I get the feeling sometimes that there are two distinct groups of people who visit this blog. Firstly, there are the folks who are here because they know me in real life and they themselves are awesome. They're mostly here for real-life-ish updates and maybe to see what bizarre thing I'm cooking. Secondly, there are the folks who come to Grotus' Acorn primarily for the football- and Auburn-related posts, IE, folks who get linked up to the blog by Jerry at The Joe Cribbs Car Wash. There are also people like my Dad - well, people who are my Dad - who are here for both.
As you probably already know, The Joe Cribbs Car Wash is officially becoming a part of The War Eagle Reader's new Auburn website. You may also have seen that The War Eagle Reader was looking for writers. Long story cut short - I'll be putting all my Auburn-related blogging eggs in that basket as well. So for the folks who look here for football, look further to The War Eagle Reader. Specifically for the segment titled "God Girl Grill Gridiron." Seek out this logo:
What will remain here? Things I cook, stuff I do at the hospital, and whatever ruminations I have on whatever's to be ruminated upon. It'll be more of a blog per se than it might otherwise have been. Hopefully there will actually be more of the regular-style blogging here, now that I can cordon off all the football and make Grotus' Acorn a more personal endeavor.
Granted, the slogan remains the same because that's who I am: God Girl Grill Gridiron.
First of all you've got to understand, it's a bleak picture I have in my Auburn brain.
Like some other Auburn bloggers, Tuberville IS (WAS) Auburn to me. I was 15 when he took over from Terry Bowden, and living in the football hell that is central Virginia. He's all I know practically of football at all, and the Tommy I knew was a rock in the tempest, a JetGate-defying long-hauler, a man whose cachet was the surprise onside kick and the out-of-the-blue reverse pass. Tommy Tuberville represented rock-solid stability in the face of any challenge. And in the final year of his tenure on the Plains, that coolness under fire disappeared. The CEO mismanaged his players, his assistants, and especially his most important coordinator. And was fired. My world's been shook. Auburn football is wrong side out this winter.
What's more, Chizik fit the bleak, bleak bill for the every-other Tiger coach, a pro-and-con five-year program reboot. At best, I felt that very good excuses could be made for his current record as a head coach, that we could confidently move his indicator from the bright-red realm of "FAIL" to the middling yellow uncertainty just below the center of the dial. IE, perhaps it's not fair to judge a first-time head coach on a scant two seasons at one of college footballs perennial dirt-munchers1. But what was undoubtedly certain was that Gene Chizik had done nothing to prove himself worthy of the job. At least not in a public sense. God knows what the Jays unearthed in the man, or remembered in him, that swayed their decision from his battle-hardened competition. I sure didn't know. He was - and to a large extent, remains - a definite maybe. Would he be Barfield or Bowden?
And so, imagine my surprise when he toed the party line of relentless Dye-inspired mouthsmashin'. After all, what were the fans, the linemen, and the running backs clamoring for? More three-pointin', tooth-rattlin' foobaw, more clouds of dust and grass-plastered helmets. Everyone was ready for ta bust 'em in the mouth. Chizik knew what he had to say.
Even I was ready! Let it be said - if it even need be - that I'm a huge fan of the spread philosophy, and in fact think that the Auburn Tiger offense has put on a "why you need the spread" clinic for the past two years. I was Frankly delirious after the Clemson game. I was eager for more of the Tony Franklin Experience, and ready to inhale deeply. And I loved to see our spread in action! There is little-to-no doubt in my mind that if Kodi Burns had played meaningful snaps in 2007, he would have been the clear starter in 2008. And there is even less doubt in my mind that an experienced Kodi Burns would have made the difference in Death Valley2. But after the LSU game, the game when the Spread Eagle starting darting around the field, hampered though she was - when even that game our passing game almost won, when even the best drive of that game had my father bellowing "Bring back Pat Dye! Bring back Pat Dye! Bring back Pat Dye!" ... I didn't think we were ready here at Auburn. The fans aren't the team by any stretch, and all in all what damns we give don't matter, but Lord Almighty... the monolith was trembling. The center could not hold. And of course, shortly after another heartrending Hat-tastic "almost" in the Bayou, the center gave way. Everything fell apart. We spit out the fireplug and kept in our mouth the lukewarm, offensively stagnant bunch of dudes who were "already out of football." We weren't ready. I had consigned myself to the shield of orthodoxy, and braced for five years of grind-like-a-millstone Big Blue groundpounding. Mississippi State with a pulse and old-school badassitude even in the face of certain box-stacking.
War Damn Eagle anyway, and all that. Like I said, the picture was bleak. And then: Malzahn. Gus Malzahn...
My first reaction was to resume panic. As in, OH GOD WHY ARE WE DOING THIS AGAIN OH GOD. The last thing Auburn needs is more self-inflicted mayhem. Regardless of Chizik's encouraging ability to identify a high-profile guy and go git 'im, it seemed that another spread jockey was to be wrangled awkwardly into place only to have his hopes and dreams splattered as his predecessor's. When I suggested "Winesburg, Alabama" as a name for the 2008 season, I meant it. Bleak.
But as Chizik and Malzahn began to address their public, this initial hysteria quieted. Everyone by now has heard how Chizik is going to let Malzahn have a say in the structure of the offense and the hiring of assistants, and is rightly pleased. But - courtesy of Jay G. Tate - this is what Malzahn had to say:
That's what I did today -- spent time evaluating our strengths.
Well, you got to be balanced, and you've got to take what the defense gives you. People tell me, hey, do you want to run more than throw? Really, it matters on what the defense is going to give you.
We're going throw the ball far downfield, and we're going to do that quite often.
[When I talk to the players,] we will definitely put up exactly who we are, we will put up our goals... we'll have a good sound plan, and we'll have extremely high goals.
