I have a few comments to add about the Springfield News-Leader op-ed piece that David Stokes wrote about earlier today. The piece berates Rep. Roy Blunt for favoring private insurance reform to a public option model, and falls prey to a few logical errors in the process.

The article claims:

For-profit insurance companies milk 30 percent off the top for “administrative” costs vs. just 4 percent for Medicare.

These are very misleading numbers. For one, elderly and disabled Medicare patients require more care so that the administrative cost will be spread out over more patient dollars. In actuality, the per-patient Medicare administration cost is much higher for Medicare than for private insurance companies — it is just spread out over more health care dollars. This does not mean that Medicare is more efficient; a study from the Heritage Foundation debunks the myth of Medicare “efficiency”:

In 2005, Medicare’s administrative costs were $509 per primary beneficiary, compared to private-sector administrative costs of $453. In the years from 2000 to 2005, Medicare’s administrative costs per beneficiary were consistently higher than that for private insurance, ranging from 5 to 48 percent higher, depending on the year.

Private insurance companies must also pay additional taxes from which Medicare is exempt — as much as 4 percent in certain states. This must be factored into the administrative costs for private insurance. These costs do not go to “insurance execs” and their “cronies,” but to the government. Other administrative costs for private insurance include marketing expenses and profit margins; the latter is a significant factor, because profit helps motivate efficiency.

The author of the News-Leader op-ed rails against the fact that private insurance company executives take home “multi-million dollar salaries and huge stock options while the government pays its top Medicare brass just a few hundred thousand dollars a year.” Offering large salaries enables some insurance companies to attract the best in the business. Effective leadership is not an arbitrary factor in building a successful business; a good CEO can create profits that far outweigh his compensation. And it’s worth emphasizing that private insurance companies can’t survive in a competitive market if they merely take profit without providing good service to their customers.

Expanding measures to increase market competition would be more likely to “squeeze the profiteers” than the author’s proposed public option. A government-run option does not engender competition, because its taxpayer-subsidized nature means it does not have to compete for revenue or customers, and will be guaranteed to offer the lowest sticker prices (not counting the cost of the subsidy, of course).

The private insurance business as it stands today is not a free market at all — it’s restrictive and highly regulated. Potential competitors face significant barriers to entry in the insurance market because of the geographic and other regulatory barriers they face; this effectively drives up health care prices. However, even considering the limited competition that currently exists in the private insurance market, these companies manage to be more efficient than their government-run counterparts.

Combest today has a link to a truly bad op-ed on health care in the Springfield News-Leader. (This is not a knock on the News-Leader, because the piece appears to have been submitted by someone outside the paper.)

The only thing good about this op-ed is that it can serve as an excellent lesson in how not to do something. I don’t call it “bad” because I disagree with the author, although I do disagree vehemently with him. It is poorly written because, for whatever reason, it contains all the easy, worthless catch-phrases that instantly identify the author as being biased and operating from a pool of partisan emotions rather than reasoned thinking.

Take a very quick skim of the piece. The heavy use of loaded words and phrases like “cronies,” “greedy profiteers,” “huge stock options,” and “skimming the system” instantly let me know that I have no need to take the writer seriously. He clearly hasn’t put the time into writing the piece that might make it worth my time to read it carefully. (I did read it carefully anyway, but only for the purpose of this blog post.) I think the author uses the term “profiteers” three times in the op-ed to describe executives at insurance companies, as though he has the ability to judge the amount of profit that is proper.

If you want to convince people who are not already inclined to agree with you about something, try more of this:

For-profit insurance companies milk 30 percent off the top for “administrative” costs vs. just 4 percent for Medicare.

And far less of this:

We need both these options in the final bill to reign in greedy profiteers.

The first is an argument. The second is a screed. This op-ed has too much of the latter and too little of the former.

Two stories on the Drudge Report feature kids sailing (or wanting to sail) solo around the world. The first is about a boy from Britain who accomplished this feat, and the second is about a girl who is being prevented by a court in the Netherlands from doing the same.

One reason advanced in opposition to the girl’s plan is that she would have to study by herself for two years rather than going to school. This is a scary example of a state imposing uniformity at the expense of someone’s dream. Schools as we know them have been around for only a short period of time, relative to the vast span of history. People have been exploring for thousands of years. Who is to say that the modern classroom constitutes a normal experience and sailing the open seas is aberrant?

