Here’s my list of movies I’ve recently seen and liked, in order of WTF factor: Imitation Game, Birdman and Inherent Vice. How about you?
Archives for January 2015
Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Harbingers
From faithful gardening correspondent Marvel:
Over this-away, we’re starting to get a tiny bit restive, what with all the time we’ve spent these last few months weighing down the couches & chairs.
Aside from a nasty early freeze in November which positively nuked a bunch of still-recovering new growth from our Big Freeze the previous Winter, it’s been pretty mild here in the Willamette Valley. Too rainy & cold for much outside work, but very few seasonal extremes.
…and yesterday our first crocus emerged. Spring’s still a long ways off, but it’s always a happy day when these little wonders pop up and join in the dance.
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Since I spent last evening removing six inches of heavy, wet snow from our front steps, it seemed almost cruel to my fellow New Englanders to publish this — especially since we’re promised another “one to two feet of snow” starting Monday evening! And yet…
What’s going on with your garden plans for Spring, assuming it will arrive eventually?
Saturday Night Video Open Thread: The President Visits YouTube
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Maybe I’m an easy marker, but this works better than you might think — the President is very comfortable talking to Tha Yoot one-on-one. Even NPR was impressed:
… [T]he president sat down for interviews with three YouTube stars: GloZell Green, known for her outrageous experiments and observations; Bethany Mota, a 19-year-old who gives makeup and decorating tips; and Hank Green, who co-creates videos about science, tech and more.
Some of the questions got right to the point. Obama glossed over issues of race and policing during his State of the Union address, but GloZell Green forced him to expand on the issue with this question: “I hope that this changes — how can we bridge the gap between black, African-American males and white cops?”
Nineteen-year-old Bethany Mota asked the president why she and other young people should even care about politics. High-five, Hank Green, for saying what many younger viewers were thinking as they watched Tuesday’s State of the Union: Is it all just talk?…
“There are some areas where I think we can get some Republican cooperation,” Obama replied. “There are some areas where it’s important for us to frame the debate and get the American people behind us.”…
Mota had a confession: Before preparing to interview the president, she said, “I never really followed politics that much.”
“Politics is just — How do we organize ourselves in a society? How do we make decisions about how we’re going to live together?” the president responded….
At Bloomberg Politics, Arit John points out that aging political junkies are not exactly the President’s target audience:
…[I]s it really beneath the dignity of the president to engage with millennials—the country’s largest constituency—in the way that interests them? Younger people vote at embarrassing low rates, and to the extent that they do follow the news, they’re more likely to get it through social media than older Americans. Meanwhile, the three stars who interviewed Obama—Green; Hank Green, 35; and Bethany Mota, 19—have 13.8 million subscribers between them, and many of those followers think it’s beneath the dignity of the media to scoff at the session…
What say you guys?
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Open Thread: A Rallying Cry for Democrats
There have been complaints that “we” spend too much time talking about Republican negatives, and not enough supporting Democratic positives. So, here’s D.R. Tucker, at the Washington Monthly, “Je Suis Barack“:
… This November marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of Reagan’s victory over President Jimmy Carter. For the past thirty-five years, Carter’s legacy has been relentlessly vilified by the right, with insufficient defense from the left. Sometimes, it seems as though progressives are ashamed of Carter—a man whose foresight on energy was remarkable, a man whose commitment to peace was unshakable.
Progressives cannot allow Barack Obama’s legacy to be relentlessly trashed the way Carter’s legacy was. Quite frankly, we need a Barack Obama Legacy Project, one that will recognize, today, tomorrow and forever, his true significance to America and the world.With two years remaining in his term, a compelling case can be made that Barack Obama is one of the greatest presidents of all-time. Look at the track record: an economy resurrected, Osama bin Laden brought to ultimate justice, the Iraq War ended, millions of Americans finally accessing health care, dramatic advances in equal treatment for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans, two brilliant Supreme Court appointees, sweeping economic reform, and an energy policy that, while imperfect, nevertheless takes the climate crisis seriously…
Generations from now, children should read about the courage and conscience of Barack Obama, his passionate love for this country, his commitment to the hurting and the hungry and the hopeless. Generations from now, Obama’s name should grace public schools and federal buildings. Generations from now, his name should be honored in the same way we honor the names of Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt and Kennedy…
Inspirational videos and more at the link.
Open Thread: A Rallying Cry for DemocratsPost + Comments (131)
The Saudi Kings, in All Their “Glory”
Saudi women should recognize the King's death by holding a driving procession.
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 23, 2015
The NYTimes reports that President Obama will skip the Taj Mahal, curtailing his visit to India to “pay his respects to the [Saudi] royal family” in Riyadh. As the Times phrases it, “Mr. Obama has not often flown to other countries to pay his respects after the deaths of their leaders,” comparing this to the President’s attendance at Nelson Mandela’s state memorial. Of course Mandela had his own royal roots, but the comparison hardly flatters the late Saudi king… or his successor(s).
