[nfbwatlk] Unintended Consequences and the ADA

[Frederick Driver]

Wow!  That's sure interesting.  Thanks Noel.

There are definitely unintended and destructive consequences there.  A
very valid concern.

Some people will read that as a reason not to have enforceable laws
protecting equality.

I don't read it that way.  I see it as solely addressing the issue of who
pays the cost for reaching the goal of the law.

I read it as a reason to have the associated costs absorbed by the state,
by tax payers collectively, rather than by doctors, businesses, individual
practitioners, etc.

That removes the backfire or disincentive.

I suppose one could argue that there would then be some kind of collective
societal or attitudinal disincentive or resentment.  But I don't buy that.

If the people as a whole think equal rights are a good idea, there's
nothing wrong with laws to protect equal rights.  But the people as a
whole, who value equal rights, have to be prepared to pay to get that job
done.

On the other hand, any such laws have to be well thought out and nailed
down.  Limited to what is actually necessary to enforce the spirit of the
law, and with safeguards against abuse of it.  So as not to waste public
money on unnecessary absurdities like luxury dorm accommodations for no
reason at all other than that some guy asked for it, or cell phones for
the [quote] wayward blind person.
Who was only wayward because he or she had not had the opportunity of
proper training, which he had a right to, which right ought to be
protected in law.
Protect the guy's right to proper training!  Not his right to a stupid
cell phone in case he get's lost.

Also, such abuses are only possible because of the ignorant misconceptions
of whatever administrator provided or granted those things when asked for.

The more public education along Federation lines the better.

Thanks for the thought-provoking post.

Rick



On Fri, 25 Jan 2008, Nightingale, Noel wrote:

