Six more states – Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, Wyoming, Wisconsin and Maine — are joining Florida’s federal lawsuit challenging ObamaCare’s constitutionality.
That puts the number at 26 – a majority of states.
Hmmm … I guess they’re not swayed by “adult children” free-riding on parents’ policies.
South Florida Business Journal, Six states join health care reform challenge, January 18, 2011
Roads were icy in DC yesterday, so on the way into Georgetown I heard my favorite weather-related announcement:
“Only essential Federal employees need to report today; non-essential employees may take liberal leave”
Raises an obvious question: why do non-essential government employees ever need to report?
Sounds like a cost reduction opportunity to me … nice place to start the belt tightening … get rid of the slackers who self-identify as “non-essential”.
Why not?
According to conservative economist Thomas Sowell …
“Moral hazard” is an insurance term.
People behave differently when they are insured from the way they behave when they are not insured.
For example, people whose cars are insured may not be as cautious as other people are about what kinds of neighborhoods they park their car in.
Similarly, when taxpayer-subsidized government insurance policies protect people against flood damage, more people are willing to live in places where there are greater dangers of flooding.
Often these are luxury beach front homes with great views of the ocean.
So what if they suffer flood damage once every decade or so, if Uncle Sam is picking up the tab for restoring everything?
More than 25,000 properties have received government flood insurance payments more than four times.
Over a period of 28 years, more than 4,000 properties received government insurance payments exceeding the total value of the property.
If a property is located in a dangerous place, repeated damage can easily add up to more than the property is worth, especially if the property is damaged and then later wiped out completely.
Excerpted from RCP: “Moral Hazard” in Politics, August 27, 2010
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/08/27/moral_hazard_in_politics_106909.html
TakeAway: Fostering innovation for a decades old candy isn’t easy.
To come up with some new ideas, Mars implemented an innovation initiative.
The result – a new business unit making customized M&Ms.
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Excerpted from Bloomberg Businessweek, “How Mars Built a Business,” by Jessie Scanlon, December 28, 2009
“There is little reason for an individual to have a computer in their home,” Ken Olsen, the president and founder of the Digital Equipment, famously said in 1977. As Olsen’s quote suggests, predicting demand for new, innovative products and services can be difficult, in part because many of the traditional methods of market testing—using historical data to forecast sales, for instance, or asking customers in a focus group to compare a new product with an existing, competing one—aren’t well-suited to the innovation process
This was the dilemma that Dan Michael, then R&D director for Mars‘ M&Ms brand, faced in 2000. He and his research team at the advanced R&D lab in Hackettstown, N.J., had an idea: to make customizable M&Ms printed with the word or image of a customer’s choosing. …
… Michael and team needed to convince management there could be a market for customized candies. To do that, they had to reinvent the development process—and the role of marketing within it.
Mars had recently launched an innovation initiative called Pioneer Week. Select research teams were given a modest budget and 90 days to build a trial production line, after which the new product would be made available to Mars’ 65,000 employees. “The teams were allowed to bypass some of the testing normally associated with product development,” says Marc Meyer, a professor at Northeastern University’s College of Business in Boston, who has studied the company. …
The internal trial provided critical marketing feedback: The four-pound minimum order size was too big, and customers wanted colored candy and “party favor” packaging options.
Setting the price was another challenge. For the internal launch, the team chose $12 a pound, $4 more than the retail price for standard M&Ms. Since then, according to Cass, the price has changed four or five times. …
Ready to take it to the next level, the team began selling My M&Ms, as the custom candies are now known, to the public through a small link from the main M&M Web site in March 2004. Without any marketing blitz, sales took off. That’s also when the team began to do more serious customer research. …
In 2006, Mars’ My M&Ms experiment became a formal business unit called Mars Direct. …
Edit by DMG
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Full Article
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/dec2009/id20091217_120646.htm
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The Homa Files 