USA’s new series “Royal Pains” is about Dr. Hank Lawson (Mark Feuerstein), who serves as a “concierge doctor” to the rich and semi-famous residents of the Hamptons.  In the course of the show, there are some unfortunate public policy claims made. In the second episode, entitled “There will be food,” Dr. Hank is trying to provide health care to a not particularly well-to-do fisherman. Hank gives a short lecture on price gouging and hospitals “screwing” people. A heavily discussed theme in this episode involves the need for a free clinic for the regular people who make the Hamptons run and the selfishness of the person who would have been the biggest donor to the clinic who is instead spent his money on a retirement party for a ballerina. In any case, the dialogue for this segment that I would like to focus on is as follows:

Dr. Hank Lawson: I’m back.

Fisherman: I’ll get my harpoon.

Hank: As inviting as that sounds, I won’t stay long.

Fisherman: The doctor’s mantra.

Hank: But you know for what it is worth, I am not a big fan of hospitals myself. In fact, I just got fired by one a few weeks ago.

Fisherman: Well, that is reassuring.

Hank: Naw, not for medical reasons. Look, hospitals are bureaucracies, right? Bureaucracies screw people, they overcharge you if you are insured, and they really do it if you are not, just because they can. You get zero leverage and no alternatives, so you get screwed. It is like out here with the gas docks when they price gauge after a hurricane. The system sucks. But you are sick and you are going to get sicker if you don’t get treatment. I would like to help you.

Fisherman: That is what they all say. Then the bill comes.

Hank: there is no bill. No, I am going to be here for you week in, week out. No red tape, no forms, no harpoon, just me.

Fisherman: So, what is the catch?

Hank: You are the fisherman, you tell me.

It seems like you can’t watch a doctor show without it constantly making digs about medical insurance and the uninsured.

Here is the problem that is faced after a hurricane — people want more gas than is available. Higher prices allocate gas purchases to those who value the gas the most. When prices aren’t allowed to rise, gas stations in many states resort to “putting up signs asking drivers to buy as little gas as possible.” Drivers aren’t apparently too thrilled by that idea. One news story quoted one driver as calling the signs “ridiculous.” Another asked why shouldn’t he buy more, why should he risk running out of gas?

It is quite common for consumers and politicians to complain about prices before a storm even hits. But higher prices before the storm reduce consumption and increase inventories and thus reduce how much prices will rise after the storm hits. The overall increase in price will actually be less.

The possibility of higher prices when disasters strike also gives oil companies an incentive to put aside more gas to cover those emergencies. Storing gas is costly, and if you want them to bear those costs, you had better compensate them. The irony is that letting the companies charge higher prices actually reduces customers’ total costs when you include such things as having to wait in long lines, because there will be more gas available when the disaster strikes.

Memories have apparently faded too much after the 1970s gas shortages. Price controls didn’t stop the cost of gasoline from rising. They just changed how we paid for them. Instead of prices rising until the amount people wanted equaled the amount available, chronic shortages of gasoline had Americans waiting in lines for hours. Yet, the supposedly permanent shortages disappeared instantly as soon as price controls were removed in 1981.

Everyone would like to have lower prices. The problem is that when people want more gasoline than is available, you either let prices rise or you have shortages.

The second issue in this short segment from “Royal Pains” is the claim that everyone, especially the uninsured, are dissatisfied with how the medical system works. In fact, a 2006 survey found that 89 percent of Americans were satisfied with their own personal medical care, while only 44 percent were satisfied with the overall quality of the American medical system.  Yet, even 70 percent of the uninsured were also satisfied with the quality of the medical care that they received. To put it differently, only 2.3 percent of people are both uninsured and very dissatisfied with the quality of their medical care and a mere 3.9 percent are both uninsured and dissatisfied in anyway with their medical care.

