The Angry Bear

run75441: This is the first in a series of 3 posts written by Maggie Mahar discussing Medicare, what it covers, and what it lacks in coverage. Maggie touches on the Public Option and Medicare. I start to get edgy when people talk about the Public Option, Universal Coverage, Single Payor, Medicare-For-All, etc. as they do not really define it and who will control its funding. We have a Congress which is intent on cutting the PPACA/ACA/Obamacare which many take...

Via Naked Capitalism comes Andrew Bacevich’s piece on What Obsessing About Trump Causes Us To Miss:

Via Upworthy On May 7, the city of Chicago put up a full copy of the pages on its own website — and they’re encouraging other cities to do the same.

A new article at consumerreports.org suggests that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act* (PPACA) played a substantial role in the decline of annual personal bankruptcies that we have seen since the high of 1.5 million in 2010. As I showed several years ago, international bankruptcy data support the oft-heard claim that medical bills make up one of the biggest, if not the biggest, causes of personal bankruptcy. That is, if the United States has a...

by New Deal democrat Strong growth in labor force participation is correlated with weak realwage growth Prof. Jared Bernstein has a piece in the Washington Post today (and at his blog) noting that, even with much improved unemployment and underemployment rates, wage growth is still subpar. One item I wanted to add to the conversation is the inverse correlation between the prime age labor force participation rate and wage growth.  As I I’ve pointed out several...

Lifted from Alternet: Which ailments are on the list of preexisting conditions that can drive up prices for coverage? The Kaiser Family Foundation catalogs “so-called declinable medical conditions” before the ACA. AIDS/HIV Alcohol or drug abuse with recent treatment Alzheimer’s/dementia Anorexia Arthritis Bulimia Cancer Cerebral palsy Congestive heart failure Coronary artery/heart disease, bypass surgery Crohn’s disease Diabetes More listed below the fold....

Is there a neo-classical theory of immiseration? Below is the marvelous Chapman hours of labor diagram (follow the link for a more detailed explanation). It looks complicated but it really only contains four curves representing, roughly, long-term and short-term productivity, income and fatigue. But there is more to it than Chapman realized or that I have previously noticed. The context for this diagram is William Stanley Jevons’s discussion of work...

by New Deal democrat Scenes from the employment report As I described in my detailed post on the April jobs report, below, almost everything moved in the right direction, and significantly so.  Let me lay out a few graphs to show the longer-term stronger and weaker points. In the good news department, the U6 underemployment rate has been falling at a good clip in the last few months, and at 8.6%, is about 0.6% from representing a reasonably “full” employment...