Peter Ubel

Taxes are inevitable, or so they say. How much we should tax our citizenry, however, is debatable. Tea party members think we tax too much, and many liberals think we don’t tax quite enough.

I’m not going to take a position on the overall tax burden right now. Instead, I’ll point out two things I hope any reasonable citizen would agree upon:

1. Taxes shouldn’t be nonexistent. The government does have some legitimate functions after all, and these functions require money.

2. Smart taxes are better than stupid ones.

So what would ever make a tax “smart”? Answer: If that tax better aligns the price of those goods with the true social costs of those same goods.

Consider how much a can of Coke really costs. To the consumer, Coke is a cheap source of empty calories. (Full disclosure — I love a cold Coke at lunch!) But over the past few decades, the cost per calorie of drinks like Coke have plunged almost 40%, after adjusting for inflation. Coke is not only delicious. It’s cheap!

Cheap for consumers, that is. But not for society as a whole, because the price of Coke doesn’t reflect the cost of medical care associated with our nation’s obesity epidemic, an epidemic fueled by the low cost of sugary beverages. Nor does it reflect the cost of diabetes care, of cardiology interventions, of joint replacements… of the many medical treatments that have grown in frequency in an attempt to counter the health consequences of our expanding waistlines.

Taxing sugary beverages is smart policy.

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It was a confession, one that was perhaps more revealing than the confessor realized. Mark Leibovich, writing about Politico in The New York Times Magazine in April, felt the need to disclose that he had known Mike Allen, the subject of his essay, for a dozen or so years, and that he was a fan of Politico.

Then Leibovich went on to say, in an offhand manner, that he had even been a source for Allen: “after I ‘spotted’ treasury secretary Tim Geithner at an organic Chinese restaurant in my neighborhood last year–picking up kung pao chicken with brown rice (‘for Tim’)–I dutifully emailed Allen with the breaking news.”

Honestly. A reporter for the world’s greatest newspaper and he feels compelled to play kung pao paparazzi?

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. We humans are gossip mongers after all. We are enamored with fame. Even hardnosed reporters get stars in their eyes: Geithner! Kung pao chicken–organic even!

But as a citizen, desperate for a news media that will consistently cut through the spin and dig deep into the complex challenges our country faces, I experienced a painful sinking feeling when I came across Leibovich’s disclosure.

Is it too much to hope that the world’s best reporters will stay focused on the big picture, without being distracted by the daily undulations of minor gossip?

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“No” isn’t an ideology.

“Nada” is no way to govern a country.

“Nope” won’t turn around the economy, and political rope-a-doping won’t balance the federal budget.

Yet if you had to summarize the three top “accomplishments” of the Republican party since Obama took office, they would be no, nada, and nope. Because it is out of power, the Republican Party has decided to abandon any thought of governing, any intention of influencing policy. Rather than moderate Obama’s policies, they decided purely on political grounds to battle Obama’s message of hope with the audacity of nope.

Audacious, indeed.

With governance comes responsibility. When in power, “no” can’t be the answer to every policy question. But Republicans aren’t in power. And so they don’t have to make any policy decisions of their own. They don’t have to seriously contemplate any of the difficult decisions facing any honest government. Instead, they can wait and see what the Democrats propose, and trash it.

Obama’s health care plan? They were against it before they even knew what was in it. The fact that this was very much what Republicans from Nixon on would probably have proposed, in place of a truly socialized health care system, is irrelevant. Because all they cared about was saying no.

The best way to deal with global warming? It’s certainly not cap and trade, they’ll tell you, even though that is a market (!) approach to environmental regulation. It’s certainly not any alternative to cap and trade, either. Just give them the details of Obama’s plan, and they’ll be against it.

Bolstered by the radicals at Fox News, the Republican Party has ceded its role as policy makers and, thus, no longer make themselves available as people who can improve our country. All in an effort to bring down Obama.

Very sad. The country would be a better place if each party was willing to compromise — to rein in the excesses of the other party. The Democrats really have no choice now but to stop wasting energy developing bipartisan solutions to the problems they are trying to tackle. They have no choice but to go alone. And that go-it-alone strategy will inevitably lead to worse policies than if they were working toward compromise.

I yearn for the days when Republicans, even as a minority party, were willing to sit in back rooms and hash out compromises with their Democratic adversaries.

