Shinseki Falls on Sword

Not a huge surprise that Eric Shinseki took one for the team and tendered his resignation as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Either he knew or he should have known that his minions were not stretching their budgets far enough to satisfy everyone and provide the level of service the American public thinks it has promised our veterans.  What remains to be seen is whether or not some of the heads of VA hospitals in various states also admit they were in on the concealment and inability to cope.

But what I'm waiting for is the mass resignation from Congress of all legislators who repeatedly voted against sufficient resources so that the VA could, in fact, comply with the expectations of the American public and veterans.  Will the lackeys of the Koch brothers publicly admit they fully understood the VA had no chance of providing the levels of care they were demanding with the budgets that were being approved?    Pretty sure I'll have a long, long disappointing wait.

AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

I must be missing something, maybe several somethings. Why do so many of my peers & friends detest and oppose the Affordable Care Act? Many people who are either Medicare eligible or federal retirees or both have, if they will admit it, benefited from aspects of “socialized medicine” for significant portions of their professional lives. Yet they now lambast the decisions taken by the country in 2009 and subsequently to extend the availabililty of medical care to large portions of the populace. Why? I do regretfully understand the position taken by some in the 20s – 30s age groups who prefer to roll the dice on their current state of good health and avoid the cost of insuring that it continues. That is and should be their “right”, perhaps. Except that the whole concept of insurance has always been that resources are produced by large portions of a population for concentrated use by isolated individuals when unplanned needs arose. And while a person may choose to go without automobile insurance coverages that address replacement or repair of their car if damaged, they cannot likewise decline liability coverages for dealing with what happens if their wreck damages someone else’s car and injures others. In this vein, I could agree with the libertarians that people should be free to pay or not pay for health insurance. If . . . and only if the hospitals and “the people” were free to decline to treat the uninsured. I also am totally missing the argument in the news the last few days that the ACA represents such a huge “tax”. Which specific taxes are set to rise?? And by how much? The “penalty” or “tax” for those who opt out of the “mandatory” coverage would affect a fairly small segment of the population. But what other taxes besides that will be exploding?

The Coming Census Count

Today's local newspaper has an opinion piece masquerading as a news story. (But then seems like all local newspapers do some of that these days.) The gist of the piece was that Texas needs to figure out how to "count" more of its residents in next year's census. We should do this to avoid "losing" one billion or more dollars in federal largesse and entitlements over the course of the following decade. The article mostly addressed two aspects of the issue. It quoted various "experts" who assert that Hispanics and presumably some other minorities are undercounted by the census. There was some discussion of why this occurs even though full counting would ostensibly benefit those who are undercounted, lavishing them with federal dollars for various public service purposes, including healthcare and other federal aid. The article also mentioned in passing that apportionment of U S House seats is based on the dicennial census and that Texas can expect to gain seats in a couple of years.
This article, however, failed to explore indepth the reasons for the undercounting. It also totally ignored some realworld realities. If the main purpose of the census, besides getting a reasonably accurate estimate of total number of inhabitants of the country at a specific point in time, is to decide how to divide up the "pie", well that has no impact on the size of the pie or whether or not it grows. Whether Texas "gets" 10% or 11% of all available federal dollars ends up being great for Texas. But it doesn't change the potential size of the available pool of federal dollars.
I think I will quit with this introduction. Future posts will look at the two separate issues: Why and how we historically haven't had good census counts in Texas (if that is in fact true); and the bigger picture if Texas were magically able to count all its inhabitants next time - (Does this assume other states are not similarly attempting the same thing? If they are successful, then we don't gain percentage share, do we?)