The Associated Press just released a story with the headline, “Millions in insurance rebates coming to Carolinas.” The story talks about 2013 health insurance premiums that are considered overcharges, based on provisions of The Affordable Care Act. But the writing of the story is rather flawed. The writer calculates “an average refund of $92 per family” in South Carolina, by dividing the total amount being refunded by the total number of consumers that will get a refund. This glosses over the fact that only 387,000 consumers (out of a total population of over 14 million) in North and South Carolina will be getting any kind of refund this year.
But I am burying the lead, as they say. The real point of this post is the headline itself. Most news outlets that published this story online ran the following headline (which was no doubt supplied by The Associated Press):
Millions in insurance rebates coming to Carolinas
WXII in Winston-Salem thought we should know more about the insurance:
Millions in health insurance rebates coming to Carolinas
Time-Warner Cable of Charlotte added capital letters and units of measurement:
Millions of Dollars in Insurance Rebates Coming to Carolinas
But our Asheville Citizen-Times decided to change the very facts of the story:
Health insurance rebates coming to millions in Carolinas
Which isn’t true. Some people in this little town have too much time on their hands. I won’t say who.
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Update: An hour or so after I posted a comment on The Citizen-Times pointing out the misleading headline, the newspaper (to its credit) changed the headline to:
Health insurance rebates coming to consumers in Carolinas
To some consumers, yes.
On one hand you have mounted troops, horse drawn artillery, lancers and communications by pigeon and signal flag. On the other you have the intoduction of machine guns, aircraft, chemical warfare, and tanks.
Also, I think the uniforms, especially the wool ones with bullion SSI’s are really compelling and artistic in their own way.
Not to mention small, unartistic details like the sixteen million or so deaths from that war.
Some still ask, “How could people do this to each other?” as if there were not thousands of years of human behavior serving as precedent, as if borders on a map have ever been able to contain or restrain human conflict. Was Hobbes (1660) so wrong about our nature?
From [man’s] equality of ability ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end (which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only) endeavour to destroy or subdue one another.
The map at the top of this post is called The Global Conflict Tracker, and is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a foreign-policy think-tank founded at the close of World War I. I counted thirty-four wars and conflicts on this map — and those are only the ones listed as “conflict prevention priorities” by CFR’s Center for Preventive Action.
The Center for Preventive Action says its mission is “to help prevent, defuse, or resolve deadly conflicts around the world and to expand the body of knowledge on conflict prevention.” I wonder, looking at the map and considering human history, how many conflicts this think-tank thinks it is going to prevent.