Remembering the Roger I knew

Werner Herzog and Roger Ebert at Ebertfest, 2007. Photo by Jim Emerson

Roger Ebert's last review is on the screen in front of me and I can't quite bring myself to deal with it. I'd like to get it posted right away because I know that's what Roger would want under the circumstances. ("We'll be getting a lot of traffic!") Actually, he filed two or three other reviews before his condition took a sudden turn for the worse. But this final one -- sent March 16 and labeled "FOR USE as needed," is of Terence Malick's "To the Wonder," which (spoiler warning) he liked quite a lot. Publicists might object that it hasn't opened in Chicago yet, but Roger wasn't just a Chicago movie critic (though he certainly was that). I can imagine his email now: "Who's going to complain? It's three and a half stars!"

In his 46 years as film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger wrote more than his share of obits and posthumous appreciations on deadline -- hardly ever in advance, like the ones most newspapers have on file, ready to publish at a moment's notice, but off the top of his head on the day the news broke. For years, I did that for other papers and web sites, too. But this isn't just another obit; it's one of the hardest things I've ever had to write. Still, I know he'd want me to do it -- and to get it online ASAP so he could, as he said, "socialize" it -- tweet it and Facebook it.

I honestly expected Roger to outlive me. As Pablo Villaca, one of Roger's "Far-Flung Correspondents" (or FFCs as they are affectionately known), wrote this afternoon: "We are orphans now." And that's the way it feels. (Oddly, my own father died six years ago on this very day -- which Roger would acknowledge is a kind of apt coincidence, though not anything of "woo-woo" supernatural significance.) But I want to avoid anything maudlin or sentimental because he hated, hated HATED that sort of thing.

The bond between a writer and an editor can be a surprisingly intimate one, and for almost 10 years Roger and I ran RogerEbert.com as basically a two-man operation. His Chicago Sun-Times editor for 20-plus years, Laura Emerick, edited all of Roger's writing that appeared in the paper, and we always tried to use her expertly edited versions online, but sometimes he'd write other stuff exclusively for the site, or that would appear on the web first, and I would edit those myself. At first our site also had the support of the Sun-Times, including Catherine Lanucha, John Cary, Jack Barry and the company's webstaff, but budget cuts and layoffs at the paper eventually left us with no day-to-day resources but ourselves: the only two employees of RogerEbert.com, as we liked to joke. But it was true. (BTW, nobody edited Roger's blog; it was direct from him to you, which is what a blog should be.)

Mostly, I maintained the site, reading, formatting and publishing reviews and articles new and old -- forever correcting typos, import errors and formatting glitches in the thousands of reviews in the database that went back to when Roger started reviewing for the Sun-Times in 1967.

Above all, I read and responded to emails from Roger -- thousands and thousands of emails (all archived, because I would often need to reach back years to remind him of how and why we'd made certain decisions, or to clarify matters). They ran the gamut of subjects and varieties -- questions, ideas, notifications, requests, bug reports, jokes, philosophical musings. It wasn't unusual to get 10 or 20 in a 14-hour stretch. And they were sent, and replied to, at all hours of the day and night, 365 days a year -- Roger using his MacBook in Chicago (or Cannes or Toronto or Telluride or Park City or Mexico or Los Angeles or Pritikin or wherever he happened to be) and me working mostly from home in Seattle.

As his output amply demonstrated, Roger wasn't just a recovering alcoholic (one of his favorite topics, along with Darwinian evolution), but a workaholic. He would invariably insist on writing something that just had to be posted on July 4 or Christmas Day (even though it had nothing to do with American independence or Christmas and could just as well have waited). He was oblivious to the concept of weekends, holidays or any limitations on working hours. He really liked to write. But, if you read him, you know that. (One Oscar night I got mad at him because Laura and I were waiting for the final version of his Oscar story and I discovered he was tweeting about other things while we were on a tight deadline. That's when I found out he was using a Twitter-scheduling app, so he could load up his tweets in advance and it would post them automatically. Yes, he practically worked round the clock, anyway -- but even when he wasn't working, he got software to do the tweeting for him.)

