not go through as anticipated amid election-year opposition from congressional Democrats.

The cuts would have reduced benefits that seniors receive from health plans in the program, which is intended as an alternative to Medicare.

Under cuts planned by the administration, insurers offering the plans were to see their federal payments reduced by 1.9 percent, which likely would have necessitated cuts for customers.

Instead, the administration said the federal payments to insurers will increase next year by .40 percent.

The healthcare law included $200 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage over 10 years, in part to pay for ObamaCare.

The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) on Monday said changes in the healthcare market meant it did not need to make those cuts to Medicare Advantage this year.

It cited an increase in healthy beneficiaries under Medicare, which it said has lowered projected costs for that program.

should cast real doubt on our ability to reduce the rate of increase of healthcare spending within the constraints of the current system. A shorter version of the plan is “don’t cut the benefits, just lower the projected costs”. This returns to the time inconsistency problem I mentioned yesterday.

Such a process also makes a number of assumptions, each of which should concern us. Broad discretionary executive power assumes that every conceivable future executive will agree with you. Future legislators will have motivations different than those of the present incumbents. It will be easier to make cuts in the future than it is now.

Another way of looking at the events described in the quoted passage is that healthier insureds than anticipated mean that fewer people will be hurt by benefit cuts than might otherwise be the case so it’s the perfect time to cut them.

Of course treating CMS’s explanation as substantive makes assumptions, too. It assumes, for example, that they weren’t just looking for a plausible pretext to avoid making the cuts. It also assumes that the pretext is plausible.

I can’t help but wonder if this episode:

Senate Democrats ripped former CIA Director Michael Hayden on Monday for describing Sen. Dianne Feinstein as “emotional,” calling Hayden’s remarks both a “baseless smear” and condescending.

Hayden on Sunday said the Senate Intelligence chairwoman may have been motivated by a “deep, emotional feeling” in her move last week to declassify a five-year investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation policies. He concluded the report may not be objective, though the report’s findings have not yet been been made public and Hayden said he hadn’t read it.

isn’t emblematic of a whole mindset in the military and CIA rather than just one of Republicans, as maintained by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The reality is that Sen. Feinstein is the superior of both generals and the CIA and, even more importantly, their patron. If anybody’s going to be condescending, it should be the other way around.

You just don’t treat your patrons that way. It’s as though the CIA thinks that it has some sort of claim on the public purse without any sort of oversight. I can understand how they might think that since that’s more or less the way it’s been throughout the organization’s history but it ain’t necessarily so.

In an op-ed at The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Mitchell makes an interesting proposal:

Rather than fixating on deficits and debt, I suggest another goal: Ensure that government spending, over time, grows more slowly than the private economy. Evidence from economies around the world shows this is the best path to bring down deficits and nurture prosperity.

He goes on to explain how it would work and cites the examples of how something like his proposal has worked in Canada, Sweden, and Germany, not exactly havens of anarcho-capitalism.

While I think his ideas have merit, I’m still skeptical as to their practicality. For one thing, I’m skeptical of any attempt at central planning. I don’t think they can ever be administered quite as well as their proponents believe.

Additionally, private sector growth is always an after-the-fact determination. How would he propose that the government deal with the inevitable miscalculations and is that politically possible?

Finally, how would his “Golden Rule” operate in cyclical downturns? He appears to want the operative words in his prescription to be “grows more slowly” but I think they’re actually “over time”. To me his proposal would require a very different balance between discretionary spending and entitlement spending than actually prevails.

I don’t think our most serious fiscal problem is that government grows during and immediately after recessions. I think it’s that government grows during and immediately after recessions, long after the recovery is well under way, while the recovery is peaking, and ever after.

I think there’s a name for all of this and it’s “time inconsistency”. What would motivate politicians to behave as he’d want them? Statesmanship? That’s a good one.

When I read this NYT op-ed, my immediate reaction, especially following hard on the heels of Paul Krugman’s spat with Nate Silver, was that the op-ed was more pushback against him. I recognize that it’s an op-ed and not an editorial but I also seriously doubt that the NYT publishes op-eds from any passing stranger. The selection of op-eds to run is as much a part of editorial policy as editorials are. Just as the news that they decide isn’t “fit to print” is.

Pretty obviously he’s got a lot of his former associates spooked. Why?

Check out this interview with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel in The New Republic. As I have no doubt made clear I do not hold the mayor in high regard and this interview should give some idea why.

I have grave reservations about parleying an unquestionable skill as a Democratic Party fundraiser into riches and power.

Update

Apparently, it’s not just right-wingers and centrists who have problems with the mayor. digby remarks:

Please let this be his last job in politics. Then he can go back to Wall Street where he belongs.

I feel so much better know that I know I’m not alone. Now if we can only persuade the voters of Chicago…

One of the last big stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood has died:

Mickey Rooney, a celebrated child actor who embodied the All-American boy in the “Andy Hardy” films of the 1930s and ’40s and became one of the era’s top box-office draws, has died. He was 93.

Rooney, whose roller-coaster show-business career was marked by an often-turbulent personal life, died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Police Commander Andrew Smith and the Los Angeles County coroner’s office confirmed his death.

Rooney’s daughter-in-law Charlene Rooney said the actor died of natural causes Sunday afternoon at the home he shared with her and her husband, Mark Rooney.

I can only think of a few remaining top box office stars from that period. Olivia de Havilland and Luise Rainer come to mind and, remarkably, they’re both older than The Mick.

