I was just notified that the 2010-2011 rate for this same plan was going up to $410 a month – a 14% increase. I wasn’t thrilled about that, of course, given that the overall annual rate of inflation these days is close to zero. But I figured it was better than the 39% increase facing some folks this year. So I was going to put my head down and pay the bills.

Then I got a letter from Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority. This is the kind of government-organized exchange that is one of the core components of the President’s health care plan. It was created as part of Massachusetts’ universal health care system.

The letter told me about Business Express, a new way for small businesses like mine to purchase insurance for employees. (Before this, we had to shop directly with insurers or – as I did — join an organization like the Small Business Service Bureau.) I went to the Business Express web site, answered three or four basic questions about my business, and then got taken to this grid:

What’s on this grid? A choice between 35 private health insurance plans. That’s right. That’s how a health insurance exchange works. You go to a government-run web site and you get to choose between several competing private plans with a wide range of costs and benefits.

I noticed that the prices for the Tufts plans started a lot lower than the prices for the plans offered by my current insurer, Harvard Pilgrim. So I checked out some of the details of the Tufts plan options. The one for $280 a month has a $2,000 annual deductible, a $5,000 out-of-pocket maximum, and no co-insurance.  Co-pays for things like doctors visits, prescription drugs, and emergency room services might be a bit different, but essentially it’s the same plan as I have now … for 20% less than I pay now and 32% less than next year’s rate for my current plan.

Let me repeat that … because of my state’s version of the “government takeover of healthcare” I will be saving $1,600 in health care premiums next year. Same doctor (I checked – he’s on the plan.) Same drugs. Same hospitals. Even if I end up getting sick and paying the difference between the out-of-pocket cost maximums, I still come out $600 ahead. I’ll also save the $85 a year it cost me to join the Small Business Service Bureau.

Hmm, you say … maybe I’m getting screwed. Maybe there is fine print somewhere that I haven’t noticed and the Tufts plan excludes coverage for some things I’ll end up needing. I suppose that’s possible, but at least I have the assurance that every plan offered through the connector meets the State’s Minimum Creditable Coverage standards.

Oh, and if I hadn’t been a small business owner … if I’d just been some poor schmuck on his own trying to get coverage … I could buy the same plan for $307 a month. And if my income were less than $32,496 as an individual I’d be eligible for subsidized insurance through the Commonwealth Care program.

Ah, but what this chart doesn’t show is the hidden costs of all the new government mandates and regulations, right? How much would I have been paying if all this health care reform had never been put in place? Well, in 2008 I was paying $486 a month (albeit for a plan with a much smaller deductible and out-of-pocket maximum, but also for one that had no prescription drug coverage at all). So the idea that more government action in the health care market inevitably leads to higher premiums is simply a canard.

OK, you Obamacare opponents … tell me which part of this you don’t like.