Now, I hate those "In Memoriam" pieces in which the writers overstate their closeness to the deceased. I started working with Roger in 1994, when I was the editor of Microsoft Cinemania, then became his web editor when we founded RogerEbert.com in 2003, and have remained so ever since -- the longest time I've ever held a single job, although the job kept changing and I stayed put.

I'm not so presumptuous as to say I knew All About Roger -- but I knew certain aspects of the guy probably as well as anybody, particularly when it came to his thoughts and feelings about various things that were dear to him, like the newspaper business, movie criticism and various ethical and philosophical issues. You don't read and correspond with somebody (particularly a writer) every day for 10 years without learning something about their tastes and sensibilities, their use of language, the principles they believe in, and how they prefer to conduct themselves in the world. But he had many, many different sides to him -- some of which he shared, some he didn't. I often learned personal details, particularly about his health, when he'd write something on his blog months or years after the fact.

I'm most grateful for Roger's friendship, trust, and generosity. As much as he lived his life in public, he was also intensely private. But he loved to gather people around him. In 1997 he extended the invitation for me to join the Floating Film Festival as one of its critic/programmers. It was helmed by Dusty and Joan Cohl, who quickly became two of my favorite people. He introduced me to the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO, where he conducted the week-long Cinema Interruptus (now the Ebert Cinema Interruptus) program for more than 30 years and asked me to join him in the process. A few years later, after he lost his ability to talk, I was able to step in and continue the tradition he had started.

And, of course, there was Ebertfest, where I instantly bonded with film scholars David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, now good pals, and befriended Roger's Far-Flung Correspondents (the formation of which was an urgent inspiration he had one Thanksgiving weekend when I was in Oregon trying to have dinner with friends) and The Demanders.

For Roger, the ideal life was a moveable party, with him as the host, seated at a big table with a circle of friends and colorful characters. That's basically what Ebertfest was, but I sat at that table many other times in many other places, from the Red Lion, a lodge in the hills above Boulder, to ships cruising the Caribbean or the Panama Canal during the FFF. As much as he would sometimes complain about being a "celebrity," or being noticed because of "that damn TV show," nobody thrived in the spotlight more than Roger (with the possible exception of Quentin Tarantino).

I'm tempted to say that if Roger had never written a word, he'd be known for bringing people together. But the writing was what made Roger Roger. He wasn't just generous with those close to him. He told everyone a lot about himself -- sometimes, I think, more than he knew -- in the words he published: his reviews, his op-ed pieces, his interviews, his blog, his memoir -- even his tweets.

At this moment, I know that thousands of others all over the world are collecting their thoughts and memories of Roger. I often felt awkward and out of place, like I was just in the way, when I tagged along with him in public and he was surrounded by fans, well-wishers and gawkers -- and I feel that way now. I'm overwhelmed -- with affection, gratitude, regret, sadness. So I'm getting back to work.

In one of Roger's last emails, responding to my concerns that he was firing off messages that were garbled or didn't make sense, he said he sometimes felt that way himself, but wanted to assure me that he was still in possesion of all his marbles.

"JIm, old friend, I'm in bad shape. I type on my lap in a hospital bed. I'm on pain meds.  Did the review of 'To the Wonder" make sense e to you? Such a strange movie.

"I need your help."

You've got it, R.

- - - - -

P.S. Last night, when I was publishing the new reviews for the week as usual (I haven't had a Wednesday off in years!), I wrote a headline for my review of "Room 237": "A whole world lies waiting behind door No. 237." I was going to call it to R's attention because he'd recognize the reference. It's from a song written by Jimmy Buffett and Steve Goodman, and Roger was a big fan of the latter. I think it would have made him smile.

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De-Extinction Would Be Really Cool

The current issue of Science has an
article on the
costs and benefits of de-extinction, i.e., using biotechnology
to resurrect species. The article by Stanford University scholars
Jacob Sherkow and Henry Greely note that extinct species might be
brought back to life by means of back-breeding, cloning, or genetic
engineering.

