Going into the House health care debate today, it pays to keep in mind what the Republican party has identified as the real problem with American health care. Steve Benen in the Washington Monthly sums it up succinctly, quoting former Congressman Dick Armey, the guru of the tea party crowd: “The largest empirical problem we have in health care today is too many people are too overinsured.”

There it is, the right’s philosophy on American health care in 17 words. Most of us think the problem with the existing system is that we pay too much, get too little, and leave too many behind. Dick Armey sees the existing system and thinks we’d all be better off with less coverage....

Just two months ago, Reps. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) and Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal making the same case. “When was the last time you asked your doctor how much it would cost for a necessary test or procedure?” they asked, making the case that consumers need more “control … over their care.”

It’s all premised on the notion that health insurance encourages medical treatments. If we have coverage, we might get tests and procedures that we wouldn’t get if weren’t so darned insured. Less coverage means fewer costs.

This last point highlights an enduring myth about health care that has yet to be seriously challenged, even by Democrats, in the current debate. It’s the idea that if people had better access to health care, it would lead to “overuse,” and therefore to increased cost. That’s why we can’t have single-payer or any other reform that makes free or low-cost health care more available to more people---because without financial barriers, everyone would be running to the doctor every time they sneezed.

This myth treats medical procedures as if they were enjoyable leisure activities that everyone would like to partake of more often if only they were given the chance: “Gosh, I’ve got some free time today–-I think I’ll go sit in my doctor’s waiting room” or “Wow, I’d love to have another colonoscopy this month” or “Hey, why don’t I have my hip replaced---after all, it’s free.” The overuse myth suggests that a large portion of the U.S. population is suffering from Munchausen syndrome---or at the very least, that we are masochistic hypochodriacs.

In reality, there’s scant evidence that better access leads to overuse---although the opposite is certainly true. And the meteoric rise in health care costs, beginning in the 1990s, has no apparent relationship to greater access. As Physicians for a National Health Program pointed out several years back:

Ever wondered just how partisan or bipartisan Congress is now compared to then? Well, here's a series of visual representations of just that, thanks to Andrew Odewahn, who calculated Senatorial affinities over time and plugged the data into GraphViz.

This is another typically fun and speedy Ignite presentation: 1 speaker, 5 minutes, 20 slides auto-advancing every 15 seconds, whether the speaker keeps up or not. Thanks to my friend Sara Winge at O'Reilly Media, the home of Ignite, for the heads up on the video.

This story first appeared at Miller-McCune.

Metacritic.com is an acclaimed Web site that combines thousands of media reviews of entertainment offerings — movies, games, books and albums — into a Metascore, a sort of weighted average of critics' reviews that ranges from zero to 100. Analysis of just a small subset of the site's information shows the power of numbers to confirm — or defy — expectation.

The Actors
The colored horizontal bars on this chart present a graphical representation of the distribution of scores given to movies in which each of the listed actors appear. The numbers inside the bars represent the average of review scores for those movies; the actors listed are the top 50 and the bottom 10, in terms of those averages. Note that the reviews are primarily from the last decade; no consideration is given to the magnitude of the actor's role; and a high average rating could indicate acting skill, the ability to pick good projects (or good trilogies), reviewer bias or just luck. To the extent that the ordering of the actors appears generally reasonable, some unexpected placements may inspire a rethinking of subjective assessments (or, in the case of Viggo Mortensen's rating above Clint Eastwood, a good long laugh).

The Critics
This scatterplot shows 25 prolific movie critics in terms of the favorability with which they rate films, and the degree to which their reviews tend to agree with those of other critics, scaled to reflect their volume of reviews written. If you want to get a sense of the zeitgeist but can only read one review, you might prefer Rene Rodriguez, whose low standard deviation from the mean review score makes him very nearly a living critical average. If you are interested in an alternative perspective, Mick LaSalle's high standard deviation places him further from the critical pack than any of these peers. Reviews from both Michael Wilmington and Marc Savlov are so regularly and respectively positive and negative that they should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.

The Movies
A "smoothed" plot of movie scores over time is depicted, highlighting the expected seasonal peaks in mid-summer and at the end of the year, along with the mid-winter and early autumn doldrums. Also listed are some of the more influential movies of their eras, in terms of number of reviews, along with their mean scores. Might the poorly reviewed summer of 2002 be attributed to releases delayed in the wake of 9/11? Does the relative lack of troughs from 2003 to 2006 reflect a real or imagined streak of high-quality films?

On the left, Domino is snoozing the morning away while Inkblot ponders his options.  After I took this picture I hopped in the shower, and when I got out Domino was gone and Inkblot had buried himself under the blankets.  What happened in between?  Is that a guilty look on his face?  As with Schrödinger's cat, no human will ever know.

I barely even understand this chart, but it looks pretty cool, doesn't it?  It's an analysis of the Senate vote on Tom Coburn's screwball amendment to defund political science research, which failed 36-62.  The dark blue and dark red are nay votes, while bright blue and bright red are yea votes.  Brendan Nyhan:

Each senator is placed at their estimated ideal point in the ideological space. The diagonal cutting line, which represents the best-fitting line dividing yes from no votes in the space, indicates that the vote reflected both the primary ideological division between the parties (in this case, cutting "wasteful" government spending) and the second "social issues" dimension (feelings toward pointy-headed academics?).

Sure.  I guess I'll buy that.  More charts for other votes here.

Actually, though, I think I'm more interested in the placement of senators themselves.  Democrats are almost all bunched into a single grouping, with only four outliers.  Republicans, by contrast, are spread through considerably more space on both the economic and social dimensions.  That doesn't seem intuitively right to me, but it strikes me as more complimentary toward Republicans than Democrats.  So tell me again why they want to defund pointy-headed political scientists?