Now, some may dismiss that as coachspeak, pandering, or well-duh-isms. But our current situation dictates what the "Well duh" will be. And this year, what is "well duh" is play to our strengths, balance in the context of the opposing defensive scheme, and stretch the field. None of which was done consistently in 2008. Taken with Chizik's generous proclamations, this is the message I heard:
We have identified the lethal mistakes that were made and publicly announce our desire to correct them.
Hallelujah. This is the real ray of light, the sign that the dawn marches ever earlier after our dark solstice.
So with my worst fears placated for the moment, I gradually started to recall our own brief experiences with the man who first populated my nightmares with fleet-footed midgets:
It's like a horror movie, like, Guys! Guys! Look out! Guys he's RIGHT THERE LOOK OUT GUYS OH NOOOOOO!
Malzahn who, I'm certain, has never been witnessed in the same room with another weirdly insightful man among the nerdier of my heroes:
Good Offense! du-du-du-Du-du-du-du-Du!
So, Auburn Tigers. There may be reason to hope, after all. Chizik may not be the second coming of Doug. Malzahn may get to trick out the offense with his warp-speed wizardry. And we may yet see Auburn be Auburn again.
The dawn marches ever earlier.
1 Just to momentarily address that lurking double standard: Turner Gill went 7 and 17 at Buffalo in his first two seasons at then-ultradoormat Buffalo. So there, Round Mound. Eat you damn shoe.
2 And we'd still have a rough-hewn Tony Franklin, Tommy Tuberville's fading panache, and all those grumbling hangers-on of assistant coaches who didn't really want to be coaching, after all. The Lord works in mysterious ways... toward mysterious ends.
So real life has conspired to keep me off the blog lately. Don't look at me like that. I've been to Winston-Salem, Johnson City TN, Nashville, Cleveland, Raleigh-Durham, Pittsburgh, Hershey, Huntington WV, New York, Richmond, Rochester, New York, Columbus Ohio, and Greensboro in the past three weeks. In that order.
But it's the week leading up to the Iron Bowl. I am compelled to write something.
Pre-game analysis is at this point moot, and more effectively pursued by those who've been able to watch the recent games. The bottom line as far as I can see is that we got pissed off against Ole Miss, we showed that we could have beaten Georgia with a few breaks, and we’ve had a solid two weeks to get rared up for the Iron Bowl - I'm encouraged. Beyond that, I’m not going to X ‘n O it, as the X’s and O’s are neither clear nor encouraging, and I’m not going to be the one to sift through our season of DEATH to find the glimmers of hope still holding their breath in the wreckage and therefore jinx the Story indelibly on the intertubes. If anyone’s disappointed, well, they can get their bellyful of freudeschaden by reading my truly glorious preview of the LSU game.
But that’s neither here nor there. It’s HATE week.
It'll rust if you just leave it there, underground.
So what's more interesting to me is the recent paradigm shift in the state of Bama fandom.
Maybe I'm just old-school - fortunate to be thoroughly brewed in our bitter Alabaman past - but I hate Bama. My father will have the blame and credit for that, for he is an Auburn fan to end all Auburn fans, a man who traces his blue-and-orange blood back to our pre-civil war ancestors. The neighbors, peacefully walking their dogs on Saturdays in autumn, are no longer startled when they hear him bellowing inside our house from the other side of the street. He grew up in Montgomery, and his allegiance was forged in that most crushing of decades, the long haul from 1972 and "Punt Bama Punt" to Bo Over the Top in 1982. As a child, he watched most of that 1972 game on television. Late in the game, Bama was cramming the football down our throat and he was literally driven from his home by the flood of calls from his Bammer classmates. He lived through the near-decade of agony that followed. He became a student at Auburn himself, and met my mother there. And in 1982, when Bo went over the Alabama line straight into the heart of the Crimson Tide, taking with him the famous words on which the Bear would ever gnaw... my father was there. My mother was there. And I was there, in the womb, as he and she and thousands upon thousands of Auburn faithful erupted. Victory! My mother was knocked down a row or two when he sprang to his feet - War Damn Eagle!
Press play. I am somewhere to the left of your screen. Eleven seconds in, my world gets permanently shook.
Explains a lot, one could say. As should be obvious by now, I’ve been toted about in blue and orange since the day I first entered God’s green earth at Lee County Hospital. And almost as long as that, I’ve been well-instructed in the hate. Not just any old hate. The kind of hate that Hamilcar Barca administered unto his son Hannibal with the strength of an oath. A hate that has little equal. Ohio State and Michigan fans, for instance, will quickly point out that they, too, hate each other, and if you pal around in Ann Arbor wearing silver and scarlet or stroll into a Buckeye bar in Columbus humming “Hail to the Victors,” you’re itchin’ for a beatdown. Maybe that’s true. But hate ain’t about beer-addled twenty-somethings dustin’ up over “disrespect” and such like. Hate’s better than a mere rivalry. And maybe I’ll be the first to say it, but in that respect the Iron Bowl isn't a rivalry game because it isn't really a rivalry at all. Rivalries are born on the gridiron and spill out into the rest of the year by virtue of their implications. Ohio State - Michigan is a great rivalry. They’re two storied teams that have clashed over and over, often with national ambitions hanging in the balance. Bowl games, championships, trophies - ever do the Buckeyes and Wolverines stand in each other’s path, and from this mutual blockade flows the hostility. But had the Wolverines and Buckeyes never played, they wouldn’t have a hate at all. That's a rivalry.
Had Auburn and Alabama never played, it would only have been worse. What lives between Auburn and Alabama is itself sovereign, and not the child of mere football. It grew up all on its own, gnarling deep in four and a half million hearts, 364 days of the year, waiting to emerge from its lair and hurl young blood headlong into young blood for a savage four hours. Our hate, having festered in the wilderness for an entire year, enters into the stadium like a demon summoned to an altar, ready for the bloodletting. It demands the contest, not (as in mere rivalry) the other way around. The university presidents of the two schools knew it and wanted no part of the madness, when so long ago they refused to pit their young men against each other to slake the thirst of the Yellowhammer State. It would be a gruesome tilt to overshadow any other, they protested, driving the weak-spirited before it in horror. Oh how right they were about that. How deeply true it is that to become a citizen of Alabama is to become enter one of two fiefdoms, to be owned wholesale. Those young men belonged to the malice - it demanded their youth. And oh how bad we wanted it anyway.
