This is NSFW, and you honestly will not believe this happened.
US AIRWAYS HIRING NEW SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTORPost + Comments (158)
This post is in: Because of wow., Clown Shoes, Seriously, WTF?
This is NSFW, and you honestly will not believe this happened.
US AIRWAYS HIRING NEW SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTORPost + Comments (158)
This post is in: Open Threads
The Guardian US and The Washington Post were both awarded a Pulitzer Prize today in the “Public Service” category for their NSA coverage. Hey, don’t shoot the messenger!
In other news, Walmart continues to be the biggest welfare queen in history, according to Americans for Tax Fairness. Their summary chart:
Thoughts?
WaPo and Guardian win Pulitzers for NSA CoveragePost + Comments (80)
by David Anderson| 79 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
I expected the post Open Enrollment CBO estimates for coverage costs to show a significant increase over their February estimates:
the CBO headline will not be that Obamacare costs $9 billion more than projected, but $13 or $15 or $20 billion dollars more than projected. The CBO will probably not alter their out-year projections for total uptake as they’ll model the person that they assumed would have skipped out on 2014 enrollment but entered the Exchange in 2015 will have just entered a year “early”.
The increase in cost will be due to two factors. The first is increased subsidy costs. 80% of the people on the Exchange qualified for subsidy. If that ratio holds, that means an additional 800,000 to 1,200,000 people will be getting monthly subsidies. The second factor is that fewer people will be paying the mandate penalty. The absolute lowest revenue loss would be $100 million dollars, probable revenue loss is $300 to $500 million dollars.
I was really, really wrong!
The new CBO report just was released and here are the highlights:
Relative to their previous projections made in February 2014, CBO and JCT now estimate that the ACA’s coverage provisions will result in lower net costs to the federal government: The agencies currently project a net cost of $36 billion for 2014, $5 billion less than the previous projection for the year; and $1,383 billion for the 2015–2024 period, $104 billion less than the previous projections (see the figure below).
. As time has passed, the period spanned by the estimates has changed. But a year-by-year comparison shows that CBO and JCT’s estimates of the net budgetary impact of the ACA’s insurance coverage provisions have decreased, on balance, over the past four years (see the figure below). That net downward revision is attributable to many factors, including changes in law, revisions to CBO’s economic projections, judicial decisions, administrative actions, new data, numerous improvements in CBO and JCT’s modeling, and lower projected health care costs for both the federal government and the private sector.
It’s almost like this thing is going to work at both increasing coverage and flattening the growth curve of healthcare spending.
Latest CBO update — more covered at lower costsPost + Comments (79)
This post is in: Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Fucked-up-edness
The anti-vax death toll continues to mount. Here’s the latest misery to come across my desk (h/t Seth Mnookin):
Kathryn Riffenburg decided on a closed casket for her baby’s funeral.
She didn’t want her family to see what whooping cough, her son’s first illness, had done to 9-week-old Brady Alcaide. The nearly forgotten disease, which has in recent years afflicted thousands of Americans, left Brady’s tiny body swollen and unrecognizable.
Riffenburg herself isn’t an anti-vaxxer; she didn’t know she needed a booster for her own prior immunization. But that’s the thing about herd immunity: if enough of the population has vaccine-induced protection, then the disease itself runs out of reservoirs that can touch the remaining vulnerable hosts. When the vaccination level dips too low…
This is non-partisan stupid, as we know– if anything skewing more blue than red. Oregon shows the highest rate of vaccine refusal, with next door Idaho one of several states just behind that dismal record. Distrust of evil doctors and distrust of the state feed bad decisions across political commitments.
As a first order of business, efforts state by state to make non-medical exemptions as hard to get as possible seems like the way to go. But the underlying pathology is not one to be fixed simply by the (needed) legislative patches. This is one more campaign in an ongoing culture war — which we need to fight on at least two fronts: against woo, which really does know no political boundaries, and versus faux populist jihad on expertise, which is right now much more the property of the GOP than anyone else. Until those battles are won, we will continue to hear this kind of news — tales of yet more collateral damage inflicted by other folk’s dumb, dumb, dumb choices:
Jeremiah Mitchell, 10, plays Xbox with no hands, writes with a pencil strapped to what remains of his arms and prefers eating pizza because it’s one of the few foods he can hold.
Four years ago, doctors working to rid his body of meningitis amputated both his arms and legs as well as parts of his eyelids, jaw and ears. At the time, Jeremiah, then 6, was a kindergartner in Oologah-Talala Public Schools in Oklahoma. An outbreak of meningitis in the school system killed two children and infected five others, including Jeremiah.
Go read the whole wretched story. I haven’t pulled the peak stupid quotes. Too much utterly unnecessary suffering.
*Yeah — I know that’s a cartoon on many levels. But the meaning behind the (deeply flawed) metaphor is clear enough, I think.
Image: English School, Portrait of a Dead child, 1624.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 23 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Sorry, busy morning and you were all left alone. Here’s more thread.
