I have the flu that’s been making the rounds. Darn it. Open thread, if you are so inclined.

The New York Times has an article about people who avoid DNA tests because it might reveal or confirm information that will be used against them by insurance companies.

In some cases, doctors say, patients who could make more informed health care decisions if they learned whether they had inherited an elevated risk of diseases like breast and colon cancer refuse to do so because of the potentially dire economic consequences.

Others enter a kind of genetic underground, spending hundreds or thousands of dollars of their own money for DNA tests that an insurer would otherwise cover, so as to avoid scrutiny. Those who do find out they are likely or certain to develop a particular genetic condition often beg doctors not to mention it in their records.
. . .

And even doctors who recommend DNA testing to their patients warn them that they could face genetic discrimination from employers or insurers.

Such discrimination appears to be rare; even proponents of federal legislation that would outlaw it can cite few examples of it. But thousands of people accustomed to a health insurance system in which known risks carry financial penalties are drawing their own conclusions about how a genetic predisposition to disease is likely to be regarded.

When I started this entry, my premise was going to be to the effect that “any system that rewards ignorance is fundamentally flawed.” But, when I thought about the nature of insurance, it occurred to me that rewarding ignorance is at the very foundation of what insurance is about. Insurance is about managing risk. Risk is an unknown danger. For example, in the 17th century, if you have 100 ships sailing to the Spice Islands, you can calculate that storms and pirates and whatnot will take out a certain number of them, but you don’t know precisely which ones will be lost. So, the ones who will make the voyage successfully pay in and effectively reward the ones who will lose their ships on account of everyone’s collective ignorance. If the future loss were known, the voyage probably wouldn’t be made in the first place, for starters, but the ones who knew they wouldn’t lose certainly would not be inclined to pay into the insurance risk pool.

Health care sets up something of a different dynamic, however. Someone with a high genetic risk of a disease isn’t going to choose to forgo the voyage. So, as our knowledge of a person’s likely health care profile increases, paying for medical treatment becomes less about managing risk through insurance and more about determining what our obligations might be toward our fellow humans in subsidizing their ability to live and/or remain healthy.

This is tough. Generally it seems that there is some obligation to give a little if that would save the life of your neighbor. On the other side, paying huge sums for the benefit of someone on the other side of the country just so that person can eek out a couple more weeks of an agonizing existence seems unreasonable. Somewhere between those extremes is an appropriate balance. But that balance will rarely seem appropriate to the person who is watching their own mother die.

I read this latest run down of the standoff between the House of Representatives and the Bush administration with respect to retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that enabled the Bush administration to conduct wiretaps without a warrant. The Senate and House have passed bills that would extend surveillance authority for our intelligence agencies. The primary difference is that the Senate version provides the retroactive immunity. The House version does not. The White House has said it will veto a bill without the retroactive immunity provisions. The White House explained, “EEK! TERRORISTS!” The White House did not, however, explain why, if the surveillance powers were so damned important, why they would risk the powers over the issue of immunity for telecommunications companies who, after all, have nothing to fear if they didn’t break the law — exactly the same rationale for why citizens shouldn’t bother their pretty little heads over warrantless wiretapping.

Anyway, the kids and I have been on another Jonathan Coulton kick this weekend. So, Coulton’s great tune “Re: Your Brains” made me think of the Bush administration’s standard operating procedure in negotiations.

For those who don’t feel like giving it a listen, the premise is Bob, a former office mate turned zombie attempting to negotiate with Tom to open the door.

All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re not unreasonable, I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re at an impasse here, maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
We’ll all come inside and eat your brains

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, what with Grover Norquist having compared bipartisanship to date rape and all.

Seth Slabaugh has an article in the Muncie Star Press on an individual who seems to have gotten in over his head buying properties at tax sale. The person spent a couple hundred dollars apiece buying about 14 properties at tax sale. But:

[Muncie’s] unsafe building hearing authority has issued civil penalties of $5,000 each on two of the properties . . . for failing to comply with orders to demolish the unsafe structures. And more penalties could be coming.

. . .

[The individual] is not only facing civil penalties. If he fails to demolish the properties, the city can raze them and charge him the cost of demolition as well as administrative costs, said Gretchen Cheesman, director of the authority.

Oops. And, the guy says he is living off of about $900 in social security income.

There is a lunar eclipse tonight. It started at about 8:45 p.m. (EST) and will continue for a couple of hours. Apparently it will be at its fullest at about 10 p.m. Here in Lafayette, we have a nice clear sky. At the moment, it just looks like a smudge in the lower left hand quadrant of the moon. Good stuff.

