Half Changed World

AP had a depressing story this week on the increase in "moderate to middle-income" Americans who were uninsured for at least a part of last year.  It’s not particularly surprising, though, since fewer employers are providing insurance, and buying individual insurance is out of reach for most lower-income families.

A couple of people have asked me what I think of the new Massachusetts health insurance law, which requires everyone in the state to have health insurance (or face fiscal penalties) and provides subsidies for low-income individuals and families.  I’m a little dubious about whether it will work, but it’s certainly worth trying.  No one else is even making a serious attempt at achieving universal coverage, and I have to admit that the Massachusetts model is a lot more politically feasible that my preferred choice of a single payer model.  And I’ve got a lot more confidence in this approach than in Health Savings Accounts as the solution to the uninsurance problem.

If you want to know the details of the argument for an individual mandate system, check out the New America Foundation, which has been pitching this approach for a while.  But in brief, the argument is that there are a significant number of young healthy people who could (theoretically) afford to pay for insurance, but gamble that they won’t need it.  They know that if they really get sick, they can show up at a hospital, and won’t be turned away for inability to pay.  An individual mandate therefore both makes them pay their fair share, and reduces the costs of uncompensated care, freeing up funds to pay for insurance for those who really can’t afford to pay.

The reason I’m skeptical is that I haven’t seen anything that explains how the Massachusetts approach deals with the problem of the small minority of people who have major health problems, people like Annika.  Unless you have some way of putting such people in a risk pool with a large number of mostly healthy people (as in the typical employer-provided plan), there’s no way they can afford an insurance plan that charges their actuarial costs.  As soon as people are choosing their own plans, anyone who is healthy will keep their costs down by staying out of insurance plans that are attractive to very sick people.  And so the costs of those generous plans spiral up and up.  If anyone knows how Massachusetts is dealing with this problem, I’d love to hear about it.

So, yesterday was Equal Pay Day, the day when the average woman’s wages catch up with what the average man earned the previous year.  Evelyn Murphy is promoting a new organization, the WAGE project, to combat wage inequality.  The web site looks interesting.

I have to admit that I took Murphy’s book, Getting Even, out of the library, and only made it about half way through it.  Drawing mostly on court records, she discusses the various ways that gender discrimination is alive and kicking.  From blue collar workers whose gear was soaked in urine, to the Sears saleswomen systematically kept out of the high commission departments, to investment bankers facing the old boys’ network, she records case after case.  It’s depressing reading.

Without minimizing the role of discrimination in keeping women’s earnings down, I think Murphy goes too far in dismissing the role of self-selection and work-family issues.  Yes, the workers from which the 77 cents on the dollar figure comes are all full-time workers.  But male full-time workers work, on average, more hours than female full-time workers.  And — as we’ve discussed here before — women feel freer, for better or worse, to choose jobs for reasons other than making the most money possible.

For terrific discussion of these issues, see:

• Ampersand’s series on the wage gap at Alas, a blog
• Echidne’s of the Snake’s three part series on the gender gap in earnings.

My computer just ate the post I was writing, and since it’s getting late, I’ll just say Happy Free Cone Day!  The boys are in shock that we let them skip dinner for ice cream cones.

Our flavor choices:

• Me: Coffee
• T: Strawberry cheesecake
• D: Chocolate chip cookie dough
• N: Cherry Garcia

Today’s Doonesbury made me laugh out loud.

The scary thing is that it’s a real study, by Philip Longman. I wonder if New America will put up a link to the Doonesbury.

Since I’m still utterly wiped, here’s an easy post, a movie meme via The Republic of Heaven.

The list is Ebert’s 101 Movies You Must See Before You Die. Bold the ones you’ve seen. 
[Edited to add: italics for the ones that T insists that I’ve seen with him but I don’t have any memory of seeing.]

