The prospects of the Senate health care bill are looking kind of grim these days, so Republicans have taken to taunting Democrats over Obamacare:

Our healthcare system is collapsing, but Democrats refuse to bring anything to the table. Where’s THEIR plan? pic.twitter.com/sBkVQOEEGg

— GOP (@GOP) July 5, 2017

This is followed by a series of personal versions of this tweet. Where’s your plan, Hillary Clinton? Where’s your plan, Joe Manchin. Etc.

Sadly, nobody asked me for my plan, but I’m going to present it anyway. This is what bloggers do: demand that people listen to their ideas for curing the world’s ills whether they want to or not. Mine is a nice, simple, 3-step plan:

1. Enforce the individual mandate and increase the penalty to 3.5 percent of income.
2. Increase subsidies by 20 percent and extend them to 6x the poverty level.
3. In areas where there are fewer than two insurers participating in the exchanges, make Medicaid available for the price of an average Bronze plan.

This is not a wish list of everything that would make Obamacare better. It’s a minimum set of proposals that would keep Obamacare stable, reduce premiums, and fix its worst problems. That’s it.

The point of item #1 is not to penalize poor people, it’s to get more healthy people into the system. Here’s a rough example of how this works:

• Today: Net cost of Bronze plan for 27-year-old earning $30,000 after subsidy = $1,900. Noninsurance penalty = $700. Difference = $1,200.
• New plan: Net cost after subsidy = $1,400. Noninsurance penalty = $1,000. Difference = $400.

Today, the difference between buying insurance and paying the penalty is fairly large. This means that a lot of young, healthy people grit their teeth and pay the penalty because they don’t think they can afford an additional $100 per month. This is a huge loser on multiple levels: it makes people bitter; it destabilizes the insurance pool; and it puts more people at risk of catastrophic financial loss if they develop a health problem. But if you increase both the subsidies and the penalty, the difference is much less. For only $30 per month, most people will go ahead and buy the insurance.

Item #2 makes insurance more affordable for everyone, and extends subsidies further into the working and middle classes. This is both the right thing to do and a political winner. Too many working-class families don’t benefit much from Obamacare even though their incomes are modest, and that should stop.

Item #3 is a stopgap for areas in which there’s either no competition for insurance or no insurance available at all. My guess is that if we implement the first two items we’d barely need this, but it can’t hurt to have it around as a backstop.

Of course, my plan would cost more. My horseback guess is that it would cost an additional $25 billion per year or so. Obamacare is currently under its initial budget projections, and this would put it a little over. That means no tax cut for the rich, which presumably makes it a nonstarter for Republicans. On the bright side, I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t include a few Republican ideas in this package too. More generous tax treatment of HSAs, more Medicaid flexibility for states, etc.

This is all pie in the sky. But I’m pretty sure that it would work once the details were filled in. This isn’t rocket science. Beyond those details, the big selling point for Republicans is that it might make people happy enough that it kills off the movement toward single-payer. The selling point for Democrats is that it would provide better health care for millions of people. It’s a win-win.

I have heard your pleas. You need something soothing today. So here you go: this is the Huntington Beach pier at sunset. It’s about the most soothing picture I have in my collection. And remember, it’s almost Friday. That means it’s almost almost the weekend.

If you want better ratings for your nightly news program, the logical approach is to attract more viewers with a better product. But that’s hard. An alternative is to figure out a way to have Nielsen ignore your broadcasts on days when viewership is low. But how? The Wall Street Journal explains:

In a game largely sanctioned by TV-ratings firm Nielsen, television networks try to hide their shows’ poor performances on any given night by forgetting how to spell. That explains the appearance of “NBC Nitely News,” which apparently aired on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend this year, when a lot of people were away from their TVs….Hiding the May 26 program from Nielsen dramatically improved the show’s average viewership that week.

….The network needn’t feel defensive. ABC took its own ratings mulligan seven times during the 2016-17 season with “Wrld New Tonite.” CBS misspelled “The CBS Evening News” as the “CBS Evening Nws” 12 times this season.