As to the fisherman’s concern that doctors don’t spend enough time with patients, Americans spend much more time with their doctors than do patients in other countries such as Canada, Australia, and Britain. While 30 percent of Americans spend more than 20 minutes with their doctors, only five percent of Brits spend more than 20 minutes.

Life’s episode “Initiative 38″ has a fairly unbelievable plot: a woman working on an initiative to ban handguns is murdered and there is one major suspect, P&K, a gun company. Here is some of the dialogue:

Detective Charlie Crews (Damian Lewis): We are saying that someone came here to kill your wife. Can you think of who that might be?

Harold Amis: Yes, I can. Initiative 38.

Woman who works for Initiative 38: Initiative 38 is a comprehensive ban on handguns. Lisa was working to get it passed.

Detective Seever (Crews’ partner): How comprehensive?

Woman who works for Initiative 38: We were working to take back our streets.

Seever: Getting any push back from the gun companies?

Woman who works for Initiative 38: Getting push back? Ya, there was a lot money coming in against us from the other side. From P&K guns. I didn’t think that they would do this though. Lisa was the face of Initiative 38.

Seever: Lisa Amos is the face of Initiative 38. If that passes, P&K guns gets hit hard.

On the one side, the show notes all the carnage from guns being used to kill people. The only argument offered for guns is that they produce jobs for those who make them and that guns are the one manufactured product left that we can produce cheaper than China.

Of course, there is no mention of defensive gun use and that guns are used to stop crime about 4 to 5 times more frequently than they are used to commit it. No mention that while police are extremely important in stopping crime (indeed, my research shows them to be the single most important factor), the police themselves understand that they virtually always arrive on the crime scene after the crime is committed. Obviously, the question of what victims should do when they are facing a criminal by themselves is ignored.

The notion that gun makers, which are fairly small companies, are going to donate a lot of money to defeat an initiative as the episode suggests is also fairly unbelievable. The donations to defeat such initiatives would tend to be a lot of very small donations from people who care about being able to defend themselves and their families and the principle of self-defense.

“House” often goes after gun ownership. It only mentions people not having health insurance more frequently. In the episode “Simple Explanation,” Kutner (Kal Penn) commits suicide with a gun. There is all the normal dialogue about how he probably bought the gun for self defense and instead used it to commit suicide.

For those interested, the National Academy of Sciences released a 2004 report that comprehensively reviewed academic research studying guns and suicide. The panel set up under the Clinton administration surveyed the extensive literature from public health, economics, and criminology. The Academy concluded that, “Some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population.” The point is that there are a lot of ways to commit suicides, and you would pretty much have the same rate of suicide even if guns disappeared tomorrow.

However, I would argue that there isn’t even a lot of evidence that gun bans or gun lock laws reduce gun suicide rates.

Kal Penn was killed off in the show so that he could go work for the Obama administration. It is probably somewhat appropriate that he got killed off in a way that provided a politically correct lesson for viewers.

The TV series “Chuck” this last week had some dialogue on the benefits of carrying one’s gun with them (Chuck Versus the Predator). Chuck (Zachary Levi)  formulated a mission at the Buy More electronic store and insisted the team — Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski) and Casey (Adam Baldwin) — not carry guns. Chuck then gets captured by a Fulcrum Agent…

Fulcrum Agent: (speaking to Chuck, Casey, and Sarah) You get one chance — drop your guns.

Chuck: Um, sir, they don’t have any guns. I personally put this mission together and I forbade them from packing.

Fulcrum Agent: (mystified) Why would you do that?

Chuck: (making things up as he went) I don’t know, I think that guns make things too easy, and I like my spies to be tough. Look, you’re not going to shoot anyone, right?

Fulcrum Agent: It would be unprofessional not to.

[Casey pulls out a gun and shoots Fulcrum Agent]

Chuck: You had a gun?

Casey: I always have a gun.

A lesson some might learn the hard way. Other Americans are glad they’ve had the same attitude Casey had about carrying their guns with them (for examples from this week see here, here, and here).