This post is in: Books, Excellent Links, Open Threads, Warren for Senate 2012
(Walt Handelsman via GoComics.com)
Anybody up for a Book Chat? Jill LePore, in the New Yorker, reviews Senator Elizabeth Warren’s upcoming autobiography:
… Warren’s book was originally called “Rigged,” a reference to her contention that the American political system places power in the hands of plutocrats and bankers at the expense of ordinary, middle-class Americans. “Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor,” Warren writes. “Meanwhile, hardworking families are told that they’ll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children.”
“A Fighting Chance” is in many ways heir to a book published a century ago. “Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It,” by Louis Brandeis, appeared in the spring of 1914. Brandeis believed that the country was being run by plutocrats and, especially, by investment bankers, who, by combining, consolidating, and aggregating the functions of banks, trusts, and corporations, controlled both the nation’s credit and the majority of its resources—including the railroads—and yet had not the least accountability to the public or any sense that the functions they had adopted were essentially those of a public utility. “The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and quick capital of others,” Brandeis wrote. “The fetters which bind the people are forged from the people’s own gold.”…
Warren is concerned not with saving but with borrowing, not with monopoly but with debt. Since the nineteen-eighties, many Progressive-era and New Deal reforms have been repealed, including a cap on interest rates and a wall, erected in 1933, separating commercial and savings banking from investment banking. In the second gilded age, the fetters that bind the people were forged first from the people’s own credit cards and then from their mortgages. Credit-card companies lured borrowers in with “teaser rates.” Rates of consumer bankruptcy skyrocketed. Eying the profits made by credit-card companies, mortgage companies began selling an entirely new inventory of “mortgage products,” with low down payments, ballooning rates, and prepayment penalties. Home prices shot up, and then they collapsed. “When the housing market sank,” Warren writes, “so did America’s middle class.”…
In 2008, Warren joined a five-person congressional-oversight panel whose creation was mandated by the seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout. She found that thrilling and maddening, too. In the spring of 2009, after the panel issued its third report, critical of the bailout, Larry Summers took Warren out to dinner in Washington and, she recalls, told her that she had a choice to make. She could be an insider or an outsider, but if she was going to be an insider she needed to understand one unbreakable rule about insiders: “They don’t criticize other insiders.” That’s about when Warren went on the Jon Stewart show, and you get the sense that, over that dinner, she decided to run for office…
Warren is also smart enough to use the conventions of political biography, old and new, to insist on the existence of a relationship between caring for other people and caring about politics. Her brief is really about the abandonment of children, not by women who go to school or to work but by legislatures and courts that have allowed the nation’s social & economic policies to be made by corporations and bankers. Writing about her children and grandchildren—rocking that baby—is more than the place where Warren leaves Brandeis behind. It’s an argument about where our real debts lie.
***********
What’s on the agenda for the start of another week?
This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Sports
Pure self-indulgence, because although I know nothing about sports I am always interested in the exotic folkways of my fellow Americans. (In the spirit of Rule 34, I believe there should be a Rule 35: ‘For every existing system, there is at least one group gaming it.’) From Steven Godfrey, at SB Nation:
… [I]t’s just cash changing hands. When things are done correctly, there’s no proof more substantial than one man’s word over another. That allows for plausible deniability, which is good enough for the coaches, administrators, conference officials, and network executives. And the man I officially didn’t speak with was emphatic that no one really understands how often and how well it almost always works.
These men are fans who believe they’re leveraging football success $500 or $50,000 at a time. I can’t show you that money, and neither can anyone else. You might think you see the money — a flash of $20 bills all over some kid’s Instagram or Facebook update — but that’s just money…
“If we could take a vote for these kids to make a real salary every season, I would vote for it. $40,000 or something. Goes back to mama, buys them a car, lets them go live like normal people after they work their asses off for us. But let’s be honest, that ain’t gonna stop all this. If everyone gets $40,000, someone would still be trying to give ’em 40 extra on the side.”…
“There are jokes about kids getting cars, but that’s actually pretty easy. We all have dealerships all over. You practically have to nowadays, anyway, just for the coaches. Think about it. Most schools, all the football, basketball, and baseball coaches and their wives are getting some kind of vehicle for free as part of their contract. Then they’re turning them in every three years or so. That’s a fleet right there. You need a lot of guys with dealerships, and you need them in different towns. Then getting a clean title on a member of the family is pretty easy.”…
Resources, assistance, paperwork, and even a subpar explanation mean most needs can be taken care of.
“One time grandpa needed his tractor fixed. He and grandma were the primary care-givers of this kid out in a rural area. Well, they aren’t going to turn down the money, and they didn’t, but what they needed was a tractor to get fixed. But we couldn’t take this tractor to get fixed just anywhere, because the guy who does that locally works for a business that’s owned by a [rival school] fan.”…
Long Read: “Meet the Bag Man (How to Buy College Football Players…)”Post + Comments (42)