Scratch that - it's hard to say "want it" when I don't even like the Iron Bowl. It's hard to enjoy the game when the moral, even synderetic significance of the game is palpable - every yard given up to the Tide an affront to human decency, every first down is a sheer crime, and may God forgive us if we're beaten. It isn't fun, it's work. I grind my teeth a little flatter every year even when we win. Moreover it has little to do with our standing in the conference or the nation. In fact, I most enjoy the years when neither team stands to make national gains from our regional grind. With nothing to distract from the grisly task, our moral certitude is even clearer. Put it to you this way: looking forward to the Iron Bowl as a springboard to national aspirations is as foreign to me as going to church with the hopes of getting all the money out of the offering plates. You go to that game to give, not to take. To sacrifice for the greater good. So I'm not one of the Auburn fans who claimed boredom with an Iron Bowl devoid of "implications." I don't care if it's competitive - all I want is their hearts broken. I want old ladies going up to Nick Saban and asking "When are we going to beat those people?" We could beat Bama by nine touchdowns for fifty years and it wouldn't be enough. Had they gotten the "death penalty" as they richly deserved, had they become financially destitute and utterly talentless, I would still grit my teeth for every play and I would still exult in every victory, every single year. It's the oath I inherited, the roar of Jordan-Hare still echoing through amnion and umbilicus, twenty-six years later.
And while many Auburn fans don’t drink as deeply from that goblet of teeth-gnashing fandom, we're united in that unalloyed devotion to the school. It's true - as is so smugly pointed out - that Auburn never was a beauty queen and probably never will be. Our fans are quick to point out 2004's disaster, and it will ever rankle, but nearly as galling was 1983, the year of my birth and the bowl season after Bo over the top. We were leap-frogged by the newcomer Miami because they were new on the scene, and we were stonewalled by Oklahoma because they had always been around. Whatev. As an Auburn fan, I've been trained my entire life not to be an attention whore troubled by the uninformed opinions of sportwriters and haggard coaches. I have no illusions about the polls, about "history," about being the hotshot - the only meritocracy in college football is sixty minutes between the sidelines. When we win out, we go to the SECCG or we go to a great bowl. While it's frustrating sometimes for our team to be overlooked, there's a kind of pyrrhic honor therein. By my estimation, everything Auburn gets Auburn has earned. And that includes our fans. Auburn fans root for Auburn - not for the polls, not for the BCS, not for a history that they may never have lived. Big Blue. And I'm proud to be a part of that. The commercials are cheesy but true: we're a family and we recognize one another.
Bama is entirely different, ever the pageant contestant consumed by the gaze of the masses. And it seems it's not the point why or from where the attention comes - the culture that surrounds the University of Alabama seems to be "any focus on us is good." Which cuts two ways.
The first is the wide legion of Bamagroupies (groupiebammers? ironically, grammers?) that crawl out from under every rock whenever Bama is "back." Which, somehow, Bama manages to be "back" every other year. My father (totally unbiased, mind you) will rail on about all the Bama fans who've never even been south of Tennessee or east of Mississippi and couldn't find T-town on a map of Tuscaloosa county. I wouldn't begrudge the Tide their success on the field, moral affrontery though it may be. But the flood of OMIGAWD BAMARR YAWL that festoons the intertubes every time SJPW completes a pass is damn near comical. But also, meaningless. For instance, you may also have been audience to the joker who left a blithely anonymous comment over on a JCCW post:
So let me get this straight, after all thats happened this year, if Auburn manages to knock off Bama, Auburn fans will happy about this season? Dear God that is pathetic...
At first I thought to myself, oh hell, another fool Bammer crying sour grapes. After all, how can this guy not understand what kind of satisfaction that would bring? I figured that their spirit was simply broken, crushed under the weight of six straight defeats, of three senior classes that would never beat the Auburn Tigers. That they were unable to bring themselves to express any hope for fear of mentally reliving the past six years. But it gradually dawned on me: this guy has absolutely no clue what team he's rooting for. Else he wouldn't need “his” own team's history spelled out for him. When an alleged Bama fan tells me he don't hate Auburn or claims not to understand our dream of spoiling the Tide's season, I just think he's not a Bama fan. He's merely another hanger-on with no connection to the actual university. That, or a rabble-rouser who thinks himself sly and aloof as he anonymously rouses the rabble on the intertubes in a manner that divorces his image from his fanhood. Either way: throwaway, and familiar practice from the grammers. I'm glad not to have to deal with that kind of fan.
The second way is of the last-words-of-a-redneck variety. Par example, Jerry at the JCCW pointed out the bammer-tastic smack talkin' over at West By God Virginia, back before the Mountaineer game. Any Auburn fan whose spleen needs a pre-Iron Bowl ticklin' should get on over there and bask in the anti-glory. It's a feast for the eye and the conscience:
Auburn [is still] destined to live in the shadow of the Crimson Tide no matter what their successes or our failures.
Consider: Since 1996, the year Gene Stallings stepped down as the head coach of the Crimson Tide, Alabama has seen more turmoil in just over a decade than many programs have seen throughout the course of their entire existance[sic]. Five different coaches have been hired in that time span, with two of them being derailed by sordid sex scandals (one of whom never even coached a down because of it), one of them abandoning the program due to impending NCAA probation, and one landing the job by virtue of having played quarterback for the school in the 80s and not much more. The program was run into the ground and embarassed by all means imaginable, while Auburn rose to the ranks of the SEC “elite” during that time, and yet all of the focus remained on Alabama.
