Tag Archives: politics

by Matthew Cunnigham – Cook The problems with Medicare Advantage is coding and pricing for care. And Fee for Service participants pay for the MA costs even though they do not use MA. “When accounting for favorable selection of enrollees in MA and higher MA coding intensity, we estimate Medicare spends approximately 22 percent more for MA enrollees. This spend is more than if those beneficiaries were a part of FFS Medicare. The difference...

Oddly I am back here posting. Even more oddly I am posting on the topic I am paid to address. I start by noting two things. About one year ago, many macroeconomic forecasters predicted that a recession would have started by now in the USA. I forget who placed the probability at 100%. In spite of sltightly disappointing 0.4% (1.6% if annualized) real GDP growth in the first quarter of 2024, we are not in a recesion. What went right ? The...

Listening to the back and forth between the justices and Idaho’s Solicitor General, there is tension on display here. The Idaho Solicitor General appears to take the stance the abortion is available if necessary. The justices are questioning how such could be if doctors will not treat the women if abortion is needed. That being, doctors believe they blocked by Idaho’s abortion law. Alito takes the chicken or the egg approach with US Solicitor...

You gotta be old enough to remember what took place in the sixties and into the seventies with regard to protesting. In 1970 when I was bathing in and drinking the Camp Lejeune water, we were selected to be trained in riot control. JIC the protestors, the student protesters were a bit rambunctious in Washington D.C. All the better we were not called out. Still the same fears we are seeing today on college campuses. Similar right-wing dialogue by...

This is a rehash of what was going on in Flint from 2014 onward. It is mostly what I had seen, read about, and wrote about from 2014 till 2022. Republicans were in control of the state during most of this time if not all of it. Attorneys will lay claim to 1/3rd of the payout. If the state gov had been more active in resolving the issue, I am sure the attorney fees would have been less. Article by Gabrielle Gurley with a lot of input by a former...

by Alan Collinge Medium A number of beltway “experts” are currently claiming that cancelling student loans would unduly benefit the wealthy. These claims are based upon blatantly flawed research, They have been used by very well-coordinated media/social media campaigns, designed to kill the push for student loan cancellation, and have flooded the zeitgeist in recent weeks. Most recently, Professor Kent Smetters (The Wharton School at the...

And the grift goes on:“Jerry Dean McLain first bet on former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social two years ago, buying into the Trump company’s planned merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, at $90 a share. Over time, as the price changed, he kept buying, amassing hundreds of shares for $25,000 — pretty much his “whole nest egg,” he said.“McLain, the tree service owner in Oklahoma, said he believes the stock could “go to $1,000 a share, easy,”...

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog First off, let me reiterate that my focus this year is on manufacturing and construction. That’s because these are the two sectors the waxing and waning of which have almost always determined if the US economy is growing or not. By contrast, for the past half century or more the production and consumption of services has tended to increase even right through most recessions. With that framework in...

by Andrea Hsu National Public Radio The Starbucks case is more a battle over which approach Appeals courts should use when they consider requests for injunctions like this one over labor violations. The Supreme Court appears to be weighing in on their decisions. The impact of the Supreme Court decision will weigh heavily on unions and labor. Five Appeals court use a two-prong test: – Is there “reasonable cause” to believe an unfair...

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog As per my usual caveat, while new home sales are the most leading of the housing construction metrics, they are noisy and heavily revised.  That was true again this month, as sales (blue in the graph below) increased almost 9% m/m to 693,000 annualized, after February was revised downward by -25,000 to 637,000. As the five year graph below shows, after the initial Boom powered by 3% mortgage rates,...