After more than 80 years of family ownership, the Spackmans are selling Indiana Beach in Monticello to New York Based Morgan RV Resorts.

Spackman, whose family has operated the park on Lake Shafer since 1926, said the new owners have good plans for the park’s future.

Bob Moser, co-owner of Morgan RV Resorts, could not be reached for comment Tuesday evening. Morgan RV Resorts’ Web site says it’s the largest privately owned RV park corporation in the country.

Hard telling whether this will be a net positive or net negative for Monticello.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has a good post on how proponents of federalism have been pretty selective in their championing of the principle. He’s riffing on a descendant of Confederates who proclaimed his pride in the ideals of the Confederacy, “beyond the darkness of slavery,” in particular federalism.

Lemieux takes a look back and finds that erstwhile Confederates tend not to be very consistent in their support of “states rights”

[U]ntil demographics shifted in favor of the free states most Southerners were advocates of strong federal power — John Calhoun started as a nationalist, Jefferson may have been tortured by the Louisiana Purchase but most of his supporters weren’t (and even he went ahead with it), and so on. The relevant principle the slaveholding states adhered to is straightforward: the protection of human bondage.

When the federal government advanced the interests of slaveholders, they advocated strong federal powers; when the federal government didn’t advance those interests, all of a sudden the rights of the states were paramount.

And, of course, has been consistent from Reconstruction onward as well. Pro-apartheid Southerners who claimed that Brown v. Board was an outrageous arrogation of federal power generally didn’t object to the Tennessee Valley Authority, constitutionally dubious federal persecution of communists, federal spending programs as long as most of the benefits went to white people, etc. Almost everybody who purports to want abortion “sent back to the states” favors every federal abortion regulation to come down the pike. And so on. “Federalism” has never been an especially important independent factor in American politics; much more commonly, it’s a way of advancing substantive claims you’d rather not defend on the merits.

A couple of the Democratic blogospheric titans seem to be clashing in a way that directly mirrors the preferred candidates of those blogs. The vitriol seems to be spewing back and forth between Daily Kos and MyDD. The former seems more supportive of Barack Obama while the latter seems more supportive of Hillary Clinton. I am hedging a bit because these blogs have numerous front page authors and legions of commentors. They aren’t monoliths. But, I think I’m being fair when I say that Daily Kos tends toward a pro-Obama tone and MyDD tends toward a pro-Clinton tone. But, more and more, I’m seeing less pro-their-candidate and more anti-the-other-candidate.

I have less direct contact with Daily Kos than I do with MyDD — I tend to wander around the comment sections at MyDD because it’s less populated and the discussions tend to be more manageable. There is some strong anti-Obama sentiment going on in the comment section which in turn has resulted in frequent anti-Daily Kos sentiment. My guess is that similar stuff is going on at Daily Kos.

At the very least, it reminds me of the power of group think. Going to a forum where, traditionally I have found like minded people, and finding sentiments that are strongly in opposition to my own, is jarring. Where did these frothing maniacs come from? Have they always been here? I think those divisions will return to manageable after the primary fight is through. But, it’s good to be reminded that you can’t be sure of your own reasonableness just because a lot of like minded people agree with you.

The Associated Press writes about homeless people taking advantage of the surge in foreclosures. With more empty houses sitting around, it makes sense that homeless people would sneak in and squat in these houses.

Short term, it makes sense for lenders to foreclose on houses, and it makes sense for the homeless to squat in abandoned homes. Long term, it probably leads to an overall decline in value. Though, I guess this hurts the lenders more than it hurts the homeless who, presumably, don’t have a lot to lose in any case. But, it seems that we have a significant disconnect in resource allocation.

It’s just lose-lose for the lenders. They have property that’s not returning revenue on their investment. There is no one living in it, so the potential for destruction (by the homeless, the weather, rampaging bands of teenagers, whatever) increases. I would think that empty houses in the neighborhood result in a decline in surrounding home values. Seems like there ought to be a way to lease these homes to people without homes at a price that at least mitigates the lender’s losses if not eliminating them entirely. As a financial investment, you probably don’t want to lend to the sorts of people who are squatting in them right now, even if they could come up with the rent money — mentally ill drug abusers tend not to have the most pride in ownership. But, there has to be a non-trivial segment of the population that is responsible but simply can’t afford the mortgage on these kinds of property who would show some pride in ownership, pay a chunk of the rent, and keep squatters away. Just a thought.