It’s time for Republicans to put the interest of their country ahead of their short-term political agenda.

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It is a dangerous time to compromise in the U. S. government. A Republican working with Obama is dead meat in the next primary. A Democrat who works with Republicans? Well, you saw what happened to Joe Lieberman the last time he ran as a Democrat.

Politicians are understandably worried that if they collaborate across the aisle, their political careers will soon end. They fear losing their next election.

But their fears are misplaced, at least from my perspective as a researcher who has studied the kinds of ways people mispredict what will make themselves happy or miserable.

People frequently overestimate the emotional impact of adversity. Early-career professors imagine that if they fail to receive tenure they’ll be miserable the rest of their lives, even though long-term studies show that tenured positions have no impact on well-being. Making these same mistakes, elected officials assume that if they lose the next election, they will be miserable. In making these mispredictions, they focus too narrowly on the feelings they will experience as the results of their election loss trickle in – the shame of the failure, the challenge of telling staff that they’ll have to find new jobs, and the misery of giving up all that power and prestige.

But what happens to legislators after they lose elections? Remember, these are often very talented people, with large social networks and often with access to lots of money, through previously accumulated fortunes or through the business connections they have developed in office. These people more than land on their feet again. Most of them thrive. They live extremely full lives, working at the intersection of business and government. Fromrom what I’ve seen, I’d guess that most of them are happier than they were when they were in the government. I mean look at those cool eyeglasses Tom Daschle started wearing after he lost his reelection campaign. And how about Al Gore and his Nobel Prize!

Indeed, I would go a step further in characterizing politicians’ mispredictions. Most imagine, incorrectly, that losing the next election will make them miserable. Instead, I’d guess that doing what it takes to get reelected is really what will make them miserable.

That brings us to Bart Stupak, Democratic Congressman from Michigan — notable for his pro-life views as well as his embrace of social programs to help poor people. When Stupak considered whether to vote for health care reform legislation, he found himself attacked from the left for focusing too much on making sure that such reforms did not expand federal funding for abortions. And he found himself attacked from the right, for supporting Obama’s “socialist” agenda. By looking for middle ground, a compromise, he set himself up for a very difficult election campaign.

But he didn’t care. He thought the legislation was important enough that he was going to do what he thought was right, even if that made everyone angry. And now, he is retiring, rather than face a brutal reelection campaign. And here is my prediction: he will soon be a very happy man. He will be able to look back on the end of his political career convinced that he acted on principle to do what he thought was best for the country, regardless of the political consequences of those same actions.

By caring more about his country than he cared about his political fortunes, Stupak has taken a large step towards living a happy and fulfilled life.

Let that be a lesson to all his colleagues, as they fret over their next reelection campaign.

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Common wisdom ain’t always that wise.

The pundits have concluded that Obama made a big mistake by focusing on health care reform this past year, when he should have focused on the economy. Politically speaking, the pundits are correct. Obama has appeared to be ignoring the economy at the expense of health care reform, and his popularity has consequently plummeted.

But Obama is right to have stuck by his desire to reform health care. Sometimes the good of the country is more important than this year’s approval ratings. And here are 7 reasons why Obama was correct to focus on health care reform this year, and why we can only hope that his efforts will come to fruition soon.

1. The federal government can’t do very much to change the course of recessions.

If stocks are overvalued, the stock market will drop. If houses are overpriced, the housing market will plummet. The government cannot change these realities. The best it can do is to soften the economic blows thrown at us by the recession.

2. The Obama administration did take aggressive steps to attack the recession.

While the government cannot stop recessions from happening, it can go into deficit spending to minimize the depth of the recession. That’s what Obama did. Paul Krugman wished the Obama administration had spent more money. Members of the Tea Party wish he’d spent less. Looks to me like he got about as much spending out of Congress as he could have at the time, given the circumstances.

3. The recession is going to end sometime soon — hopefully — and then we’re going to have to look at how we can minimize the depth of the next recession.

Having pushed a stimulus package through Congress in the opening months of his administration, Obama rightly turned his attention to future threats to our economy.

4. The biggest long-term threat to our economy is our health care system.

If we don’t reform health care, our future will be disastrous.

