The issue of predictability also has bearing on the merits of insurance against chronic illness or maternity. On a lifetime insurance basis, insurance against chronic illness makes sense, since it is both highly predictable and highly significant in cost. Among people who already have chronic illness, or symptoms which reliably indicate it, insurance in the strict sense is probably pointless.[963]

Is that part of PP’s analysis of Arrow’s paper? Prolly not.

Okay.

Thanks for your input. Is that really the most important thing said or discussed in this thread?

_______

All others:

About once every 3 years I let fly with an expletive of the caliber let loose here. It has been pointed out to me, and I accept the admonition. The offending disambiguation of a texting/twitter “vulgarity” has been removed, and I apologized to all who have been offended. The offense was mine, and you should not have been subjected to it.

Brilliant Strategy!

It’s interesting that the Director of the CBO closes his summary of the impact of H.R. 3590 with this qualification:

Although CBO does not generally provide cost estimates beyond the 10-year budget projection period, CBO (together with JCT) has developed a rough outlook for the ensuing decade. CBO estimates that the combined effect of enacting H.R. 3590 and the reconciliation proposal would be to reduce federal budget deficits during the 2020s relative to those projected under current law—with a total effect during that decade in a broad range around one-half percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

That calculation reflects an assumption that the provisions of the legislation are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation. For example, the sustainable growth rate mechanism governing Medicare’s payments to physicians has frequently been modified to avoid reductions in those payments, and legislation to do so again is currently under consideration by the Congress. The current legislation would maintain and put into effect a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time.

I wonder: why would the CBO make that assumption when they know it’s not true? Here’s what I think: because there’s no way to project how the “difficult to sustain” policies will be beefed up in the future.

However, that qualifier at the end of the statement is the ultimate nullifier for the rest of the estimate — because it says, “well, sure: this bit of simple math reduces the impact on the budget, but there’s a ton of stuff we have to leave out because it’s not defined yet.”

Stew on that while I’m reading Kenneth Arrow’s paper you recommended. Let us thank God and Google that this paper is actually available on line.

That’s quite a mouthful. It’ll take me a weekend to get through it all, but the one easy-to-dispose of issue we can get out of the way is this:

Can you explain, in 300 words or less, whether there is a difference between “budget deficit” and “national debt”? I think that will make fascinating reading.

Which expletive did I use? Is “Felix Unger” really offensive to you? That’s a shame — because it seems to me that PP did some stuff significantly more offensive than mention a member of the Odd Couple in his two comments here — especially given your previous advocacy for the primacy of property rights. You might focus your drive-by sights on him.

I don’t see any democratic talking points in my posts. I’m as apolitical as you could get. I’m merely interested in bringing glory to Christ at all levels of life, and I am just as open to good ideas whether they come from the right or the left.

How should the Church respond to this? What is God speaking to us in this situation? Is there a lesson in this of some kind for the Church and if so, what is it? I am pretty sure it is somewhere in between armed rebellion and a victory dance.

Your scale between an armed rebellion and a victory dance is scaringly broad, and you completely dropped me. Can you please explain to me why you would even consider an armed rebellion? I don’t know about you, but the main instrument through which God speaks to me is the Bible. So, the premiums will go up for some people. So what? What did Jesus say about paying taxes? It was He who put Obama where he is now. Why would the church have to react in any way?

This whole discussion seems to hinge on the idea that offering quasi-universal health care to people robs them of Jesus. Where is the logic? Do you actually believe that a person will now be lost because of the health reform, who would’ve been saved otherwise? How is that? Health care only competes with your gospel, if yours is merely a social gospel.

Finally, let’s be pragmatic here. As a Christian, consider yourself being an autocratic leader (I’m not saying that Obama is autocratic), and having the chance to offer health care to everyone, and that it’s also the fiscally responsible thing to do compared to status quo. Let’s also imagine that everyone knows that you love Christ. Now, what do you do?

At least all of us now know we too can use expletives to tell you off. Of course, not in such a clever way and all.

I didn’t realize this was DailyKos or Huffington Post. Are Democratic talking points all you have?

Frank took your bait and went off on you after your initial post, but you missed the whole point on the original post and the line of discussion. The passing of Obamacare, if you are Christian in America, is an opportunity to check your reactions and discern what the proper response is regardless of your political affliation because, to paraphrase the VP, it is a big **** deal.