Nielsen may wink at this, but do advertisers? TV execs say the inflated numbers are used only for “publicity purposes,” but apparently that’s not quite true:

“Networks never used to do this,” said Billie Gold, director of programming at ad giant Dentsu Inc. Now, she said, it has become the norm….Ms. Gold and other ad executives say they are frustrated with the detective work required to kick the tires on network viewer ratings. She said her clients are surprised by the difference between the number of eyeballs the networks claim and Ms. Gold’s tally, which accounts for the altered titles.

I wonder if there’s something similar that bloggers can do to game their numbers? Hmmm.

The Senate health care bill would increase premiums dramatically: an average of 74 percent when you compare similar policies, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. EPI breaks that down by state:

Seven states would suffer triple-digit increases: Alabama, Alaska, California, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and West Virginia. All but one of these are states that voted strongly for Donald Trump.

Ten states would escape with increases of less than 50 percent: Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Washington DC, and Washington. All but two of them voted for Hillary Clinton.

No state would see an actual premium decrease.

In a way, I suppose you have to congratulate Republicans. They’s so dedicated to dismantling Obamacare that they’re willing to endorse a plan that hurts every single state, but hurts red states the most and blue states the least. All so the Wall Street crowd can get a tax break. I’m guessing that this is not really what Trump’s fans thought they were signing up for when they voted for him.

Yonhap News/Newscom via ZUMA

Fresh from the adoring, bused-in crowds that greeted him on his arrival in Poland, our president had some things to say about North Korea today:

In Warsaw, Trump said the United States was considering “some pretty severe things” in response to what he called “very, very bad behavior” from the North, although he did not mention any specific plans. “Something will have to be done about it,” he said.

“Something.” Would you care to offer a comment above a sixth-grade level, Mr. President? No? Roger that.

There aren’t a whole lot of options when it comes to North Korea. We can tick them off in a few moments:

• Sanctions. Go whole hog on economic sanctions. This is the most likely possibility, but the problem is that about 85 percent of North Korea’s trade is with China. We could kill off the rest of the world’s trade and it wouldn’t make much difference. So China is it, and there’s a limit to the kind of sanctions we want to levy against China. They can fight back, after all.
• Nuclear attack. Destroy North Korea’s nuclear capability and its conventional retaliatory capability against Seoul. There’s no way to do this quickly except via nuclear weapons. So this amounts to dropping several nuclear bombs on North Korea.

Am I missing anything? A blockade accomplishes nothing since most trade is overland with China. A conventional attack would result in thousands or millions of South Korean—and maybe Japanese—casualties. A diplomatic solution is unlikely in the extreme. North Korea is convinced—not without reason—that its nuclear weapons are the only sure protection against an American attack. And Chinese cooperation seems pretty unlikely short of convincing them that a nuclear attack is imminent unless they cut off North Korea entirely.

This is how I view it, anyway. We either launch a nuclear attack against North Korea or else their bomb and missile program is going to continue. Tell me why I’m wrong.

From Gen. David Petraeus, asked if he believes Donald Trump is mentally fit to serve as president:

I think it’s immaterial.

We are doomed. Petraeus would remove a fireteam leader if he thought the guy was mentally unstable. But the commander-in-chief? Meh. He’s got good people around him. They’ll keep him on a leash. Probably.

Via AEI and the Washington Post, here’s the gender pay gap among White House staffers during the Obama and Trump administrations:

During the Obama years, the average disparity was 13 cents on the dollar. Under Trump, it’s 37 cents. But before you jump to any conclusions, I don’t think this is because Trump believes women should be paid less than men for the same work. He’s not a neanderthal. He just doesn’t like to hire women for senior roles in the first place. What’s wrong with that? There’s nothing nefarious about it, so all you humorless feminists need to back off.

