Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

I did not have this on my fuck 2020 bingo card.

It’s been a really long fucking year.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Reality always wins in the end.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Let there be snark.

We still have time to mess this up!

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

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A Goodbye to Cheryl

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As many of you know, Cheryl left us the other day for the always outstanding LGM, and I would be remiss if I did not thank her for all the wonderful and informative posts. And while she is not really going anywhere, it’s still sad to see her go.

Next year, this site will have been around for twenty years, and it’s just been a weird journey. My own political changes, my lifestyle changes, my interests changing, all mapped out for several decades with a bunch of people following along is weird, but more surprising to me is all the relationships we have formed along the way. There are so many people from earlier years who I still am in touch with via facebook and twitter who newer members of the current community wouldn’t know if the names were mentioned- Redkitten, Justsomefuckhead, ABL, Minna, etc. And not to give you a lethal dose of egocentrism, I’m just talking about my personal experiences. All of you have formed your own relationships and like any community, some of you like some of you more than others, etc.

Reading the LGM thread, I saw a lot of old names of I had not seen in a while- Aimai, Linnaeus, and many more, and so on. A lot of complaints about the commenting system. And it makes me wonder, do people hate the comment section design that much? Or is that just what they are saying now? Maybe they left because they no longer felt the website compelling and the blaming the comment features is just an easier way to put things. I dunno.

It’s hard keeping communities together, because people change and interests change and the community itself changes. I see it in my online gaming communities- people lose interest in a game and before you know it, a core member of your team is but a distant memory. Do we focus too much on pets and gardening and cooking? I don’t know. I can only write about what interests me. Every day there are tons of things that hit the news and I just don’t have the energy to fucking deal with the same idiots again- right now I am thinking about the execrable David Brooks who wrote another tedious piece on the Bobos, managing to blame everyone in his elite caste except… himself. I sat down to react, typed out a few sentences, and just stopped and all I could think was “THIS FUCKING GUY AGAIN.”

That has happened a lot the last couple of years for me, not just on the blog, but in real life. My youngest sister, who never paid attention to politics until a couple years ago, started posting shit on facebook. And she was always unintentionally posting right wing memes thinking they were reasonable, and I would just unload on her. She’d get hurt, and ask me why I was so mad when she was just asking a question. And I finally had to explain to her that she was not asking a question, she was advancing right wing frames, and the reason I didn’t want to argue with her about it is because I HAVE BEEN HAVING THE SAME FUCKING ARGUMENTS WITH BAD ACTORS FOR TWO DECADES.

At any rate, this got rambly, as my posts often do. Go read the LGM thread. Read the comments. Are we as a community failing others? How can we grow? Are we too insular? Are the commenting features in need of a complete overhaul? I want this site to be around for another 20 years. I want it to keep going after I am dead.

And back to the point of the post in the first place- thanks, Cheryl, and best of luck to you and LGM!

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The Elders Have Authorized a Reply To Levenson’s Bucket List

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The Elders have authorized me to make the following reply to Levenson’s bucket list desire to hike a very long way:

We’re watching you Professor Levenson…

Finally, I am not authorized at this time to disclose whether this post is paid for with Sorosbucks!

Open Thread!

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Let’s Talk About How We Treat Each Other Here

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As I’ve told you, we will be moving to the brand spanking new site sometime between 6 November to 8 November, and while most of the stuff is done by the developers and Watergirl, I am still working on writing up a new commenting policy. Much to the chagrin of Watergirl, who wants everything done yesterday (even if she does not yell at me I know she is screaming on the inside- I have that effect on women), I’ve been tossing it around in my head for six months, how I want to handle things, how I want us to move forward, etc. In fairness, that is how I write everything- by letting it bounce around my thick skull for a while and then I just blurt it all out. At any rate, I still have not finished the policy, and will circulate it among the front pagers before implemented, but recent events have led me to believe we need to have a chat.

Obviously, and this is no mystery to anyone here, I don’t read the comments as much as I used to. For years, I responded to almost every comment directed my way, and spent hours upon hours mixing it up. I just don’t have the time to do that anymore, and some times I just get burnt out with it all and need a break. We’re coming up on 20 years as a blog, and I don’t know if you realize it, 20 years for a blog is A LONG FUCKING TIME. Most digital magazines only last a year or two, to give you an idea. So I do what I have to do to stay fresh, or as close to it as reasonably possible. A lot of times I go to write posts these days, and Betty Cracker or Mistermix or Anne Laurie or someone else has already not only addressed what I wanted to talk about, but did a better job than I would have.

