Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" 2014 edition –>
http://t.co/eUcvlorHWe
— Billmon (@billmon1) October 28, 2014
You can’t win, and you can’t break even
You can’t get out of the game;
You shouldn’t stay, but you ain’t leaving
‘Cause your luck could change again…
Everything about today was a debacle. A bunch of stuff I can’t discuss that were debacular (I just made that up, it means spectacular debacle, you can credit me Never mind. Debacular is already in the Urban dictionary- I checked before I posted. Damnit.), but I can describe the four hour ordeal of getting Holly’s car from the airport.
Holly, my friend who had the brain issues (I better narrow that down- my friend who had the aneurysm. I have lots of friends I am convinced have brain issues, but that is another story. I think that may be why I am friends with them. Moving right along.) drove her car to the airport in Pittsburgh so that she could fly to NY to spend time with her husband, and while she was up there became ill. The details are fuzzy, something about her stomach hurting bad and her head hurting, but she went to the hospital and something about the shunt in her brain needs to be dealt with and she is going to be there for a while. Apparently they are going to remove her shunt and then have an external shunt (?) for a bit and then insert a new shunt, followed by a week’s worth of antibiotics. That’s all the details I know, so don’t ask.
Since she is going to be there a while, we went up to get her car so she doesn’t end up spending eleventy billion dollars on parking. She fed-exed the keys, and there was a note that said Lot 744. She just bought a new car since many of us had teased her about her old car (which at one point had moss growing on the window seals from sitting dormant so long- she doesn’t drive much), a little Fiat clown car in that greenish color that all your stoves and refrigerators looked like when you were a kid if you are my age. According to Fiat, the color is technically Verde Chiaro, which sounds suspiciously like a drink that Starbucks would market to 30 something female professionals in New York City to drink in between yoga and trips to Trader Joes. I figured, “Ok. Got the keys, know the lot number, and that color is going to stick out like a sore thumb. We’re good to go.”
So Shawn and I piled into the Lezbaru and rode up towards Pittsburgh, going past the airport to Robinson Town Centre to hit the Giant Eagle and then go to the pet store and I wanted to look for some new down pillows for my bed. Finished our shopping, got to the airport, and when we arrived, I remembered that there is short, long term, and extended parking. I assumed she went extended, because that is the cheapest. So we went into the extended lot and… there is no Lot 744. Not only is there no Lot 744 in extended parking, there is no Lot 744 ANYWHERE IN THE AIRPORT. They don’t even have “Lots” per se, they just have signs with a number and a letter, and each number letter combination hold hundreds of cars. Shawn looked at me and said “I think the sugar free Klondike bars are going to melt.”
We tried to get hold of Holly, but Holly is on a morphine drip and has been for a day or so. I finally get a response, and she is completely befuddled. All she has in Lot 744 written down in her notes. So we drive up and down through extended parking for an hour, stopping every 50 feet for a fucking stop sign. No car. Since you only have a free first hour in extended, we drove around to the exit, turned in the ticket, and explained our situation to the guy. He asked- “Do you have her license plate number?” Apparently they take pictures of cars and store them in the office, so our new side mission was to find her license plate number. At this point, I must repeat that this is a new car and Holly is on a morphine drip. She still had the tag on her keys from the dealer, and it had a bunch of letter/number combos, but none of those worked. I texted Holly, and asked her to try to think really hard what it would be. In the meantime, we drove around the airport, back into extended parking, and picked up where we left off, going row by row, car by car, STOPPING EVERY FUCKING 50 FEET FOR A STOP SIGN.
I then had an idea- she just bought the car, I bet the dealership has her plate info. So I texted Holly, found out where she bought the car, and called them. They said they would look into it and call me back. At this point, it was time to leave the lot and get a new ticket. Left parking, turned in our ticket at the toll booth, and as we were looping around the airport to re-enter, from about a mile away, Shawn spotted the car in the back of nowhere in the “additional parking” for the extended parking lot. Gotta love Cav Scouts and their eagle eyes.
We then drove home, stopping at a great Mexican restaurant called Chico Fiesta which is, and I am not kidding, across the street from a business that has a sign that says “Party Dresses/Lawnmower Repair.” Talk about a niche business model. The dealer called with the license plate number while we were eating. Johnny on the fucking spot, those guys were.
The klondike bars are all melted, but they are the crunchy kind, so we are trying to refreeze them. I’m going to sit down and watch the hockey game.
Oh- wait. I almost forgot. Holly’s nurse is named A. Fluffy Bunny, RN. And no, I am not making that up. Apparently he is out and proud and just fabulous in every way. So she’s got that going for her- I always get mean nurses who look like babushkas. I’d love A. Fluffy Bunny if I am ever hospitalized.
We still have not solved the mystery of why she wrote down Lot 744. A modern day Rosebud.
Speaking of Adam Smith’s “conspiracy against the public… “* Jon Ward, at Yahoo News, “RNC’s deal with Koch political operation raises questions about illegal coordination“:
The most important thing that Republicans did over the past two years to improve their data and technology came at the end of August.
That’s when Data Trust, the private company that functions as an offshoot of the Republican National Committee, announced that it would begin sharing information from its voter file with i360, the entity created by the Koch brothers to house its own voter file and data analytics tools.
