The Angry Bear

Last December 2017, Envision Healthcare Corporation paid an approximate $30 million to settle allegations for subsidiary EmCare doctors getting bonus payments for admitting patients to hospitals when it was not necessary. History: A subsidiary of Envision, EmCare is a provider of physician services to emergency departments, inpatient services for hospitals, acute care surgery, trauma and general surgery, women’s and children’s services, radiology /...

Brookings Institute points us to: Big, techy metros like San Francisco, Boston, and New York with populations over 1 million have flourished, accounting for 72 percent of the nation’s employment growth since the financial crisis. By contrast, many of the nation’s smaller cities, small towns, and rural areas have languished. Smaller metropolitan areas (those with populations between 50,000 and 250,000) have contributed less than 6 percent of the nation’s...

Michigan Electablog “Lame Duck Republican Majority at work in Michigan.” • Accrued Sick Time: This was one of the proposals not allowed to go to the ballot. Why? Because if it passed and it would have, Repubs would have needed 2/3rds vote to overturn it. Instead they passed it before November 6th and now they are altering it by taking coverage responsibility from over 93% of Michigan’s firms. The threshold for exemption from the law was raised from 5 in...

Persuasive Case of Voter Fraud and Republicans Do Not Care North Carolina: The first public indication things were not right in Bladen County occurred weeks ago. The North Carolina State Board of Elections did not certify the results of the closely watched 9th Congressional District race. Republican Mark Harris appeared to defeat Democrat Dan McCready by just 905 votes. Documents released by the NCSBE on Tuesday revealed a political-consulting firm...

A note about the financial markets The markets are closed today in observation of former President George H.W. Bush’s funeral. In the meantime, let me offer a brief few observations (pontifications?) about my sense of the immediate and longer term trend. First off, here is a broad look at the last 10 years for the S&P 500 (blue, right scale) and 10 year Treasury bond (red, left scale): The moves in the bond market look exaggerated, because the...

At the CEPR blog, Beat the Press, Dean Baker and Jason Hickel are debating degrowth. Dean makes the excellent point that “claims about growth” from oil companies and politicians who oppose policies to restrict greenhouse gas emissions, “are just window dressing.” I also agree, however, with the first comment in response to Dean’s post that his point about window dressing could be taken much further. I would add that economic growth is window dressing for...

Governor Rick Snyder: I would ask you to block any legislation from the Michigan Lame Duck Legislature which would overturn the will of the constituents as determined through the November 6th vote or endorsed by petition and thereby blocked from being placed on the ballot due to deliberate legislative action passing it in the Michigan House and Senate pre-November 6th. As you already know proposals passed through elections require a two-thirds legislative...

Strong manufacturers new orders in November ISM report There are a lot of economic writers who won’t tell you when something moves against their thesis. Those guys trumpeting a flatlining of commercial and industrial growth last year? They never heard of it this year (hint: because it’s up!). To the contrary, one of the reasons I do my Weekly Indicators piece is that it forces me to mark my forecasts to market each week. If a forecast doesn’t work out, I...

Mourning The Death Of The New World Order  I think this is behind the apparently bipartisan and intense outpouring of mourning over the death of 94 year old George H.W. Bush, indeed with some of this even being for the broader post-World War II era in which the US predominated over the world.  Bush was president when the long Cold War with the former Soviet Union came to its end with the victory of the US and the breaking up of the USSR, as well as being...