"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) Stanley Kubrick
"The 400 Blows" (1959) Francois Truffaut
"8 1/2" (1963) Federico Fellini
"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) Werner Herzog
"Alien" (1979) Ridley Scott.
"All About Eve" (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
"Annie Hall" (1977) Woody Allen
"Bambi" (1942) Disney
"Battleship Potemkin" (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
"The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) William Wyler
"The Big Red One" (1980) Samuel Fuller
"The Bicycle Thief" (1949) Vittorio De Sica
"The Big Sleep" (1946) Howard Hawks
"Blade Runner" (1982) Ridley Scott
"Blowup" (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
"Blue Velvet" (1986) David Lynch
"Bonnie and Clyde"(1967) Arthur Penn
"Breathless" (1959) Jean-Luc Godard
"Bringing Up Baby" (1938) Howard Hawks
"Carrie" (1975) Brian DePalma
"Casablanca"(1942) Michael Curtiz
"Un Chien Andalou" (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
"Children of Paradise"/ "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) Marcel Carne
"Chinatown"(1974) Roman Polanski
"Citizen Kane" (1941) Orson Welles
"A Clockwork Orange"(1971) Stanley Kubrick
"The Crying Game" (1992) Neil Jordan
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) Robert Wise
"Days of Heaven" (1978) Terence Malick
"Dirty Harry" (1971) Don Siegel
"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) Luis Bunuel
"Do the Right Thing" (1989) Spike Lee
"La Dolce Vita" (1960) Federico Fellini
"Double Indemnity" (1944) Billy Wilder
"Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying andLove the Bomb" (1964) Stanley Kubrick
"Duck Soup" (1933) Leo McCarey
"E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) StevenSpielberg
"Easy Rider" (1969) Dennis Hopper
"The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) Irvin Kershner
"The Exorcist" (1973) William Friedkin
"Fargo"(1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
"Fight Club" (1999) David Fincher
"Frankenstein" (1931) James Whale
"The General" (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
"The Godfather," "The Godfather, PartII" (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
"Gone With the Wind" (1939) Victor Fleming
"GoodFellas" (1990) Martin Scorsese
"The Graduate" (1967) Mike Nichols
"Halloween" (1978) John Carpenter
"A Hard Day’s Night" (1964) Richard Lester
"Intolerance" (1916) D.W. Griffith
"It’s A Gift" (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
"It’s a Wonderful Life" (1946) Frank Capra
"Jaws" (1975) Steven Spielberg
"The Lady Eve" (1941) PrestonSturges
"Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) David Lean
"M" (1931) Fritz Lang
"Mad Max 2" / "The Road Warrior" (1981) George Miller
"The Maltese Falcon" (1941) John Huston
"The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) JohnFrankenheimer
"Metropolis" (1926) Fritz Lang
"Modern Times" (1936) Charles Chaplin
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
"Nashville"(1975) Robert Altman
"The Night of the Hunter" (1955) Charles Laughton
"Night of the Living Dead" (1968) George Romero
"North by Northwest" (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
"Nosferatu" (1922) F.W. Murnau
"On the Waterfront" (1954) Elia Kazan
"Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968) Sergio Leone
"Out of the Past" (1947) Jacques Tournier
"Persona" (1966) Ingmar Bergman
"Pink Flamingos" (1972) John Waters
"Psycho" (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
"Pulp Fiction" (1994) Quentin Tarantino
"Rashomon" (1950) Akira Kurosawa
"Rear Window" (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
"Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) Nicholas Ray
"Red River" (1948) Howard Hawks
"Repulsion" (1965) Roman Polanski
"Rules of the Game" (1939) Jean Renoir
"Scarface" (1932) Howard Hawks
"The Scarlet Empress" (1934) Josef von Sternberg
"Schindler’s List" (1993) Steven Spielberg
"The Searchers" (1956) John Ford
"The Seven Samurai" (1954) Akira Kurosawa
"Singin’ in the Rain" (1952) Stanley Donen &Gene Kelly
"Some Like It Hot" (1959) Billy Wilder
"A Star Is Born" (1954) George Cukor
"A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) Elia Kazan
"Sunset Boulevard" (1950) Billy Wilder
"Taxi Driver" (1976) Martin Scorsese
"The Third Man" (1949) Carol Reed
"Tokyo Story" (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
"Touch of Evil" (1958) Orson Welles
"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) John Huston
"Trouble in Paradise" (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
"Vertigo" (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
"West Side Story" (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
"The Wild Bunch" (1969) Sam Peckinpah
"The Wizard of Oz" (1939) Victor Fleming

Lots of things to add to my already overflowing Netflix list.  The category that’s most obviously missing for me is non-English language movies.  I’ll have to tell T that Ebert agrees with him in our longstanding argument of which is a better movie, Star Wars or Empire Strikes Back.

My apologies for the light posting.  I’ve got lots of stuff going on right now that I can’t blog about, and no energy left for putting together coherent posts on other subjects.  Don’t worry, everyone’s healthy, no disasters have struck.  Hopefully, I’ll be back in gear by next week. 

Meanwhile, check out MomsRising.org!

