The Angry Bear

What we are seeing in the UK is an example of giving commercial healthcare too much latitude in providing healthcare. Private equity became involved with care for older people and care became chargeable and means-tested, long-stay hospitals were closed. and the government gave over the building of new facilities to private interests. Th US is just starting to experience the growth of mega-healthcare corporations having tenacles in the lowest...

More on the sharp deceleration in YoY house price gains, and the Fed’s chasing the phantom menace  – by New Deal democrat Since there is no big economic news again today, let me fill in a little more detail on house prices through January, reported yesterday, vs. CPI for shelter. Here is the monthly % change for the past 18 months for Owners Equivalent Rent in the CPI (blue), vs. the Case Shiller national index (gold) and the FHFA purchase...

Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time.Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of...

YoY house price gains continue to decline  – by New Deal democrat Today is a travel day so I have to keep this brief.  On a monthly basis for January, prices rose 0.2% as measured by the FHFA house price index. But because that was far less of an increase in January last year, YoY house prices as measured by the FHFA index declined to +5.3%. This implies that by January next year OER as measured in the CPI will only be up about 2.1% – well...

Sanford-Fairview merger is a symptom of a larger problem, MinnPost, Kip Sullivan. Minnesota has a hospital merger problem. But it didn’t begin last fall when Sanford Health and Fairview Health Services announced their intention to merge. It began in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s in response to mergers of unprecedented size among health insurance companies. By the early 2000s, Minnesota’s hospital sector had been transformed into a few...

I have heard of this. Have not used it. But, I wonder what will happen to our own creativity. We humans are supposed to be a curious, thoughtful, and an intelligent specious. We do the unexpected in different environments and situations which makes us unique. No two of us are alike or react the same. “It is a spectacular scientific puzzle that human beings are the sole species that seems to be able to think and feel beyond the limits of the scale...

Have Medicare Advantage plans been over coding? According the MedPac 2022 report for year 2020 they have been. The funds of which come out of Medicare funding. The amount of which was an ~$12 billion for 2020 alone. But it is not just 2020, “Medicare Advantage has Overcharged FFS Medicare by Billions for Years,” Angry Bear. “Aggregate Medicare payments to Medicare Advantage plans” have never been lower than FFS Medicare spending. MedPac 2022 Chapter...

Open thread March 17, 2023, Angry Bear (angrybearblog.com) Tags: open thread

3 graphic signs of financial stress  – by New Deal democrat The theme of my weekly “high frequency” economic indicators update over the weekend was the sudden deterioration in some measurements of financial stress. Tomorrow we’ll find out that house prices as measured by both the FHFA and Case Shiller have decline further, and that increases are substantially lower than as measured by the CPI, and on Friday we’ll find out what two of the...

I have read enough on the bailing out of two banks (Silicon Valley Bank and the smaller Signature bank). in 2018, I had argued against increasing the $50 or $100 (?) billion limit to $250 billion. These were commercial banks which were allowed in 2008 to join with Wall Street banks to dabble in securities, Banks writing home mortgages had skipped the practice of registering them with the counties. Not a safe practice. Here we are in a situation where...