More Congressional Ineptitude

Maxine Waters is not the only incompetent House member. Not by a long shot.

Yesterday, as I watched/listened to the so-called health care summit, Fox News cut to an interview by Megyn Kelly with Florida Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

It was, to say the least, revealing.

Kelly asked Schultz to explain why Democrats continue to push a 2,300 page health care bill too complex for anyone to fully comprehend, when so many polls indicate that about 55% of voters want a new health care bill to be written from scratch by both parties, together, and something like only 30% of voters want the current proposed legislation.

Schultz replied with a laundry list of items which she claimed voters were for, on an individual basis. Among the items she listed were:

-low insurance premiums or small increases
-no dropping coverage because of sickness
-insurance available for pre-existing conditions
-coverage of all Americans

What Schultz and, for that matter, Kelly, overlooked and ignored, is the flaw inherent in asking interviewees on a questionnaire for multiple, serial responses on attributes of a choice.

Back in the late 1970s, when I attended graduate business school, conjoint analysis was already a fairly mature, well-regarded technique in marketing research. That was over 30 years ago!

What conjoint analysis does is allow respondents to choose, usually in either paired-comparisons or rank ordering tasks, between various sub-optimal combinations of attributes.

In the case of health care, for example, a 'choice' might be low premium increases, but no pre-existing condition coverage and coverage for 90% of Americans.

By working through such choices, respondents reveal their relative values for each attribute. The key is being forced to choose among alternatives combining various levels of the various attributes.

Why isn't Congress commissioning some conjoint analysis-based research to provide members with information on what Americans value most, and least, among the possible, but expensive, attributes of a health care reform bill?

This is the sort of omission that drives me crazy. Sad to say, a look at Schultz's bio tells you a lot. She was a carpetbagging resident in her district when she went to work for a state legislator. She then ran for his vacated seat at the tender age of 26, won it, and served the maximum number of terms. Then she ran for Congress.

So, once again, as in the case of Carolyn Maloney or, for that matter, my old civics teacher, longtime Bob Michel aide and current Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, we have a Representative with no more than perhaps 3-4 years of experience actually working for a living. And those years were quite long ago.

No wonder our elected representatives provide so few modern, easily-available techniques to assist in resolving policy questions. They truly are clueless, because they've spent too much of their adult lives as professional office-holders.

And, again, as I did at the end of my post about Maxine Waters, I want to stress the business implications of this post. Provisions of the current health care bill will cause businesses to dump their employees into government-run plans. This will cause health insurance costs to skyrocket, increasing our national debt and, eventually, raising taxes. This will lead to less job creation and lower economic growth rates.

It's important for all of us to push back ill-advised, stupid legislation and government overreach. It begins by getting rid of lifetime officeholders of all parties, and striving to elect experienced, non-professional candidates for a few terms, so that their goals and those of ordinary citizens who work for a living are aligned.