“Don’t deploy the very principles of white privilege to silence a black man on the panel because you don’t want to talk about race. So be quiet,” the hustler screamed at Lewis.An even more puzzling complaint: the observation that young, healthy people aren't flocking to the exchanges as hoped is "very gendered." I was hoping for some explanation, but alas.
Part of this week's Friday news dump is the decision to delay the posting of price increases for 2015 policies from October 15 to November 15, 2014. Nothing to do with the election, of course; there's just a reasonable desire to give insurance companies more time to complete their calculations. Suspicions to the contrary are gendered.
The young lady's blog is here. Maybe at some point she'll get around to explaining what she meant by that, but so far she hasn't.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to know. I can only think of a few things that even could possibly be meant by the comment, and none of them have a clear sense.
Let us call 'the observation that young, healthy people aren't flocking to the exchanges,' "X." So "X is very gendered" might mean:
1) 'X implies that young people are like women in some unfair and stereotypical way.' (This seems like the most likely explanation to me, but I can't imagine what the stereotype is supposed to be: women are sharp shoppers? Women know a good deal when they see one? Women aren't easy to trap in a bad relationship?)
2) 'X implies that young people are like men in some stereotypical way, not necessarily unfair.' (Less likely, because 'gendered' almost always refers to stereotypes against women; but sometimes you see this use. But again, what's the stereotype? Young people are like men because they are being passive aggressive? Because they're unfairly seizing the position of power in order to deny resources to the weak/old/female?)
3) 'X is an argument only a man would make.' or, 'X is an argument that the kind of people who are stereotypical men like to make.' (This seems plausible to me, though demonstrably untrue as well as a logical fallacy.)
Are there other candidates? Maybe she'll tell us.
I would have sworn - and did argue here - that there was no way the Obama Administration would push back the start date of open enrollment next Fall. I thought that since employment-based open enrollment had to happen on schedule, the individual enrollment would also. Shows what I know.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can tell, employer provided insurance will almost certainly have rates before the 2014 election. Of course, Obama can always delay the employer mandate again.
From what I'm reading, the original idea was for insurers to decide by May 2014 whether to stay in for 2015 and what rates they would charge. Then the Feds would have 5 months to decide if their offerings were okay. I guess I can still hope that the insurers will still have to have their rates prepared before the 2014 election and that the rates will leak.
In the video clip, Ms. Maxwell explains what she means by "gendered". She argues that claiming young people won't enroll in ObamaCare is incorrect because young women want to go on the exchanges, won't roll the dice by going without insurance, and don't have the option of not going to the doctor. Thus her argument is that when nay-sayers claim young people aren't flocking to the exchanges what they really mean is young men aren't flocking to the exchanges.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea if she's right since I haven't seen a breakdown of enrollment by age and gender. So her argument may be incorrect but it's not ridiculous within the Standard Feminism 101 world view of men treated as the norm and women treated as the Other - a view which is not totally without merit.
Lowry, of course, misses two chances. First, a request for data backing up Ms. Maxwell's claim that young women are enrolling. Second, if Ms. Maxwell is correct that young women are flocking to the exchanges even while young men are not, then both claims - that young people are flocking to the exchanges and that young people are not flocking to the exchanges - are equally gendered.
I suspect he may have missed these chances because he failed to understand his opponent. If Ms. Maxwell is correct then those who believe ObamaCare will fail due to lack of participation by young people are making the same, usually fatal, error.
Well, if that's what she meant, it is even possible that both claims could be true. In that case, though, women are part of the death spiral even though they are young: the need isn't for "young people" to enroll to support the old, but more properly for "those who use fewer benefits" to enroll in order to pay for those who use more.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, if she's right about the facts, it doesn't fix the problem: young women may use fewer benefits than old women, but they still use relatively more than the young men ('don't have the option of not going to the doctor'). To avoid the death spiral, you need robust participation by those who need fewest, i.e., you need them to pay for benefits they won't receive in order that someone else can receive more.
Or, as LR1 put it the other day, this system depends on people buying health insurance that doesn't provide health care. Insofar as young women are buying health insurance that does provide health care at about the level of their cost, they can't fix the problem of a system that is weighted with the old and the sick. Only those who provide resources substantially above what they consume can do that.
ReplyDeleteOf course, possibly the costs are fixed high enough that the young women are buying health insurance at a rate that provides more insurance than the care they will use. If so, they'd be better off (being young and relatively poor) buying the care directly. And they may be rational enough to know it, which means the assumption that they will join the exchange is wrong.
The young lady's blog is here. Maybe at some point she'll get around to explaining what she meant by that, but so far she hasn't.
ReplyDeleteAnd she never will, Elise's discovery in the video notwithstanding--it's self-evident, as you would see, were you not such a sexist bigot.
Sorry--it's hard to take such...seriously. Even if it's necessary to peruse, so as to track whence the next wave of destruction comes.
As far as I can tell, employer provided insurance will almost certainly have rates before the 2014 election.
Yes. What's being delayed (the "rule" isn't final yet) is the start of the open enrollment period. Premiums almost certainly will leak much sooner, but those can easily be written off--and will be by the NLMSM--as not official, and so not to be believed.
And the premiums are fixed, for those who don't use, high enough, or in this early stage at the best guess of high enough, to cover those who do, because the premiums are utterly divorced from risk; they're tied instead strictly to the definitions of "need welfare" and "have resources."
