[unable to retrieve full-text content]Years ago, we had an MD/PhD student in our program who had Eilers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that causes joint laxity and frequent painful joint dislocations. After over a decade of being misdiagnosed, her correct diagnosis was made by a physical therapist, not a physician. I noted in a previous post that I’ve been […]
The post Diversity in healthcare delivery appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]America is the only industrialized nation where you can go bankrupt because of medical care. The ACA helped mitigate that risk for tens of millions, but the Trump Administration is promising to abolish the ACA. For those with some form of health insurance (private insurance, the ACA, Medicare), there’s still the challenge of (a) finding […]
The post Access to medical care: right or privilege? appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Trump and his minions may not believe in global warming, but people whose livelihoods depend on understanding climate change—bankers, insurance companies and the military—know it’s real. So do non-humans whose livelihoods are compromised by climate change: “Native fish populations will likely continue their decline off of Massachusetts’ coast, while species from further south will move […]
The post Seafood says global warming is not a hoax appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]No, the 1% aren’t the job creators—that’s the middle class and working class. Tax cuts for the 1%, of course, don’t create jobs, they just create greater wealth disparity: “The authors set out to examine all instances of major tax reductions on the rich in 18 OECD countries between 1965 and 2015 and identify the […]
The post Tax cuts for the rich only increase wealth disparity appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]We had rooftop solar on our house for eight years before we moved. Half the price was paid by Ameren, the electric utility, and we got a 30% tax rebate on the balance. Even with that steep discount, we never got back our put, even in nominal dollars. Solar panels are much cheaper now, and […]
The post The future of solar power looks bright! appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The Trump administration is threatening to deport >10 million people. These are people who, regardless of their immigration status, are contributing to the economy and jobs by purchasing goods and service (“job creators”) and contributing to social programs like Social Security and Medicare. Indeed, if they are undocumented, they will never see benefits to the […]
The post The economics of deportation appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]I’ve seen some people post “Happy Veteran’s Day.” I’m not a veteran. Technically, my dad was, although he was a naval officer who did his service in the Canal Zone, nowhere close to combat. I never saw him happy on Veteran’s Day. I was never in the military, although I did carry a draft card […]
The post Veteran’s Day appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Trump says global warming is a scam and a hoax. He promises to cut federal funding for green programs and to ramp up fracking and drilling. He can certainly do the former, but business controls drilling and fracking, and the price of oil is dictated by international supply and demand, not the whims of the […]
The post Investing in the hoax market appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Posted on behalf of the author, RC Weakley: At this point hysteresis is all that is holding the US dollar as the global reserve currency. That has been the case since Nixon. What we have done since then has only dug us into a deeper hole when events finally happen that will throw the dirt […]
The post The future of the US dollar appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]In 2020, I enrolled in the Moderna clinical trial of their mRNA vaccine. I got the first jab in August 2020, and it turns out I was in the vaccine arm of the trial, not the placebo arm. I’ve now had seven vaccinations, as the vaccine has been updated. I contracted COVID once. Of course, […]
The post Idaho public health to Idahoans: suffer and die appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]My parents retired to rural upstate NY, where they lived happily for 20 years. But naturally, as they aged, their health declined. At one point, my mom had a pulmonary embolism, and landed in a community hospital in Bennington VT, about 30 miles away. She got the care she needed, but when she was later […]
The post The economics of healthcare is sick in Vermont appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]I have two dental implants, the first of which was done nearly ten years ago. They were both done after a tooth broke and the dentist told me he couldn’t save the tooth. I could have just left the hole, but elected to fill it with an implant, which was done in each case by […]
The post The business of dental implants appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Republicans have long objected to the ACA, and Trump tried several times to have it overturned; he’s claimed he’ll replace it with something better, but in eight years, he’s never come up with even a rudiment of a proposal. And here’s Speaker Johnson at a campaign stop yesterday: “No Obamacare?” an attendee asked Johnson, referring […]
The post Healthcare and the 2024 presidential election appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]My wife and I are recently retired. We moved to New England to be close to our grandson and his parents. We’re living independently in a three-bedroom detached house. My parents were able to live independently into their early 80s, when my dad began to dement. My mom was much smaller than him, and wasn’t […]
The post The business of aging appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Here at Angry Bear, we’re all about intelligent discourse and diverse viewpoints, as long as the posts are honest and backed by facts and evidence. We will delete comments that support a flat earth, a geocentric solar system or creationism, as well as their political equivalents. We don’t feed trolls here at AB, regardless of […]
The post Programming note appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Kevin Drum over at jabberwocking.com watched the Trump spectacle over at Madison Square Garden so we didn’t have to. He zeros in on Elon Musk: “Elon used to be smart enough to do simple addition, but he thinks we can cut “at least” $2 trillion from federal spending—which amounted to $6.1 trillion last year, not […]
The post Elon Musk can’t do arithmetic appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The plutocrats on the right want to dismantle the administrative state, so they say. Of course, their wealth derives directly from the fiction of private property and an administrative state is required to enforce that fiction. Their wealth is monetized in currency, which is another fiction that the administrative state holds a monopoly on. The […]
The post The Administrative state appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Trump promises to round up the homeless and put them in government internment camps. Only if they seek treatment and counseling, they might then qualify to be moved to housing. Harris takes a “housing first” approach. Get a roof over their heads and some housing stability, then offer the treatments and counseling that can move […]
The post Trump vs Harris on homelessness appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]You might think universities would be immune to the financial pressures of the non-academic marketplace. You would be wrong. Brandeis University is struggling financially, and recently fired their resident string quartet, the Lydian String Quartet* after 40 years, to save $275,000. Other universities that, unlike Brandeis, have medical schools, are also struggling with their budgets. […]
The post Economic stress in higher education appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Trump is promising lots of tariffs if he’s elected. Make no mistake: American consumers pay tariffs, not the exporting country. US consumers will be hit by (a) increased cost of imported goods, and (b) increased cost of domestic goods, as domestic producers raise prices to match imports. Econ 101. Trump is promising to lift taxes […]
The post The economics of Trump II appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]When I was growing up, I viewed being a physician as the zenith of achievement for someone interested in science. That changed when I got to college and became interested in research. I realized I didn’t have the temperament for a physician (OK, maybe a radiologist or a pathologist) and I became a lab rat. […]
The post The economics of medicine: personal reflections appeared first on Angry Bear.