I’m rambling. At any rate, I want to talk about how we treat each other in the comments. As always, you are free to say, within limits, whatever the fuck you want in the comments. Obviously there are some things we will not tolerate, like racist, sexist, and other wise bigoted bullshit. But my overall philosophy has been you are, within limits, able to post whatever you want, because it only reflects on you. When you say stupid shit, you’re the one who is standing out in public with your pants around your ankles looking the fool, not me. We’re not going to delete comments, we’re not going to censor you, and if people don’t want to hear your rambling nonsense, well, that’s why we have the pie filter (ALL HAIL CLEEK!).

Having said that, I do want to caution you that it appears we are all strung out from year 67 (that is how long he has been President, right?) of the Trump Presidency and the never-ending cavalcade of nonsense and the ceaseless barrage of mean-spiritedness and overall nastiness, and appear at times to be taking it out on each other. I’d like you to think about how you treat your fellow commenters, and try to, in the words of Melania, BE BEST. There’s no reason for pile-ons of decent people who you just happen to disagree with. Just because you don’t value one person’s insight doesn’t mean there aren’t others who love them. I’m speaking in general, but more specifically I saw MomSense take a heap of abuse and there have been others. There’s just no need for that. It’s not your job to tone police the comments, or to drive off people who don’t agree with you. There’s no need to assume that because someone lurves them some Bernie or has a full on crush for Biden (both positions I personally find mystifying) is just a troll or trying to hurt Democrats or what not. Just stop it with the bad faith stuff.

This place is supposed to be a community and a safe haven. Try to be good to one another. Try to keep that every person typing, even if their screen name is LordFartDaddy, is an actual living, breathing, sentient human being, with feelings and emotions and a life of their own. You don’t know how bad their day has been. You don’t know what they are struggling with on an hourly basis. Try not to fuck with them. Let’s use this space to help each other, help liberal causes, and vent when we need to. Let’s try to be better about not tearing each other down and getting at each other’s throats. And this goes for commenters and front pagers.

Or else I’m gonna have to fuck one or more of you up. Steve hasn’t eaten since noon, people. This is not an idle threat.

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Another year, another look back post

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Six years in, and almost 1,800 Mayhew Anderson on Insurance posts written. Another anniversary and another exploration of the odd esoterica of the US healthcare system completed as I begin writing for a seventh year at Balloon Juice. I need to say the same thing that I said last year:

Writing here at Balloon Juice has been and continues to be an amazing experience. I get to play with ideas that fascinate me, and John gives me the keys to write to an audience…..

One of the big changes since I’ve come to Duke, beyond saying good bye to the persona of Richard Mayhew, is that I’ve changed my writing targets. When I was Richard Mayhew, I had to write at Balloon Juice…. Now, the audience is sometimes all jackals. Other days, the intended audience is a few score of geeks and policy professionals who need to know about some esoteric corner case. I apologize when I take over the blog for those purposes as I feel like I am hijacking your attention to pay the cost of entry into conversations that I want to be in….

But mainly, I just want to thank all of the jackals, the front-pagers and John for a community where I can nerd out on something that I find fascinating. I’ll figure out what Year Six SEVEN looks like, but the first five six have been wonderful.

My writing has become even more narrowly focused over the past year. Part of that has been that I set a goal for myself to play in the peer review space this year. And the very nature of that space requires far more targeting. At this point last year I had a single peer reviewed research project that was almost to the point of acceptance at the Journal of Health, Politics, Policy and Law and a letter to the editor for Health Affairs where I made the point that 2018 is an analytically weird year.

This summer I had a cluster of original research come out and an invited commentary already published. I have an article forthcoming in two weeks where a co-author and I will be looking at one of two topics which will dominate the 2021 rule making process for the ACA exchanges. The two of us have another paper accepted last night  which engages on the other major topic of the 2021 rule making process. We, along with a third collaborator, are again looking at that question from a different angle with a paper that is likely to come out this fall. I had a moment of quasi-maniacal super-villain laughter this summer when I looked at a revised version of Exhibit 3 for that manuscript and realized it will be entered as evidence in future litigation.

