Maybe Bernstein's wrong this time?

If I may indulge in a lazy blog post format, at bottom is my comment in response to Jonathan Bernstein's rather astonishing claim that the fight over the Islamic Center near Ground Zero. Bernstein, always trenchant in his  debunking of unsupported assertions about the way politicians' words and deeds affect electorates, rather gleefully insists that Park51 (f.k.a. Cordoba House) is

not going to affect elections, it's not substantively important, and to the extent it's symbolically important...well, let's just say it's not symbolically important as a stand-alone issue in any significant way (at best, it's what Kevin Drum says, one straw -- so shouldn't we pay more attention to all that other straw?).  I'm sorry to be a stick in the mud about it, but it just isn't actually a big story no matter how much it gets hyped.  Okay? 

My response, which I'll be the first to admit lacks supporting evidence and doubtless needs work:

Gee Jonathan, I know you're an expert in the dynamics of public opinion and all that, but to second CSH, you sure seem wrong to me here.

Per a Ben Smith story, I think the Republicans completely repudiating Bush's efforts to differentiate Islam from Islamism is significant. I think Palin's success in bringing another poisonous meme to the eruption point is significant. I think that waves of hysterical demagoguery that hit fever pitch are significant. And I think that, as with torture, when it comes to defense of civil liberties leaders have to be better than the rest of us, because majorities will sell those liberties without a twitch for a modicum of relief from rage or fear. When one of our two major parties goes all out demonizing an entire religion and works assiduously to interfere with a local government's approval of a religious institution to be built on private property, that's dangerous.

The invisible 1/3 of U.S. health care funding

Trickling through news reports and blogs are 2008 census figures showing an accelerating shift away from employer-based and toward government-supplied health insurance. Employers in 2008 covered just 58.5% of Americans, down from 59.3% in 2007 and 64.2% in 2000.

What's often not noted in the health care debate is a parallel shift by employers from providing traditional insurance, supplied by an insurance company, to providing self-funded health care plans, generally administered by an insurance company or other "third party administrator" (TPA) and backed by catastrophic "stop-loss" insurance.

More than half of Americans who get their health coverage from their employers are in self-insured plans (the last figure I remember seeing is 55%), which are not subject to state mandates. There are more people whose health care is funded directly by their employer than by government plans, and almost as many as are insured by private health insurers (whether employer-provided or purchased directly).

Per the numbers below, presented by the Council of Economic Advisor's Cecilia Rouse and flagged by Ben Smith, little more than one third of Americans are covered by traditional private, third-party health insurance plans (a bit less than half of the 58.5% with employer-based coverage, plus approximately 9% who buy insurance directly).

Some questions worth answering: how does employer-funded health care stack up against traditional private insurance? How successful are employers at controlling costs -- are they completely in the hands of their TPAs? What percentage of health insurers' income comes from administering companies' self-funded plans, or from providing stop-loss to self-funded companies? To what extent will new health care legislation regulate employer-funded benefits? In addition to providing health insurers with a new pool of subsidized shoppers, will health care legislation offer them new opportunities to act as administrators?