News flash: gettin' all the 'tention cause you're acting like a bunch of degenerate hillbillies is really, really bad. So immature - would the average Tiger fan talk so blithely of a complete failure of character that plagued our school for a rip-roarin' decade? Not that we would do such a thing, or even if we did, not that we as fans would be caught dead taking pride therein. No, Alabama, that shadow you cast as you shamble out of the strip joint is not one that falls on Auburn.
Neither is this behavior new.
But what's most intriguing about the smack-talking post, though, is not the sleight-of-hand that allows him to claim that no one cares about Auburn because they couldn't tear their eyes away from the Crimson Tide's humiliating train wreck of a decade1. Nor is it the nifty trick whereby he claims to be above hating Auburn, and yet still revels in Bama gettin' all the 'tention, y'all. What's most interesting is the simultaneous embracing and rejection of Tide history that distinguishes the new Bama fan. On one hand, he's obviously denying more than a century of vicious, gladiatorial combat in the form of football. As I need not mention, this is a war fought long by our fathers and grandfathers - and in my case, great-great-grandfathers. To claim that the Iron Bowl holds no significance is to completely ignore the bitter feud that has shaped our two institutions. All while simultaneously proclaiming the resurrection of the Tide, return to the glories of the Alabama past, the days of a new Bear - this itself is an appeal to history, to trudishun, to legacy. Mmm, crimson cake to be eaten and to be had!
Can't have your Bear and eat him, too.... er....
And yet these two aspects of Alabama's history are inextricably intertwined. For one, they are united in the Bear. Just go back to his famous2 proclamations before and after the 1972 Iron Bowl - that he would rather lose to Texas ten times than to Auburn once, and that he would never lose to Auburn ever again. The titan of Tide history knew that Texas was a rival and Auburn an enemy. To appeal to the national significance Bama attained under Paul Bryant and yet discount wholesale the passion he had for the game seems distinctly un-Bammerly - downright heretical, even.
But even Bryant's recognition of the Iron Bowl's significance is mere symptom and should be taken as such, lest we repeat the mistakes of our universities' past presidents. Each university in turn feared that a gridiron manifestation of the hate would overtake the entire state's culture, but in truth it is the state's culture. Like I said before, rivalries are born in tough games in which hearts are broken and dreams are made, but in our war - our hate - football is merely the expression of a symbiotic hostility that lives all on its own. This is no casual diversion to be brushed aside when inconvenient, it's life in Alabama. Hell, it's life in upstate New York. I remember my 10th grade earth science teacher, a hard-bitten New Englander who got on my case for saying "Yes ma'am" because she thought I was smarting off. "Oh I know Auburn alright," she said one day, having seen me in my Auburn cap. She told me the story of two kids she taught back in upstate, a boy and a girl who became friends, grew in affection, and began dating. However, it was soon discovered that one family was from Auburn, and the other from Alabama. In a rare display of mutual intention, both sets of parents put an end to the relationship. Immediately. This is, as my dad puts it, a hate that ends marriages and bankrupts businesses. And by God, those businesses should fail. If their owners haven't the acumen to understand the state in which they live, they ought not set up shop within the Yellowhammer's borders.
As you can see, to deny our enmity is to deny our very statehood, and the history that flows from it. Again, it must be said that many uneducated groupies can do so without real intellectual consequence - these remoras can't be faulted for not knowing whence the whale has swum. But I'm convinced that a growing number of genuine Bammers are going down that path. When a Bammer says on one hand that Bama is better because the nation gawked at theirs, the most dramatic and most public self-humiliation endured by an academic football squad, and on the other hand tries to claim they have outgrown the sordid, snarling grudge between our schools that is such a facet of Alabaman life... well, what can a plainsman or plainswoman do but shake their head? Isn't it clear that you can't logically claim to have transcended the boundaries of Alabama and still claim the expression of its skankiest, most stereoptypical qualities as your nimbus? Would the Tide truly have us believe that they have somehow become greater than the petty infighting of the state of Alabama, as evidenced by their decade of redneck revelry and near-execution? How embarassing.
Yes, Alabama, the world will show up to take in the spectacle, but at the end of the day.... that's all it is.
So take heart, tigers. We may be beaten on the field, but we should take pride on this Thanksgiving that we will never be those people.
War. Damn. Eagle. Kick 'em in the teeth Big Blue.
1 Though it is clever, I'll have to admit. 2 And famously edible.
Seeing as I gave McCain's plan a shakedown, it's only fair - as was pointed out here at the Acorn - to similarly examine Obama's. So I'll do that on Friday. It's a bit more complicated, though, and there's a lot more material to sift through. Unlike McCain, Obama's plan is available in the easily-digestible soundbite form, and as a much-more detailed .pdf. And I feel compelled to read and digest the latter if I am to adequately comment on it.
At a first glance, Obama's plan does represent a step towards nationalized healthcare. But more on that later.
Also, I should be fair to McCain's plan and clarify: earlier I said that he would recoup the costs of his healthcare plan by making employer-sponsored healthcare benefits taxable. On initial glance, it looks terrible, as employer-sponsored healthcare will evaporate if everything goes off according to McCain's plan. In actuality, he would offset the costs of a $5,000 tax credit by reforming Medicare and encouraging preventative care.
This is one area where the two candidates are in agreement. No matter who is elected, the next President will push for doctors to be paid for diagnosis, preventative care, and care coordination. It amounts to an investment: medical care will be more costly on the whole for a number of years, but will be less expensive in the long run. Moreover, both candidates want doctors not to be paid for gross medical errors. In my opinion, these reforms would redistribute responsibility (risk and pay) over an entire medical team. It's a sound strategy that reflects the current trend in medicine towards team-based coordinated care and greater emphasis on the ounce of prevention.
Auburn Tigers, I haven't forgotten you
I'm just bracing myself for the mountain brawl that comes tomorrow night. When this game was originally announced, I was excited - a chance to whip White and Co. and vault into national title consideration. And now... I'd be happy to escape Morgantown with our team completely free of mountain moonshine whupass.
