I just had to give a shout out to the land of my childhood, Wayne County, for its outstanding work in attracting (or creating) divorced people.

More than 19 percent of Wayne County residents over age 15 are divorced, according to new 2008 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s the highest percentage for any county with a population more than 65,000 in the nation, and two other Indiana counties — Floyd and Madison — also made the top 10.

My folks got divorced back in the early 70s, presumably before it was cool. I had no idea they were trendsetters.

Serious nuanced debate frequently seems to bog down. But, there are other options. Somehow humor seems to work better on the Left. (The Right has its own effective tools):

I am in Day 2 of my continuing legal education seminar. I have my iPhone but no laptop, so blogging is tough. Twitter and Facebook seem to be getting a lot of my attention – even with the gripping federal tax update going on now. Word of warning on that, though. The federal estate tax lapses for a year next year. So, watch your back if you have any greedy heirs.

I mentioned earlier my belief that limiting medical malpractice liability won’t do much to drive down the cost of health care. So, what will? My favorite health care futurist — ok, the *only* health care futurist I know — Joe Flower, has a list. Click through the link for the narrative, but the list is as follows:

1. Single payer.
2. “Robust” public option.
3. Limiting medical loss ratios.
4. Negotiating drug prices.
5. Bundling.
6. Publishing outcomes.
7. Publishing prices.
8. Banning discounts.
9. Giving a premium to integrated “accountable care organizations.”
10. Increasing subsidies for digitization, tied to productivity improvements.
11. Subsidizing automation.
12. Standardization and checklists.
13. Warranties.

The issue of “medical loss” is one that really captures my attention. It has to do with what percentage of health insurance premium dollars actually go toward providing health care. A high percentage suggests an efficient health care system and a low percentage suggests an inefficient system. Flower has this to say about medical loss in the U.S. versus Europe:

Many European countries dictate that health plans must return 85% or 90% or 92.5% of the premium paid in as medical services paid out. U.S. health plans, in contrast, compete on (and brag to Wall Street analysts about) how low their medical loss ratio is. Some are as low as 60%.

Maureen Groppe, writing for Gannett, has an article about increased attention to “tort reform” in the context of the health care debate.

Medical malpractice costs are getting increasing attention in the health care debate, despite studies that show capping jury awards in malpractice cases would do little to lower health care spending.

I mentioned last week Jeff Hagedorn’s opinion piece in the Perry County News citing studies that suggest the rise and fall of medical malpractice premiums correlate much more strongly with shifts in the stock market than they do with malpractice costs.

But, never mind the reality. That medical malpractice claims have something significant to do with health care costs has become an article of faith among voters and, consequently, among politicians seeking their votes.

The Groppe article points out that Indiana has a pretty doctor-friendly malpractice system and yet there is little evidence that this has done much to keep health care costs down in our state.

Indiana’s health spending per capita is slightly higher than the national average. Hoosiers spend less per person on doctors, but more for hospitals and health insurance premiums, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy research group.

WellPoint Inc., the Indianapolis-based insurance giant, said in a May report that malpractice suits are one of the popular explanations for rising health care costs, but falsely so.

I don’t really have a dog in the medical malpractice fight. I don’t practice that kind of law and, if I did, chances are I’d be defending and would find further restrictions advantageous for a client. But, in terms of the health care debate, it’s little more than a distraction.

Eric Weddle has an article in the Lafayette Journal & Courier about federal funds being given to general aviation airports. I don’t have a great deal of knowledge about these facilities. I served a brief stint as counsel for the Frankfort airport authority until a couple of thorny issues were resolved and the local political situation changed there and it no longer made sense for them to pay a Lafayette attorney to come to their meetings.

General aviation airports are those, generally speaking, that do not primarily serve the military or scheduled, commercial flights. They are the smaller airports that serve chartered and private airplanes, among other things. I have a theoretical sense that it’s good that these airports are available for decentralized air travel. But, in a lot of cases, they serve a very limited segment of the population. They are sometimes cited as an economic development tool because the lives of executives with local factories are easier if they can land a chartered plane close to a factory. Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends — or at least one of my best friends — is a pilot who uses general aviation airports. But, unless I’m underestimating their value to the community, I suspect that these airports are probably on the edges of what we need government to fund when we’re dealing with limited tax dollars.