• Someone needs to take a poll of the American public: “Do you support the idea of having the Federal government create minimum standards for private health insurance policies?” I’m betting at least 60% say yes, and probably a lot more if you point out that the Federal government already does this for things like food safety, workplace safety, auto safety, and so forth.
• Funny to hear Republican Mike Enzi advocating so strongly for keeping Medicare (i.e. socialized medicine) intact.
• Enzi: “I like the exchanges.” Is he going to catch hell for that?
• Just for the record, I own a small business and I provide health insurance for all my employees. (I’m the only employee.) I pay $360 a month ($4,320 a year) for an HMO plan with a $2,000 deductible for hospitalization and other secondary services. I would pay this same rate regardless of my medical condition. I purchase this insurance through the Small Business Service Bureau, which is essentially an exchange. I’m given an option each year to change plans, and I can change between insurance companies or between plans offered by my existing insurance company. I think this is a perfectly acceptable solution and I’m not sure why it’s so hard to replicate this model across the nation.
• Tom Harkin is the first to address the problem of the incremental approach: It’s like seeing someone who’s drowning 50 feet off-shore and you throw them a 10-foot rope.
• Tom Harkin compares pooling to segregation. Yes, that is the only way to make a profit in insurance.
• Odd to hear Boehner referred to as “Leader.” Sounds like we’re in North Korea.
• Republicans’ reliance on state-by-state approaches sounds wrong. People are mobile, and in many cases families cross state lines. We need a national approach.
• Jay Rockefeller: “The health insurance industry is the shark that swims just beneath the water.” Ouch!
• Damn, just missed 10 minutes. What happened?
• “If Jay’s son got hit by a bus … and his father wasn’t Jay Rockefeller …” LOL!
• Obama: We want competition, but we want some minimum standards. Wait … isn’t that managed competition?
• Memo to Biden: Stop talking. Although your point about making Social Security mandated is well-taken.
• Memo to Biden ten minutes later: Seriously, stop talking.
• I hope someone does a fact check on Ryan’s budget stats, and if he’s right, the Dems need to take this seriously and get it fixed. On the other hand, it’s not clear how Ryan’s approach would make the situation any better.
• Obama trying hard to introduce “Medicare Advantage” into common parlance, since that’s the part of Medicare he wants to cut. If he can sell the idea that the cuts in Medicare he proposes are actually cuts in payments to insurance companies, he’s got a winning argument. Grassley has a rebuttal for this. Fact check time!
• Obama to McCain: “I think you make a legitimate point.” McCain is speechless. Nice moment.
• God help us if the CBO is a bunch of idiots.
• Grassley says this would be first time government requires people to buy something. Not really, since our tax dollars are used all the time to buy things that we as individuals don’t necessarily want bought.
• Conrad: Medicare is going to go broke in eight years. Doing nothing guarantees this. Right on.
• Conrad: Five percent of Medicare beneficiaries – the chronically ill – use fifty percent of all the money. Wow. Says solution for this is coordination of care. How much of the problem can be solved this way?
• Boehner thinks his job is to listen. That’s only part of it. The Congress also needs to educate and lead.
• Missed another half hour or so. Drat.
• It seems to me that both parties in both houses select the dumbest and most reactionary among them as their leaders.
• Barrasso talks about how scared people are about what will happen if the bill passes. But he neglects to mention that they’re primarily scared because they’ve been fed lies by opponents of the bill.
• Barrasso points out that people who have to pay out of pocket are best consumers of health care, because they are sensitive to cost. He’s right about this, and a fundamental weakness of the Democrats’ approach is a failure to make people more aware of what their own health care costs.
• Barrasso also right to point out need to eat less, exercise more, and stop smoking. (So will the GOP support tougher FDA regulations on cigarettes? Doubt it.)
• Obama rebuts Barrasso, pointing out that high deductible, low premium plans don’t work all that well for folks making $40,000. So true.
• Everything I’ve heard today just confirms what I think – and what others have suggested: We need a system that makes basic, no-frills care available to everyone regardless of income, employment, residence, etc., and then let the market take care of the extras like brand name prescriptions, treatments that extend life for less than three months, and all the other nice things that our “best in the world” health care providers can offer.
• Roskam makes same point about public reaction to the bill – they don’t like it – but the public thinks the bill contained death panels.
• Republicans probably make a good point that expanding Medicaid is not a great idea. But it may be the best bad idea we’ve got. What’s their alternative? As has been pointing out, you can’t help someone living at the poverty line with HSAs and tort reform.
• Obama: “Neither of these proposals are radical, the question is which one works best.” Yup.
• Obama FINALLY – at 4:35 – points out that the individual elements of the bill are popular even when the overall bill isn’t. Thank you!
• Republicans need to remember that we DID start with a blank piece of paper at the beginning of the administration. What’s the point of starting again … we’d just waste another year. Oh, and they don’t really want to start with a blank piece of paper. At least some of them want to start with the Boehner plan. (Obama made this point at the very end.)
• Again, enough with the anecdotes! We get it.
• Coburn is absolutely right that we need to reconnect the system of payment with the system of purchase. But to a great extent it’s the private health insurance system that inserts the disconnect. Why can’t he see that?
• Pelosi wraps up by saying the key thing is to eliminate discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions. But that’s at the foundation of the insurance model. You try to estimate how likely something is to happen and you charge accordingly so you can make a profit.
• Overall I thought Obama came across as someone who takes this very seriously and listens to both sides but is not receptive to bull. Many (but not all) Republicans came across as simply whining and refusing to play.
• And I really hope this kind of summit happens again and again. Having these people make their cases without filtering them through talking heads. And it makes them do their homework. I loved it.

OK, time to break for lunch.

[W]hat frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We cannot wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about their opponent — a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of well-qualified public servants should not be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual Senators. Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game. But it is precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the American people. Worse yet, it is sowing further division among our citizens and further distrust in our government.

Does anyone disagree?

The “other version” of the Hitler-Coakley-Brown video has now received well over a million views. But not only on DrRonPaul2012’s page. The same video has been uploaded to YouTube by:

• Battlefield315 (67,000 views as of Friday afternoon)
• RonPaul4Pres2K8 (4,200)
• tikamue (1,500)
• tonytonytee (1,200)
• wbradss (400)

… and a whole bunch of others. There are probably additional me-too posts coming in every hour.

So now I’m wondering whether DrRonPaul2012 is really the author of the subtitles of “Hitler Finds Out Scott Brown Massachusetts Senate Seat” or if he was also merely a re-poster who happened to get found by the right people.