For the first time ever, the two biggest voter-file-gathering operations on the right would be working together. They would remain independent of each other, but benefit from the information-gathering work of each other’s volunteers. The data flows would go both ways, and the RNC would for the first time have access to the outside groups’ data…
The sharing agreement between the RNC and the Kochs was not easy to arrange. The RNC had legal questions about whether a party committee and an outside group could share voter data without violating federal law. Democrats, in fact, still accuse them of violating the law and have filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission.
The suit argues that the RNC and the Kochs “appear to be illegally coordinating through the ongoing exchange of non-public strategic campaign and party data, resulting in millions of dollars in prohibited contributions from Super PACs and corporations to Republican campaigns and parties.”
Getting the two sides to cooperate was also an obstacle, insiders told Yahoo News. One source at a party committee referred to it as a “power struggle” between the two groups over who would control data collected by volunteers and paid staff on the ground…
While relations between the RNC and the Koch empire have outwardly improved, theirs remains an uneasy truce. The data-sharing agreement gives the central party a boost, allowing it to make up data-gathering ground it had lost to outside groups, but it also strengthens the Koch empire by giving its analytics firm an array of information the Republican Party has gathered on voters. What the Koch groups do with that data going forward is not something the RNC has any control over, and vice versa…
* “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public…” — The Wealth of Nations
Long Read: “GOP digital revamp sees mixed results two years after report”Post + Comments (64)
In this space, I was going to post a hilarious video my daughter made by strapping a GoPro camera onto one of the dogs and letting her (the dog) run amok in the yard. You’d see terrified lizards fleeing, alarmed chickens retreating from the fence, a close-up of the other dog’s butt and more spills, thrills and chills than a Hollywood epic.
But first, the GoPro crashed my daughter’s laptop, and then it crashed mine. We didn’t think to film the curses, screaming and hair-pulling that ensued. And all you get is this lousy open thread. Sorry.
If we were not engaged in a systemic freak out about a disease that has not killed anyone infected on US soil yet, we would be aggressively vaccinating for the flu right now. The flu is a disease that kills thousands in a good year, and tens of thousands in an average year. Its early symptoms look a lot like Ebola (high fever, coughing, feeling like shit) so people going to the ER or their doctor’s office for a flu visit will be getting screened for Ebola, and there will be some small percentage who falsely fail the Ebola screening and thus have their lives upended. Minimizing the spread of the flu would make Ebola precautions more effective plus get far fewer people sick from a deadly disease.
Yet, we’re doing almost nothing different about this. The CDC is tracking the rates of vaccination in 2013 and 2014. 2014 vaccination rates are up slightly.
Even in a non-Ebola world, health insurers want to pay for the flu vaccine. Mayhew Insurance knocks $200 off individual deductibles for flu shots because it saves a lot of money by avoiding hospitalizations (let’s ignore the avoided feeling like shit days and unplanned time off from a cost accounting view to keep things simple.) It is a massive net win for society to minimize flu in good years. In years where there is another infectious disease whose early symptoms mimic a nasty flu, it is even more of a no brainer if our society actually wanted to solve the problem.
Instead, we get a freak-out and mass hysteria.
Back in 2008, there was an excellent study on the cost of losing health insurance and then regaining it for people with chronic conditions.
RESULTS:
Overall total program expenditures were higher for post-lapse periods compared with pre-lapse periods. Total expenditures were estimated to increase by $239 per member per month for the 3-month period. The likelihood of having any expenditure was actually lower in the post-lapse period. However inpatient and emergency room use was higher.
CONCLUSIONS:
The results from this study suggest that interruptions in Medicaid coverage are associated with overall greater program expenditures in the post-lapse periods. However, this increase in expenditures seems to be driven by a subset of individuals whose greater use of inpatient and emergency room services increased overall program costs.
$240 per member per month for Medicaid members in the mid-2000s is a massive number. Diabetics are risk adjusted to be more expensive, but this is a 50% (guesstimate) increase in per member per month cost. Most of the cost will be concentrated, as expected, on the high end users. Intuitively, this makes sense as diabetes and several other chronic conditions can be fairly cheaply managed if there is routine, regular care to prevent acute crisis. When that routine care disappears, crisii are far more likely to happen, and more likely to be more expensive on a per-event basis. So once care is reestablished, there are already crisii in the pipeline that needs to be paid for. This story makes sense.
Now, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities CBPP passing along Kaiser information has released some very interesting on state level Medicaid spending in 2014:
The 28 states (including Washington, D.C.) that have expanded Medicaid or will expand it this fiscal year (2015) expect their Medicaid spending to grow by 4.4 percent this year, compared to 6.8 percent among non-expansion states, Kaiser’s annual survey finds (see graph)…What’s more, state Medicaid spending growth will actually slow in expansion states this year, down from 6.6 percent last year. Meanwhile, non-expansion states expect a modest uptick in state spending growth from last year.
At least some of the non-expansion state spending growth is due to the woodworkers who were previously eligible but not enrolled now enrolling. We know that the states which have not expanded, have on average, been less aggressive in pushing Legacy Medicaid enrollment pre-PPACA, so they should, all else being equal, have more and sicker woodworkers than the typical expansion state. Another portion of this drop is most likely a mechanical drop. Some states, more likely to be Expansion states, had expanded pre-PPACA Medicaid to certain groups with state only funds. Those individuals make under 138% FPL, so they’ve been transferred to federal expansion dollars instead of state dollars. However, this is not most of the story.