Back-breeding would use selective breeding of species closely
related aim at producing the phenotype of the extinct species,
e.g., the Tauros
Project is working to revive the auroch. Cloning could be used
if a sufficiently well-preserved nucleus from the tissue of an
extinct species could be tranferred into the enucleated egg of a
similar species and then implanted in a surrogate. So far this has
only been attempted with the recently extinct
Pyrenean ibex. A kid was born but died of lung malformations
soon after.

Perhaps the more promising, though more technically difficult
route toward de-extinction, would be to isolate DNA from preserved
tissue of an extinct species and then sequence it, e.g., a wooly
mammoth. Then that information could be used to alter the genetic
sequences in a closely related species, e.g., an Indian elephant,
resulting in a wooly mammoth.

The authors observe:

De-extinction is a particularly intriguing application of our
increasing control over life. We think it will happen. The most
interesting and important question is how humanity will deal with
it.

They suggest that some might object to de-extinction on the
grounds that the resurrected creatures might be exploited, vectors
for pathogens, invasive, examples of "playing god," or lessen
people's concerns about extinction. On the benefit side, the
authors them as ...

... falling into five categories: scientific knowledge,
technological advancement, concrete environmental benefits,
justice, and “wonder.”

To my mind, those benefits clearly outweigh the rather
insubstantial objections cited by the authors, especially the last
one. As the authors write:

The last benefit might be called “wonder,” or, more colloquially
“coolness.” This may be the biggest attraction, and possibly the
biggest benefit, of de-extinction. It would surely be very cool to
see a living wooly mammoth. And while this is rarely viewed as a
substantial benefit, much of what we do as individuals—even many
aspects of science—we do because it’s “cool.”

Yes.

See below 1933 footage of the last Tasmanian Tiger.

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Covered at Reason 24/7: Obama Wants To Limit Retirement Accounts

Complaining that "some wealthy
individuals are able to accumulate many millions of dollars in
these accounts," the Obama administration announced a plan to cap
the total sum of any individual's retirement accounts at $3
million. Stashing cash beyond that point, the administration
insists, builds sums "substantially more than is needed to fund
reasonable levels of retirement saving." The administration's
argument seems to be based on the use of the word "million,"
implying that only nasty rich people would want to accumulate such
a hoard. But is that true? How much is enough for "reasonable
levels of retirement saving."

As it turns out, that's one of the toughest questions to answer
for retirement planning. Many advisors suggest you base your
retirement savings on something like 70 percent of your
pre-retirement income, multiplied by how many years you expect to
live. So ... Just when do you plan to kick off? As
one article on retirement planning puts it, "basing your
retirement needs on income is like basing your fuel needs on the
size of your car’s gas tank. What really matters is how far you
have to go and what kind of gas mileage you get." Part of that "gas
mileage" for retirement planning includes inflation. By the time
you retire, will $3 million buy luxury? Or a sandwich?

From
Bloomberg Businessweek:

President Barack Obama’s budget proposal would cap
multimillion-dollar tax-favored retirement accounts like the one
held by Mitt Romney, his Republican rival in 2012.

Obama’s budget plan, to be unveiled April 10, would prohibit
taxpayers from accumulating more than $3 million in an individual
retirement account. That proposal would generate $9 billion in
revenue for the Treasury over the next decade, according to a White
House statement released today. ...

Brian Graff, executive director and chief executive officer of
the American Society of Pension Professionals and Actuaries, said
his group will “vigorously oppose” the idea.

“It is a ‘plan killer,’” he said in an e-mailed statement. “As
business owners reach the cap, they will lose their incentive to
maintain a plan, and either shut down the plan or greatly reduce
benefits. This would leave workers with a greatly diminished plan
or without any plan at all.”

Follow this story and more at Reason 24/7.

If you have a story that would be of interest to Reason's
readers please let us know by emailing the 24/7 crew at
24_7@reason.com, or tweet us stories at @reason247.