I’ve been to California a few times, for scientific meetings, for vacation and once for a friend’s wedding. I’ve had a good experience each time. It has always struck me as an expensive place to live, though, and I’m definitely not a beach person.Elon Musk is warning us that the nation will become “Californicated” if Harris is elected. Considering that California’s per capita GDP has grown faster than the nation’s per capita GDP since at least 2011, that seems like a good thing. Maybe Elon should research his threats before making them.Musk lives in Texas. The Union General Philip Sheridan once said of Texas: “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.” Seems like Texification would be a greater threat.Elon Musk threatens

Housing is expensive here in East Providence. It’s even more expensive in Boston, an hour from here. Some folks live in Rhode Island and commute to Boston. When we were house-hunting in the Providence area in the Spring of ’22, the real estate market was white hot. We were out-bid on three offers. Making an inspection a condition was an automatic reject. In the event, the house we bought never even went on the market.Over at jabberwocking.com, Kevin Drum argues that the “housing crisis” is really a housing crisis in California. He also takes on the argument that the big barrier to building new housing isn’t red tape:“Outside of California, the evidence doesn’t support the idea of either a red tape crisis or a more general housing crisis. The

I’m reading an article about Kamala Harris in the October 21st New Yorker. This paragraph caught my eye:“When Harris talks of the origins of her interest in government, she lingers on a moment from her time in Montreal: a friend from Westmount High, Wanda Kagan, was being physically and sexually abused at home, and Harris’s mother took her in. “A big part of the reason I wanted to be a prosecutor was to protect people like her,” Harris has said. In subtler ways, she was coming to see government as an arena where the powerful encounter the weak, bringing either aid or harm. She observed her mother—a small, watchful immigrant—grow nervous around people in uniform.”In a democratically elected government, the collectivized power and resources of the state

A common right-wing grievance is that undocumented (“illegal”) immigrants are taking all the jobs. In particular, that they’re stealing jobs from native-born Americans. What’s the evidence?

