A system with multiple veto points

This is Joseph.

From Kevin Drum:

As for third parties, I'll say only this: in 1980, when I was 22, I voted for John Anderson. That sure was stupid. Eight years of Ronald Reagan because Jimmy Carter didn't quite meet my idealistic standards of excellence for presidents. I've never made that mistake again.

This is the issue with first past the post systems -- splitting up the vote from one coalition can lead to the other one being elected.  Just ask Canada about majority Conservative governments with a minority of the popular vote.

But it is worse in the United States of America.  For a law to be passed, it needs to pass the house, pass the senate, and then not be vetoed by the president (or have the veto overridden).  With two partisan parties, it already leads to a lot of gridlock.  Imagine if you needed to build coalitions in both the house and senate?

Now, some degree of gridlock might be a feature and not a bug if one is distrustful of government.  But there is probably a limit to how unresponsive we want government to be to actual problems, including those of bad government policy.

So third parties are both a chance to push the opposition past the post, but there isn't really a vision as to how a third party would work without one of the old parties collapsing.  And I am not sure how that reforms the parties -- it just shuffles the coalitions and puts new labels on them. 

Occam's Razor

This is Joseph.

I know Mark is often lukewarm about Kevin Drum.  But he has been asking some pretty good questions lately, and I think this one about Hillary Clinton is quite good.  I find, in practice, that people tend to assume that others know about he things that they do.  Many of my most geeky friends who are good with coding also tend to not be the biggest fans of the Clintons. 

I wonder if much of the email and server issues are about what they could know that one could do with such a set-up if they were intending to be nefarious.  But it seems, from the emails, that Hillary was not especially adept with technology, asking to be taught how to use an iPad. 

So I am starting to side with Kevin Drum -- the private server is looking more like an idea that seemed cool at the time, and nobody thought that it would ever look bad.  After all, people are still not attacking Colin Powell over exactly the same practice when he was Secretary of State.

Oregon and Medicaid

The new Oregon Medicaid study is coming out at a very bad time for me to comment.  But I want to direct you to the Incidental Economist which is doing a banner job of clarifying why it was hard to get good evidence directly on health outcomes from the study.  Further comments are here. 

One thing to note on health outcomes (poached from the comments at TIE) is:

In the case of total cholesterol the rate was reduced by 17% (from 14.1% to 11.7%). If that kind of drop is not detectable by the study then I think it is a problem.

Or this one:

 HgbA1C drops from 5.1% to 4.2%.

I think that this is too harsh, but it does point out that many of the changes were clinically significant but that the study (for a lot of reasons due to enrollment and short follow-up) is not really able to give precise estimates.   Remember, only 25% of the people offered Medicaid took it, so the adherence rate is a lot lower than what we normally think of in an RCT and so the intention to treat estimate is a poor measure of the associations among those who enrolled. 

Kevin Drum discusses this more here. Pay special attention to the PDF at the bottom of the post.