I have sort of mixed feelings about the demise of “JournoList,” an email list that I found somewhat entertaining, somewhat useful, somewhat annoying, and to a large extent the subject of unwarranted conspiracy theories. For example, David Frum in the context of an otherwise excellent post states that:

The idea that likeminded journalists would engage in formalized pre-discussions amongst ideologically like-minded people before publishing for the broad public is a formula for group-think. Genuinely private discussion via email is one thing. Coordination among colleagues: very different. Coordination seems to have been the purpose of JournoList from the start. It created “secret editors” to whom journalists privately reported, different from and undisclosed to their actual editors. That seems to me a genuinely sinister enterprise, a disservice to readers and corrupting of the participants in the list themselves.

This is just factually wrong, but of course it’s inherently difficult to persuade anyone that secret activities are non-nefarious. But I’ve been looking back a bit at what’s archived in my inbox and what you see lately is an effort to organize a happy hour in Dave Weigel honor, many threads about World Cup matches, Wimbledon matches, NBA Finals games, etc., and mostly a lot of what amounts to self-promotion. People sending out links to articles they’ve published or talks they’ve given, sometimes followed by a reply or two. We had a thread in which people speculated as to where Peter Orszag will end up when he leaves the White House.

This is the sort of thing that journalists like to talk about, but don’t like to write about in public, because it’s unprofessional to publish baseless speculation. Absent email lists those of us living in “the village” can talk about this kind of thing at the bar (or the mythical cocktail party), but the email list is a useful way for writers living in New York or the West Coast or at home with their kids to also listen in and chit chat.

Another common genre of posts was failed efforts to get an interesting discussion going. Someone recently wrote “I find that my own attitudes have hardened a bit regarding intergenerational equity and Medicare cost control issues after watching so many implacable seniors opposing HCR. Others feel the same?” That’s an interesting subject, in my opinion, but only one person replied.

More rarely, debate would really take off. As I alluded to here some of us had a long debate about whether middle class New Yorkers who own extremely expensive pieces of real estate really count as “rich.” Topics that traditionally divide liberals—trade, issues related to merit pay and charter schools, Israel—would often generate long threads.

Last but by no means least, you had requests for help. “Anyone have an email for Vanity fair columnist James Wolcott?” That was a quick one. A discussion got going recently about whether it made sense for writers to branch out into podcasts or video and what advice folks might have about that. Someone asked “there was one episode earlier this year when the D’s threatened that they were gonna roll out the cots and really make the R’s filibuster, and the R’s caved immediately. What was that about?” There was a question about whether anyone has any contacts at CSPAN.

If there’s anything nefarious about this (and there may be!) it’s more or less of a piece with the nefariousness of having any kind of social relationships with people who are also your professional peers/colleagues/competitors. There’s something to be said for the idea that a writer should know other writers through their work and their work alone. But of course political writers in DC are bound to know one another whether we have email lists or not. I thought the list served mostly to simply extend the circle somewhat to include people located elsewhere, and I think it’s those people who’ll end up missing it the most.

The debate over the Affordable Care Act was largely a debate about improving America’s morally bankrupt and economically inefficient health insurance system. But there’s more to health care than insurance payment mechanisms. A recent Commonwealth Fund report compared health systems and concluded that the Netherlands has the best performing one, which certainly makes the fact that ACA establishes a Dutch-style insurance system for non-seniors look good. But as I observed in my original post on the matter, the quality of Dutch health care likely derives from how its providers work rather than from the structure of its insurance payments.

Eric Voeten backs this up with some anecdata:

Last summer, I had to bring my daughter to a Dutch doctor. Not only did I succeed in seeing someone that same morning but the cost were less than my regular co-payment in the USA, even though I have no insurance in the Netherlands and had never seen that doctor before.

The key is that the Dutch have an extensive system of family doctors, who generally operate a practice from their homes with minimal administrative assistance. These family doctors provide basic health care, do house visits, and are the gatekeepers for (more expensive) specialized care. This keeps a lot of people out of hospitals who do not need to go to hospitals. Of course, reforming insurance is relatively easy in comparison with making the type of structural reforms that would create a similar system in the US. Yet, these may well be the types of reforms that have a broader impact on quality of life.

And there’s the rub. It’s much more feasible to provide affordable insurance to everyone if the per unit costs of medical services are lower. In America, they’re very high. In part that’s because the American consumer disproportionately subsidized medical innovation from which the whole world benefits. And in part it’s because our system is simply inefficient.

Ed Kilgore explains the tide of anti-stimulus we’ll be seeing soon from state government after Ben Nelson and Senate Republicans blocked the latest jobs bill:

Originally, the jobs bill was intended to extend the state aid contained in the original stimulus package. But as the bill was racheted down, the version limping onto the Senate floor included only $16 billion for a partial extension of the Medicaid “super-match” designed to prevent major benefit and eligibility reductions for the federal-state safety net health care program.

Unfortunately, 34 states planned on receiving that money, and its failure to materialize is going to create a whole new round of state budget crises. In many states, we can expect Medicaid cuts and/or reductions in other state spending, quite likely including layoffs of teachers and other public employees. That’s why most Republican state officials did not share the happy-talk of their brethren in Washington about opposing “bailouts of the states.”

For a lot of conservatives, however, it’s simply axiomatic that “government” has gotten “too big” and that worsening or prolonging the current recession is a small price to pay for seizing the opportunity to slim it down over the longer term. More realistically, my view is that depriving the public sector of the funds necessary to undertake functions the public demands will simply lead to increasing reliance on clumsier, less efficient, and less effective “cost free” regulatory mechanisms.

Something that pops up every time old/new media tensions emerge is the view—which I find, frankly, bizarre—common in the newspaper world that pretending to not have opinions makes your work better. One underlying presumption here is the odd notion that the ideal reporter would be someone who actually doesn’t have opinions, as if “the facts” were purely transparent and could be merely observed, processed, and then regurgitated into inverted pyramid form without passing through the muck of “judgment” or “thoughts about the world.”

Then the secondary presumption is that you can somehow make things real by pretending. Like if you want to express judgments about politicians in conversations with your friends, that’s fine, but you have to never publish them. Thus if you foolish assume that a private, but large, email list will be kept genuinely private and then something “private” goes “public” now your actual professional work is invalidated. But why? Somehow keeping the views secret is supposed to be a close substitute for not having them. But of course having a secret is totally different from having nothing. The conceit that make-believe is just as good as the real thing only arises because the real thing is impossible to achieve. That should make you rethink why you would deem it desirable, but instead leads to the odd conclusion that the best journalist is a consistently dishonest one.