Can anyone shed some light the true origins of this clip? (Not the TRUE origins … we know it’s from the movie “Downfall.” I mean the true origins of the more popular Coakley-Brown version.) And if DrRonPaul2012 is not the real subtitle author, does the real subtitle author have any copyright claims against him? Or does the fact that we’ve all be stealing from “fairly using” the original movie void any sort of authorship rights for the new subtitles we’ve added?

Some three-and-a-half hours later, I posted my creation:

I put a link to the video in my Facebook status update and in a tweet with the #MASen hashtag, and went to bed.

This morning I was very happy to see that a handful of people had already watched it. Some of my Facebook friends shared it, and some of their friends watched it, too. It wasn’t too long before the video had over 100 views. I was pretty psyched. People were paying attention.

Then around 1:00 this afternoon I saw myself mentioned in a tweet. It said “@universalhub Local playwright Dave Schrag’s video @dvschrag is a better take: http://bit.ly/7iOtjH.” OK, I thought, that’s good news. One of my friends is spreading the word. But then I thought … Wait a minute. A “better take” than what?

I looked at @universalhub’s earlier tweets and found “Hitler is stunned by Coakley’s defeat. http://bit.ly/6pRqzt.” Someone else had come up with exactly the same idea. And this other video was getting picked up all over the place, including big-name sites like Comedy Central. It was no contest. By early evening, my video had been watched almost 350 times, a number that I would have been awfully pleased with twelve hours prior. But this other video – which is funny but, IMHO, not as funny as mine – had almost 75,000 views. Seventy-five-THOUSAND views in a day. It was the 55th most viewed video today on ALL OF YOUTUBE!

So I ask those of you who know this stuff better than I, what did I do wrong? Why did this other guy go viral and not me? Did I fail to plant some seeds in the most obvious places? Or did this DrRonPaul2012 fellow have a huge head start on me? (He’s only got 61 YouTube subscribers, so I don’t think that alone could account for the rapid spread.)

Any ideas?

2002: Mitt Romney (R), 50%; Shannon O’Brien (D), 45%

1998: Paul Celluci (R), 51%; Scott Harshbarger (D), 47%

1994: Bill Weld (R), 71%; Mark Roosevelt (D), 28%

1990: Bill Weld (R), 50%; John Silber (R in D clothing), 47%

Democratic Governor Deval Patrick’s approval rating is currently around 42%, and this was the first open Senate seat in the state since John Kerry was elected in 1984.

So although it’s true that there are very few Republicans right now on Beacon Hill or Capitol Hill, let’s not pretend that this is equivalent to Barney Frank being elected senator from Utah. People who were expecting a Coakley cakewalk a month ago – myself included – were just not paying attention to some basic political facts.

A vote for Scott Brown is not a vote for real change. It’s a vote for no change. And somehow that seems to be what people want these days, even as they curse their present conditions.

It’s not just the Republicans anymore. Independents and even many Democrats seem to have decided that just about everything done or proposed by government is a bad idea. That includes all the ideas that were considered good ideas when recently proposed by candidates as opposed to actual officeholders. How else can we explain the huge shift in public opinion over the last few years? After giving the GOP “a thumping” in 2006 and 2008, we’re now turning against the people we brought in to replace them. A year after 60% of Massachusetts voters supported Obama, it now seems that a majority are going to vote to stop him from doing what he said he was going to do.

What is going on? What are people thinking? Are they thinking?

I can imagine a few reasons why a voter would just say no:

• Things are fine the way they are and are going to get better. [This view has been in the minority for years.]
• Things could be better, but anything the government tries to do about it will make it worse.
• Things could be better for other people, but that’s not my problem.
• Things could be better for me and/or other people if government did something, but I’m not willing to make other changes in my life necessary for the government’s plan to work.

I think the second position can be proven false by examining history, and it makes me sad to think that we as a society seem to have forgotten that government can be a good thing.

It also makes me sad that there are a lot of people holding the third position, but at least it’s a position that’s intellectually defensible if not politically correct. Fortunately, I think the number of people who truly feel this way is not large.

It’s the folks in the last group that are in some ways the scariest, particularly because I don’t think they fully comprehend what they’re saying or thinking. We’ve become a society that wants to lose weight without diet or exercise, get wealthier without adding value to anything, and get more of everything while spending less – especially from government.

I was a psychology major. I understand that resistance to change is part of the human psyche. But change is going to come whether you like it or not. The question is whether you want to make it happen or let it happen. Which camp are you in?