Despite the Irish stage name he wasn’t an Irishman. He was a Scot—his dad was Scottish-born vaudevillean Joe Yule. According to my mom, who appeared in vaudeville at just about the same time as Mickey Rooney did, as a child actor Rooney started out doing impressions of his dad. I presume she was passing along her dad’s assessment.

I was never much of a fan of the Andy Hardy pictures or his musicals with Judy Garland. His performances were just too manic. He began to come into his own with National Velvet but by that time he was starting to put his ingenue roles behind him. Like many child performers his transition into adult roles was difficult.

IMO it wasn’t until his old age that his acting really shone in performances like that in Bill.

Like the trooper he was he worked right through to the end. There’s no better way for an old vaudevillean to go. We still have his performances from his heyday in the glow of our televisions in glorious black and white. Check out his performances as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Captain’s Courageous, and The Human Comedy. They’re some of his best.

Glenn Hubbard muses over why, despite the nonminal recovery, total employment is lagging so badly. He proposes a number of explanations, I think they’re all inadequate, and I’ll answer them in turn.

The Baby Boomers are retiring

Actually, the Baby Boomers are continuing to work in record numbers. They can’t afford to do otherwise:

“The fact of the matter is that this aging-but-not-yet-aged segment of the baby boomer class can’t afford to retire,” said David A. Rosenberg, the chief economist of Gluskin Sheff, a Canadian firm, noting that overall household net worth was 15 percent lower than at the prerecession peak. “Dreams of the 5,000-square-foot McMansion being a viable retirement asset have morphed into nightmares of a deflationary ball and chain.”

The accompanying charts show the percentage of various age groups with jobs since the end of 2006, when the overall percentage of people with jobs hit its cyclical peak. Each of the charts has a different range, but the same spread between the top and the bottom, so that a move of a given size represents the same gain or loss in percentage points.

For the first time since the government began keeping track of the numbers in 1981 — and probably the first time ever — one in nine American men over the age of 75 was working in April. About one in 20 women over that age have jobs.

Dr. Hubbard doesn’t believe that explanation, either:

A 2012 study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimated that about one-quarter of the decline in labor-force participation since the start of the Great Recession can be traced to retirements. Other economists have attributed about half of the drop to the aging of baby boomers.

Baby boomers can’t be the whole story, though, since the participation rate has declined for younger workers too.

There are too many malingerers

That the number of people who are on Social Security Disability has grown enormously over the last half dozen years is indisputable. Dr. Hubbard presents no evidence that those who’ve enrolled are fraudulent. He merely assumes it.

Quite to the contrary I think a better explanation is that SSDI is the unemployment insurance of last resort. The long-term unemployed who no longer qualify for unemployment insurance payments and who qualify for it go on disability as a desperate means of bringing some money into the household. Rather than proving that there are a lot of malingerers out there, I think it proves that a lot of people who are tired and sick just keep working anyway.

Inadequate schooling and training

There is practically no evidence of this. Dr. Hubbard merely takes the assurances of the multi-billionaires who want to hammer down the wages of their skilled workers by importing workers from overseas who’ll work for less and over whom they have a hold into the country.

If this were actually the case, you’d expect to see rising wages in the technology sector. That hasn’t been the case for years.

It’s also unclear to me how much effect this will have when in our cities 50% of kids don’t graduate from high school. The one thing we can be confident it will do is boost the incomes of people in the educational sector. Since Dr. Hubbard is the Dean of the Columbia School of Business that may appear to him to be an unqualified good. Increasing incomes in the educational sector are only good for the country as a whole if the sector is actually producing more education and the evidence for that isn’t particularly good. There’s actually more evidence that education has reach the point of bureaucratic displacement and less education is being produced for every dollar spent.

Bad policies

In this Dr. Hubbard and I are in agreement. The stimulus was poorly timed and structured. But let’s not limit the list of bad policies to bad economic policies. We have bad security policies, bad healthcare policies, bad trade policies, bad immigration policies, and bad financial policies.

Workers are discouraged

They should be. There are too many long-term unemployed and not enough jobs for them.

Here are Dr. Hubbard’s prescriptions:

1. Increase the Earned Income Tax Credit
2. Tax reform
3. Make it harder to receive disability payments
4. Stop extending the duration of unemployment insurance
5. Block grants to states to support training and educational development
6. Eliminate the “retirement earnings test”

I agree with #1, #2, and #5 and disagree with #3 and #4, both of which assume that Americans are lazy layabouts. I don’t think that #5 will do much to boost employment but it might make life a little easier for seniors in the second and third income quintiles.

To Dr. Hubbard’s list I would add:

1. Impose a duty on imports from countries who don’t have environmental and labor laws as strict as ours in the estimated amount of their cost to American businesses
2. Encourage energy production in the United States
3. Impose the commonsense reforms to immigration that I’ve mentioned around here any number of times.
4. Healthcare reform

Our trade deficit is around a half billion dollars a year. As I’ve mentioned before that’s a drastic underestimate since it doesn’t take into account intracompany transfers, many of which are in fact imports. Producing more here would mean more jobs here.

Manufacturing demands energy and, frankly, renewables don’t produce enough energy to meet the needs of manufacturing. Rather than discouraging energy production here we need to encourage energy production. If you’re worried about carbon production, limit its production by raising the tax on gasoline to European levels. Limit road production. After transportation and energy, cement production is the largest producer of greenhouse gases.

We need healthcare reform that will lower the cost of employment.

We need measures that will actually incentivize job creation here. Americans aren’t lazy layabouts and policies that assume they are are misguided.