I'm not convinced that our team is good enough in any aspect to pull this one out. In our four most recent games, the defense has given up an average of 19 points via 303 total yards (153 through the air and 150 on the ground.) If we were to take our team over those four games and give it independent rankings, it would be #35 in points per game, #21 in total yards, and #41 in rushing defense*.
Granted, there are a number of potential reasons why. The injuries and the three-and-outs don't help anything. But the latter isn't going away - especially in Morgantown at night - unless we have some sort of Ensmingerian renaissance. I don't really see that happening. So the defense has to run the marathon again. If we couldn't do it against Arkansas, can we hope to do it against West Virginia?
*...and also #6 in passing defense. While our young secondary has performed admirably well, I think this number reflects the ability of teams to run on our defense.
McCain's plan to solve the problem of rising health care costs and the growing ranks of the uninsured:
Allow people to buy health insurance across state lines, opening competition for health insurance plans nationwide on an individual basis
Give a tax credit ($2500 to individuals, $5000 to families) that will provide the money to purchase a basic plan
Recoup these costs by making employer-sponsored healthcare benefits taxable
On the surface, the raw economics seem to be in McCain's favor. Competition lowers the price for the consumer, and in this respect it makes sense to allow the end consumer - the patient, you and me - to buy from whom we choose, knowing the entire cost of our healthcare. And perhaps this means that employee-sponsored health care plans will bite the dust, but in the name of the market they should, shouldn't they?
The problem is that insurance is inherently a form of socialism, and the bulk of healthy consumers punch below their weight when it comes to healthcare costs. The sickest 1% of our citizens account for 27% of our healthcare costs, the sickest 5% account for 38%, and so on - you see where this is going. It's a stable statistic. This is why we have insurance - the bulk of healthy people willingly transfer their wealth to the currently sick people, in exchange for the good of being prepared for the possibility of becoming sick. Scratch and scratch. Insurance agencies stay one step ahead in this game by signing up a whole bunch of healthy people. Their model is simple: revenue is provided by healthy insurees who pay in more than they take out, while overhead and unhealthy insurees constitute the expenditures. It's exactly the same idea that Cap One is taking to the bank: identify and sign the least costly consumers, and they will more than compensate for the more risky consumers. The more healthy buyers the bigger their margin.
The complication insurers want to avoid is called adverse selection: it can be summed up as "the only people who buy insurance are those who benefit from it." In the case of health insurance, this would mean that the only people who buy insurance are the sick. You can see how this instantly turns the entire balance sheet red. Adverse selection occurs when the insured (or the lessee) holds some power over their insurer (or lessor.) For health insurance, this typically results from an asymetry of information, IE, the potential insured withholds information about health issues that make him more risky, such as pre-existing conditions or cigarette smoking. So, insurance companies control that risk-benefit ratio with medical underwriting (the infamous pre-coverage health exam by which so many people are given higher rates or denied coverage) and then adjusting premiums for risk.
If McCain's plan is enacted and works as designed, the bulk of consumers will buy cheaper insurance than they already have. The design of the plan is to incentivize Americans to ditch their expensive employer-sponsored plan for the cheaper, primary care-intensive ounce of prevention. In fact, they might be forced to - the average cost of insurance for an American family is around $12,000, of which $8,000 is usually paid by imployer. $9,000 (the sum of what families already pay plus their tax credit) will get you a pretty decent plan that would be adequate for most healthy families, and with greater care coordination and preventative care, this will probably be okay for healthy Americans. However, in doing so they will have self-formed a gigantic low-cost risk pool. Credit card companies are known for risk pooling: they form groups of lessees with similar credit ratings and buy and sell them as aggregates. This allows the company to manage these accounts much as one might manage a portfolio of stocks. But imagine if, say, CapOne was forced to sell off all its financially-savvy lessees and accept only the most high-risk. They'd go bankrupt because their margin would go to nil. This is exactly the situation that will occur if every healthy American is allowed to go buy the cheapest adequate individual plan out there - they will self-pool in cheaper plans and no longer will contribute to the pool providing for the sickest citizens.
In other words, if the McCain plan works as designed, it will induce adverse selection. Because an insurance company's margin is the direct product of the ratio of healthy and sick insurees, they would have to adjust for this market realignment or face bankruptcy.
Only now, the insurance company can not do anything about adverse selection, because adverse selection is built into the system. McCain's health plan is designed to prevent insurance companies from artificially adjusting their risk pool (as a credit card company might) so they have to compete in a price market for insurees, IE, they have to drop their price. This would be financially untenable. A company providing for the care of a large pool of high-risk individuals would have to lower their premiums to competitive market prices just to retain the low-risk individuals that form their revenue base. But the cost to the company for the high-risk individuals remains high: their cost to the company is directly determined by their cost of care, a number determined not by market forces, but by the medical infrastructure. In a market where low-risk individuals are able to drive down the price of insurance by self-pooling, the high-cost individuals essentially represent a dramatically increased overhead that is robust to market forces. The result is that, at lower prices, this company would need to expand their low-risk pool to maintain the margin at a lower premium-per-person. But in order to expand their low-risk pool, they must become more competitive in the market, IE, lower prices. This would require more customers, requiring lower prices, etc. ad nauseum. The process is analagous to inflation. Smaller non-catastrophic insurance providers that do not insure large numbers of high-risk patients (such as United Concordia) would be able to bleed the big guys of their revenue base.
What happens then? The sick stick with what they've got because they have no incentive to change insurances - no company can offer them a premium significantly lower than the cost determined by the medical infrastructure. As their insurance company's margin decreases, their premium must increase if the company is to continue to provide for care and turn a profit. One might think that in an environment of increasing premiums, whoever raises premiums slowest "wins." But while insurance companies have an incentive to compete for low-risk individuals, they have no incentive to compete for high-risk individuals. This is because these people represent pure expenditure, and it is financially foolish to lower prices in order to increase expenditure. Without an employer to sponsor multiple employees as a bloc and thus force insurance companies to accept high-risk individuals as part of the pool, insurance companies should and would treat them as individuals. There may be an incentive to raise premiums only to the a level acceptable by the market, but as revenue-per-insuree decreases, there is certainly an incentive to minimize the expenditures due to high-risk individuals by raising their premiums.