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Covered at Reason 24/7: Obama Says He Needs Nancy Pelosi as Speaker

The
2016 race for president may already
be getting under way, but there’s a more imminent election in
2014, and the campaigner-in-chief is
in California today raising money for that effort, and, by
extension, for his second-term plans.

From Politico:

President Barack Obama said Wednesday at a DCCC
fundraiser it would be difficult for him to pass a slew of
second-term agenda items without Nancy Pelosi regaining her
speakership.



"I would be dishonest if I didn’t say that it would be a whole lot
easier to govern if I had Nancy Pelosi as Speaker," Obama said at
the second Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser
he attended, this one at the home of San Francisco investor Gordon
Getty.

Follow these stories and more at Reason 24/7 and don't forget you
can e-mail stories to us at 24_7@reason.com and tweet us
at @reason247.

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Why I'm Teaching My Son To Break the Law

In 1858, hundreds of
residents of Oberlin and Wellington, Ohio—many of them students and
faculty at Oberlin College—surrounded Wadsworth's Hotel, in
Wellington, in which law enforcement officers and slavehunters held
a fugitive slave named John Price, under the authority of the
Fugitive Slave Act. After a brief standoff, the armed crowd stormed
the hotel and overpowered the captors. Price was freed and
transported to safety in Canada (that's a photo of some of the
rescuers in the courtyard of the Cuyahoga County Jail, below and to
the right). I know these details because my son recently borrowed
from the library
The Price of Freedom, a book about the Oberlin-Wellington
Rescue, as the
incident is called (PDF). My wife and I used it as a starting
point for telling our seven-year-old why we don't expect
him to obey the law—that laws and the governments that pass them
are often evil. We expect him, instead, to stand up for his rights
and those of others, and to do good, even if that means breaking
the law.

Our insistence on putting right before the law isn't a new
position. I've always liked Ralph Waldo Emerson's sentiment that
"Good men must not obey the laws too well." That's a well-known
quote, but it comes from a longer essay in which he
wrote:

Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws
make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of
living, and employments of the population, that commerce,
education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any
measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only
you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know
that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the
twisting ...

Rope of sand the law may be,
but it can strangle unlucky people on the receiving end long before
it perishes. John Price could well have ended up with not just the
law, but a real rope, around his neck, just because he
wanted to exercise the natural freedom to which he was entitled by
birth as a sapient being.

John Price ended his life as a free man because he was willing
to defy laws that said he was nothing but the property of other
people, to be disposed of as they wished. He got a nice helping
hand in maintaining his freedom from other people who were willing
to not only defy laws that would compel them to collaborate in
Price's bondage, but to beat the hell out of government agents
charged with enforcing those laws.

Emerson would likely have approved. His son reported years later
that, upon learning that his children were writing school
compositions about building houses, he
told them, "you must be sure to say that no house nowadays is
perfect without having a nook where a fugitive slave can be safely
hidden away."

Much influenced by Emerson, but more down to Earth, Henry David
Thoreau went to jail (however briefly) for refusing to pay tax to
support the Mexican War. In an essay now known as "Civil Disobedience," he
wrote:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree,
resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a
conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects
afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law,
so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right
to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

This is the same essay in which Thoreau famously stated, "that
government is best which governs not at all." Government was not an
institution he held in high regard. He fretted that soldiers,
police, and other officials "serve the state thus, not as men
mainly, but as machines" and that "in most cases there is no free
exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they
put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones."

Ours being a more academic and less poetic age, Thoreau's
sentiments are likely to be captured these days as embodying the
divide between Lawrence Kohlberg's
stages of moral development. Specifically, they mark the
difference between conventional thinkers who believe the law is due
obedience because somehow it defines morality, and
post-conventional thinkers who believe that higher principles take
precedence over the law.

Yeah, I prefer Emerson and Thoreau, too.

Personally, I would say that I love liberty
more than any other value, and I don't give a damn if my neighbors
or the state disagree. I will be free, and I'm willing to help
others be free, if they want my assistance. Screw any laws to the
contrary. I don't think social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would be
surprised at my attitude. According to him,
that's what makes libertarians tick. And that's what my wife
and I are trying to pass on to our son.

