Tag Archives: politics

I was no general, field grade officer, or even an officer in 1970. Just a three-strip Sergeant in my 3rd year stationed at Lejeune drinking the water and bathing in it. Someone had a brilliant idea we should be trained in riot control since Camp Lejeune was not far from Washington D.C. Some elements out of Fort Bragg would join us. As we were Federal soldiers, our facing civilians is frowned upon. In any case, we were trained, never called...

Door Wide Open for Republicans on Student Loans, Alan Collinge, Student Loan Justice, Medium. Angry Bear has featured Alan and Student Loan Justice Org. well over a decade now. In the manner they are written, these loans by the Federal Government and maintained by private enterprises are akin to loans made by a hypothetical student loan shark. Loan relief exists for every other loan in this nation. Just not for Students. There are about 54...

What we are seeing in the UK is an example of giving commercial healthcare too much latitude in providing healthcare. Private equity became involved with care for older people and care became chargeable and means-tested, long-stay hospitals were closed. and the government gave over the building of new facilities to private interests. Th US is just starting to experience the growth of mega-healthcare corporations having tenacles in the lowest...

Sanford-Fairview merger is a symptom of a larger problem, MinnPost, Kip Sullivan. Minnesota has a hospital merger problem. But it didn’t begin last fall when Sanford Health and Fairview Health Services announced their intention to merge. It began in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s in response to mergers of unprecedented size among health insurance companies. By the early 2000s, Minnesota’s hospital sector had been transformed into a few...

Have Medicare Advantage plans been over coding? According the MedPac 2022 report for year 2020 they have been. The funds of which come out of Medicare funding. The amount of which was an ~$12 billion for 2020 alone. But it is not just 2020, “Medicare Advantage has Overcharged FFS Medicare by Billions for Years,” Angry Bear. “Aggregate Medicare payments to Medicare Advantage plans” have never been lower than FFS Medicare spending. MedPac 2022 Chapter...

3 graphic signs of financial stress  – by New Deal democrat The theme of my weekly “high frequency” economic indicators update over the weekend was the sudden deterioration in some measurements of financial stress. Tomorrow we’ll find out that house prices as measured by both the FHFA and Case Shiller have decline further, and that increases are substantially lower than as measured by the CPI, and on Friday we’ll find out what two of the...

I have read enough on the bailing out of two banks (Silicon Valley Bank and the smaller Signature bank). in 2018, I had argued against increasing the $50 or $100 (?) billion limit to $250 billion. These were commercial banks which were allowed in 2008 to join with Wall Street banks to dabble in securities, Banks writing home mortgages had skipped the practice of registering them with the counties. Not a safe practice. Here we are in a situation where...

“France Is Furious”: Anger Grows at Macron for Raising Retirement Age as Millions Strike and Protest (rsn.org), Democracy Now. This is what happens when you let “the government” (“rich” taxpayers of a “progressive” tax) pay for your Social Security.  American Social Security was created “worker paid” by FDR exactly to avoid this (“so no damn politician can take it away from them”). And for more than 80 years that has worked.  but lately the...

Katie Porter on Social Security. Can you spare a bit more than three minutes? [embedded content] Three of the many Republicans who are absolutely not for the People. Social Security & the Debt Limit, Angry Bear, Bruce Webb. Tags: debt, Katie Porter ...

Weekly Indicators for March 20 – 24 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat I’ve neglected to put this up for the past several weeks, but by now you know where to find my latest Weekly Indicator post at Seeking Alpha. Probably unsurprisingly, in the week after the Silicon Valley Bank failure, just about every financial stress indicators suddenly spiked. In other words, credit conditions, which had already tightened by the end of last year,...