5. If health care costs continue to rise, the middle class will move toward poverty.

Do the math. If more of our money goes toward health care, our wages will decline, our taxes will rise, and our employers will have a harder time offering us any health care benefits. This will lead to economic disaster, for all those middle-class Americans who are struggling right now to make fiscal ends meet.

6. The health insurance industry can’t solve this problem on its own.

Health insurance companies are making great profits, despite rising health-care costs. Their primary goal is not to reduce how much money people spend on health care. If we want to control health care costs, we need the government to use its clout to negotiate better prices for the healthcare industry.

7. If we don’t reform health care now, we won’t be able to touch this topic for another decade.

And we can’t afford to do that. Ten more years of rising costs, of people losing their insurance, of stagnating wages, of Medicare expenditures squeezing federal budgets, of Medicaid expenditures squeezing state budgets… and the American economy will be headed toward long-term decline.

Obama and his team have made plenty of political mistakes. Their public relations efforts have not fared well against Fox news, et al. But under Obama’s leadership, the administration is staying the course in health care reform — looking for enough votes to pass some kind of bill that will move our country in the right direction.

I desperately hope that the administration succeeds.

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Okay, as fine as is her midriff, most of you probably don’t list Megan Fox’s belly button as her first, um, attribute worth pondering. But bear with me–her belly button IS key to understanding why the Massachusetts senate seat just went to a Republican, and why Democratic efforts to reform our healthcare system are now all but history.

In the old days, you see, if a piece of legislation garnered 59 votes in the Senate, it was rightly perceived as the product of a national consensus. Landslide kind of stuff. The will of the people.

However, in the old days, the two major parties were much more diverse. The Democratic Party included Southern conservatives, while the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, included Yankees who, today, would at most be centrist Democrats.

Then … along came Megan Fox’s belly button?

No, be patient gentle readers. Fox will enter our story soon. But first came another person, someone whose belly button was, to my knowledge, not a focus of anyone’s lascivious mind. Along came Lyndon Johnson, a Southern conservative at heart, but a power-seeker to the core. And to consolidate his power, Johnson had to find a way to convince Southern conservative Democrats to support civil rights legislation. In doing so–in cajoling conservative Democrats to vote against their long term opposition to such legislation–Johnson effectively began the slow re-sorting of the two parties. Ronald Reagan accelerated this re-sorting. And eventually the Republican party pulled Southern conservatives away from the Democrats, while the Democratic party became, itself, more uniformly liberal.

And that is almost when Megan Fox’s well-toned abs began to grab the attention of my peri-adolescent son. But she’s still not ready to enter the story.

First, one more thing happened that I want to tell you about. Barack Obama became President of the United States, and the Republican Party–now almost uniformly conservative–pulled together in opposition to any and all Democratic legislation, cheered on the sidelines by conservative websites and cable news organizations. The result is that we now have a politics of us versus them, of Republican/Conservatives versus Democrats/Liberals.

In the old days, if you pulled together all the conservatives in Congress to craft a piece of legislation, you would have to grab a mix of Republicans and Democrats. The same would have gone for liberal legislation–you would need a mixture of Midwestern Democrats and Northeastern Republicans.

But now, with the parties so unified ideologically, politics is like belly buttons–innies are good, and outies are bad. For all of Megan Fox’s beauty, if she had a serious outie, her agent would be working overtime to hide this part of her body from photographers. We relate to people the way we judge belly buttons. It really matters to us whether we consider the other person to be an innie or an outie–what social scientists call “in groups” and “out groups.”

If you place orange dots on half the kids in a fourth grade classroom, and green dots on the other half, pretty soon the orange kids will start excluding the green ones from their play groups. In no time, in fact, friends will be torn apart by this artificial in group/out group manipulation. You literally will have fights on your hands, simply because the green kids will perceive the orange kids as some kind of competing group.

The American public is not famous for its knowledge of politics. That’s why when most people judge upcoming legislation, it matters less to them what the legislation proposes as who proposes it. If George Bush had proposed health care reform that resembles the current Democratic plan, it would have been perceived as some kind of ultra-conservative legislation by Democrats. “There he goes, helping out greedy insurance companies again.” But instead, the same legislation proposed by the Democrats is viewed, by Republicans, as Socialism. Innie and outie–so much of politics depends on this single perception.