You can see that the overall effect is everyone's insurance premiums will approach the actual direct cost of their healthcare (some asymptote designated by the cost of medical infrastructure.) For many Americans, this would be just fine because they don't get sick too often or too badly, and they'll catch a break. But for a significant portion of America, though, this would be devastating. It's $100 just to get your blood gases checked. What happens when you need a 5-day stay in the ICU? What happens when your croupy kid needs to be intubated? When someone needs IV tPA for a stroke? The costs are astronomical. Just apply the relevant facts: ~30% of the population receives ~90% of the total US healthcare expenditures, which came to $2.26 trillion in 2007. That's $22,198 per person, per year for 3 of 10 Americans. They would forfeit half an average year's pay. The cost of healthcare would be shifted from the population as a whole (as insurance is designed to work) to those who need it the most. McCain's"market of insurances" plan defeats the purpose of having health insurance at all.
This conclusion should have been obvious, right from the start. The demand for healthcare among those who really need it is inherently high and the supply (by virtue of the necessary expertise, infrastructure, research and safety precautions) is inherently low. In a situation of fixed supply and high demand, the most basic tenets of economics dictate that price will always be high. This is one example of why pure market economics can not solve the problems with health care. Price increases in direct proportion to your need, and people's very lives depend on healthcare. You can not afford to buy your life.
But what's really sticky is that very few people end up in the same risk pool they started in. The low-risk pool is composed primarily of the young and healthy, whereas the high-risk pool is mostly made up of the old and ill. As people age, their chance of being severely hurt or contracting some devastating disease goes up. Under a purely free-market system such as McCain's, their direct cost of healthcare (their insurance premium) will similarly increase as insurance companies risk-adjust their premiums in accordance with the demands of the market and the raw cost of our healthcare infrastructure. The end result is that when the truly expensive emergency or late-life care is needed, health insurance will not soften the blow. This plan takes all the non-insured and the adequately insured and incentivizes them to become under-insured.
The real problem with health care is not that insurance is expensive, insurance is expensive because there are problems with healthcare. We Americans face the old trilemma: effective, available, cheap - pick two. Infrastructure overhaul and cultural change would be a good start on this mammoth problem but probably wouldn't solve it entirely. It isn't encouraging that John McCain "Will Develop A Strategy For Meeting The Challenge Of A Population Needing Greater Long-Term Care For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of America," but I can't hold that against him. So he hasn't come up with a strategy for solving that problem, join the club John McCain, we call it America. But simply decreasing the cost of insurance isn't going to solve the underlying problems. It's like the gas prices I argued with my Dad about. He saw gas prices lose a buck, and said "Oh good, the market's working." In a sense, I agree that sure, when people are less willing to pay for gas, the price goes down to reflect the decrease in demand. It's good that we can adjust like that. But the current drop in gas prices merely reflects the fact that our economy is a wreck. It is not encouraging to see a 25% drop in gas prices in the span of a week - in fact, it's kind of ominous to see rats jumping ship. It's the same situation with health insurance: just because the cost of insurance goes down for the average American does not mean any real problem has been solved. It just reflects the fact that when people can't get much they settle for little, and those who can't settle pay out the nose. It's important to remember that we all run the risk of becoming the high-risk patient - all it takes is one drunk driver, one bad infection, one weird genetic condition and you could be totaled. Like the kids I took care of in the ICU last month.
I'm not saying that to be sentimental. I just want to point out that while the market would shelter healthy people like you and me, it would ravage those who absolutely require its services because that's the way a market works. Supply and demand. And that's fine for a lot of things. A great deal of problems are best solved by the market's coldly brutal efficiency. But not healthcare, and certainly not like this.
Spare a moment, indeed. It's worth remembering that college football means an awful lot more to these kids than it could, say, to me, nerdy blogging med student that I am. And that they're really giving their all in a season that is crumbling before their very eyes. It's sobering to remember that not only is college football the collected split-second decision-making of 18-23 year old males under extreme duress, it's probably the biggest thing they've participated in their entire lives. And this season is tougher on them than anyone else.
I was a little chastened to realize how hard we (I) can be on 'em.
...please don't go there
Regardless of their incredible domination of the opposing scoreboard, I'm still not convinced that this defense is entirely living up to the stats. It's frustrating to see not one, not two, but three tigers miss a tackle. To see 'em looking gassed in the first half versus the mighty orange suck. None of that is anything I'm accustomed to as an Auburn fan. Answer me honestly: if Tennessee had fielded even an average quarterback, is there any doubt the Volunteers would have carried the day?
It makes me even more nervous when Tuberville casually drops hints like this
It's a tough transition (to the spread), but I'm sold on it. Our recruits are sold on it. I prepared the team for this. I knew there would be growing pains.
...We should have won that game 13-0, to be honest.
...sweet Moses did Tubby just call out our defense?!
Men and women of the plains, place your fingers firmly in your ears and follow me in song: Oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight o'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming....
Again, duly examine the applicability of the three criteria, but...
However, I would disagree that the chickens ultimately roost in Franklin's coop alone. You can't blame the offensive coordinator for that nasty rash of early-season fumbles, for the line's failure to do anything but drive block regardless of Tommy's insistence that the blocking is easier, for the receivers' inability to run basic routes (such that Tony Franklin had to run the route himself to show them how it's done.) If you want to do that, tell me why Tony Franklin was able to get the job done when he supplanted Gorgeous Borges just prior to the bowl tilt with Clemson? I'm not saying he's blameless, but it seems there's more going on here.
As an Auburn fan, there are three goals for any season.
