That was my first reaction to this morning’s story.

The Obama administration on Thursday night significantly relaxed the rules of the federal health-care law for millions of consumers whose individual insurance policies have been canceled, saying they can buy bare-bones plans or entirely avoid a requirement that most Americans have health coverage.

Some of my initial reactions, which I have to say are snarky and uncharitable.

1. This really amplifies “You have to pass the bill to see what’s in it.”

2. Until yesterday, this policy would have been impossible to enact legislatively (had the Republicans proposed it, the Senate would have killed it or Obama would have vetoed it). However, if I were a Republican, I would now introduce legislation that word-for-word enacts this proposal, just to rub the Democrats’ nose in it.

3. I am sure that many folks will say that the problems with the web site are what caused the change. However, my view is that had the web site been working well, people would have found out much sooner how unattractive the insurance policies were, and the self-repeal of Obamacare would have been just as imperative.

Ezra Klein notes,

A 45-year-old whose plan just got canceled can now purchase catastrophic coverage. A 45-year-old who didn’t have insurance at all can’t. Why don’t people who couldn’t afford a plan in the first place deserve the same kind of help as people whose plans were canceled?

I have been thinking about this. During the era of Vietnam protests, politics was quite heated. I would describe it as confrontational, with traces of violence. The tactics today strike me as milder (or subtler). However, I think we were better off back then in two ways.

1. The vast majority of the American people were repelled by confrontations with traces of violence, and they expressed this through voting for Richard Nixon, particularly his landslide re-election in 1972. I hate to give Nixon credit for anything, but he did provide a vehicle through which the silent majority got its message across. Today, it may be the case that most people are sick of partisanship, but it is less likely that they will find a vehicle with which to express that. Primaries being what they are, could we wind up in 2016 with Ted Cruz vs. Elizabeth Warren? Even if a centrist were elected, would the polarization in Congress remain too intense to be overcome?

2. Back then, elite individuals changed their minds and reversed course. A lot of prominent supporters of the Vietnam War, including Senators who voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, recanted and turned against the war. The economists who had enthusiastically supported “incomes policies” (meaning wage and price controls) and pooh-poohed monetary policy as an inflation-fighting tool recanted, based on experience. I don’t see that sort of mind-changing being possible today. If Obamacare ends up helping millions more people than it harms, will its opponents recant? If Obamacare ends up harming millions more people than it helps, will its supporters recant?

I am most worried about problem (2), the way that people are closing their minds. I have said that very few bloggers or newspaper columnists seek to communicate with people on the other side or to open minds of people on their own side. Instead, the goal seems to be to ensure the opposite–that people on your own side keep their minds closed. You reinforce mind closure by demonizing the other side, using ad hominem and straw-man arguments, and by working intensively to reinforce your side’s narrative through using spin, denial, and bullying.

The WSJ blog reports,

The Brookings Institution is bringing a new player into Washington’s think tank arena, launching a center to study fiscal and monetary policy that will be led by The Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel.

In recent weeks, I have been struck by how firm the Insiders have become about their narrative of the financial crisis:

–it was caused by markets run amok
–the economy was saved by bailouts and stimulus
–the public does not appreciate the good that the interventions achieved
–in fact, it turns out that the “secular stagnation” is so stubborn that we need even more interventions

I am not saying that this narrative is necessarily wrong. I just don’t like the sense that I get that the Insiders are determined to bully us into suppressing any doubts.

I hope that this is truly a think tank, and not a narrative tank. But it looks pretty Insiderish to me.

Using terms from the Prisoners’ Dilemma, she writes,

if you think the other side might waver, then your best move is to defect immediately. If insurers stand strong but politicians end up repealing the mandate, then they will have lost a bunch of money for nothing. If politicians stand strong but insurers raise prices and/or exit the market, they’ll get slaughtered at the polls.