Slavery and the Mexican War are, thankfully, dead issues in this
country, but that doesn't mean there's any shortage of
objectionable restrictions and mandates laid upon us by law and the
government. Taxes, nanny-state restrictions, business regulations,
drug laws ... All beg for defiance. The Fugitive Slave Law may no
longer command Americans to do evil, but "safety" rules would have
physicians
and
mental health professionals snitch on their patients. And
there's always another military adventure, someplace, on which
politicians want to expend other people's blood and money.

I sincerely hope that my son never has to run for his freedom in
defiance of evil laws, like John Price. I also hope, at least a
little, that he never has to beat the stuffing out of police
officers, as did the residents of Oberlin and Wellington, to defend
the freedom of another. But, if he does, I want him to do so
without reservations.

If all my son does is live his life a little freer than the law
allows, then we've done some good. A few regulations ignored and
some paperwork tossed in the garbage can make the world a much
easier place in which to live. Better yet, if he sits on a jury or
two and stubbornly refuses to find any reason why he should convict
some poor mark who was hauled in for owning a forbidden firearm or
for ingesting the wrong chemicals.
Jury nullification isn't illegal (yet), but it helps others
escape punishment for doing things that are, but ought not be. No
harm, no foul is a good rule for a juror, no matter what lawmakers
say.

And, if he wants to go beyond that, and actively help people
defy the prohibitions and authoritarian outrages of the years to
come, he'll be cheered on by me, his mother, and perhaps even
(depending on your views on the matter) an approving audience of
spectral ancestors. Our family has
long experience with scoffing at the law. Purveying the
forbidden or conveying the persecuted are honorable occupations,
whether done for profit or out of personal commitment.

As I think our son has already come to appreciate, making the
world freer is always right, especially when the law is wrong.

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Obama's Budget: Medicaid Would Be Spared From Deep Cuts

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama's budget will steer clear of major cuts to Medicaid.

They wouldn't go over too well at a time when his administration is trying to persuade skeptical governors to expand the giant health care program for the poor.

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More on sequester

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Covered at Reason 24/7: Obama Says He Needs Nancy Pelosi as Speaker

The
2016 race for president may already
be getting under way, but there’s a more imminent election in
2014, and the campaigner-in-chief is
in California today raising money for that effort, and, by
extension, for his second-term plans.

From Politico:

President Barack Obama said Wednesday at a DCCC
fundraiser it would be difficult for him to pass a slew of
second-term agenda items without Nancy Pelosi regaining her
speakership.


"I would be dishonest if I didn’t say that it would be a whole lot
easier to govern if I had Nancy Pelosi as Speaker," Obama said at
the second Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser
he attended, this one at the home of San Francisco investor Gordon
Getty.

Follow these stories and more at Reason 24/7 and don't forget you
can e-mail stories to us at 24_7@reason.com and tweet us
at @reason247.

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Obama: Nancy Pelosi As Speaker Of The House Would Make My Job A Lot Easier

President Barack Obama heaped praise on Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) Wednesday during a San Francisco fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, making it clear that he had a strong interest in helping Democrats regain control of the House in order to give Pelosi the speakership again.

"My job is to make sure we move the country forward, and I think we can best do that if Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House once again," Obama said, explaining his belief that she supported a number of broad second-term policy goals that have already been waylaid by partisan division in Congress.

Obama went on to lay out a laundry list of agenda items, from gun control, to early childhood education, to climate change and patching up the nation's cracking infrastructure, conceding that they weren't always politically popular.

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More on Barack Obama

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Anarcho-Capitalism: So Crazy, It Just Might Work!

George Mason University economist, and advocate of
anarcho-capitalism, Bryan Caplan explains why details of the
ideological history of human attitudes toward methods and
techniques of government show that ideas that almost everyone
dismisses offhand as nutty and impossible can and in fact have come
to dominate our political culture.

I mean, you think anarcho-capitalism is crazy? Imagine how
people used to react to democracy? 