I’ve written so much about Leslie Morgan Steiner’s Mommy Wars book and the press it’s gotten that it almost seemed beside the point to read the book.  But when I picked up the book in a store and realized how many of the authors I’ve written about here — Lonnae O’Neil Parker, Jane Juska, Anna Fels — I decided to give it a second chance, in spite of the dreadful title and the worse subtitle (Stay-At-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families).

The good news is that the book is far better than media coverage or Steiner’s blog would suggest.  Many of the essays are thoughtful, some are funny, others tender.  Almost all of them come to some soothing conclusion about how we’re all doing our best:

• Parker: "I can have it all, just not on the same day."
• Leslie Lehr: "I also hope they’ll respect all women, no matter what choices are made in terms of work and motherhood."
• Ann Misiaszek Sarnoff: "There is no formula for success, but there are many individual solutions, and I’ve found mine."
• Page Evans: "Happy children.  That’s the bottom line for mothers."
• Juska: "I am in favor of choosing, consciously, to have a good time with kids."

Only a few of the essays conclude with what I would call true "mommy wars" moments.  Interestingly, both authors attribute the stinger lines to their 10 year olds —  Catherine Clifford’s son’s asking "Yeah, you love him so much, how come you leave him with some nanny person all the time?" Sara Nelson’s son saying "There once was a time when women didn’t work, wasn’t there?  Is that what they call the Dark Ages?"

The downside of the book is that, as Sandra Tsing Loh nastily points out in the Atlantic, the writers lack a certain diversity.  (Thanks Sandy.)  It’s not just that they’re almost all white and affluent.  It’s that they almost all seem to work (or used to) as writers, editors, or television producers and use brand names to prove their credentials.  That said, I think Loh takes her criticism to an extreme (and is somewhat hypocritical, as she’s the one who turned a book review last year into a tale of her own troubles getting her kid into preschool).  And, as we discussed last week, I think the work-family issues of the affluent are worth discussing.  The problem is what Steiner writes in her introduction:

"Most of the debate in the United States about the benefits of working versus stay-at-home motherhood has been taken over by experts: researchers, academics, politicians, journalists.  Many of them aren’t women.  Some aren’t even parents.  The most authoritative (and fascinating) answers come from moms themselves."

I just don’t think that’s true, especially when the only moms you’re talking to are the ones like you.  I enjoyed many of these essays, but I learned a lot more from reading journalists like Jason DeParle and academics like Annette Lareau and Kathryn Edin. 

A more fundamental problem is that — as usual for these work-family discussions — fathers and husbands are all but invisible (with Sarnoff’s "I Do Know How She Does It," where she explicitly says that she couldn’t have succeeded in her high pressure career without her husband’s sharing of parenting duties, as a notable exception).  One passage in particular stood out for me, from Beth Brophy’s "Good Enough":

"It’s been eight years since I quit my job.  I’ve never looked back.  My husband has glanced back, usually with a calculator in one hand and a stack of mortgage and orthodontia bills in the other.  He misses my paycheck and I do too.  When I had a steady one and I wanted something, I usually bought it.  Now I can’t.  Or if I do buy it, I feel guilty…. While I’m feeling a lot more relaxed with the new world order, my husband is developing an ulcer.  As I’ve made abundantly clear to him and anyone else who asks, I hope never again to work full-time in an office."

I wonder what he thinks about this.   

Sorry for the light posting — between Passover, a crazy workweek, and a visit from my mother-in-law, something had to give, and this blog was it.

Overall, we’ve had a very mellow and pleasant Passover.  While it always makes me a little sad not to see my parents and siblings over Passover, I must admit that there’s something nice about not schlepping anywhere.  And we didn’t host our own seder either — went to a friend’s one night, and the shul’s community seder the second.  So relatively little stress.

It also simplifies things that I’ve decided that it doesn’t make any sense for me to make myself (and my family crazy) to avoid kitniyot for Passover (beans, corn, rice) given that I don’t keep kosher, don’t have separate Passover dishes, etc.  Not that I require absolute consistency in my religious practice — I don’t eat pork, but I do eat shellfish, even though both are equally treif.  (My logic is that no one was ever martyred for refusing to eat shrimp.)  But it’s not particularly meaningful to me to avoid rice and tofu.  I’m fairly sure that whatever the ancient Hebrews ate on their way out of Egypt, it looked more like pita bread or tortillas than modern matzah, but I haven’t quite been ready to follow that argument to its logical end.

Phantom Scribbler linked to a sermon by a reform Rabbi on the real meaning of Passover: "When we badger ourselves or one another about a drop of corn syrup in a Coca-Cola, but fail to work for freedom, we are in violation of Passover."  Or, as another teacher once put it:

   Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
       only a day for a man to humble himself?
       Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
       and for lying on sackcloth and ashes?
       Is that what you call a fast,
       a day acceptable to the LORD ?

    Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
       to loose the chains of injustice
       and untie the cords of the yoke,
       to set the oppressed free
       and break every yoke?

Saturday morning, D woke up and asked if it was Easter.  We said, no, it’s tomorrow, but we don’t really celebrate Easter.  He insisted that we had to have an Easter egg hunt.  Ok…  We assumed that he had figured out that this often involved chocolate, so we told him that if it was really important to him, we could dye some eggs, and then he and N could look for them on Sunday. This sounded like a great plan to him, so off we went to pick up some dye.  (Mostly we dyed hard boiled eggs, but I blew a few, and used the insides to make matzoh balls, much to my own amusement.) Both boys had great fun dying eggs and finding them, and then we let them trade the eggs they had found for chocolate bunny pops left over from the Max and Ruby birthday party of two months ago.  And later we let them egg joust.

But somewhere in all of this, D wanted to know why we don’t celebrate Easter.  We sort of tiptoed around this one, not wanting to get into the details of the cruxifiction (remember, this is the kid who cried over March of the Penguins) but generally explaining that people believe lots of different things about God.  But he’s at the stage where he likes there to be RIGHT answers and WRONG answers, and wasn’t too convinced by our answers about uncertainty and tolerance.  Oh well, I figure we’ll have a lot more chances coming up…

A few more links:

• Susan at Crunchy Granola’s got a bunch of Passover posts up.
• For some thoughtful Jewish-Christian dialogue, see Sue at Inner Dorothy’s post about Christian Seders (via Phantom Scribbler).

I’m not the only one for whom "For we were strangers in the land of Egypt" is resonating particularly loudly this year.

• Jews for Racial and Economic Justice
• Passover in Spanish — in the Streets of America

Jews in America are not as solidly left as they once were, but most are pro-immigration, both because many of us are not that many generations removed from the immigrant experience (both my grandmothers came to this country as children), and because we know that thousands — maybe tens of thousands, maybe more — of the six million might have survived if America and other countries had been willing to let them in.

Or as Marge Piercy writes in a poem that was read at many seders tonight:

"We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes
under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours
raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed
tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage,

who walked into the strange and became strangers
and gave birth to children who could look down
on them standing on their shoulders for having
been slaves. We honor those who let go of everything
but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought,
who became other by saving themselves."

Dave S’s comment on my school post — saying that Arlington county spends $19,000 per student — sent me googling to look up school spending per pupil in the area.  I think his numbers are a little high — but only a little.  According to this anti-tax website, the superintendent’s budget calls for spending of $17,923 per student in FY 2007.

Another post on the same site sent me to the Washington Area Boards of Education, which puts out this nifty comparison of spending in most of the suburban districts surrounding Washington DC.  According to this site (page 29 of the report), in FY 2006, Arlington topped the local school districts for spending at $16,464 per student, followed closely by Falls Church City at $16,020 and Alexandria $15,871.   Montgomery County and Fairfax County — the two huge, highly regarded school systems in the area — come next, at $12,549 and $11,915 respectively.  All of these figures are way above the national average, which is a bit over $8,000

I found this fascinating, because it suggests a) that the high spending levels aren’t solely being driven by the overall cost of living in the DC metropolitan area and b) that the systems with the best reputations aren’t necessarily those spending the most.  So what’s going on? A few things jumped out from the report. Alexandria seems to have particularly low class sizes, especially in the lower grades.  Arlington seems to pay teachers better than average.  Both have lots of small schools, which probably pushes up overhead costs.  Fairfax seems to do a particularly good job of limiting the number of staff who aren’t school-based.  (Alexandria seems to have an habit of promoting good principals into system-wide positions, which I think is probably a mistake.) Alexandria and Arlington both have significantly higher proportions of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunches (e.g. low-income families) and higher proportions of English as a second language students than Fairfax does.  It’s not in the report, but I know that all Alexandria schools have full-day kindergarten, but only some Fairfax schools do.  I couldn’t figure out from the report how they were handling capital costs — I know that both Alexandria and Arlington have undertaken major renovations/rebuilding of high schools in recent years.

What about DC?  It’s not included in this report, but I found a Parents United study that attempted to calculate its spending on the same basis as the surrounding suburbs.  This study suggests that DC spends about as much per student as Montgomery and Fairfax, but serves a much needier student population, and with antiquated facilities that both require much higher utilities and demand more capital investment.