As for the safety issue, the girl’s family planned her trip so that she would at most be at sea for three weeks at a time. Young teenagers have sailed solo on voyages of that duration. If a three-week journey is acceptable, then there should be nothing wrong with many three-week journeys in succession.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that babies be breastfed for a year because of the medical benefits it confers. More mothers might choose to breastfeed if they had that information. However, people should make decisions with their doctors about caring for infants, based on a calm consideration of medical advice. They shouldn’t make those choices out of fear.

That’s why I don’t like this ad from the Department of Health and Senior Services. The ad urges readers to prepare for “those emergencies that come up every day or during a natural disaster” and admonishes that breastfeeding is “even more important during emergencies.” The ad also features a little emblem that looks like a sheriff’s badge and reads, “Breastfeeding: A Vital Emergency Response.”

The website explains the link between breastfeeding and emergencies: If people can’t get to a store because of a natural disaster, it’s helpful to be able to breastfeed. Well, I guess that’s true. The print ad doesn’t make the connection, though, and even after reading the website’s commentary, I’m still confused by the reference to “emergencies that come up every day.”

The ad leaves readers with the impression that breastfeeding is necessary to avert disasters that could strike at any time — much like last year’s midwifery op-ed that claimed we need midwives in case of floods or hurricanes.

Besides provoking anxiety with its allusions to unlikely scenarios, the ad tells women to “contact a local public health department,” as though women could only breastfeed with the government’s help.

Although I personally think breastfeeding is an important practice, I don’t want the state to push that choice on everyone — especially not with scare tactics.

In an effort to cut expenses, the U.S. Postal Service is offering to pay employees to retire or resign by the end of the year. This deal, arranged by the union, will offer employees payouts totaling $15,000 over the next two years. The USPS hopes to save $500 million with these job cuts, and is also considering closing mail centers to address further budget concerns; of the 681 national mail centers that may potentially close, 38 are in St. Louis.

With a $6 billion budget deficit, the USPS surely needs an overhaul.  But the USPS has taken the wrong tack. It should be improving its service, rather than simply cutting it. Many businesses and individuals rely on the USPS for important mail; reductions to service fail to address that, instead exacerbating the existing problems. The advent of the Internet has made USPS service redundant in some areas, and a decrease in service would only serve to push its usefulness even farther to the wayside.

With the inevitable decline of USPS service, however, lawmakers need to reduce the legal restrictions that currently hamper other potential mail services. Although the USPS does not receive taxpayer funds, it has essentially been given a regulatory monopoly on certain types of delivery services. Mailboxes, by law, can only be accessed by postal service employees. The Private Express Statutes limit private mail carriers from delivering mail unless it has the proper USPS postage or is “extremely important” and priced at more than $3. These statutes stifle competition and hurt consumers.

Even long before the advent of the Internet and telephones, the USPS was inefficient. In 1844, abolitionist and individualist lawyer Lysander Spooner created the American Letter Mail Company to ferry letters to Boston, Philadelphia, New York, or Washington, D.C., for a third of the price that the USPS charged at the time. New legislation eventually halted his business, but his efforts did force the USPS to significantly lower its rates. The giant postal monopoly of today no longer has to respond to this sort of cost-cutting competition, because federal protection keeps it insulated from those who might provide a similar service more efficiently. Instead, it can get away with practices like paying employees to quit without having to address the real reasons that it cannot make a profit, while private companies like FedEx and UPS are flourishing.

It’s certainly a good idea for the USPS to cut jobs and make its process more efficient, in order to meet its budget constraints. But sustainable efficiency will not occur without real, free-market competition. Simply paying people to quit does not address the growing superfluity of the USPS, and instead makes the mail service slower and more expensive.

The president of United Teachers of New Orleans comments on charters:

“There’s no replication of programs that are successful,” Carter said. “I don’t want to see schools closing year after year because their business models don’t work.”

At first glance, it’s hard to tell what he’s referring to when he says there’s no replication. Many of the most successful charter programs, like KIPP, are national networks. They replicate their best ideas in multiple schools.

I think he’s talking about different charters within the same city, which are not joined by common policies the way schools in a traditional public district are. If one charter does a good job, other nearby charters are free to deviate from its methods — and possibly fail, as a result.

