The Angry Bear

Introduction: FFS Medicare Overhead costs are ~2%. Medicare Advantage overhead costs are far higher. The same can be said for commercial healthcare costs paid by insurance companies. Neither MA administered healthcare or commercial insurance plans can compete with FFS Medicare for costs and care. I will touch on a few reasons why on Medicare at the end of this article which came by way of Dale Coberly, the resident expert of today’s SS. As...

USDA has now dropped the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates in the much awaited October reporting. In a simple one liner, here is the gist of it – lower soy and corn yields this year (drought and lack of fertilizer – we saw this one coming), but wheat supply down, but higher than last year. Wheat is essentially a weed and has conditional consideration mostly to weather and also if the crop was planted, looks like we’re ok here. Here...

As the economy slows, so has producer price growth  – by New Deal democrat Consumer prices for September will be released tomorrow. This morning the upstream producer prices were released. Total PPI rose by 0.4%, after two straight months of decline; but excluding those and December 2021, the lowest monthly increase since November 2020. Here are the monthly changes compared with CPI: YoY producer prices increased at the lowest rate in a...

The desire to manage escalation risk – especially the risk of a nuclear attack – has clearly led the United States to withhold weapons from Ukraine.  We may also be slow-walking delivery of weapons or limiting quantities to reduce escalation risk, although perceived delays could be due to training and logistics issues or our own readiness concerns; even experts disagree about this. The Ukrainian attack on the Kerch bridge and the Russian...

The title is not from Letters from an American. It is just my perception of what I envision having happened to the Republican party. Republicans are acting strangely to say the least. Could it be they slept next to some pods pre-January 6th? I had thought and according to the movie related facts, they would be short lived. Yet here we are two years later with strange thinks occurring. A lack of moral compass, etc. Read on. It is a good recital by...

Latest mixed bag of articles for the week touching on many topics. The very first article implies there was a grant to the Wuhan, China facility. Not sure why that would occur considering all the ruckus which occurred in the past. There is also an article on the Jacksom Mississippi water issues. Jackson is a fair size town. Kind of wonder why that is even occurring. There is also an article about the Boy Scouts selling off their land to pay for...

Having read at various blogs, I found “annieasksyou” to be interesting and covering a topic in economics for which I have limited bandwidth. It is definitely beyond AB’s version of economics and numbers. I think you will also find annie’s words to be interesting. If you visit her site, be polite. Although Annie is also a polite person, she is a no-nonsense person too. The topic today? Abortion and the right for women to decide. “Abortion Is...

“For Indigenous Peoples’ Day: on the centrality of mass migrations to human history“  – by New Deal democrat I just finished reading Susan Wise Bauer’s “The History of the Ancient World,” which in a little under 800 pages summarizes an almost endless string of kings and battles from the earliest written records kept by the Sumerians around 3000 BC through the accession of Constantine as Roman Emperor in 306 AD.  It is timely to consider it...

I believe we are. This is kind of interesting. The article on the budget deficit is from August. From what I have been reading in WaPo, etc., they are claiming the deficit increased. This does not surprise me either with all the inflation occurring from oil, supply chain issues, etc. The question to ask is whether we are worse off than the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and the resulting recession. This article is from Politico; “White House...