No Heroes

August 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The “more guns, less crime” crowd have a romantic fantasy of bravely defending themselves and their property (and of course their wives and children) against potential predators (see my earlier post here) . It’s the adolescent boy’s super-hero fantasy, only the boys are older, and instead of imagined super-powers, they have actual super-weapons.

The reality of shooting bad guys in self-defense is far more complicated. The people who have done it don’t feel like heroes.

I tried to make this point in an overly long post a few days ago about Charles Augusto, the Harlem store owner. Kareem Farim, reporting in today’s The New York Times, does it better. He mentions Augusto’s sympathy for the families of the robbers. Then,

His emotions echoed those of Peter Giron, the co-owner of a South Bronx dry cleaning establishment who shot and killed a 17-year-old gunman in 1978. Mr. Giron collapsed and had to be sedated after the 17-year-old’s father visited his store and politely asked about the shooting.

A few owners said the shootings in their pasts, even those from decades ago, were still too painful to talk about. One, who would speak only anonymously, said, “I’ve been trying to forget about this since it happened.”

Ivan Blume, who wrestled a gun away from a robber and killed both him and his accomplice at his store, Quality Canines, in Brooklyn, in 2003, would say only, “It’s a chapter in my life I’d rather close.”

Healthcare, Lies, and Videotape, and More Lies

August 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, said Honest Abe. Maybe so, but Lincoln missed the point. You only have to fool about half of the people every couple of years. And dishonesty seems to be a pretty effective way to do it.

Some of the assertions about health care reform –broadcast in the media and sent around the Internet – are just plain lies. Here are four of them. The assessments are from either PolitiFact or FactCheck.org

(For a larger, legible view, click on the image.)

Do these lies have any impact? A recent NBC/WSJ poll asked people how likely some of these outcomes were.

• Will give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants
• Will lead to a government takeover of the health care system
• Will use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions
• Will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly

Does lying work? At least for the moment, it certainly looks as though it’s not doing the liars any harm.


One more thing. Of the people who had seen coverage of the town hall meetings, most (62%) said that these made no difference in their views. The rest were about evenly split – 16% said they’d become more favorable to the Obama plan, 19% less favorable, because of the protests.

(Hat tip: Ezra Klein)

Kind of Blue

August 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Kind of Blue. The LP was released fifty years ago this week. It’s the best-selling album in the history of jazz, and year in year out, it continues to sell. Has anyone in the sociology of culture tried to explain this kind of durability?




It’s easy to explain how and why Kind of Blue was different and influential – its use of modes rather than chord changes as the basis for solos (though the first track on the album Milestones, recorded a year earlier, was also modal in concept). But that’s probably not much of a consideration for most people who buy and listen to the album. Its initial success owed something to the tastes of the time. It came out when jazz was at its most popular. But does that account for its continued popularity?

Are there other albums in other genres that still sell decades after they first came out. The Wall? Sgt. Pepper? The Glenn Gould Goldberg Variations?

Inside the Insurance Industry

August 19, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is just the threat of a public option changing the way insurance companies do business? I had to call my insurer yesterday to find out if an MRI at the place designated by my doctor would be covered. The MRI lab is in New York, my coverage is in New Jersey, so it wasn’t clear and simple. The guy I talked to was incredibly polite and helpful, checking every way he could, explaining the problem, asking if it was all right to put me on hold while he checked. He might as well have been saying, “We really, really want to keep your business.”

Meanwhile, if you had any doubts that the structural forces of the market affect health care, and not always for the benefit of the patient, check out this long interview with Wendell Potter. Potter is the former Cigna head of “corporate communications” who has been telling tales out of school, revealing what insurance companies actually do – how and why. (The “loss ratio” he refers to is the percent that the insurance company pays out to cover medical expenses. The lower the loss ratio, the higher the company’s profit. See this earlier SocioBlog post. )

As recently as fifteen years ago, the medical-loss ratio in this country was 95 percent. Since then, there’s been great industry consolidation to the point that now there are seven companies that dominate. They’re all for-profit. During the time that this consolidation, this shift to for-profit occurred, the medical-loss ratio has continued to drop. Now it’s around 80 percent. That means twenty cents of every dollar goes to something other than paying medical claims. Just fifteen years ago, ninety-five cents of every dollar went to paying medical claims. This trend is due to pressure from Wall Street. If a company misses Wall Street’s expectations—if the medical-loss ratio starts to inch up—the company will suffer. I’ve seen companies lose 20 percent of their stock value in one day by disappointing Wall Street with their medical-loss ratio.

Sightseers on the sociology tour bus will come across other points of interest in this interview.

• Social movements? The role of corporate PR in the “grassroots” reaction against health care reform. (“They’re skilled at setting up front groups to spread disinformation.” )
  
  
• Ideology? The relation between the insurance industry and Congress (“The industry has contributed so heavily to the Republicans over the years that they are pretty much assured that every single Republican in Congress will vote exactly the way they want.”)
  
  
• Social psychology? How the structure of insurance executives’ lives shapes their perceptions and misperceptions (“you get a very skewed understanding of America.”)

Potter also cites the events that led to his own apostasy (“Sicko,” a free health care expo at a fairgrounds in Virginia (“hundreds of people waiting in the rain while physicians attended to patients in animal stalls . . . ‘Is this the United States?’ ”).