Let
Caplan explain:

Imagine advocating democracy a thousand years ago.  You
sketch your basic idea: "Every few years we'll have a free
election.  Anyone who wants power can run for office, every
adult gets a vote, and whoever gets the most votes runs the
government until the next election."  How would your
contemporaries react?

They would probably call you "crazy."  Why?  Before
you could even get to the second paragraph in your sales pitch,
they'd interrupt: "Do you seriously mean to tell
us that if the ruling government loses the election, they'll
peacefully hand the reins of power over to their rivals?! 
Yeah, right!"

A thousand years later, the planet is covered with
democracies.  In most of them, defeated incumbents
consistently make the "crazy" decision to peacefully walk away from
power.  In long-standing democracies, this pattern is so
familiar we take it for granted.  But we shouldn't.  The
viability of democracy is an amazing fact that begs for an
explanation....

Caplan then points out that in the modern world, a political
leader who told his cronies their response to losing an election
would be to start killin' would not be obeyed, but condemned as
"crazy."

The lesson: "Crazy" is relative to expectations.  A
thousand years ago, everyone was used to despotism.   No
one expected a defeated incumbent to voluntarily
hand over power.  As a result, refusing to hand over power
didn't seem crazy.  Since it didn't seem crazy, incumbents who
refused to hand over power after losing an election probably would
have managed to retain power.  In modern Sweden, in contrast,
everyone is used to democracy.  Everyone expects a defeated
incumbent to voluntarily hand over
power.  Refusing to hand over power seems
crazy.  As a result, refusing to hand over power would end not
democracy, but the incumbent's career.

Now, Caplan says, anarcho-capitalism sounds as nuts as to most
everyone as democracy likely did in those days of yore:

"Do you seriously mean to tell us that
privatized police companies will peacefully settle disputes,
instead of attacking each other until one firm becomes the new
government?!  Yeah, right!"

....Suppose however that a stable anarcho-capitalist system
existed.  Then this logic reverses.  Since everyone is
used to this system, people expectprivate police
firms to amicably resolve disputes.  In such a setting, a CEO
who advocates a war of conquest would seem crazy - and his pleas to
his co-workers would fall on deaf ears.  In a stable
anarcho-capitalist society, a war-mongering CEO doesn't get a
war.  He gets fired.

Since we've never had anarcho-capitalism, this peaceful
equilibrium sounds like wishful thinking.  But it's no more
wishful thinking than stable democracy.  Both systems sound
crazy when first proposed.  Neither can be stable as long as
people expect them to be unstable.  But both can be stable
once people expect them to be stable.

You could object: The expectations necessary to sustain
anarcho-capitalism are highly unlikely to ever arrive.  But
the same was true for democracy a thousand years ago.  Yet
somehow, expectations radically changed and stable democracy
arrived.  How did expectations change so dramatically? 
It's complicated.  But can expectations change
dramatically?  Absolutely.

As someone who was first exposed to anarcho-capitalist ideas 25
years or so ago, has written histories of the libertarian movement
since then, and is quite confident (even without survey data) that
the ideas seem far less crazy to far more people than he could have
imagined then, I think Caplan has a point. (On a far narrower level
of precipitous shifts in cultural attitudes toward "crazy," I think
the progress of ideas such as gay marriage and marijuana's use as
medicine or legalization recently are encouraging signs. Things do
change.)

Part of the key to Caplan's "It's complicated" is the tireless
work of ideological and economic education pursued by all the
various thinkers and organizations and journalists and advocates
working under the rough rubric of the "libertarian movement," whose
history was told in my 2007 book
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern
American Libertarian Movement, and whose most recent
surprising success was told in my book from last year,
Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He
Inspired.

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ObamaCare’s Unsustainable Revenue Raisers

About half of ObamaCare’s first-decade cost was
supposed to be funded via cuts to Medicare and fees on specific
segments of the health industry. Republicans responded by
complaining that those cuts would decimate care for seniors, but
the real problem was that those cuts, along with some of the other
revenue raisers built into the law, were never likely to occur.

