Blog of Jeff

There is a new law on the way that will prevent insurance companies from using genetic information against people. (LA Times Story Here) President Bush has said that he will sign it, so it should be law soon. But this will create an interesting scenario. If a percentage of the population finds our that they are high-risk for a disease and another percentage of the populations finds out they are low-risk, those populations will naturally choose insurance plans based on those predispositions. So, people likely to get cancer will add cancer riders, while those unlikely to get cancer will avoid those riders. We still don’t know enough to be conclusive on those sorts of things, but scientists are getting better at it all the time.

At its core, insurance is a bet on an unknown event. Insurance companies make money when they correctly calculate the odds of an event happening and base premiums on those odds. Insurance companies lose money when they incorrectly calculate those odds. And usually, invididual people have little idea about the odds. If we are about to enter a realm where individuals may know more than the insurance company, it may throw insurance way out of whack. If only people who will get cancer have cancer riders, those riders will become incredibly expensive just so the insurance companies can stay afloat. The net impact of that scenario is financial discrimination of exactly the sort this law hopes to avoid.

The only way this works out is if people cannot opt out of insurance policies (or choose not to get full coverage), so that the pool stays large and the majority of people in the pool do not suffer the events for which they are covered. In many ways, this may be a foreshadowing of the need for single payer (governmental) health insurance. If everyone in the country had the same policy, people learning about their genetic predispositions to various diseases could be irrelevant to their insurance premiums and coverage and this law works as intended. If you expect insurance to remain in the realm of the free market, then this law may cause the exact sort of problem it seeks to avoid. If only people predisposed to terrible diseases buy insurance against terrible diseases, the whole system breaks down.

My guess is that there are a million hypotheticals that can and will test this law over the next two decades. I’m willing to bet that technology will present some completely unexpected challenge to this law that will throw our courts into confusion. I also suspect that this story and this law will follow the model that the biggest news of the day is never the top story of the day. In the very near future, this law, for better or worse, may be one of the most important laws in the country. Technology is moving that fast and genetics is developing in thousands of directions .

In a Supreme Court case that shows there is no place for common sense in the law, the court recently found that you can only sue for gender discrimination in your paycheck if you catch it 180 days from the first check. The case was one where discrimination was proven and the company was found guilty. The only question was whether the woman had the right to sue years down the road, when she actually found out about the discrimination. The answer was that she should have sued in the first 180 days of the first check. Now, aside from the issue that it is a little hard to figure out that your paycheck is lower on your very first paycheck, this also sets the stage for companies to get off scott free as long as they can get you to accept lower pay for 6 months. Hell, it can even be their written policy to pay women less just for being women as long as they can dodge a suit for the first six months. This is stupid.

A congressional bill to solve this problem was passed and it died. McCain is one of the people that refused to support it, citing that it would cause more lawsuits and a better way to improve pay for women is through increased job training. Now, I don’t know exactly why McCain thinks job training will reduce discrimination, but my initial guess is that it is because he is a stupid, senile old man bowing to the crazies in his party.

The entire point of the discrimination case in front of the supreme court was that there was a women with equal skill, qualifications and performance receiving less money specifically because she was a woman. That part of the case was proven. Is McCain suggesting that if she had enough training to become far superior to her male peers, all those male bigots around her would change their opinion of women in the workplace?

I wonder if McCain also thinks job training would solve racial prejudice issues. “Cops just pulled me over for being a black guy in a white neighborhood. If only I had more job training…”

This was a no-brainer in terms of legislation and congress should have looked at that Supreme Court case and immediately realized that their own law was being completely undone. The simple legal way to handle this is to say that a person has a limited amount of time to sue, from the time they find out about the discrimination. There are lots of laws with that language. The other approach would be to state that each consequent check with less money in it would count as a separate offense and start a new clock ticking on when you can sue.