Those of us who have worked with crime data have long understood this problem. For example, 50 percent of counties in the US have zero murders in any given year and another 25 percent have just one murder. Over 70 percent of murders take place in just a little over 3 percent of the counties, but even that exaggerates the picture because anyone who has seen a picture of murders in a major city know how heavily concentrated they are in specific areas within the city.

I looked at I-Tunes descriptions for seasons seven and nine of “CSI” and seasons four and five of “CSI NY” as well as some episodes of “Law & Order,” but I can’t seem to find any episodes that deal with gangs. I found “Law & Order” shows that dealt with gang rape, but that is obviously not the same as gang violence. During the first season there is a murder by a doctor at a hospital, a white woman who guns down two blacks, a gay man killed because he was gay, a man who kills his lovers, and on and on during the first season.

The cases dreamed up for TV shows may make interesting viewing, but just remember they have little to do with more than a tiny minority of the crime in the US. Sometimes a show like “Law & Order” latches on to a real life event that has been in the news to form the basis for a script, but the reason they latch on to those pieces of news is their desperate desire to be relevant. The shows have other inaccuracies over who the criminals are and how the cases are solved, but that will be something for a later post.

Madeline Weston: Should I call the police?

Sam Axe: No, that would make it way too easy for them. Cops take us to the station — they know where we are and they know that we are unarmed.

The segment reminded me of an even even more politically incorrect show: “The Rifleman.” The episode entitled “The Anvil Chorus” aired on December 17, 1962, and is summarized this way:

Blacksmith Nils Swenson (Joe Higgins) is asked to serve as temporary Marshall for the town. He asks all the citizens to check their guns at the Marshall’s office while they are in town. His intention is to make the town safer, but that is NOT the result. When three thugs arrive and begin to cause trouble, the unarmed citizens have no means to protect themselves. Lucas (Chuck Connors) is summoned to help rescue Mark (Johnny Crawford) and the Marshall.

As a friend of mine noted to me, “Of course, Lucas relies on his gun to secure Mark’s rescue.” The episode of “Burn Notice” might not seem as relevant to most people as the above episode of “The Rifleman” (after all, when you’re not dealing with spies, research shows that police are quite effective in deterring criminals), but it stills gets the point across. When guns are banned, instead of making things safe for the victims, you make things safe for the criminals. Instead of gun free zones deterring criminals, they actually serve as a magnet for them.

Is it really surprising that all the multiple victim public shootings in the United States where more than three people have been killed have all taken place where permitted concealed handguns are not allowed? Or that states that pass right-to-carry laws have a 60 percent drop in multiple victim public shootings and that to the extent these attacks still occur, they overwhelmingly take place in those few areas with the state where permitted concealed handguns are not allowed?

While people who watched Obama’s first national press conference noticed his use of a teleprompter to give his initial presentation as well as in answering questions, the media and late night joke writers completely ignored it. The American Spectator notes that in many events:

…down to many of the questions and the answers to those questions … [t]eleprompter screens at the events scrolled not only his opening remarks, but also statistics and information he could use to answer questions.

Apparently, Obama is looking to install a computer screen into the podium so that, according to one Obama advisor, ”It would make it easier for the comms guys to pass along information without being obvious about it.” [emphasis added] Obama’s aids would put together answers to a large number of possible questions so as soon as a reporter asks a particular question the computer screen would flash talking points to remind Obama how he’s supposed to respond to that question.

Jay, Dave, Conan… You don’t see anything funny here?

It will be an interesting academic exercise to see how many late night jokes there will be regarding Obama hitting his head while leaving Marine One. Obama is essentially the same height as George H.W. Bush (6′ 1″ to 6′ 2″) and Ronald Reagan (6′ 1″).

Speaking of Chevy Chase, his recent comments about using humor on “Saturday Night Live” to destroy a candidate’s credibility might be relevant here. When commenting on Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin he said:

I want her to decimate this woman. This woman is, I can’t believe there hasn’t been more about it. … It’s just unbelievable to me this woman is actually running for vice president.