How should the Church respond to this? What is God speaking to us in this situation? Is there a lesson in this of some kind for the Church and if so, what is it? I am pretty sure it is somewhere in between armed rebellion and a victory dance.

If you just want to pick a political fight, trolling somewhere else might not be a bad move. If, however you want to contribute something to the discussion besides talking points, feel free.

I repent! Let’s do something now.

Albert,

Thank you for the history lesson.

Frank,

Well, let’s do it then. Where do we start? I, too, immediately thought of the “Disaster Relief” things that Baptists do. How do we invigorate ministry to different kinds of disaster? (i.e. Cancer, etc.). Start a Facebook meme? Have a meeting? Tell Tom Ascol? What do we do?

I apologize for “ranting”. Let’s just establish some Econ 101 facts, and then see how they tie with what our Lord Jesus taught us.

hard fact is that many of these people don’t want health care — they are self-employed, and they simply don’t need the benefit. They stay healthy and opt for catastrophic policies in case they fall off a roof or something.

Kenneth Arrow wrote a seminal paper in 1963 (“Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care”), where he showed, simply, that in order for health care to work you need a pool of both healthy and sick people who pay for universal coverage. Why? Because nobody knows when they will get sick, and if they needed a triple bypass, very few would afford to pay it out of pocket. In the paper, Arrow shows it’s in everybody’s interest to be in the pool.

Now, there are three options. First, you’ve never thought of this simple logic. Second, the logic is too difficult for you to understand. Third, you don’t agree that everyone should be forced to pay for universal coverage. Now, the second option seems implausible, because even a toddler would understand the simple logic. Option 3 seems most likely, but there’s no need to thank me, if I just opened your eyes (i.e. option 1 is true). However, you would need to justify option 3 a bit more from a Christian perspective. Here’s why.

First of all, you imply that having access to universal health care hinders people from getting to heaven.

it is in fact antithetical to Christian reasoning to think we are ever putting ourselves in the hands of a savior when we are in fact putting ourselves in debt.

That’s the Gospel, dude

Really?!

I’m not sure of your logic here, but I suppose that you think when people’s health care needs also satisfied, then their spiritual needs are also satisfied, leaving no room for Jesus. There is no Biblical basis for such an argument. Btw. how do you think people view Christianity when guys like you are trying stop them from accessing health care. I’m not sure, but I doubt that it brings them closer to Christ. I really wish that Christians would’ve been the primus motor behind the whole reform (and done it better, as well).

Secondly, you seem to suggest that the church should take care of the sick, right? I agree with you wholeheartedly, but it hasn’t happened. Out of curiosity, how many triple bypasses have you paid for other people voluntarily, out of your personal finances? You should know, as a Christian, that it’s not going to happen either (Rom 3:10-18).

Lastly, let’s talk about the primary deficit. The estimate of 2011 fiscal deficit is 10.6 % of GDP. The normal tax revenue is around 17 % of GDP (it’s less now during the recession). Of the outlays, military accounts for 5 %, health spending is another 5 %, but this is about to go down thanks to the new health bill (see CBO estimates), social security is 5 %, as well. Interest on public debt will soon reach 2 % of GDP. In other words, the current tax revenue only covers these four items. Everything else is covered by new borrowing (homeland security, roads, and other infrastructure, education, judicial and penal systems, etc., etc.). The deficit is not caused by health care costs, which are now about decrease. The deficit is caused by the Republican utopia that you could have a functioning society without any tax revenue. Ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars might slash the deficit by 2 %, but you will still need to raise taxes. The new health care bill only improves the situation marginally.

But I just want to make sure I am reading you right: you think the additional debt does, in fact, save us, yes? That adding to debt is an act of political/economic/sociological salvation for the people of America.

You should ask your fellow republicans about this. After all, the democrats would rather have you pay for the spending in a responsible way (that’s code for taxes).

Let me put it back to you this way: I know a better savior. He has taken all my debts — every bit of wrongdoing I have ever done — and has not told me, “I’ll make your children pay for it,” but “I have paid for it: it is finished.”

That’s actual salvation.

Hmm. I’m not sure how that covers the primary deficit. Can you run me through the logic?

But to make sure we don’t brush your sloganeering under the carpet here, I am in favor of doctors treating patients — which was not illegal last week.

Dude, what are you talking about?

taking all moral responsibility out of the equation yet demanding that we feel some kind of moral onus to force someone else to solve the problem.