But here’s what I really wonder: what would this number look like if you didn’t include the communications folks? 50 cents? 60 cents? I don’t know the answer to that, but I can say this: if you exclude women whose job is primarily communications, who will shortly be exiled to Singapore, or who are on Melania’s staff, the Trump White House employs a grand total of two (2) women out of 34 in the top two pay grades: Dina Powell and Marcia Kelly. That’s 94 percent men. In its own way, this is actually kind of an impressive accomplishment, what with this being 2017 and all.

I don’t know. No matter what we say, maybe we all like having a reality-TV president:

I don’t think CNN did anything wrong in tracking down and reporting on the Reddit guy. But the “we reserve” sentence was a colossal mistake.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) July 5, 2017

What’s this all about? Well, you remember the dumb video that Donald Trump posted on Sunday? The one where he’s body slamming a wrestler whose head has been replaced by the CNN logo? We all decided to get outraged over that. This was dumbness level 1.

Then we tracked down the origin of the video. It came from someone named HanAssholeSolo on the alt-right reddit sewer r/The_Donald. It turned out that Han had also posted some inane anti-semitic memes, so we all decided to get outraged over that. This was dumbness level 2.

Then CNN tracked down the actual person behind HanAssholeSolo. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be some dude who had been acting out and was terrified at the prospect of becoming national news just because our president was stupid enough to retweet his stuff. So CNN decided not to publish his name “because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again.”

However, CNN also said it “reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.” This sounded like a threat, so we all decided to get outraged over that. This was dumbness level 3.

Is there anything we won’t use as an excuse to get outraged? Trump’s tweet was puerile, but it was just a joke, not a call to violence. HanAssholeSolo is an idiot, but he’s just one of millions of individual idiots, not someone with any power or influence unless we give it to him. And under anything but the most hostile reading, CNN obviously wasn’t threatening anyone. They were just covering themselves: If it turned out that Han was playing them, they were under no obligation to maintain his anonymity.

Not that it matters. If CNN can track this guy down, so can someone else. He’ll be viral on Twitter before long no matter how abjectly he’s apologized.

President Trump says variously that Obamacare is dead, failed, broken, and in a “death spiral.” But as Jon Chait points out, “death spiral isn’t just a term people who hate Obamacare get to use to predict that the law is going to fail because they hate it.” It has a specific meaning, and Trump’s own administration agrees with the CBO that Obamacare isn’t in a death spiral.

But what is a death spiral, anyway? It’s pretty simple. Suppose you have a health care market with five people in it. Their average annual medical expenses are $1, $3, $5, $7, and $9:

The average medical expense is $5, and in our fantasy world insurance companies don’t need to make a profit. This means our five customers each pay $5 for their health insurance. But Ariel thinks this is too much, because she hardly ever sees a doctor for anything. So she drops out:

Now there’s four people left, and the average premium goes up to $6. But this is now too rich for Banquo, who was willing to take a bit of a hit in order to reduce his risk, but not that big a hit. So he drops out too:

Three people are left, and now Cassius is fed up. His premiums keep going up, and at this price he feels like he’s hugely overpaying for the care he gets. So he drops out too:

And here’s where we end up. Desdemona and Edward will probably keep getting insurance, but it’s hardly insurance at all anymore. They’re both paying very nearly what their care would cost them if they just handed a pile of Krugerrands directly to their doctors. In all, 60 percent of the market has dropped out and the other 40 percent is barely getting any benefit. And the insurance company is probably not doing so well either. By the time we get to this point, they might decide to abandon the market entirely, leaving Desdemona and Edward out of luck too.

That’s a death spiral. That’s what dead, failing, and broken mean. It’s not happening with Obamacare now, and it won’t happen in the future unless Trump and his fellow Republicans deliberately sabotage it.

Our local fireworks show wasn’t as good this year as it’s been in the past, but I made up for that with a more serious effort to get a good picture of it. This shot was captured at a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds, with the camera steadied by my trusty beanbag. I like it, a good ol’ red, white, and blue extravaganza in the sky above Irvine. Happy Birthday, America.