>
>
> Thought this might be of interest  and generate some discussion on this
> list .
>
>
>
> January 20, 2008
> Freakonomics
> Unintended Consequences
> By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
> The Case of the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker
> One year from today, a new president moves into the White House. This
> president will be eager to carry out any number of plans - including,
> surely, plans to help the segments of society that most need help.
> Extending a helping hand, after all, is one of the great privileges and
> responsibilities of the presidency.
>
> But before charging ahead with such plans, the new president might do
> well to first ask him- or herself the following question: What do a deaf
> woman in Los Angeles, a first-century Jewish sandal maker and a
> red-cockaded woodpecker have in common?
>
> A few months ago, a prospective patient called the office of Andrew
> Brooks, a top-ranked orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles. She was having
> serious knee trouble, and she was also deaf. She wanted to know if her
> deafness posed a problem for Brooks. He had his assistant relay a
> message: no, of course not; he could easily discuss her situation using
> knee models, anatomical charts and written notes.
>
> The woman later called again to say she would rather have a
> sign-language interpreter. Fine, Brooks said, and asked his assistant to
> make the arrangements. As it turned out, an interpreter would cost $120
> an hour, with a two-hour minimum, and the expense wasn't covered by
> insurance. Brooks didn't think it made sense for him to pay. That would
> mean laying out $240 to conduct an exam for which the woman's insurance
> company would pay him $58 - a loss of more than $180 even before
> accounting for taxes and overhead.
>
> So Brooks suggested to the patient that they make do without the
> interpreter. That's when she told him that the Americans With
> Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) allowed a patient to choose the mode of
> interpretation, at the physician's expense. Brooks, flabbergasted,
> researched the law and found that he was indeed obliged to do as the
> patient asked - unless, that is, he wanted to invite a lawsuit that he
> would probably lose.
>
> If he ultimately operated on the woman's knee, Brooks would be paid
> roughly $1,200. But he would also then need to see her for eight
> follow-up visits, presumably with the $240 interpreter each time. By the
> end of the patient's treatment, Brooks would be solidly in the red.
>
> He went ahead and examined the woman, paying the interpreter out of his
> pocket. As it turned out, she didn't need surgery; her knee could be
> treated through physical therapy. This was a fortunate outcome for
> everyone involved - except, perhaps, for the physical therapist who
> would have to pay the interpreter's bills.
>
> Brooks told several colleagues and doctor friends about his deaf
> patient. "They all said, 'If I ever get a call from someone like that,
> I'll never see her,' " he says. This led him to wonder if the A.D.A. had
> a dark side. "It's got to be widely pervasive and probably not talked
> about, because doctors are just getting squeezed further and further.
> This kind of patient will end up getting passed on and passed on,
> getting the runaround, not understanding why she's not getting good
> care."
>
> So does the A.D.A. in some cases hurt the very patients it is intended
> to help? That's a hard question to answer with the available medical
> data. But the economists Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist once asked a
> similar question: How did the A.D.A. affect employment among the
> disabled?
>
> Their conclusion was rather startling and makes Andrew Brooks's hunch
> ring true. Acemoglu and Angrist found that when the A.D.A. was enacted
> in 1992, it led to a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers.
> How could this be? Employers, concerned that they wouldn't be able to
> discipline or fire disabled workers who happened to be incompetent,
> apparently avoided hiring them in the first place.
>
> How long have such do-good laws been backfiring? Consider the ancient
> Jewish laws concerning the sabbatical, or seventh year. As commanded in
> the Bible, all Jewish-owned lands in Israel were to lie fallow every
> seventh year, with the needy allowed to gather whatever food continued
> to grow. Even more significant, all loans were to be forgiven in the
> sabbatical. The appeal of such unilateral debt relief cannot be
> overestimated, since the penalties for defaulting on a loan at the time
> were severe: a creditor could go so far as to take a debtor or his
> children into bondage.
>
> So for a poor Jewish sandal maker having trouble with his loan payments,
> the sabbatical law was truly a godsend. If you were a creditor, however,
> you saw things differently. Why should you lend the sandal maker money
> if he could just tear up the loan in Year Seven? Creditors duly gamed
> the system, making loans in the years right after a sabbatical, when
> they were confident they would be repaid, but then pulling tight the
> purse strings in Years Five and Six. The resulting credit drought was so
> damaging to poor people that it fell to the great sage Hillel to fix
> things.
>
> His solution, known as prosbul, allowed a lender to go to court and
> pre-emptively declare that a specific loan would not be subject to
> sabbatical debt relief, transferring the debt to the court itself and
> thereby empowering it to collect the loan. This left the law technically
> intact but allowed for lenders to once again make credit available to
> the poor without taking on unwarranted risk for themselves.
>
> The fallow-land portion of the sabbatical law, meanwhile, was upheld for
> centuries, but it, too, finally gained a loophole, called heter mechira.
> This allowed for a Jew to temporarily "sell" his land to a non-Jew and
> to continue farming it during the sabbatical year and then "buy" it back
> immediately afterward - a solution that helped the modern state of
> Israel keep its agricultural economy humming.
>
> The trouble is that many of the most observant Israeli Jews reject this
> maneuver as a sleight of hand that violates the spirit of the law. Many
> of these traditionalists are also extremely poor. And so this year,
> which happens to be a sabbatical year, the poorest Jews in Israel who
> wish to eat only food grown on non-Jewish land are left to buy imported
> goods at double or triple the regular price - all in order to uphold a
> law meant to help feed the poorest Jews in Israel.
>
> Such well-meaning laws surely don't end up harming animals as well, do
> they?
> Consider the Endangered Species Act (E.S.A.) of 1973, which protects
> flora and fauna as well as their physical habitats. The economists Dean
> Lueck and Jeffrey Michael wanted to gauge the E.S.A.'s effect on the
> red-cockaded woodpecker, a protected bird that nests in old-growth pine
> trees in eastern North Carolina. By examining the timber harvest
> activity of more than 1,000 privately owned forest plots, Lueck and
> Michael found a clear pattern: when a landowner felt that his property
> was turning into the sort of habitat that might attract a nesting pair
> of woodpeckers, he rushed in to cut down the trees. It didn't matter if
> timber prices were low.
>
> This happened less than two years ago in Boiling Spring Lakes, N.C.
> "Along the roadsides," an A.P. article reported, "scattered brown bark
> is all that's left of once majestic pine stands." As sad as this may be,
> it isn't surprising to anyone who has examined the perverse incentives
> created by the E.S.A. In their paper, Lueck and Michael cite a 1996
> developers' guide from the National Association of Home Builders: "The
> highest level of assurance that a property owner will not face an E.S.A.
> issue is to maintain the property in a condition such that protected
> species cannot occupy the property."
>
> One notable wrinkle of the E.S.A. is that a species is often declared
> endangered months or even years before its "critical habitats" are
> officially designated. This allows time for developers,
> environmentalists and everyone in between to have their say at public
> hearings. What happens during that lag time?
>
> In a new working paper that examines the plight of the cactus
> ferruginous pygmy owl, the economists John List, Michael Margolis and
> Daniel Osgood found that landowners near Tucson rushed to clear their
> property for development rather than risk having it declared a safe
> haven for the owl. The economists make the argument for "the distinct
> possibility that the Endangered Species Act is actually endangering,
> rather than protecting, species."
>
> So does this mean that every law designed to help endangered animals,
> poor people and the disabled is bound to fail? Of course not. But with a
> government that is regularly begged for relief - these days, from
> mortgage woes, health-care costs and tax burdens - and with every
> presidential hopeful making daily promises to address these woes, it
> might be worth encouraging the winning candidate to think twice (or even
> 8 or 10 times) before rushing off to do good. Because if there is any
> law more powerful than the ones constructed in a place like Washington,
> it is the law of unintended consequences.
>
> Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of the book
> "Freakonomics." More information on the research behind this column is
> online at www.freakonomics.com <file://www.freakonomics.com> .
>
>