I don’t think you’re referring here to your moral responsibility to take care of the sick, because that doesn’t change whether there’s universal healthcare or not. If you refer to sick people having the moral responsibility to care of themselves (which would contradict what you said about charity), then again, you’re following a different Jesus, and reading a different Bible, than I am.

I admit it: conservative political reasoning is somewhat cold and calculated and balanced on the back of self-interest

Funny, Jesus never came out as cold, calculated, or balanced on the back of self-interest.

I think the irony of what you have said here is that NAMB and IMB are already doing this is crisis situations so effectively that they are a first responder working on behalf of the Red Cross. So my opinion is that we know how.

I’m not a guy, as you know, who wants to kick the church in the teeth because we don’t all live in rags and pay for others people’s kids’ college education or whatev’s. But I think that there’s a way to follow the example, if I may be so bold, of the Luthernas and the Catholics in how we use what we would call “cooperative funding” to advance the Gospel by doing the things which are necessary consequences of the Gospel.

There is a baptist health system in place today; it could be larger.

And that’s the sort of thing we have to get our arms around, one church at a time.

President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president’s budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

Thanks!

And frankly, if we aren’t willing to do that, then Caesar will.

What am I missing here?

You’re missing a connection to history, a connection which is essential to understanding where we are today. Many Christians, politically liberal or conservative, operate under a myth that the government had to step in because the Church in the U. S. failed to care for the poor, sick and unemployed. This is almost completely wrong, though not in the way one would expect.

The vast majority of Christians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were Progressives in mainline denominations who did not fail to care for the sick and poor; they did so through the means of the government and intentionally so because they believed the State was the chosen instrument of God to bring relief to the poor. If one recalls, the Progressive era was the heyday of the social gospel. The Progressives were so politically energized and powerful they, led by their elites, passed four constitutional amendments (four!) within only seven years: the 16th Amendment authorizing the federal income tax, which made possible large-scale federal entitlement programs; the 17th Amendment authorizing the direct election of U. S. Senators; the 18th Amendment prohibiting alcohol (recall the influence of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Prohibition); and the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. Woodrow Wilson was elected by the Progressive Christians in this era, and with their blessing he established the prototype federal institutions dedicated to expanding the power of the federal government to care for the poor, sick and unemployed, institutions that laid the groundwork for FDR’s New Deal programs/agencies and the Great Society institutions under LBJ.

So, no, the “the government had to step in because Christians failed to do their job” theory is completely removed from historical reality. That’s not how the federal government got involved. The government got involved because the evangelicals of that day, the Progressives, became captivated at both the populist and elite levels by the same vision of material salvation through the power of the State that was capturing the hearts and minds of the elites of the dominant European culture, to where U. S. elites also traveled to learn. Progressive Christians, who were the vast majority of American Christians at the turn of the century, chose the government.

The problem was not that Christians were involved in politics. The problem was that the Progressive version of the Gospel–the social gospel–embodied in their politics, was a shallow and heretical distortion disconnected from the historic Church through time (we Americans love our clean slates).

Nevertheless, the federal Leviathan today represents the culmination and triumph of the vision of liberal Christians over the past century. Theologically conservative Christians love pointing to the declining numbers of mainline denominations because they think it means they are winning the battle in some Gnostic realm of invisible spirituality; unfortunately, it means something else. They are shrinking because they already won in America in the early 20th century; mainline decline is simply the outworking of their false theology privatizing and eventually eliminating the Church. But the weakness is illusory; the numbers of their “moral therapeutic deistic” descendants are swelling and we see that fact mirrored economically in state capitalism, culturally in the media/arts and politically in our democracy by the increasing centralization and growth of the State (a process which, one recalls, has not been abated for over a century–sorry politically conservative Christians, not even during Reagan–not even close).

The true Church needs to reject both the privatized gospel of fundamentalism which allowed the Progressives free reign by abandoning cultural life and, in truth, the world; and the social gospel of liberal Christianity which denies the centrality of the crucified and risen Savior and His Spirit-filled Body.

We do this not by sticking a “Jesus saves” sticker on whatever modern culture and politics happens to be and doing the same things, but by continuing the re-forming and re-ordering of our lives in every sphere as the historic Church has always needed to do and has done, more or less faithfully, to build up the Kingdom of God.

Today for the Church in globalized America, after a century of false choices, this will mean some big changes that will only happen over time by God’s grace, if He is so merciful. Once again, the Church must be against the world, for the world.