The Angry Bear

The same as turning Medicare over to commercial healthcare, having a nine-member panel and a critic of the VA in charge does not bode well for Veteran Healthcare. Denis McDonough is not a veteran and it is hard to imagine how he would relate to many of us. Senators Joe Manchin and Michael Rounds penned a letter to President Joe Biden, enjoined by other senators in a bipartisan request to maintain quality veteran care across the nation in VA...

On February 11, 2022, Faye Flam published an opinion piece in Bloomberg titled “Mask Mandates Didn’t Make Much of a Difference Anyway.”  The subhead was “The policies clearly didn’t stop omicron. Let’s focus on tactics that have worked better.” The headline is somewhat misleading.  Flam acknowledges that masks may be beneficial, especially high-quality masks, and she quotes an expert who supports masking when cases are high and vaccination rates...

Coronavirus dashboard for April 13: watching the BA.2 “bump” The BA.2 “bump” (h/t Dr. Eric Topol) is upon us (and hopefully a “bump” is all it is). Let’s take a look at where we stand. Cases bottomed 8 days ago at 28,378. As of yesterday, they had increased to 32,835: Hospitalizations have continued to decline, and at 9859 are the lowest since March 2020 when the pandemic was just beginning: Deaths are at 527, just above...

Jobless claims: the employment sector of the economy continues to do just fine [Note: I’ll comment on this morning’s retail sales report for March separately] Initial jobless claims rose 18,000 to 185,000 from their 50+ year last week. The 4 week average rose 2,000 from last week’s all-time low to 172,250. Continuing claims declined -48,000 this week to 1,475,000, a new 50 year low (but still higher than the 1960s): Essentially...

RJS, Focus on Fracking; Summary; Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a 20-year low; US distillates exports at a 45 month high leaves domestic supplies at an 8 year low The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending April 8th indicated that after a near record decrease in our oil exports, we were able to add surplus oil to our stored commercial crude...

Some History 2014: A frenzy of hospital mergers into ACOs as detailed by Philip Longman and Paul Hewitt could leave many families having lesser amounts of healthcare paid for by healthcare insurance due to healthcare industry consolidation leading to higher prices. We have seen this happen with higher prices for insurance plans, increased deductibles, and less covered. I think we have all experienced this in the last couple of years,...

March consumer inflation part 2: I told you so; the Fed *must* start paying attention to house price indexes This is the second part of my take on the March consumer inflation report. As you may have already read, total inflation clocked in at +1.2% for March alone! YoY consumer prices are up 8.6%, the highest 12-month rate since 1981. As anticipated, gas prices were a huge contributor; less energy, prices were up 0.4%; less both food and...

This comes by way of New Deal Democrat who was doing some research and ran across a not so recent Krugman article via the late Economist’s View blog. Krugman’s prescient words of things to come? Hat tip to New Deal democrat and a thank you for sending this to me. “The Great Illusion” Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times So far, the international economic consequences of the war in the Caucasus have been fairly minor, despite Georgia’s role...

Tough Guy, senator Mitch McConnell making political hay over President Joe Biden extending a student loan moratorium for a few more months. The mistake Joe is making or has made is not deciding what to do. It is getting late in the game of politics. Here is senator Mitch McConnell. “I think in this country, it’s important to remind people that we ought to pay our debts,” McConnell opined. “We all pay our debts. And with regard to extending the...