That warning was posted on Facebook by a magazine targeted to teenage girls. (No, I don’t read the magazine myself. It’s published by a client of mine.) I read that post a couple times and said to myself, “that can’t be right.” And in fact, it’s not. It seems I’d stumbled onto an urban legend in the making.

The Facebook post linked to an article at Feministing.com titled “Carrying condoms could get you arrested.” The article begins:

Jaclyn Friedman has a good post up at Amplify about an initiative in D.C. that could literally get you arrested for prostitution charges if you’re caught carrying three or more condoms with you. In short, D.C. police are using their "Prostitution Free Zone" law to go as far as arresting women for carrying condoms in their purse. This is happening in New and San Francisco as well.

Follow the link to Jaclyn Friedman’s article and you’ll read that

in some areas of D.C., carrying three or more condoms is grounds for arrest on prostitution charges

Follow this link in turn and you’ll come to a January 7 article by Alex DiBranco at Change.org titled “Don’t Carry Condoms in D.C. – You Could Be Charged Charged With Prostitution.” DiBranco opens with:

Think you might get lucky tonight? Well, if you’re in D.C., don’t bring more than two condoms in your purse, or you could be arrested as a prostitute. In D.C., police can declare "Prostitution Free Zones" where officers can pick up (I mean, arrest) anyone suspected of sex work. And they’ve been accused of using carrying three or more condoms as proof of intent to sell sex — rather than intent to spend the weekend getting jiggy with a guy.

Finally, we’ve arrived at some primary source material: A 2008 report written by the Alliance for a Safe & Diverse DC and published by a nonprofit called Different Avenues, as well as the official definition of a Prostitution Free Zone from the DC Metropolitan Police Department.

One teensy-weensy problem: Neither the report nor the police regulations nor anything else outside the blogosphere state that carrying condoms – whether three or three hundred — can get you arrested.

Alex DiBranco knows this now. Five days after posting the “Don’t Carry Condoms” article, she wrote a follow-up, titled “D.C. Police Confirm Condom Policy that Endangers Public Health.” She noted that DCist.com, another blog, had done some fact-checking. DiBranco wrote:

DCist contacted the Metropolitan Police Department for comment on its policy after they reported on an article I wrote last week about the use of condoms as evidence in "Prostitution Free Zones." According to DCist, MPD spokesperson Gwendolyn Crump confirms that condoms can be used as a factor leading "an officer to suspect (reasonable suspicion) that a person is engaged in prostitution," but stresses that possession of rubbers alone isn’t sufficient cause for an order to disperse or arrest. [emphasis added]

Here is the full comment from the police spokesperson, as posted by DCist:

Although the possession of multiple condoms may be a factor that leads an officer to suspect (reasonable suspicion) that a person is engaged in prostitution, it is not enough to establish probable cause for any crime. Depending on the circumstances, factors such as this may justify an investigative stop – but not an arrest.

If an individual is congregating with at least one other person in a Prostitution Free Zone (PFZ), which is already by nature a high prostitution area, late at night with no apparent destination, and in possession of multiple condoms, that would be sufficient to order the individual to disperse. Police cannot just order individuals to leave a PFZ without a reasonable suspicion that they are engaged in prostitution or prostitution-related activities.

The criminal offense associated with a PFZ involves the failure to disperse after an officer issues such an order to two or more persons congregating on public space within the PFZ for the purpose of engaging in prostitution or prostitution-related activities. The indicators for determining whether a group is congregating for prostitution-related activities are below, and the full DC Code section is attached.

Essentially, if police cannot arrest someone for having two or more condoms outside a PFZ, police cannot arrest them for it within a PFZ. Community members often refer to PFZs as an anti-loitering statute. To some extent that is accurate, but the only loitering that is prohibited is that related to prostitution.

One may approve or disapprove of DC’s actual tactics to thwart prostitution, but boiling down their policy to “carrying condoms in DC will get you arrested” is preposterously misleading. Advocates do their causes no favors by repeating errant claims, and bloggers should take the time to drill down to the original source material before rebroadcasting inflammatory reports.

As of this writing (January 13 at 11:15 AM EST), the main text of DiBranco’s original “Don’t Carry Condoms” article has not been updated to reflect the DCist’s post of the MPD clarification. I’m going to tell her to edit the original article. Even if she does, though, it’s probably too late to prevent this urban legend from making the rounds. Look for it someday at snopes.com.

Update: Alex DiBranco has since thanked me for my comment and an update has been posted on the January 7 article. The misleading headline and statements in the body regarding condom counts and arrests remain.

N.B. It occurred to me too late to check to see whether anyone else had already exposed this myth. After Googling carrying condoms arrest I found that CityPaper scooped me by a couple of hours. Drat!