The Angry Bear

Accountable Care Organizations don’t cut costs. It’s time to stop the managed care experiment, STAT, Kip Sullivan and James G. Kahn August 23, 2021 Kip Sullivan is a member of the advisory board of Health Care for All Minnesota. James G. Kahn is emeritus professor of health policy at the University of California San Francisco. For the last half-century, Congress has endorsed essentially the same approach to cutting health care costs, an...

“Do Your Research” Is it my imagination, or do vax- and mask-hesitant people, reported in news stories about the Covid Divide, almost always say they “have done their research” or something like that?  The medical people and public health advocates that get interviewed rarely seem to use this phrase, at least not in the first person.  More research, more unhinged beliefs—how does that happen? There are many parts to this story, but one is...

Economist-Farmer Michael Smith gives us a view of how serious the drought conditions are and the impact on the nations agriculture. Post after post of hydraulic shovels pulling orchards up in California, news of the large almond producers having to cull hundreds of acres at a time to divert water and resources to other parts of their farms. We saw the Midwest run hot and dry all summer and when harvest season arrived, monsoon rains made harvest...

Much of the news from the last few weeks has been about Covid, the Delta version, the Delta versions impact on the unvaccinated, and the lack of resources to care for those with Covid. Medical resource capacity is very low in some states. Hospitals are shipping patients to other cities and or states for care at a great expense. Practicing your individual rights in the United States is protected mostly for White Americans and complained about if...

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time XI, Capital, volume II Aside from a comment on the “labour socially necessary” in Engels’s preface, there is no other mention of socially necessary labour time in volume II of Capital. That preface is where Engels wrote of Marx saving The Source and Remedy from oblivion, albeit with only a single, short innocuous quotation (see also this earlier post).  In the early post, I related how Anton Menger had doubted...

Initial claims: simply, good news The bottom line for both initial and continued claims this week is simple: unadulterated, absolute good news. Initial jobless claims declined 29,000 to 348,000, 20,000 below their previous pandemic low. The 4 week average of claims declined by 19,000 to 377,750, 6,750 below its previous pandemic low of 384,500: Significant progress in the decline of initial claims had stalled for the last 2 months, but...

July housing permits and starts: yellow flag for economy in 2022 Last month I noted that, from here on, the comparisons with 2020 in housing would become much more challenging. And so they have. While permits (gold in the graph below) did increase this month, their declining trend remains intact. Starts (blue), and more importantly, single-family permits (red, right scale) – the least volatile measure of all – both decreased again, as they...

Industrial Production Rose 0.9% in July After Prior Four Months Were Revised Higher, RJS at MarketWatch 666 The Fed’s G17 release on Industrial production and Capacity Utilization for July indicated industrial production rose by 0.9% in July after rising by a revised 0.2% in June and a revised 0.8% in May, and is now up 6.6% from a year ago . . . the industrial production index, with the benchmark now set for average 2017 production to equal to...

Prof. Joel Eissenberg: “Zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 remains the most plausible hypothesis” There’s a saying in research science: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Given what we know about the origins of nearly all viral pandemics — that they resulted from a virus jumping from an animal to a human host (zoonotic infection)–the null hypothesis for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic should be and was zoonotic. The competing...