Things to Read on the Afternoon of April 24, 2014

Must-Reads:

1. Ezra Klein: What’s the liberal equivalent of climate denial?: “Kahan… argu[es]… being right is irrelevant. ‘It’s not whether one gets the answer right or wrong but how one reasons that counts.’ A liberal who works backwards from conclusions but happens to believe in climate change is ‘to be congratulated for being lucky that a position they unreasoningly subscribe to happens to be true’, but nothing more. Here, Kahan makes a serious mistake. Political reasoning doesn’t take place inside our heads. It takes place inside our parties. No one can personally investigate the vast array of issues facing the country. In terms of getting the right answers, the most important decision people make is choosing whom to trust…. Majority parties bear the heavy responsibility of actually getting policy right…. That’s less true for minority parties. They have the luxury of being irresponsible…. But even minority parties have reason to calm the tribal impulses of their members. Winning elections requires winning the support of many voters who aren’t hardcore conservatives or liberals…”

2. Kevin Drum: Aetna CEO: Obamacare Pretty Much On Track: “CEO Mark Bertolini passed along a couple of interesting factlets: ‘Bertolini said about half of the company’s premium increases, whatever they turn out to be, will be attributable to “on the fly” regulatory changes made by the Obama administration. He cited as an example the administration’s policy of allowing old health plans that were supposed to expire in 2014 to be extended another three years if states and insurers wanted to…. Aetna has added 230,000 paying customers from ACA exchanges, and it projects to end the year with 450,000 paid customers. It said it can’t yet draw a “meaningful conclusion” about the population’s overall health status.’ The first is interesting because it suggests that Aetna’s premium increases won’t be based on fundamentals… aren’t rising because the customers Aetna signed up were older or sicker than they expected…. And the second is interesting because Aetna apparently expects to double its Obamacare customer base by the end of the year.”

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Should-Reads:

1. Jonathan Chait: Cliven Bundy Shockingly Turns Out to Be Gigantic Racist: “According to J.D. Tuccille of the libertarian magazine Reason, the Cliven Bundy standoff is about something larger and grander than mere grazing rights. It is about freedom-loving individuals fighting back against distant, bureaucratic government. ‘They see little reason’, he writes, ‘to leave their fate in the hands of a stumbling federal government that can’t balance its books’. Now Cliven Bundy, the deadbeat rancher embraced by Rand Paul and other freedom lovers, has added some thoughts of his own…. ‘I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro…. They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.’ So apparently there’s more to Bundy’s cause than the existence of the federal budget deficit…. Just the other day, Tuccille expressed outrage… [because] I suggested that conservatism in its current incarnation has no future in American politics because ‘America’s unique brand of ideological anti-statism is historically inseparable… from the legacy of slaver’y, and thus will have little natural appeal to an increasingly diverse electorate. Tuccille shot back… helped stoke some belated outrage on the right at the ‘yes, American conservatism is deeply intertwined with racism’ part…. I’d argue it’s not exactly a coincidence that Bundy also turns out to be a gigantic racist. Just like Ron Paul’s longtime ghostwriter turned out to be a neoconfederate white supremacist. And like the way Rand Paul’s ghostwriter also turned out to be a neoconfederate white supremacist. Presumably all these revelations have struck Tuccille as a series of shocking coincidences. Why do all these people with strong antipathy toward the federal government turn out to be racists?…”

2. Ed Kilgore: Medicaid Expansion: Deal Too Good To Refuse Getting Better: “In hard-core rejectionist country, especially in the South, all the talk about ‘fiscal responsibility’ in connection with the Medicaid expansion is pretty much bunk. They oppose expanding Medicaid because they actually want to blow Medicaid up, and/or because they see no reason to do any favors for those people who might tend to benefit most. So evidence that the expansion might actually be neutral for state budgets and very positive for state economies (not to mention public health) won’t cut much ice. Meanness is priceless to an awful lot of southern conservatives these days…”

Should Be Aware of:

1. Tracy Gnadinger: October 2013′s Insurance Cancellation Firestorm In Context: “In October 2013, a political firestorm erupted when Americans with individual health insurance plans received cancellation notices from their insurers. Their plans had failed to meet the new minimum coverage standards of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) taking effect in January 2014…. Benjamin Sommers… found… every year an estimated 6.2 million Americans in nongroup plans moved out of nongroup coverage, and only 42 percent remained consistently enrolled in such coverage after one year…. Eighty percent of those leaving a nongroup plan ended up with different health insurance within twelve months, most commonly through coverage offered by an employer…. Some Americans—particularly those who were older and self-employed—typically retained their policies for three years or more. For them, writes Sommers, ‘cancellations of nongrandfathered plans related to the ACA represented an unwanted change in coverage options that might have been quite disruptive.’… In addition to providing insights into the ACA’s cancellation controversy, the author suggests that his analysis can also offer ‘a nationally representative estimate of baseline coverage stability’ in the nongroup market prior to the ACA…”

2. Felix Salmon: Why I’m joining Fusion: “So here’s the idea: let’s say we can serve up high-quality Fusion-branded content to a new generation of digital natives, and that they love that content. If and when that happens, it’s going to be a lot easier for the cable companies to persude that audience to pay for cable TV if their cable lineup also includes Fusion. The content won’t be the same, of course — but the brand will be. And the cable companies are going to want the Fusion brand on their lineup because that’s the only way they’re going to be able to seem relevant to anybody under the age of 32. The result: Fusion has negotiating leverage with the cable channels, and becomes very valuable. Here’s where things start getting really cool. What this means is that it doesn’t matter where people consume our digital content: it only matters that they consume it. So while everybody else fights with each other to get millions of unique visitors to their websites, we will be happy to go reach the audience wherever they are. Of course, we will have an excellent website of our own — the amazing Hong Qu is hard at work building it as we speak. But in no way will we feel constrained by that website. If our audience is on Instagram, we’ll make 15-second videos for them on Instagram. If they’re on Upworthy or BuzzFeed or Vox or even Snapchat, we’ll try to find a way to reach them there, too. It’s what I call promiscuous media: put everything where it works best…”

3. Brian Buetler: Cliven Bundy, Racist Rancher, Still Has Conservative Defenders: “I had assumed that Cliven Bundy’s lapse into slaver nostalgia would augur the end of his martyr status on the right. But I was wrong. National Review writer Kevin Williamson, for one, is sticking to his guns…. If Bundy were a food stamp recipient, and Republicans in Congress cut his SNAP benefit, and he responded by walking into a public high school every afternoon and stealing a subsidized lunch, Williamson wouldn’t compare him to a freedom fighter. He’d call him a lazy deadbeat. But it’s the same infraction. The question of whether you think the federal government should own so much land in Nevada in the first place has nothing to do with it…”

And:

• Deborah Bocouyannis: Adam Smith is not the antidote to Thomas Piketty
• Brad Plumer: Two degrees: How the world failed on climate change
• Colin Lewis: 5 areas in Robotics that will transform society and their economic impact