The Guardian has a wide-ranging obituary for “King Abdullah… whose reign saw the spread of division, corruption and strife, and was saved only by ‘black gold’”:
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who has died aged 90, promised much but accomplished little. By the time he came to the throne in 2005, he was 81 years old. And though he had gained considerable experience as acting monarch after his brother King Fahd’s stroke, he was beset by numerous difficulties – dynastic, democratic, religious, ideological, regional and global – and, with only rising oil revenues in his favour, found himself unable to address them to any significant extent.
Curse You, Scott Beauchamp!
“He (still) hates America’s great military traditions!” Tweaking the beast, in the pages of the Washington Post:
…The service academies — the U.S. Military Academy for the Army (West Point), the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy — promise to educate and mold future officers charged with leading the enlisted members of the military.
But they are not the hallowed arbiters of quality promised by their myths. Their traditions mask bloated government money-sucks that consistently underperform. They are centers of nepotism that turn below-average students into average officers. They are indulgences that taxpayers, who fund them, can no longer afford. They’ve outlived their use, and it’s time to shut them down.
The most compelling and obvious argument is the financial one. It officially costs about $205,000 to produce a West Point graduate, although a 2003 Government Accountability Office study put the price tag at more than $300,000; officers at the Air Force and Naval academies are minted for $322,000 and $275,000, respectively. According to at least one measurement, that’s about four times as much as it costs to produce an officer through the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, which trains officers-to-be while they attend civilian colleges…
Anecdotes are not data, but in my experience, committed Libertarians have been the biggest service-academy cheerleaders — knowing how to “work the system” to ensure that your kid can become “recognized for life as a member of the elite” is a valuable bragging point.
I’m willing to accept that America needs to pay for a permanent officer corp, but it does seem like ROTC is both a cheaper and a more democratic method. Your thoughts?
You’ve got questions, I’ve got something
I just want to reply to a couple of recent questions in comments:
A. Do the ACA substantive requirements for health insurance — no exclusion of pre-existing conditions, mandatory preventive care coverage, etc. — apply to all health insurance, or just to insurance bought on an exchange, like healthcare.gov?
No, but most commercially available insurance in general will meet the requirements. There are three major classes of insurance products which won’t meet all of the substantive requirements. The first are plans that were sold on or before PPACA was signed in March 2010. These plans are grandfathered. The grandfathered plans can continue to be offered as long as there is no substantial difference. Most grandfather plans will disappear over the next couple of years although I will be shocked if there is not some grandfathered plan with seven members still being sold in 2025. The second group of plans are group insurance plans that are self-insured. That means Big Mega Corp will contract with Mayhew Insurance to do the front end work, but Big Mega Corp pays all the bills and takes the risk of a $10,000,000 claim. Self-insured is fairly common at medium to large employers. Self-insured plans have far fewer requirements and regulations than fully insured plans. Fully insured means Big Mega Corp writes a big check to Mayhew Insurance and we bear the risk of paying out on a $10,000,000 claim. The final group of plans that won’t met all of the requirements are the closely held private firms that got profitable religion.
On the Individual market, there are very few grandfathered plans out there, and the other two categories don’t matter. Most of the plans are ACA compliant. Off-exchange has more variety than on-exchange, but the structure is very similar.
it turns out that this so-called “provider” is a Middleman Bill Processing Company. The actual provider sends the bill to this Middleman company, who then applies the discount, does the billing, and then sends it to the insurance company. Middleman Bill Processing Company shows up as the provider on the EOB.
What this also means is that the actual charges by the actual provider are obscured. I have no idea what the real Amount Billed is. The discount is not given. It’s all completely invisible. I got into an argument with the actual provider’s billing office because their billing rep thought I should be able to see this info. I could not.
So my question is: How is this legal or is it legal? How is it allowed for the “Provider” to be some anonymous Middleman Bill Processing Company?
This is legal and fairly common. Right now, Mayhew Insurance’s biggest single “provider” account is a claims processing company a time zone east of us. From a claims payment point of view, an insurance company needs a valid tax ID number, a valid national practitioner ID, a valid set of procedure codes and that is about it. Anything else is a bonus. From a claims point of view again, the charged amount or what the actual doc asks for is irrelevant. The amount paid will be the agreed amount between the insurer and the claims processing company for that set of codes and for that TIN. The allowed amount is what will count to deductible and co-pays and coinsurance, not the charged amount.
The medical loss ratio of the ACA stipulates that 80% of all insurance costs should be used for medical purposes, with 20% going for profits and overhead. That is billed as a cost saving device…. if the insurance plan can either pay for procedure A, costing 1000 dollars, and procedure B, costing 10,000 dollars, doesn’t it have an incentive to chose procedure B, allowing it to hike premiums next year and having the 20% it keeps become more valuable?
What am I missing?
Competition.
In states/regions where there are multiple insurers all trying to get and keep marketshare, if Company 1 pays $10,000 for procedure B while Company 2 pays $1,000, Company 2 will have much lower medical costs and thus lower premiums next year. It is extremely likely that Company 2 will have a Top-2 Silver product next year. That means people get full subsidy and very low out of pocket premium prices which means they get a lot of new membership from both the still uninsured pool as well as healthy membership from Company 1 as they are transferring.
This falls apart in states/regions with only a single insurer.