In the old days, a liberal Democrat might propose a piece of social legislation to one of his conservative Democratic colleagues, and the conservative would at least consider the merits of such legislation as a favor to someone who is in his own political party. Even if this conservative ultimately decided not to support the legislation, he would be unlikely to filibuster (as long as it didn’t have anything to do with Civil Rights) because he wouldn’t want to stand in the way of his own colleague’s legislation.

Today, legislation stalls not just because it lacks 60 votes in the Senate but, more importantly, because those votes rarely cross party lines. It is easy to filibuster someone who belongs to an out group–who has the wrong colored dot on his head.

The unification of our two parties into tighter ideologic entities is thwarting our ability as a nation to tackle the challenges we face. We need to cut the umbilical cord that tethers ideology to partisan politics.

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It is pothole season in Michigan, with roads crumbling under the pressure of winter cold. Then again, with the condition of our state’s dismal economy, pothole season is becoming a year-round phenomenon here in the Great Lake State. Michigan’s government can no longer afford to fix roads like it used to, and the same goes for bridges, water mains and other infrastructure. And don’t even get me going on budget cuts to our public education system.

While Michigan’s auto-based economy is the main cause of our fiscal distress, physician that I am, I cannot help but see MRIs lurking at the bottom of the sports-car-sized pot holes that litter the roads on my daily commute. An MRI costs a few thousand dollars a pop, you see, and we doctors order such tests almost unthinkingly. Back bothering you? Shoulder pain lasting more than a week? And that blip on your liver enzymes? We need to make sure nothing terrible is going on. Time for an MRI!

Our willy-nilly use of MRIs occurs in part because we doctors don’t pay for these tests. In fact some of us (but not me!) actually make money by ordering these tests.

The same goes for medical procedures. A primary care physician like me makes a token amount of money during a routine (and frequently time consuming) annual checkup. But if we can bring that same patient back for a skin biopsy, that ten-minute visit smells to me like a college tuition payment!

So we physicians order tests and procedures, and other folks pay — sometimes insurance companies, sometimes patients themselves, and increasingly often, the government through Medicare or Medicaid. Eventually, of course, we all pay for these tests and procedures. Our crazy health care system is basically a huge transfer of income from the general public to people in the health care industry.

States like Michigan are facing enormous budget pressures in the face of the recession. But even before this recession hit, many states were starting to buckle under the strain of Medicaid inflation, leaving huge SUV-sized holes in their annual budgets.

We need healthcare reform because we need to control health care costs, or we will end up with an infrastructure that would embarrass a third world dictator.

And the Democratic party needs to tell us more about how its reform efforts, should they succeed in the face of the Massachusetts senate debacle, will control costs.

And the Republicans need to stop whining about healthcare rationing, if they actually care about the future of this country.

We are facing a serious challenge. If politicians don’t meet this challenge, we will all have lots more to worry about than potholes.

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Easy to criticize the Obama administration, isn’t it?

Look at the unemployment rate, for example. And have you seen the tax hikes they’re going to need to pay for healthcare reform? Oh yeah, and they did a great job with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab didn’t they?-his dad told us he was going rogue, and then when he buys a ticket with cash and doesn’t check in any luggage, we look the other way. Time to say this in unison now, folks, with your most sarcastic tone of voice: “Great work Obama!”

Or is it too soon for such sarcasm?

Folks, before we start blaming the government for all these terrible things, we need to remember that hindsight is not even close to 20/20, and that we cannot accurately judge what our government is doing or not doing for us until we pay attention to what I call “the Politics of Invisibility.”

You see, there is some invisible stuff we need to pay attention to.

Let’s start with our unemployment rate. I live in Michigan, and I’m one degree of separation away from a hell of a lot of unemployment. I am not at all happy about our nation’s economy. And I’d like to have seen us make more progress over the past year in addressing our economic woes. But before we criticize Obama’s economic stimulus plan-on the grounds that it has not ended unemployment as we know it-take a moment to ponder the invisible: ask yourself what the employment rate would have been if Obama hadn’t pushed his stimulus plan through a reluctant Congress. Don’t know the answer? Welcome to the Politics of Invisibility.