First and foremost, embarrass Bama or break their hearts, but either way beat the tar out of 'em. I don't buy it when Auburn fans say they're glad Bama's getting more competitive. My father instilled in me the same gritty, biting tiger blood that was forged in his Montgomery boyhood during the reign of the B'er. A deep-seated hate that hangs like a millstone, having ground its way from the Punt Bama Punt game to Bo Over the Top, both of which he remembers vividly. I was there in the student section in the womb when Bo Jackson ended nine years of pain and I will spit on my grandmother's grave before I relish the thought of Bama getting anything less than the beatdown they deserve.
Second, the ever-nagging hope of our chronically hampered national ambitions. 2004 won't ever go away for me, but again, my father points me back to 1983. We ain't no beauty queens, tigers, even when we are. Screw it.
And then, there's the SEC. Call me a homer but winning the conference will always mean more than garnering some national opinion. This isn't an election, it's foobaw. So while beating Bama is a moral victory and a triumph of justice, competing in the SEC is the measure of success for our football team. Every year, LSU and Auburn meet at the crossroads of the SEC west and beat each other beyond recognition.
As SEC rivalries go, this is one in which I'm pretty neutral. I don't hate LSU. Maybe that's by virtue of having never even seen an LSU fan, though my dad is happy to tell me of their bourbon-reeking ways. Having never had beer or mustard dumped on me, and never seen bottles and rocks chucked at the elderly, I simply appreciate their team from afar. To me, they're just that other juggernaut in the SEC West.
Here's my wish list for Armageddon:
1. We win.
Nurr - obviously. Victory would mean no less than in any other year.
2. Everyone leaves the field with all our bones and ligaments.
The Violence Bowl would be a fitting title. Seems like every time LSU and Auburn meet, someone comes up brutally injured. I'd be relieved to get out of this game with our quartback intact, now that we've officially painted the bulls-eye on Chris Todd.
3. Tray Blackmon dishes out some stiff nutrition to a cupcake-fattened Austin Scott
Scott's been a hoss in the few games LSU has played, romping all over the bengals' hapless opponents to the tune of a bizarre 11 yards a carry. But of his four touchdowns, only one came from in the redzone, and the fourth was from eight yards out after a 56 yard scamper. Call me silly, but I think this is a good sign for Auburn - busting huge runs against Appy State and North Texas doesn't necessarily translate into the everydown, grinding, tooth-rattling run game it'll take to get by an incredibly nasty Auburn run defense. Scott's numbers still look good when you minus 'em out: 5.4 a carry on 14 carries with a touch vs. the fighting Appendectomies, and 4 a carry on 5 carries against the mean green. We just aren't going to give up that big play, so Scott's going to have to do the work all by his self. If we held the God-like McFadden to 43 yards and we're better this year...? When Auburn's on defense, I think the lines will come to a draw at worst and that means the spotlight is on a resurgent Ball of Hate. God help Austin 'cause Tray ain't gonna.
4. Jerraud Powers comes clean like a Tomahawk missile on a corner blitz Jerraud's been thinking about this game for a long, long time now. I'm fully confident he'll give us a fantastic performance tomorrow night. I'd just love to see him knock a tooth out of Hatch's unsuspecting head. You know, purely for the sake of catharsis.
I'd put the whole secondary on this list (Godspeed to them against that swarm of ostrich-legged, glue-fingered freaks) but honestly, our green defensive backfield has played outstandingly so far, and I can't see jinxing that success. Good luck, fellas.
5. The refs fail to notice that our defensive line is in reality an angry cohort of grizzly bears We can only hide this for so much longer.
6. Chris Todd does nothing to stoke the Kodi fever
Todd did his one job very well last week, which was, don't give the ball game away. Ideally, I'd love to see a Campbellian transformation, the kind of gut-check post route sent whistling downfield that propels a young man into glory and leadership. But first and foremost, we can't do anything to give this one away. Interceptions, flubbed handoffs, errant shotgun pitches, fumblies - that crap's gotta go, lest we be obliterated. And we have to keep moving the ball, any way we can. The fate of the offense will fall squarely upon its captain's shoulders.
7. The offensive line regains their jerseys from the aliens that kidnapped them last week
Hoo boy. That was the one thing about the MSU game that really has me worried. It's not like Ziemba et al are any less talented than they were last year, or that State's that much better in the trenches. If we stage another holding festival, we are in serious trouble.
and while I'm on the O-line...
7b. Ricky Jean-Francois gets beat fair and square and shambles off to the locker room in shame... but with two healthy knees. Chop blocks ain't Auburn.
8. Receivers. Catch. Nurr. Second-most obvious item on this wish list - to have a truly effective passing game. At all.
9. Running backs hang on to the ball Continuing the general theme of "at least don't give the ball game away." I think Tate, Smith, Fannin, and Davis (and Lester if he plays) will be more than sufficient if the passing game is working at all. That poor second-string linebacker is in more trouble than he knows. We just can't put the ball on the ground.
10. Tubby proves me right about his trickeratious strategerizing
I really, really, hope to God that Tubby's got something up his sleeve. That last week's baseball game will give birth to the Spread Eagle in her full glory. That Franklin will give a great big chuckle as Mario Fannin rockets past some hapless white-jerseyed umbrella.
11. Les Miles continues to be mad as a hatter and unlike last year, it bites him in the ass.
When I was in sixth or seventh grade, I went to Boy Scout camp at Powhatan Scout Reservation. Boy that was fun - mountain lakes, A-6 intruders, copperheads and best of all: woodcarving. It was my very first scout camp and they were already going to let us use knives. Awesome!
It's been said that a sharp knife is a safe knife, because you're less likely to be using a lot of pressure to make a cut, and therefore you won't slip and cut yourself. This is what the merit badge counselor told me as he honed my standard-issue red BSA pocketknife to a razor-like edge completely inappropriate for its construction, use, or owner. I demonstrated this shortly afterwards when, just prior to dinner, I was cutting toward my hand to make a stop-cut, sliced right into my left middle finger, and wound up needing six stitches. I even passed out in the camp clinic. My mom got a lovely phone call in the middle of the night that began "Pulaski County Hospital, can you hold? *click*"
That was when I learned that the safest knife is not necessarily a sharp knife, but one not wielded by an idiot. Rule number one is: cut away, away, away from yourself. Lest the dull tool in the box get cut by the nice sharp knife.