Eric Hines
I'm willing to take Elise's claim seriously that it's a view that isn't wholly without merit, which might be understood for reasons other than simply because it serves as an origin point for attacks against things I hold dear (although, it often does). It may be worth understanding her perspective not just because she's an opponent and you should know your enemy, but because she's got something interesting to say if you can understand her.
ReplyDeleteHowever, as I think about the explanation more, it strikes me as really strange. To say:
"Young people are..." is, as the man said, a matter of empirical fact.
To say, "That is gendered, because young women are doing something different than young men," is partially a matter of empirical fact: are young men and young women behaving differently? But is it true that it is 'very gendered' claim? Arguably the gendered claim is that young men and young women must be treated differently, and not included together in a category of "people."
Now Elise points out that both the claim that "young people are" and "young people are not" are equally gendered in the way she thinks the speaker intends. But both claims are arguably less gendered than the insistence that people are properly understood as gender groups.
So we end up saying that all three possible ways of discussing the facts -- "young people are/not," "young men are/not" and "young women are/not" -- are gendered. The word therefore embraces every mode of thought about the facts. It is therefore not a very helpful filter, because it filters either everything or nothing.
For clarity's sake, it wasn't Elise's claim I was blowing off, but Maxwell's. You've worked through the foolishness of Maxwell's claim.
ReplyDeleteAs she decries terms of art as excessively gendered (and not only her, but many others of her bent--"others" not being particularly gendered, as there are plenty of male-guilt...biological males...who share this beef), I'd see more credibility, if only from internal consistency's sake, were I to be able to find, for instance, copies of letters written to Justices Elena Kagan, Sonya Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg taking them to task for the excessive gendering of their nearly exclusive use of the female pronoun in their writings.
But to expect the un-gendering of bias is a gendering too far. The whole gendering meme of the Maxwells and their ilk has no use.
Eric Hines
It is therefore not a very helpful filter, because it filters either everything or nothing.
ReplyDeleteHmm. Not sure I followed you all the way on that. But even if "gendered" is not a useful filter, it may be a useful way to look at the data if, in fact, young women are signing up for ObamaCare and young men are not. My real point, however, is that if Lowry had understood what (I believe) Ms. Maxwell meant, there were effective pushbacks he could make rather than simply looking pole-axed and sounding astonished. (Or he could simply have asked her to explain further what she meant by "gendered". That would have been interesting to watch.)
To go back to Ms. Maxwell's claim for a moment, she is really mixing different reasons for buying insurance. That young women are less willing than young men to "roll the dice" is a rational reason to buy insurance even if you know that under normal circumstances you won't use as much in benefits as you pay in premiums. The women would be insuring against risk and women may be more risk-averse than men.
The argument that women can't avoid going to the doctor is a different claim. If Ms. Maxwell is talking about ob-gyn appointments to get birth control prescriptions and buying the birth control itself then I'm pretty sure that even in very expensive New Jersey a young woman can see her doctor once a year and buy birth control - and even pay for an abortion - for less than the premiums of even the cheapest plan. Seen in that light, paying for health insurance becomes, in Megan McArdle's memorable phrase, ”a spectacularly inefficient prepayment plan”.
In the end, though, the format is which Ms. Maxwell and Lowry argued is simply wrong for discussing this kind of issue. Perhaps in a more open-ended, less sound-bite oriented setting, an actual exchange (heh) of views could take place. Or perhaps, as I suspect more and more, the problem is not simply that people on different sides disagree but rather that people on different sides have no shared context for such discussions.
Elise:
ReplyDeleteShared context is so important, I agree.
What I meant by the claim you say you aren't sure you followed was this:
1) "Young people" is allegedly a gendered category because it runs men and women into a single category, about which (empirically verifiable) claims being made are more demonstrable of men than women. Say it is true that "young people" are not joining the exchanges, but that "young women" are doing so at a much higher rate than "young men" (e.g., if young men are doing so at so low a rate that women could even be doing so as a majority and the category of "young people" would be properly described as "not flocking to the exchanges). Here the problem is that calling men and women "people" makes it seem as though the typically-male decision is the one that "people" are making, even though women are making very different decisions on average.
2) However, to divide the category into "young men" and "young women" is gendered in the more literal and obvious sense of suggesting that we shouldn't view them as components of a larger category -- "people" -- but that they are properly viewed in their sexual divisions.
At the risk of putting it lightly, the defender of proposition (1) could say, "Women are people too!" But the defender of proposition (2) needs to insist on the primacy of their being women.
Of course, if the hypothesis is true that women are joining the exchanges by a small majority, and men refusing by a large majority, you could end up obscuring something important: "only 27 percent of young people are joining" could mean "1% of men and 51% of women." Epistemically, looking at things through the lens of (2) gives us better data; it may be a better way of looking at the world generally for that reason.
But both claims are 'gendered' in one of these two ways: either by diluting the experience of women among the men, or by insisting on treating them as women first and people second (if at all).
"Standard Feminism 101 world view of men treated as the norm and women treated as the Other"
ReplyDeleteStandard Feminism 101 is that women are fully human and men are defective women.
Ah, thanks, Grim - I think I follow.
ReplyDeleteBut it's pretty clear that practically no one is signing up for Obamacare, male or female. I don't care if 100% of the people signing up are female, it's still a disastrously low number.
ReplyDeleteI don't care if 100% of the people signing up are female, it's still a disastrously low number.
ReplyDeleteSo it's all wimmin's fault. You genderist, you.
Eric Hines