How about the taxes we will pay to fund healthcare reform. At first glance, it seems that there’s nothing invisible there. But take a closer look. Do you have any idea how much of your current income has been funneled into the healthcare industry? Consider that “free” healthcare benefit your employer gives you. That benefit comes out of your income. Many middle-salary wages, in fact, have stagnated in recent decades in the U.S., largely because employers have been taking what would be salary increases and pushing them over to cover the spiraling cost of healthcare benefits. And that tax break we get for our employer-based health insurance? That’s not free either. That contributes to government deficits, and ultimately forces the government to raise taxes. Nothing is free. But because of the Politics of Invisibility, we find ourselves whining about healthcare taxes at the same time we overlook the way healthcare insurance has already shrunk the size of our paychecks.

Finally, let’s revisit the TSA’s performance in the recent underwear bomber fiasco. I admit to being shocked, with the rest of the nation, at how many clues the Feds overlooked in allowing this man to board a plane with a bomb strapped to his crotch. But a moment’s reflection on the Politics of Invisibility forces us to take a more cautious view of the TSA. Consider one of the smoking guns that critics of TSA have been discussing vehemently in the blogosphere-that this terrorist stepped onto the plane WITHOUT CHECKING ANY LUGGAGE.

Ummmm, I think he means he placed his luggage into the overhead bin. You know, like half of his fellow passengers!

Now I understand that most of those other passengers’ fathers hadn’t recently told the CIA that their son was becoming radicalized. And that most of them hadn’t paid for their tickets in cash. But I don’t know, as an ordinary citizen, just how many people would have fit the underwear bomber’s profile. How many young men have come under the influence of passionately radical Imams and then boarded planes after paying for tickets with cash? I don’t know that number. I expect the number is in the tens of thousands, if not more. (And is paying in cash really that significant? If we started scrutinizing cash payments, wouldn’t terrorists simply start using credit cards? For that matter, wouldn’t they start checking luggage, if that turned out to be a security red flag?)

What’s invisible here is the denominator-how many people, if they try to blow up a plane tomorrow, would have a string of “clues” that would have made the bombing attempt look inevitable? It may very well be that very few people were as risky-looking as the Underwear Bomber. But frankly, that information is invisible to me, as it is to most of the general public.

Before we get all high-and-mighty about the terrible job that security experts are doing, we need to ponder the Politics of Invisibility, and remember that it’s easy to criticize what we see, even as we ignore what we can’t.

Peter Ubel is George Dock Collegiate Professor of Medicine at the University of Michigan, and author of Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature is at Odds with Economics-and Why it Matters (Harvard Business Press, 2009). Visit http://www.peterubel.com/ for more blogs and research updates.

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If I told you that neighborhoods cause people to develop diabetes, would you believe me? And would that make you more or less willing to see your tax dollars spent researching ways to treat and prevent diabetes?

That is essentially the question my colleagues and I posed to a wide swath of Americans, and a question, we discovered, that polarizes people along political party lines.

What do I mean when I say that neighborhoods can cause diabetes? Well, social scientists have linked neighborhoods to disease. People living, for example, in neighborhoods with poor sidewalk access end up walking less than people in other kinds of neighborhoods, thereby gaining weight and developing diabetes. By a similar token, if a neighborhood is too dangerous for people to exercise outdoors, people become more sedentary and, voila, diabetes predictably ensues in a subset of the population. What’s more, some neighborhoods have a terrible supply of grocery stores — people living in such neighborhoods can easily avail themselves of fast food restaurants, but can’t necessarily find fresh produce.

Often when people learn that forces beyond individual control contribute to illness, they become more supportive of public funding to combat those illnesses. In fact, in our study we provided a random subset of research participants with a news story explaining that diabetes is caused by genetics (this is true, by the way — genes do contribute to diabetes.) People reading this news story — whether Republican or Democrat — became more supportive of spending public funds to treat and prevent diabetes.

Then we gave another subset of participants a different news story. This one explained that diabetes is caused by neighborhoods. Once again, hearing about the forces that contribute to diabetes made Democrats more interested in spending money on diabetes research. But the Republicans who read this news story weren’t persuaded; in fact, they became less willing to use tax money to tackle the diabetes epidemic.

It is easy to believe that our country is politically polarized simply because people have gravitated toward partisan media outlets. Watch Fox news and you will hear about Tea Party demonstrations; watch MSNBC and you will hear about Gay Rights demonstrations. No surprise that when people receive imbalanced information, they end up with polarized attitudes.