So naturally, having completed seven or eight years of scouting, an Eagle scout award, numerous trips for the OA, two treks, and a surgery clerkship, I've only gotten dumber. Four stitches dumber:
The limes ain't worth it, man!
I was cutting a lime into slices for some drinks for my girlfriend and me (we were having a nice, relaxing evening.) I managed to demonstrate exactly NOT what to do, which is:
hold the lime in your hand
place a gigantic turkey-carving fillet knife against the lime where you wish to make the cut
think you're really cool
apply downward pressure with your thumb and upward pressure with the machete you've chosen to mutilate produce with
half cut your damn thumb off
better get sewn up, you chump.
So my finger immediately starts spurting blood. I apply pressure with a rag, and sit down on the floor, because every time I cut myself like this, I pass out and have this bizarre seizure/dissociative fugue. My girlfriend (wonderful that she is) sat down in front of me, prepared to catch me should I pass out. She says the last thing I said was "I hate when I cut myself, I feel so weird." And then boom! I'm in the most vivid, realistic, forget-you-exist dream in fast-forward and boom! I'm back out of it again. It was the weirdest sensation. Imagine you've forgotten who you are, where you are, who your girlfriend is, what it feels like to have clothes on... thankfully I kept them on, but just think for a second: if you had never worn clothes before in your entire life, what would that feel like? Exactly - just like that. Freakin' bizarre. Meanwhile, I'm shaking, posturing, and trying desperately to remember who I am, where I am, and who this nice girl is who seems so very concerned. Bi-zarre.
My girl was pretty freaked out, to say the least. She said that I quickly did what I foretold, crumpling up in a little ball and making weird noises that she didn't know could even come out of my mouth. I was actually glad she was there to witness it, as when this (rarely) occurs, I usually just wake up extremely confused, not knowing what happened. She quickly got up, instructed me several times to lay on the floor, and went out to buy gauze. When she returned, she took a look at my finger and said, yes, we'll need to go to the ER.
Now, I dreaded that decision the very moment I overshot that damn lime. No one likes going and sitting in the waiting room - most of the time, if you aren't cardiac you're gonna wait. So we gathered up stuff to read and study for the anticipated hours of sitting, poured a bunch of water on my perfectly ashed-over charcoal, and walked over to the ER. But lo and behold, the hospital here has gotten a brand-new triage system. I was literally in a room within ten minutes. We were astonished. My girlfriend went to go get us some dinner, and she just saw me as I was getting roomed. In fact, we didn't even have time to eat before the PA was in there pumping me up with lidocaine and stitching me closed. It was really amazing how well we were served in that first half-hour.
The hour and a half afterwards, however, sucked. They completely forgot to discharge me. Being good medical students who dutifully appreciate the system (and who have been relentlessly hammered about attempting to work outside its margins) we waited. In fact, we waited until an entire hour had passed, before I got up and took a couple laps around the ER in search of my PA or the ER doc who'd come by at first to appraise my lime-finger. I didn't find them, but shortly after I returned to my girlfriend in the room, the doc comes by again and says "What are you still doing here?" "I'm waiting for my discharge instructions," I blithely replied. It was pretty stupid, all in all. They forgot that I hadn't left, and I really didn't need them to remember. But in the name of bureaucracy, I stayed. Shows you what you learn here in the ivory tower, eh?
What really bugged us wasn't staying, and wasn't being forgotten (we had a nice chat with an elderly patient who was in the room with us, she was great.) It was missing The Office, which, turns out was a beautiful, classic character-driven and situationally clever Office episode. Thankfully all the episodes are available online free-of-charge. Else I really, really would have felt stupid.
Live and learn, and learn again, and learn again a decade later.
It's high flu season. And I've gotten some foreboding reports.
First of all, I caught a wicked good flu last weekend. And not just a rhinovirus, a real honest-to-God hates-your-guts influenza. Rocked me right in the face. For folks who don't know, most people who say they have the flu don't actually have the flu. They've got a rhino, a corona, or some other virus that makes you feel crappy, and you might go home or you might soldier through work after all. The flu ain't like that. Influenza gives you body aches and intense malaise - you just can't do anything. You sit around hurting for at least a couple days with a brain that feels like marshmallow fluff. You'll probably get pretty dehydrated, what with the fevers. Lord knows I did. My girlfriend said my lips were the color of my even-paler-than-normal face. And then she went and got me a pile of Gatorade and made me some soup - she's pretty awesome like that.
But it was also good on her account because (surprise!) she came down with the exact same thing while I was convalescing. We chowed down on some good wonton soup and lo mein that night (surprisingly good sick food...)
Long story short: you remember the flu. It does not play around.
Now, even though we got knocked flat on our butts with the flu, it wasn't anywhere close to killing us. But there are some people whom it does kill, chiefly the very young, the elderly, and people with weak immune systems - 36,000 a year in America alone. To make the obligatory bizarre comparison: HIV kills around 20,000 people every year in the USA (according to the CDC.) Eh?
Perhaps the plural of "anecdote" isn't "evidence"... but everyone I know seems to have gotten laid out by the flu. And now I hear that my girlfriend's old alma mater is closing up for a little while because too many students and faculty have gotten too sick. Keep in mind that the flu shot didn't work this year*, another nasty thing about adenovirus - sometimes it moves too fast genetically for our vaccines to keep up.
Maybe my concern also has something to do with having watched "Children of Men" recently, a premise of which is that the world went to hell after the flu pandemic of 2008.
Wash your hands and cough into your elbows. The fertility of the human race is depending on you.
*Makes me feel like less of a dumbass for being the asthmatic on steroids who "just didn't get" a flu shot. Only a little less.