That’s not such a bad thing. Allowing some charters to stagnate is the flip side of giving charters the freedom to innovate. Sponsors can dismantle their charter schools if expectations are unmet, so there’s no need to worry that a poor performer will be around for decades. The same can’t be said of traditional public schools; they lack a mechanism by which they can be shut down, and at best the state can step in after a protracted accreditation battle. The potential to close, far from being the disadvantage implied by the above quote, is actually a plus for charters when compared with traditional districts.

And the uniformity within districts doesn’t always mean that they replicate the best practices, either. For example, KIPP started out in a traditional district, but its success wasn’t replicated there because of bureaucracy. Only when KIPP’s founders switched to the charter model were they able to expand their program to help thousands of kids.

Not all charter schools are coordinated through networks, but they all can learn from other schools. The language-immersion charters opening this year in St. Louis were able to gain inspiration from the French-immersion charter in Kansas City, as well as from language-immersion schools in other states. They didn’t have to invent an immersion approach from scratch. And countless charters adopt long school days, even ones that are not affiliated with KIPP. No school board orders them to do it; they do it because it works.

I’d like to take a moment to point out the excellent work being done by Audrey Spalding over at the Show-Me Institute’s Policy Pulse website. She’s been providing detailed coverage of breaking events like health care protests and town hall meetings, a court case involving school districts and property assessments, community meetings regarding the proposed north side development project in Saint Louis, and more. One piece about a Missouri health care forum, by Show-Me Institute intern Caitlin Hartsell, even garnered notice from the widely read national blog Instapundit.

So, be sure to stay tuned to Policy Pulse as Audrey and a few other talented writers bring you perceptive coverage of events that you won’t always be able to find in other media outlets.

Here are some recent headlines, to get you started:

• McKee eschews media, makes pitch for NorthSide development
• Some north side properties kept vacant for more than a decade
• Health care protests stay cordial
• Anti–eminent domain activists join north side community group’s cause
• Earmarked millions now a little more transparent
• Eleven school districts get day in court
• High-speed rail predicted to travel much slower than advertised
• McCaskill fields questions about health care bill in Hillsboro
• North Side community group questions TIF project’s validity
• Smoking ban will likely be put to county voters
• Community group wary of north Saint Louis redevelopment plan
• Gingrich presents health care reform ideas in Saint Louis
• Health care forum draws hundreds, mostly opposed to federal reform legislation
• Legislative fix misleads school district budgets

The Grade has posted excerpts from the Columbia Community Unit School District’s statement about the service dog a judge has ordered it to accept (which I’ve written about here and here).

This part doesn’t make sense to me:

“The District’s compliance with the Preliminary Injunction will have a direct and negative impact on at least one other student who attends the Early Childhood Program,” the statement said. “Specifically, the District is aware of at least one child who will suffer serious physical harm if he is exposed to animal hair. Additionally, the District is aware of multiple other children with medical conditions which may be impacted by the presence of a dog.”

Accommodating the dog “is not a simple matter of moving students from one room to another, or even one building to another,”  the statement goes on to say.

I can’t believe every other student in the program would be adversely affected by a dog. So put the kids who can handle it with the dog, and the others in another room or building. I could sympathize if the district said moving students between rooms or buildings was a big hassle that required lot of schedule changes. But why is the district implying that wouldn’t even solve the problem?

A public school can’t serve everyone, and that’s especially apparent in the case of students with disabilities. If a child has such a severe allergy to animal hair that he can’t be in the same building as a dog, that child would still have a problem if his classmates hugged their pet dogs, then came to school with animal hair on their clothes. Is the district going to forbid pets at home? How else could they protect that child?

Very specialized schools are better able to deal with students’ severe medical problems than a public schools that has to be open to all. A broad tuition tax credit program would go a long way towards giving these kids better options.

Tonight at 7 p.m., at Zion Lutheran Church, developer Paul McKee and alderwoman April Ford-Griffin will make a presentation about the $8 billion proposed redevelopment of Saint Louis’ north side. Part of that redevelopment would involve the NorthSide Regeneration company acquiring more than 2,400 properties. On the list are a number of churches, as well as owner-occupied homes.

I hope that the mainstream media will cover tonight’s presentation. The development is contentious, not least because it is very large and involves an application for $410 million in tax increment financing (TIF) from the city, but also because of current residents’ worries that the company will use eminent domain to take their property (there is, in fact, mention of using eminent domain in the NorthSide Regeneration company’s TIF application).