The coal industry seems to be taking an ever-greater interest in children—not their future, natch, but what they're coloring. A few months ago we highlighted a "clean coal" coloring book aimed at developing youthful enthusiasm for coal-generated power. Today we find yet another coloring book homage to the industry featuring anthropomorphized lumps of coal.

This one comes from the West Virginia Coal Association, "a trade association representing more than 90 percent of the state's underground and surface coal mine production" (see a list of members here.

It explains that coal is a major source of electricity (without, however, noting that it's not the only form of electricity). It also features lumps of coal bathing and being cleaned off by a dog—which I'm fairly certain is an entirely new definition of "clean" coal. Actually, it kind of undermines the idea that coal is clean if it has to be washed, no? 

Think Progress has more.

I've long wondered just why conservatives are so obsessed with nuclear power.  If nukes had the potential to do away with our climate change problem entirely, then I could see it.  Hooray, no new regulations!  But even cheerleaders for nuclear power don't suggest that it could produce more than a small fraction of our electricity in the next 20 or 30 years.  So why has it become such a hobbyhorse?

Brad Plumer investigates today and basically says he's not sure either.  But it seems to boil down to yet another culture war issue: since hippy lefty types are against 'em, all right-thinking patriots are apparently for 'em.  Dreary stuff.  But it is what it is, and if it might serve as the basis for a bipartisan compromise on a climate change bill, maybe it's worth playing along.  But will it?  Here's Brad with the bottom line:

There's little point in acceding to the GOP's nuclear demands without getting anything in return. [Lamar] Alexander, for one, recently admitted that, even though he's taking part in talks over new nuclear provisions, nothing will persuade him to support a cap on carbon — which is the crux of any climate bill. "That's something to watch out for," grumbles one observer. "Is [the Nuclear Energy Institute] actually going to work to bring new votes to the table?" Perhaps it's finally time to see just how much this love affair is worth.

I have a guess about that, but I'll keep quiet about it for now.  There's no need for puerile cynicism while more optimistic negotiators are still taking a crack at getting a nonnegative answer, after all.  There'll be plenty of time for that later.

The Senate on Friday unanimously confirmed the nomination of Joseph Pizarchik to serve as Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. As we recently reported, Pizarchik is a controversial figure whose nomination was protested by many coal-field activists in his home state of Pennsylvania.

Pizarchik has served as the director of Pennsylvania's Bureau of Mining and Reclamation since 2002, where he has overseen mining permits and the enforcement of environmental rules related to mining and waste disposal. Residents of Pennsylvania mining areas say that he was too cozy with the coal industry and did not enforce existing environmental laws. Multiple senators on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee expressed concerns about his record in his confirmation hearing in August.

One mystery senator placed an anonymous hold on the nomination, and two—Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—voted against him in committee. But apparently the hold was removed earlier this week, allowing a voice vote to go forward Friday afternoon. Mother Jones is still trying to get comment from Menendez and Sanders about whether they did, in fact, change their minds about the nomination.

Channeling Paul Krugman, Matt Yglesias wonders why we don't fight unemployment by essentially bringing back the WPA:

Instead of saying to people whose UI benefits are about to expire “just kidding, here’s an extension” we could say “you’ll keep getting checks but you need to show up at such-and-such a place and pick up trash in parks.” This would be somewhat more expensive than a UI extension — you’d need to pay for garbage bags and supervisors — but it would have less of a disemployment effect than UI extensions and we’d also get cleaner parks in the bargain. It’s a little bit perverse to be paying people to do nothing when there’s work that could use doing.

I think this is more difficult than it sounds.  Matt admits later that public sector unions would — with good reason — oppose the idea of bringing in unemployed workers to do their jobs, but the problems go way beyond that.  The WPA didn't just send people to parks to pick up trash.  It was a huge bureacracy.  It was a program set up to last for years.  After all, there was a Depression on.

But that's not what we have today.  Nobody thinks the current recession will last for five years, and by the time a government bureacracy was up and running to provide jobs it probably wouldn't be needed anymore.  Like it or not, hiring people takes longer than it used to, building roads and post offices requires years of design and preparation, and there just isn't that much easy makework available.  It's a different era.

I might be missing something obvious here, but unemployment insurance can be extended instantly (barring Republican game playing, of course) and the money gets out to workers and then into the economy almost instantly too.  Conversely, creating useful jobs of some kind would take, I imagine, an absolute minimum of six months, and probably more like a year or more.  By then they wouldn't be needed.

It really does seem more efficient to write checks to the private sector, as well as to state and local governments, and let them hire people.  The federal government is good at writing checks!  But, at least in the 21st century, not so good at creating nationwide jobs programs, I suspect.

GOP Gone: Repubs boycott the climate bill markup. Dems unimpressed.

Boxing Day: Sen. Boxer moves climate bill, Republicans or no.

Too Late: Even with climate bill moving, it won't get passed before Copenhagen.

Pay as You Go: California advances pay-per-mile auto insurance, partly to relieve air pollution. [Sacramento Bee]

Public v. Private: So the public option's still around, but its premiums will top private's.

Letter of Support: Chamber of Commerce says it supports bipartisan climate bills. Kind of.

Presidential Promise: Obama tells tribal leaders they won't be "forgotten" on climate. [New York Times]

Winning Cap: Cap and trade could actually be a really sweet deal for some companies.

Big Business: Not all business trade groups are anti-climate like the Chamber.

Nano-What?: Nanoparticles could damage DNA, even from a distance. [Guardian]

Bigger in Texas: Texas gov says state is a model of healthcare reform. Kevin Drum disagrees.