However, our study shows that our nation’s political divisions run much deeper than the Glenn Beck/Keith Olbermann divide. In our study, Republicans and Democrats came to starkly different opinions from each other even after receiving identical information about the cause of diabetes. Hearing about neighborhood effects on diabetes brought out compassion among Democrats, but not so much among Republicans. As some of my Republican friends tell me when I talk to them about neighborhoods and illness: “The neighborhood doesn’t force people to eat at McDonalds. Even if a neighborhood is dangerous, people can do Pilates in their living rooms if they’re motivated.”

True enough. Human behavior is ultimately the main cause of diabetes. But no person’s behavior is completely under their own control. Social forces can influence people’s behavior — the kinds of social forces that differ across neighborhoods, for example. Sadly, when people think about these other forces, some are more convinced than others, and these divisions run across predictable party lines.

To reduce partisanship in this country, we need to educate more people about the complexity of human nature. I wonder if the 24 hour news channels will find the time to do that!

Our study, led by Sarah Gollust, was published in the October issue of the American Journal of Public Health.Free Market Madness. Read more of my blogs here.

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In an effort to be the first president since Lyndon Johnson to succeed in reforming our nation’s health care system, President Obama is exhibiting honorable flexibility. Taxing health care benefits for employees? He was against it when running for office, but he is considering it now that the federal budget deficit is growing so rapidly. A new public insurance plan? He promised this spring that it would be a central part of his health care reform efforts, but now he is willing to put it aside in pursuit of more important goals.

And what are those more important goals? First and foremost, the President wants to expand people’s access to health insurance, so that their medical care will no longer be threatened by job loss or by what an insurance company determines to be a “pre-existing condition;” and second, he is committed to controlling health care costs, aware that our future fiscal solvency depends on slowing the growth of Medicare and Medicaid.

The time may come for Obama to shed one of these two laudable goals. Indeed, if blue dog democrats begin turning away from health care reform because of budget concerns, Obama will need to give up his immediate plans to expand access to health insurance, and focus his efforts, instead, on showing the American people that he knows how to control health care costs.

I recognize the moral horror that my proposal will create among those people who, like me, are outraged that a wealthy country like ours allows 50 million people to go without health care insurance. Obama is correct, in fact, to be exhorting Americans to recognize our moral duty to offer basic health care coverage to all our citizens.

But with ballooning budget deficits and an economy still on the brink of disaster, it may not be politically palatable to expand health insurance coverage right now. Most conservatives, and even many moderates, are understandably worried that the government will do the easy job of spending money it doesn’t have, while ignoring the more difficult job of making our health care system more efficient. After all, Obama has not really laid out a clear plan for how he will control health care costs. Instead, he is simply asking people to trust him: somehow, with a teaspoon of electronic medical records and a few milligrams of “comparative effectiveness research,” he will cure the health system’s inefficiencies and make our financial problems go away.

I suspect that Obama already realizes that he cannot achieve both of his goals — expanding access and controlling costs — in the initial stages of his reform efforts. Instead, his administration appears to be taking a Massachusetts-style approach to health care reform: expand coverage first and then, after costs spiral further out of control, take on the difficult job of ratcheting down health care costs. In this approach, expanded coverage is the horse that pulls health care reform along what will no doubt be a long and winding road.

This access first approach is morally laudable and may even be politically wise. But politics moves quickly — who, after all, would have predicted three months ago that “death panels” would play such a large role in public discourse about health care reform?

If fiscal concerns threaten to impede Obama’s health plan, he will need to change direction. At that point, the best way to expand health care coverage to all Americans will be for Obama to focus, over the next few years, on proving to Americans that he can control health care costs — indeed, that he has a legitimate plan for controlling government expenditures more broadly. With this proof established, Obama will then be able to propose reforms that will expand health insurance coverage, and the American public will have confidence that these reforms would not break the bank.

With so many Americans worried about rising taxes and runaway budget deficits, Obama should consider putting the cart of cost control in front of the proverbial horse. If Obama can prove to us that he can rein in Medicare costs, the American public will gladly follow him further down the path of health care reform.

Peter A. Ubel M.D. is author of Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is at Odds with Economics — and Why It Matters (Harvard Business Press, 2009), and George Dock Collegiate Professor of Medicine at the University of Michigan.

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