You can expect to read a lot about “risk corridors” now. There is a provision in the law which, like many provisions, is unclear and subject to different interpretations. The idea is to protect the insurers against having an adverse risk pool by giving them taxpayer compensation if they lose money. Obviously, to the extent that the insurance company is confident that the government has its back, it will lowball the premiums on the plans that it submits.

Senator Marco Rubio has figured out this game, and he intends to try to stop it.

On Tuesday I am introducing legislation that would eliminate the risk corridor provision, ensuring that no taxpayer-funded bailout of the health insurance industry will ever occur under ObamaCare. If this disaster of a law cannot survive without a bailout rescue valve, it is yet another reason why it should be repealed.

So now you have the Obama Administration desperately trying to make government the friend of the insurance industry and a Republican Senator desperately trying to stop that from happening.

Cass Sunstein writes,

We can’t easily understand those accusations, contemporary conservative thought or the influence of the Tea Party without appreciating the enduring impact of the Hiss case.

I think that David Halberstam’s analysis of the conflict within the Republican Party between the urban establishment and small-town populists better captures the origins of the Tea Party. In his highly perceptive 1993 volume, The Fifties, Halberstam writes (p.4-5),

On one side were the lawyers and bankers of Wall Street and State Street, their colleagues through the great Eastern industrial cities, and those in the powerful national media, based in New York. They were internationalist by tradition and by instinct: They had fought against the New Deal in states where the power of labor was considerable but had eventually come to accept certain premises of the New Deal. By contrast, the Republicans of the heartland…were anxious to go back to the simple, comfortable world of the twenties…They had always controlled their political and economic destinies locally…Now they looked at Washington and saw the enemy…they seemed to have lost control of their own party…they were at war with the Eastern Republicans, who in their eyes, were traitors, tainted by cooperation with the New Deal.

The Tea Party of the 1950s spurned Nelson Rockefeller and nominated Barry Goldwater, with disastrous electoral results.

I would reiterate that midcentury politics revolves around socialism, Communism, and anti-Communism. Both sides have history that they would rather forget. The left would rather forget that many of its leading intellectuals saw Communism as equivalent to, or even superior to, capitalism. The right would rather forget its hostility to Civil Rights (the urban Republicans were crucial to passing Civil Rights legislation, overcoming Southern Democrats and heartland Republicans.)

I don’t usually blog about the latest news, particularly when there is no economic content. But I happened to be driving in suburban Maryland and listening to the car radio as the story broke on Thursday afternoon. Friday morning’s Wapo reports,

A woman with a 1-year-old girl in her car was fatally shot by police near the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, after a chase through the heart of Washington that brought a new jolt of fear to a city already rattled by the recent Navy Yard shooting and the federal shutdown.

I think this is a good way to write the lead sentence. It gets to the fact that a woman was killed, which is sad. And it gets to the fact that security issues in DC are really top of mind.

From the first report I heard, about half an hour after the shooting, my instincts were that the woman was mentally ill and that she was black. This was before it was reported that there was a child in the car, and long before the woman had been identified. Why were my instincts what they were? Perhaps because mental illness has been on my mind, just because I’ve encountered some sad cases recently. Or perhaps the actions of the driver just sounded like someone mentally ill.

And I guess my instinct that she was black was based on a presumption that the police would not have been in shoot-to-kill mode with a white woman. I am not saying that I consciously thought “the police would shoot a black woman, but not a white woman.” All I know is that the image that popped into my head was that of a black woman, and I think the reason that it did is that I had a harder time picturing the police killing a white woman.

Given these instincts, I felt uncomfortable listening to the reporters on the radio heaping praise on the police and expressing gratitude for how quickly and effectively they had secured the situation. The reporters were proud of the police and happy with the outcome. My instinct was that it was a misunderstanding and a tragedy. I am not saying that the police were necessarily unjustified in what they did. One can argue that they acted appropriately under the circumstances as they understood them (what if the woman was a threat to detonate a bomb in the car?).

My final thought: had this woman taken her mental illness anywhere but near the President and Congress, my guess is that she would be alive and getting treatment.