There is also the issue of whether a city agency was somehow complicit by holding on to vacant property in the north side for more than a decade in case a developer came along, rather than putting the property up for sale.

These issues have been brought forward several times by the North Side Community Benefits Alliance (NSCBA), a group of north side residents determined to be involved in the redevelopment process. Although the group is new, it has done a lot to publicize this issue. Recently, the NSCBA held two community forums. At the first, Saint Louis TIF commissioner and Saint Louis School District Board of Education member David Jackson spoke. At the second, Christina Walsh, of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Justice spoke. Both speakers were noteworthy, yet both forums were mostly ignored by the press.

To his credit, Don Marsh, host of “St. Louis on the Air,” did have NSCBA members on his show, and when one of the banks holding more than 400 mortgages of McKee’s north Saint Louis properties was seized by the FDIC, KMOX contacted NSCBA’s vice president, Barbara Manzara, for quotes.

It is likely that a number of community residents who oppose the proposed development will attend tonight, which means that reporters could hear both their concerns and McKee’s responses without filter. I didn’t think that media needed a nudge to cover this side of the issue, but here it is: This is important, and this is newsworthy.

You can learn so many new vocabulary words by tracking legislation in the Missouri General Assembly. “Tocology,” otherwise known as “midwifery,” made the news in 2007 when legislators accidentally legalized the practice because they didn’t know what the word meant.

Now, it turns out that a law intended to ban Styrofoam coolers on lakes and rivers really prohibits hard plastic containers, like Tupperware. Fortunately, the Missouri Water Patrol says it will ignore this law.

I’m confused by this statement in the Kansas City Star editorial about the mix-up:

The mistake was especially disappointing because the government was trying to tell the public how to behave, in this case to protect the environment.

Don’t all laws “try to tell the public how to behave”? I find this mistake less disappointing than others, because it was caught promptly and won’t be enforced.

This article in the Salt Lake Tribune tells the woeful tale of some overworked kindergartners. These kids spend several hours a day on academics, with little or no time left for play.

One comment blames this state of affairs on charter schools:

There’s seems to be this disturbing trend today, seen specifically in the development of the charter school program, of pushing the education system to higher standards in the name of achievement.

Are charter schools really the culprits? I don’t think so. The article describes public kindergartens run by traditional districts, and at least some of the impetus for drilling kindergartners comes from Utah’s education department:

“Doubling time in kindergarten should mean twice the time for instruction,” said Reed Spencer, a curriculum coordinator at the state office of education who is designing a uniform testing tool for Utah’s full-day kindergarten programs.

I’m guessing whoever wrote the comment would say that the traditional districts are responding to competition from charters. There’s pressure for traditional districts to win back students from charters, and the way they attract them is by ruthlessly pursuing higher test scores.

If districts are pressured to improve, that’s a good thing. However, improvement doesn’t have to mean forsaking common sense. As an illustration, look at some of the new charter elementary schools in St. Louis. There’s a Montessori school, a Spanish immersion school, and a French immersion school. None of those charters takes a drill-and-kill approach. A district that wants to compete with them would do well to avoid standardized tests for five-year-olds and instead replicate what the charters are creating.

As for charters like KIPP, that are known to focus on academic skills, they find ways to do that through age-appropriate activities. Here is a sample schedule from a KIPP elementary school in Houston. There are long hours, lots of time on reading, math, Spanish — what you would expect from a KIPP school. But interspersed throughout the day are blocks of time dedicated to “circle time,” “creative play,” “”storytelling,” and “project-based learning.” (And see this article about the creative ways KIPP is teaching reading to older children in St. Louis.)

It’s not all about textbooks and the blackboard. In fact, any charter that did torture kindergartners with uninterrupted test-prep would have trouble attracting students and would be very easy for any district to compete with. There would be no need to change the kindergarten curriculum in order to compete with such a poorly designed charter.

I’m opposed to local-food mandates and farm subsidies, but I’m all for consumers buying local produce if that’s what they choose. So, I was happy to see this St. Louis Beacon article about a business model that gives consumers what they want and keeps farms in operation, without resorting to handouts from the state.

Here’s how it works: Consumers pay a subscription to the farm in advance, then they receive boxes of produce every week at a pick-up location in the city.