I see that at least one of the airports defended themselves on the grounds that they are nearly self-sufficient with hangar and fuel charges. But, in Indiana, these airport authorities do have taxing authority and condemnation powers, even if their use of such powers may be limited. In the overall scheme of things, this is probably just a drop in the bucket.

Obviously, I’m all over the map on this one. Sometimes it’s just good to ramble.

I read articles like this one from Maureen Groppe and Peter Urban about Republicans whining about the use of “czars” in the Obama administration, and it makes me question whether I’ll care when newspapers finally go under. Its full of “some say one thing but others say another thing” reporting, and it’s not until deep in the article that you find out that the Republicans had nothing to say when the same thing was going on in the Obama Bush administration. That information should have been in about paragraph two and it should have been a statement of fact not a quote from someone else.

For all the legitimate policy differences one might have with the Obama administration, this is a bullshit, made up issue and for real journalists to spend any time on it is ridiculous.

The Associated Press has an article on the loss of cursive. Basically, kids aren’t learning cursive because they don’t really need it. Most communication is typed any more, and printing gets the job done for the tasks that need to be written.

As might be expected with any change, there are those who see the loss of cursive as a significant loss. But, for me, this goes in the buggy whip column. It served a purpose and, with that purpose fading, the need to learn it also fades.

I’m biased though. My cursive was never any good. I went back to printing as soon as my teachers stopped caring. I regard it as the Victorian gingerbread house of writing.

The Lafayette Journal & Courier has a reasonable editorial on the Voter ID law recently struck down as unconstitutional because it treated absentee voters more leniently than in-person voters. The J&C suggests that legislators simply go back and treat absentee voters the same as in-person voters.

Rather than appeal Thursday’s ruling, it might be a better route for lawmakers to close the loopholes and adopt a new law that applies uniformly to all voters.

Given that many of the state’s problems with voter fraud have occurred with absentee ballots, it seems reasonable that the photo ID rule apply to them, or that some other method of verifying identification be adopted.

Reasonable as it is, it starts with the flawed premise that this was ever fundamentally about combatting voter fraud. Consider that the law’s proponents rejected proposed amendments to make this law apply to absentee voters and could not point to any real life instances of fraud that this would have stopped, certainly not any that had any particular impact on an actual election.

These items don’t fit into the narrative where Voter ID proponents are crusading to protect the integrity of the electoral system from the scourge of fraud. In my misspent youth, I experimented with a little Ayn Rand. I’ve discarded most of that rubbish but one quote that stuck with me, overblown as it is, was this: “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” O.k., so that’s just an overbearing way of saying that when things don’t fit together, you ought to check your premises.

The facts fit together a lot better if you discard the premise that voter fraud was the purpose of the Voter ID law and replace it with the premise that one political party, temporarily ascendant, saw fit to pass a law that would shave a percentage point or two off the other side’s voters. The Republicans made a calculation that the voters who would: a) vote in person; and b) not have identification would skew toward the Democrats. That calculus changes if you apply the ID requirement to those who vote absentee. Therefore, the absentee voters were not subjected to the same level of scrutiny.

If the Journal & Courier’s premise is correct, I would expect simple legislation to correct the disparate treatment. If my premise is correct, I would expect a trip to the Supreme Court and a lot of public gnashing of teeth that never seems to address why absentee voters should be subjected to less scrutiny than in-person voters.

I thought it was may a one or two time thing, but the more I read Paul Ogden, the more it seems he’s becoming a watchdog for political privatization in Indiana. Today’s installment is on possible privatization of parking garage and shuttle service at the Indianapolis Airport.

He’s probably a more credible critic of government privatization operations since he is (or at least was) temperamentally predisposed to be in favor of it but has seen good theory turn into corrupt practice. My first real, direct experience was seeing things work well in reverse — watching the legislature take bill printing in-house at a substantial savings over the private printer it had been using. That probably gives me a predisposition against privatization.

Says Ogden:

Bottom line is that the Airport Board overbuilt and is now scrambling to find the resources to cover CIB-type operating deficits that loom in the future. To close the inevitable gap, the Airport Board is looking at using the long term (50 years) privatization contracts to generate substantial upfront revenue.

This is something I have preached about before. To work, privatization has to be about instilling market competition into the delivery of services. Handing a company a long term contract to provide a service not only does not instill competition, it creates a government-sanctioned monopoly. Insulated from market competition by the long-term privatization contract, the service provided by these monopolies inevitably declines.