If it were true that immigrants were stealing jobs from native born Americans, then if you plotted labor force participation by native- and foreign-born over time, they would have a reciprocal relationship. As non-native participation rose, native participation would fall. Over at jabberwocking.com, Kevin Drum posts the graph, and it shows that both native and non-native participation move in tandem. I don’t see any evidence for job stealing there.One problem with the job-stealing hypothesis is that it is based on the lump-of-labor fallacy. In this model,

Donald Trump and JD Vance are campaigning on xenophobia. There’s no evidence that immigrants are any sort of threat to America, and the data show that immigrants commit crimes at *lower* rates than American citizens. Sadly, though, fear of the other seems to work in America:“Jeffrey Balogh, a resident of Erie, said at that event that he feels strongly about Trump’s proposals on immigration. He shared that he felt uncomfortable recently when he went to rent chairs from a business and five men who spoke a foreign language were standing outside waiting for a bus.“Not one spoke a lick of English,” he said. “You see a whole different environment.”Actually, Jeffrey doesn’t know whether these men do or don’t speak English. He only knows he didn’t hear it

I had an email exchange a couple days ago with Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo about polls (which he’s written a lot about recently) and the election betting market (which he had never mentioned). Yesterday, he used our exchange as a jumping off point to explain why he doesn’t believe the betting market is reliable and certainly no improvement over polling. The money grafs:“First of all, as I said, bets are largely made on the basis of polls. But let’s go a bit beyond that. In theory at least in equity markets you have armies of industry analysts studying industries and providing insights into the future challenges and profitability of businesses. Same in commodities, currencies, bonds, etc. Investors make investments on the basis of this

The old model of a single doc running a practice is disappearing in America. Between the overhead and the reduced compensation, this model of health care delivery looks increasingly anachronistic.When I started as an assistant professor at a medical school in 1987, there was a lot of money sloshing around. Patients and their insurance companies would pay a premium to be seen by docs in an academic health care practice. Managed care put an end to that, and the medical school from which I recently retired is struggling to stay in the black after many years of deficits.At the other end of the food chain are private practice docs. As America ages, more and more of their patients are on Medicare (as am I). And the government is proposing to slash Medicare

I’ve posted here before about herd immunity. Prior to inoculation/vaccination, herd immunity was the result of enough people dying or surviving that the transmission of the disease (plague, smallpox, etc) was arrested in that population until the next generation of uninfected people grew up, whereupon the substrate for another round of death appeared.But let’s be clear: the survivors weren’t necessarily healthy. Many polio survivors spent the rest of their lives in an iron lung. Others had a permanent limp or other neurological disability (see, e.g., Joni Mitchell).With COVID, many survivors report neurological impairments like loss of taste, brain fog, anxiety or depression, as well as respiratory issues. Recent imaging studies of the brains of early

While I was raised Roman Catholic, I had already rejected the RCC teaching on abortion by the time I started high school. That teaching was not grounded in the Bible, nor was it grounded in biological science.Most human conceptuses never make it to term, making God the greatest abortionist of all time. And mammalian stem cells have the potential to develop into a complete animal in every case where it’s been tested, so destroying a “potential” human life extends to the removal of human organs and amputations.But if you want to believe that human cellular life is sacred from the moment of conception, that’s on you. Just don’t try to impose your beliefs on others, particularly in cases of life-or-death medical decisions.“When Anna Nusslock showed up at