This afternoon, I am expecting to get back a second round of co-author edits for a manuscript that uses public use files to show something bloody obvious but not recorded. Insurance is complicated and this project shows some additional forms of complications in a way that no one else has even thought about. We’re using public, downloadable data, and part of our analytical data set has less than fifty downloads (and I am responsible for 6 of them as I lost track of the file a few times). Over the weekend, I need to make edits to the discussion section of a methods paper on matching for a small and unusual population (TLDR: It is really tough to do with reasonable assumptions). We hope to get that manuscript submitted for the first time next week. Another half dozen projects are in various stages of review, revision, and rewriting even as I’m building my 2020 project pipeline that builds on what I did in 2018 and 2019.  Under the most pessimistic assumptions I anticipate having six accepted manuscripts this year, median assumptions are eight or nine acceptances while wildly optimistic assumptions have a bakers dozen acceptances.   I will have four first or solo authorships from this current tranche of papers.

From an academic point of view, that is a wildly productive year especially as a good number of those manuscripts will be landing at very good journals.

But there are trade-offs. I have narrowed my thinking a lot and it shows that a lot of my Balloon-Juice writing is technocratic tinkering. Beyond that, my non-Balloon Juice public writing has crashed. I have only published three blogs at Health Affairs this year. I have not written an op-ed although I am in the process of prepping one around a topic that will be relevant around Thanksgiving. I became very narrow this year.

I needed a year to demonstrate that I can work well within the peer review paradigm. I think I achieved that. I enjoyed myself as I would like to think that I have added some unique value to the conversation and the knowledge that my co-authors, collaborators, colleagues and I are sharing will be meaningful and important in policy development. Next year will also be a productive but hopefully at a slightly less insane pace of production in the peer review universe. I hope I can grab some of those thoughts back from the ultra-specific to slightly broader questions that are more important that describing a particular form of financial plumbing.

I still get tremendous energy writing here.  I would like to de-geekify and make some of my writing more pragmatic over the next year.  I would really appreciate help on that and suggestions as to how to be more responsive to the needs of Jackals instead of merely paying the cost of entry to other conversations. But that is a thought for another day and another post, so onto year seven.

 

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Balloon Juice and the invisible primary

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The invisible primary component of the 2020 cycle is upon us:

The invisible primary is when candidates or proto-candidates assess their strengths, test potential coalitions and reach out to rare and valuable resources such as critical staffers and validators. There will be far more people running for president on the Democratic side who will never file an FEC report because the time between waking up in the morning and deciding that the person in the mirror should be in the White House and the end of the day will be quite informational. Quite a few people will have that thought but an inventory of their ability to access resources will show that there is no chance in hell of them even getting to a three way tie for third place in a delegate poor state.

We’re part of this invisible cycle. Balloon Juice is part of the liberal/Democratic extended party infrastructure. This community is part of the wide web of diverse stakeholders that slowly, somewhat haphazardly filters the field. It won’t be perfect; there will be some cranks and there will be one noters. We are part of the filtering process.

Balloon-Juice raised significant money in the 2012-2014-2016 and most recently the 2018 cycle. We generate analysis that is trusted and disseminated to other allied thought leaders and activists. We’ve shown an ability to push pithy responses (“tire rims and anthrax” and “hookers and blow”) to key analytical problems. The commenters and the front-pagers reactions to policies, positions, events and affects are important feedback for a slice of the activist base.

So as the primary season evolves, just remember that the collective zeitgeist of Balloon Juice is part of the invisible primary — not too bad for an almost top-10,000 pet, cooking, health policy, science writing, national security, screaming into the void blog.

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Jon Swift

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It’s time once again to continue a tradition started by Jon Swift/Al Weisel, the “Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves.” Jon/Al left behind some wonderful satire, but was also a nice guy and a strong supporter of small blogs. (Here’s Jon/Al’s 2007 and 2008 editions.  Our revivals from 2010 through 2017 can be found here.)
 
If you’d like to participate, just reply to this e-mail or write to me (Batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com) with your best post of the year before 12/25:
 
Blog Name
Title of Post
Link
Author of Post
Brief Description/Pitch of the Post (1–2 sentences)
 
(If it’s not a reply, adding “best post” in the subject line would also help.) 
 
To modify Jon Swift’s 2008 solicitation:
 
I would be very honored if you would participate and send me a link to what you think was your best post of [2018], along with a short description of it.  Please make the hard choice and send me only one link.  I would like to post it before the end of the year, so if you could get it to me before Christmas, I would really appreciate it.
 
One submission per blog, please, otherwise things can get messy. Group bloggers can pick a piece among themselves, but are also welcome to submit their work via their individual blogs, if they have them. 
 
As usual, I’m aiming to find the right balance between “inclusive” and “manageable.”  If you know a few excellent blogs (preferably on the smaller side) that you suspect might not be on my radar, feel free to send me their website address (and contact info, if you have it).
Contact Batocchio <[email protected]>.

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