ObamaCare’s budget, and the deficit reduction it was alleged to
achieve, was in many ways an exercise in wishful thinking:
If Congress and Medicare’s administrators allowed the cuts
and fees to go through as planned, and if the spending
provisions stayed on target, then the law might raise enough
revenue to break even, or possibly reduce the deficit somewhat.
Well, sure. If. But the smart money was always on many of
the cuts and fees and other revenue raisers being wiped from the
books just before or shortly after they went into effect. It wasn’t
that the various revenue raisers built into the bill were
impossible, exactly; it was that they weren’t politically
sustainable.

Three years after the law passed, we’re starting to see fairly
strong indications that many of ObamaCare’s revenue raisers won’t
pan out. Just yesterday, for example, the Department of Health and
Human Services bowed to pressure from the insurance industry and
reversed its plan to cut payments to privately run Medicare
Advantage (MA) plans. Instead of taking a 2.2 percent cut, those
plans will instead be given a 3 percent increase.

Nor is this the first time that Medicare Advantage has escaped
planned cuts. Prior to the election, the administration delayed a
series of MA cuts built into the health care overhaul, replacing it
with an unusual, and extremely expensive, pilot program that it
said would help test the effect of quality bonuses. The problem was
that the pilot program extended to every MA provider in the nation,
and rewarded providers that didn’t score high on quality. It was a
pretty nakedly transparent attempt to avoid some of the cuts; the
Government Accountability Office stated flatly that the pilot
program
couldn’t possibly test the effect of quality bonuses as the
administration said it would, and called for the administration to
end the pilot.

What makes this even more revealing is that these are cuts that
ought to be relatively easy to achieve: The administration, along
with many Democrats, has long argued that Medicare Advantage
providers are
overpaid. Yet we’ve now seen it backtrack on multiple
occasions.

ObamaCare’s Medicare Advantage cuts aren’t the only revenue
raisers that didn’t survive. A tax reporting provision that was
supposed to raise $17 billion but would have resulted in big
paperwork headaches for small businesses was repealed.
So was the CLASS Act, a long-term care initiative that was
responsible for about $70 billion of the deficit reduction that was
projected to occur in ObamaCare’s first 10 years.

More recently, a bipartisan majority in the Senate voted to

repeal the law’s medical device tax. That vote was nonbinding,
and the House hasn’t followed suit. But most observers I’ve spoken
with think that the device tax isn’t long for this world.

The critics who warned that the law's
cuts and revenue projections might not be sustainable are looking
increasingly prescient. I suspect that what we're seeing now is
only the beginning. Health insurers will continue to push to

repeal the fee on their industry, and if implementation of the
law coincides with higher premiums for a large enough number of
individual, they may well have some success. In 2018, the “Cadillac
tax”—a tax on expensive health insurance plans—will kick in. Union
lobbying
already delayed the start date for that provision by several,
and it’s likely that they will renew their opposition in a few
years.

The revenue mechanisms built into the law are starting to fall
apart. The spending, of course, remains. 

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Covered at Reason 24/7: Bitcoin Now a Billion Dollar Market

The cryptocurrency bitcoin
is becoming increasingly popular. All bitcoins now in circulation
(there are about 10.9 million of them) are now worth more than a
billion dollars. The debt crisis in Cyprus is being cited as one of
the reasons that bitcoin is exploding in value as
more
Europeans seek ways to keep the government away from their
money.

From
Tech Crunch:

Hang around in the tech industry long enough and you or someone
you know will be heard saying, “that’s so crazy it just might
work.” Two years ago, if you’d have told me that an open-source,
P2P currency would soon be a thriving, billion-dollar market, I
would’ve told you that you were on a lonely bus headed to
CrazyTown, U.S.A. But today, Bitcoin officially became a crazy idea
that’s actually working.

Follow this story and more at Reason 24/7.

If you have a story that would be of interest to Reason's
readers please let us know by emailing the 24/7 crew at
24_7@reason.com, or tweet us stories at @reason247.

