Cheap Blogging Crutch 09.18

CBO dismisses co-ops' relevance
Lost in the shuffle yesterday was a little revelation from the Congressional Budget Office. The co-op's, the supposed non-socialist answer to a public plan that would provide all of the benefits of price reduction, competition, and coverage without the fascism, are ineffective, don't reduce costs or increase coverage. I'm betting little things like that won't stand in the way of co-ops being in the bill. Why? Because we're governed by adults.

Okay, you lazy bitch
Hunter S. Thompson, from the grave. Letters of note brings us a 2001 letter HST dashed off to the soon to be defunct studio the Shooting Gallery, complaining that they were dragging their feet on an adaptation of the Rum Diary, which is something that only was able to start filming this year. It's classic Thompson, with liberal use of the underline function and phrases like "waterhead fuckaround", threats of dismemberment, as well as constant assaults on their professionalism and dilettante behavior.

Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz predicts recession's end: not now, but 2012
Now, now, This counts as staggering optimism from Stiglitz. Sure he's pessimistic about everything that's going on now to deal with the financial apocalypse, but he's confident that in the future the recession will eventually end. Oh, not because of any actions taken or laws passed or bailouts handed out, just because he's a big Mayan calendar buff and he feels the world will end in 2012. That headline is a little misleading, it should read: "Stiglitz predicts recessions end, along with all life as we know it in 2012."

Baucus and the Threshold
It's pessimistic economists showing optimism day, as Paul Krugman looks at the Baucus bill and deems it to exceed his low, low, low, low, low expectations. Hell, he even has convinced himself that it will be improved when it gets to the full Senate. But he mainly centers the article around the question that while the Baucus bill has large flaws it is an improvement over what we have, so at what point do people have to accept that fact, accept that the bill won't have everything they like, and move forward and support it?

Study links 45,000 U.S. deaths to lack of insurance
That's right, more people die from lack of insurance than drunk driving, homicide, and drunk homicide combined and have a 40% higher risk of death than peopl ewith coverage. That's a very controversial opinion Harvard researchers have put forth: that people without coverage are more likely to die from things that coverage can help prevent. It could be worse; they could be insured and just be deemed too sick to use it.