The Angry Bear

PNHP Single Payer Healthcare Financing Series, Kip Sullivan JD Kip Sullivan is known for his commentary on commercial healthcare and healthcare insurance. He is one of the few who can honestly depict what the issues are today and where we are going with healthcare in the US. In this segment Kip discusses the overuse of healthcare claim of being caused by Fee for Service healthcare. This was supposedly reduced by HMOs and a method of payment...

House price increases continue to show strong market at the end The last housing market data for 2021, the FHFA and Case Shiller house price indexes, were reported this morning. Both showed a very slight deceleration in the soaring prices that have marked this year. The FHFA purchase-only index rose 1.1% for October. The YoY% increase was 17.4%, down from the 19.3% YoY peak in July. Meanwhile the Case Shiller national index rose 0.8% m/m, and...

I ran across this three-part series while reading one of Kip Sullivan’s articles “Kip Sullivan on the Creeping Privatization of Medicare, ” Corporate Crime Reporter If you wish to understand the evolution of healthcare and how we got to this point the US, the detail is here on YouTube. Kip starts the in the seventies detailing HMOs (HMO Act 1973) during the Nixon era. [embedded content] “Now there are a slew of these insurance companies like...

A Looming Anniversary Passes  Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union.  I previously posted here about this looming anniversary, arguing that the large troop buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border along with the many strong demands being made by V.V. Putin of various parties reflected his high awareness of this looking anniversary, which has been only barely mentioned or noticed in the western media.   As it...

Commenter Blogger RJS Summary: Natural gas supplies above average for first time since April. Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a 19-year low. Total oil & products supplies near a 7-year low. Total oil supply falls by most in 25 weeks. Gasoline supplies jump most in 20 months. Distillate’s demand falls by most in 5 years. DUC wells in four basins are lowest on record. DUC backlog at 5.5 months is below pre-pandemic norm. DUC well report for...

I saw this story on PPP Loans at Crooks and Liars (Chris capper Liebenthal). It was a “wow” moment. “The Capitol Rioters Had Their Big PPP Loans Forgiven by the Government” Daily Dot, Eric Leval “The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), promised to cover the cost of employee payroll of small businesses, at a time when the entire nation was shutting down and unable to make ends meet.   Amazingly, some of the people who received the money...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for December 20 – 24 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Surprisingly, so far the Omicron variant has had no deleterious effect on any of the data, and in particular, on restaurant reservations. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the economic moment, and bring me a little late Christmas cash in my stocking. Also – Programming Note: This week...

November Durable Goods: New Orders up 2.5%, Shipments Up 0.7%, Inventories Up 0.6%, MarketWatch 666, RJS The Advance Report on Durable Goods Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories and Orders for November (pdf) from the Census Bureau reported that the value of the widely watched new orders for manufactured durable goods increased by $6.5 billion or 2.5 percent to $268.3 billion in November, the 6th increase in seven months, after October’s new...

Income, spending, layoffs, and new home sales all point to a continuing expansion in 2022 We got our last batch of data before Christmas this morning. Almost all of the news was positive. I will be very brief.In the “coincident indicators” department, real personal income declined -0.2%, while real personal consumption expenditures increased less than 0.1%, although both remain well above their pre-pandemic levels:  Comparing real personal...