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Pennsylvania's Rejection Of Medicaid Expansion May Cost The State Millions: Study

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett (R) announced last month that he would reject Medicaid expansion -- a key provision of President Barack Obama's health care reform law that would have made health care available to many more of the state's poorest residents.

A new study has found that Corbett's decision might end up costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

Expanding Medicaid in Pennsylvania would have increased the annual amount of money the state receives from the federal government by around $2 billion, adding about $200 million in state revenue every year, according to a new study by the RAND Corporation, the nation's largest independent health policy research program.

Read More...
More on Barack Obama

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The Supreme Court's Latest Drug Dog Ruling Has a Downside

The New Yorker magazine once had a cartoon showing a
storefront office with the company name on the window: "None of
Your Damn Business Inc." If it were publicly traded, the
corporation's stock would be down this morning.

That's because of Tuesday's ruling by the Supreme Court in a
case barely noticed amid the frenzy of interest in the arguments on
same-sex marriage. The decision looks like a victory for personal
privacy. But the beauty may prove to be skin deep.

The case arose after two Miami-Dade police escorted a
drug-sniffing dog to Joelis Jardines' front porch, where the dog
signaled the presence of narcotics.

They got a warrant to search the house, where they found
marijuana plants. Jardines contended the search violated the Fourth
Amendment ban on unreasonable searches, and the Florida Supreme
Court agreed. By a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that
ruling.

So far, so good. Unless they get a judge to issue a search
warrant, the police may not tromp through your home looking for
cannabis. Nor may they climb a ladder to peek in the window. Using
dogs to detect something that can't be detected by normal human
senses is the equivalent of a physical search.

That should have been a slam dunk. In 2001, the justices ruled
that law enforcement agents are not entitled to use a thermal
imaging device to detect heat emissions from a home—which could
betray the use of high-wattage lamps used to grow pot. The court
said this is no more permissible than it would be to let cops
employ a new technology that can see through walls.

"We think that obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any
information regarding the interior of the home that could not
otherwise have been obtained without physical intrusion into a
constitutionally protected area constitutes a search—at least where
(as here) the technology in question is not in general public use,"
wrote Justice Antonin Scalia. You would think special
sense-enhancing technology with four legs and a wet nose would
likewise trample on privacy.

But for some reason Scalia, who wrote the court's latest opinion
as well, shied away from extending his impeccable logic. Instead,
he said the dog-sniffing was out of line because it involved
trespassing on private property. Once the officers ventured into
the area owned by Jardines without his permission, the Fourth
Amendment limited what they could do.

The trespass rationale worries Christopher Slobogin, who directs
the Criminal Justice Program at Vanderbilt Law School. "If the next
case involves a drug-sniffing dog smelling an apartment that abuts
a public sidewalk, presumably Scalia would say there is no search
because there is no trespass," he says. "But the privacy invasion
of the home would still be just as significant." Plenty of urban
residences are within a few feet of a sidewalk, making them
vulnerable to an accusatory Labrador retriever.

Justice Elena Kagan agreed, in a concurring opinion. In her
view, cops violate privacy rights "when they use trained canine
assistants to reveal within the confines of the home what they
could not otherwise have found there"—even if they do it from a
public way.

Why does it matter? Because dogs are the least of the ways in
which the government will eventually be able to monitor spaces that
once afforded sanctuary to anyone who wants to be left the hell
alone. Last year, the court said police needed a warrant to put a
GPS tracking device on a man's car because they "physically
occupied private property"—the vehicle—"for the purpose of
obtaining information.”

But the day is nigh when the government can use a tiny drone to
follow a car day after day. That would not require a cop to put
hands on someone's personal property. But the information gathered
would be no different. It's hard to see why one would be barred by
the Fourth Amendment and the other would not.

Even Scalia may grasp that. In the GPS case, he acknowledged,
"It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means,
without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion
of privacy." Still: May be?

A person's right to keep others off his property was once a
sturdy protection for privacy. But in an age of intrusive new
surveillance tools, it could leave us all with nowhere to hide.

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