I wonder if the fact that 90% of McCain’s money comes from his wife throws the issue out-of-whack for him. My wife, the heiress to a huge fortune, never complained about less pay for the same work. It must because of all that job training heiresses get. If only average women could receive that same level of training …

I’m fine with people being opposed to frivolous lawsuits, but this takes it to the point of giving a company a free pass. It takes time for people to realize that discrimination is happening. You frequently need a whistle-blower to tell the victims that it is happening or some inside information to become available. I know some conservatives argue that political correctness has gone too far and that some women should get a tougher skin when it comes to insensitive jokes or behavior in the workplace, but there is nothing more tangible and easier to understand than a paycheck. It’s a completely quantitative form of discrimination than any person can recognize and understand. If you can’t sue for that, well, it means that discrimination is legal.

I’m still trying to wake up from the last Clinton - Obama debate. It didn’t have any of that last gasp desperation that makes these things so exciting. Just a lot of rehashing old mistakes without a lot of energy. Clinton greatly exaggerated her foreign escapades. Obama said some condescending things about religious gun-owners. They both agree on most issues. Same old, same old.

If they want to do something different, how about a debate where the superdelegates attend and ask the questions? Then they vote based on the debate. It could be a winner take all, right here, right now kind of event.

The other option is to start giving them personality tests. Doesn’t it seem strange that corporations throw a barrage of tests at people to examine their personality traits and whether or not they would be a good fit, but we just hand the keys to the Whitehouse to somebody just based on how they look through the media lens. Hell, a sizable chunk of the people who vote for them are voting for a political party and don’t know anything deep about the candidate they are supporting. American Idol probably is a better model for how to select a singer than the presidential race as a model to select a president.

And, as I have from the beginning, I still dislike all the options.

Interesting coincidences in history are on display this week. Here’s an article on Slate about a case involving the death penalty for child rapists. And now, the Pope’s visit has inspired numerous articles on how he has protected Cardinal Law and others involved with child rape in the priesthood. (Here’s one by Christopher Hitchens, for example)

So, we have people in Lousianna arguing that child rape is a crime so abhorrent as to deserve the death penalty, despite the general historical practice of only executing murderers in this country. We also have people going to see the Pope during his visit to gain spiritual sustenance and inspiration, despite his role in protecting Cardinal Law, who protected multiple serial child rapists and knowingly endangered other children by moving the rapists from parish to parish without warning residents of those parishes.

I just find it interesting that these two extreme views are on such vivid display this week. Child rape is a heinous crime worthy of execution versus it’s not that big of a deal to protect a child rapist from justice. Particularly interesting is that the first view is probably held by a much larger percentage of the U.S. population than the second, but the Pope’s visit will inspire far more numerous crowds than the supreme court case and generate all sorts of well-wishing, praise and prayers. There’s just a wealth of ironies and contradictions in these stories.

On this set of contradictions, I find myself a bit in the middle. I oppose the death penalty, primarily because of a belief that our criminal justice system just doesn’t work very well. It is too prejudiced against the poor, too racist, too prone to human errors and involves too many lawyers to be consistently correct. And I think if we are going to have the state killing people, we should have a much higher degree of confidence that the state will get the right person and not just find a scapegoat that is easy to convict.

I also have a very bottom line economic objection with the death penalty. It is too damned expensive. It costs far more to go through all the appeals processes of a death penalty case than it does to keep someone in prison for life. For those who argue that the cost could be brought down by eliminating or streamlining those appeals, I would refer back to my first point. The system makes a lot of mistakes already. If you are going to have executions, you also have to have due diligence in catching and eliminating those mistakes.

On the other hand, I’m no fan of Popes either. I still haven’t gotten over the whole “say the sun revolves around the earth or we’ll burn you at the stake” issue, the inquisition, the crusades or those other historical errors of the supposedly divine dude in the silly white hat. But those are all problems from the old days. This hiding and relocating of child rapists issue is one completely on display in the here and now. Whatever good comes from the Catholic church (and I am willing to admit that the church does a lot of good things as well and that it does truly do help many people), it is still hard to overlook the fact that high-ranking members of the church willingly and knowingly protected child rapists and even assigned them to other jobs where they could attack other victims.

So, I guess the logical endgame for this contradiction is that in America, we hate child rapists enough to kill them, but we can still love and adore the people that protect them …