The Angry Bear

by Laura B. Attanasio and Kimberley H. Geissler Health Affairs This article is the latest in the Health Affairs Forefront series, Accountable Care for Population Health, featuring analysis and discussion of how to understand, design, support, and measure patient-centered, cost-efficient care under the umbrella of accountable care. ~~~~~~~~ The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any industrialized country, and it...

 – by New Deal democrat First, a programming note: I’ll post about retail sales later today. Consumer inflation in April continued essentially to be an interplay between shelter and gas prices, with a side helping of auto insurance and repairs. During late 2022 and early 2023, shelter was still accelerating or steady at a high rate of inflation, while gas prices were falling. Beginning in late 2023, the dynamic reversed, as shelter inflation...

by Ron Bousso Reuters A brief on what BP is doing. My guess is they are going to cut output to drive the market. It could be that other oil companies could fill the gap or move with BP. However, they prefer trump in office so making Biden look bad is a realistic plan for them. Their attorneys are already writtening the executive orders. Speaking to Reuters on Tuesday after BP announced $2.7 billion in first quarter profits, CEO Auchincloss...

 – by New Deal democrat Tomorrow and Thursday a plethora of data will be released, on consumer inflation and spending, production, housing, and jobless claims. In the meantime today we got a chance to look at upstream pressures on inflation. And those upstream pressures do seem to be building slightly, reflecting a strong economy with full employment. Commodity prices increased 0.9%. These are very volatile, so this was not particularly out...

I need to crash

Schools in One Virginia County to Reinstate Confederate Names, The New York Times, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar substack SUMMARY: After a meeting that lasted for hours, the Shenandoah County school board voted early Friday morning to restore the names of three Confederate officers to schools in the district. With the vote, the district appears to be the first in the country to return Confederate names to schools that had removed them after the summer...

I was going to finish this up two days ago. Except I got sick and was sweating for two nights in a row. And slept most of the first day and some of today. I had been fighting this for a about 5 days and then it came om stronger. Today, I feel I am back, but at half speed. I posted “Senator Warrens Clawback on money looted by Cereberus” here. She called it:“The third and best source of funds would be a clawback of money looted by Cerberus, de la...

It appears rent, transportation, and medical care services are the culprits holding up a decrease in inflation. Medicare does not surprise me at all. Harvard School of Health blames the rise of prices on administrative expenses, corporate greed and price gouging, and higher utilization of costly medical technology. What to Look for in the April CPI by Dean Baker CEPR The overall and core Consumer Price Index (CPI) both increased by 0.4...

Pharma companies providing pharmaceuticals exclusive to them have vast amounts of control in availability and or pricing. Either can result in increased costs to the patient. Economist Timothy Taylor reviews one particular instance with Teva Pharmaceuticals. Collaboration with other companies to control pricing appears to be Teva’s Director of Strategic Customer Marketing Nisha Patel’s strong suits. by Timothy Taylor Conversable Economist...

by Professor Heather Cox-Richarson Letters from an American If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced writer and reformer Julia...