Chase also claimed, that unlike other guests, Lorne Michaels had nothing written for Palin when she appeared on SNL: “What was brilliant about (‘SNL’ chief) Lorne (Michaels) was that he had nothing written for Sarah . . .” So you provide professional script writing help for the guests who you agree with politically and want to make look good?

Yet, sometimes the emotional response isn’t the most responsible one. In this case, hunting is done to keep animals from dying from starvation and to maintain higher quality populations. The problem is that in the wild, animal populations go through what are called “boom and crash” cycles – animal populations expand to consume the available food supplies and when those are exhausted, the animals starve and the populations crash. Starvation also makes the animals more susceptible to disease. Hunters stabilize populations, and keep those problems from recurring.

Ironically, the hunters and Sarah Palin seem to know a lot more of what is in the wolves’ and their preys’ interests than the wolves’ supposed defenders. Shooting might not be perfect (despite the ad’s exaggerations, the wolf might not die instantly), but stabilizing the wolves’ population through shooting some animals is probably a less painful way for an animal to die than through starvation. In addition, starvation would have impacted virtually all the wolves, but only a fraction of the animals risk suffering any trauma from being shot.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game Division of Wildlife Conservation explains the situation fairly clearly:

If prey numbers fall to very low levels, reductions in predation and harvest must be more dramatic. When implemented in a timely manner, predator control can result in shorter-term programs where prey numbers are stabilized and improved more quickly and efficiently. In such cases, the age and sex structure of prey populations can be maintained at optimum ratios of young to adults. When populations boom and crash, age structures can become skewed, and create difficult management situations long into the future. Harvest regulations also change regularly as the sustainable harvest numbers fluctuate year to year. Predator control programs are designed to maintain stability of elevated harvests while maintaining viable numbers of prey and predators alike.

In control programs, predators are reduced in number but never permanently eliminated from any area; viable populations of predators are a requirement of law. The long-term goal of a successful program is increased prey density, increased harvest, and stable populations of predators. Biologists determine the level of predator removal needed to allow growth of prey populations. Biologists determine predator population objectives for areas that can achieve desired levels of harvest. Intensive management efforts, including predator control, focus on achieving those objectives.

Indeed, with all this hunting, wolves are thriving and occupy virtually their entire traditional habitat throughout mainland Alaska.

In case Judd didn’t know it, Alaska is a big place with lots of very remote areas where it’s difficult to regulate animal populations on foot. Beyond the biologically related reasons for hunting in winter, Judd should realize that making hunting difficult is not in the general interest of the wolves. Judd is concerned that hunters “kill in winter when there is no chance for the wolves to escape,” but if the wolf population as a whole benefits from hunting and making hunting difficult makes stabilizing the population more difficult, won’t wolves be the ultimate losers?

As it is, since 1972, the federal government has heavily regulated aerial hunting of animals – only allowing it for predators by government employees or licensed hunters and even then, contrary to last year’s campaign ads and Judd’s latest, animals can’t be shot from the air. While the planes can be used to find and track or chase the wolves, the wolves can only be shot by hunters who are on the ground. The pictures used in the ads inaccurately depict the policies that have been in effect for the last 37 years.

Judd is outraged that “Palin even proposed a $150 bounty for the severed foreleg of each killed wolf. And now she is encouraging even more aerial killing.” But if hunting produces benefits, why not pay to have it done? The sentimentality of those who obtain all their food from the grocery store might be upset by hunters having to provide evidence of their kills, but a severed foreleg seems a simple way of providing proof.

Not just in the case of wolves, but hunting produces a lot of benefits for Americans.

This isn’t Judd’s first foray into politics. Last year she noted that “a woman voting for McCain/Palin is like a chicken voting for Col. Sanders.”

Possibly the most telling point of Judd’s ad is that the ad first mentions Sarah Palin and not the wolves. But how often are fundraising efforts directed against the losing candidates in recent national elections? Never? The ad probably says more about Democrats still viewing Palin as a credible future opponent than it does about the Defenders of the Wildlife and Judd’s inaccurate claims about hunting.

I don’t mind the humor in these shows. In fact, I laugh along with everyone else, but it would be interesting if those on the anti-gun side of this television firm (which is everyone else) would have similar fun poked at their own gun control views. Is it just not possible to think of similar jokes?

Right after Denny is shown using the gun defensively, there’s a segment showing him accidentally firing a gun into the ceiling.  After that we learn Denny’s been carrying around eight guns and a “blow torch,” which was hidden on him in a place I won’t describe, though I’ll admit that was also amusing.

What was most disturbing about the episode was that it was filled with facts and numbers about the problems with guns but not one fact or number on the use of guns defensively.  We are treated to numbers on how many people are killed with guns or commit suicide or are accidentally killed, but no numbers on defensive gun use.  Contrast that to the show’s other segment regarding a child custody case where the mother is employed as a sex surrogate.  Both sides in that discussion cited studies and statistics to make their point.

While the Brady Bill Campaign could have written the prosecution’s closing argument on the danger of guns, Denny Crane’s closing defense brought up pro-control arguments that weren’t even offered by the prosecution.  To the defense, the question is whether the jurors are concerned about something as “trivial as human life.”  The defense further argues that the Supreme Court decision in the Heller case was a joke and that they just inserted their own political views, not caring what the Constitution really meant to protect — we are told that is the right of the military to have guns. No mention of all the research provided here, here or here about concealed handguns saving lives and preventing other violent crimes.

Alan Shore ends the show with a small speech about how he’s shot guns but can’t understand why people don’t get together and agree on common sense gun control laws like “background checks and bans on assault weapons.” He also notes: “I see a lot wrong with an assault weapon and people like you walking around with guns.” Unfortunately, Denny is reduced to an unrelated response about how surprising it is that a liberal like Shore would own a gun.

Back in 1999, the show’s creator David Kelly, was among 200 celebrities who signed an open letter to the NRA, that appeared in ”USA Today,” advocating a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons, ammunition clips holding more than 10 rounds, a minimum three-day waiting periods, safety locks sold on all guns, one-gun-a-month restrictions, and the restricting of minors from firearm access. The letter was sponsored by Handgun Control.

The problem is that there’s not a single study by criminologists or economists that finds assault weapons bans reduce crime (see here and here). Similarly, there are no academic studies by criminologists or economists that find any other laws reduce violent crime (here and here), but there is some evidence indicating that laws requiring people lock their guns lead to more deaths.

Possibly, it’s just inherently easier to make fun of those that use guns than those who have irrational fears of them, but can’t one make fun of anti-gun people being forced to fruitlessly plead with criminals to be reasonable with their victims?

Obviously the academic research shows that having an accessible gun in the home saves lives, but I had a more basic question: I decided to check to see if a question about guns was likely to lead the questions on one’s fitness to serve as a foster parent or to adopt a child. American Adoptions is licensed by the state of New Jersey to provide home study services for people preparing for adoption. Their home study guide has a lot of questions on a person’s criminal record (arrests and convictions), whether they have ever been reported for child abuse/neglect (seems more important than gun ownership), and marital status and history – but no questions about gun ownership.

It is surely not impossible that such a question would be asked, but making it the first of only two questions seems extremely unlikely and misrepresents what the actual process would involve (even taking into account that forms had already been filled out by Cuddy).

I recently noted that the TV show Monk had a great episode where Monk was unable to use a gun defensively because it was locked in a gun safe, but the very next episode had Monk’s assistant Natalie accidentally shooting Monk in the leg (the odds of that happening are incredibly low). The segment wasn’t all bad since it also showed Natalie protecting herself from a criminal threatening to hit her with a rock.