(Image by NEIVANMADE)
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 615: A Brief Tuesday Night UpdatePost + Comments (42)
by Adam L Silverman| 42 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Military, Open Threads, Russia, Silverman on Security, War, War in Ukraine
(Image by NEIVANMADE)
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 615: A Brief Tuesday Night UpdatePost + Comments (42)
by John Cole| 49 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Remember during the Obama years there were long periods of like nothing going on? It just feels like it has been non stop daily catastrophe’s since 2015 or so. Every night.
by WaterGirl| 76 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
So it’s Halloween!
Some pumpkins, courtesy of Dexwood, who obviously has more carving skill and patience than I do!
I’m kind of partial to the happy guy in the third photo. How about you?
Open thread.
by WaterGirl| 74 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Supreme Court, Supreme Court Corruption
None of this would have been possible with WITHOUT (!) the leadership of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.
Or without the most excellent and relentless investigative reporting by ProPublica!
The fourth estate at work. Even if it’s not happening in the mainstream media, it is happening. Hallelujah!
The relentless work of members of the @JudiciaryDems Courts Subcommittee paved the way to hold the powerful accountable.
Last night, @SenatorDurbin and I announced that the full Committee will soon vote to authorize subpoenas for Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo, and Robin Arkley II.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) October 31, 2023
⭐️
The creepy billionaires paying for ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ for certain Supreme Court justices are not happy about our move toward subpoenas. Their wild and overheated responses signal that there’s a lot to discover!!
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) October 31, 2023
⭐️
Another small victory as the Judicial Conference seems likely to take up transparency rules to address the flotillas of front-group “amici” at SCOTUS. I sent this letter to give them a heads-up about perils to watch out for from the dark-money funders.https://t.co/CyDIYApqef
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) October 30, 2023
⭐️
Open thread!
by WaterGirl| 38 Comments
This post is in: Guest Posts, Open Threads, Political Action, Politics
Commenter Jeffro recently attended Democracy360. He mentioned it a time or two in the comments and I asked if he would be up for doing a guest post. The write-up from the conference is kind of long, so I am starting with an excerpt here, and you can find the whole write-up below the fold.
Also, here is the .pdf version of the write-up: Jeffro Democracy 360 and book review
Jeffro will be available if anyone has any questions.
Jeffro Excerpt
However, I was able to attend three in-person presentations, and the two best were Judy Woodruff’s panel on covering the White House, and Adam Kinzinger’s discussion with Jeffrey Goldberg.
Woodruff’s panel consisted of current/former White House correspondents Laura Barron’ Lopez from PBS NewsHour, Mike Emanuel from Fox News, and Elaina Plott Calabro from The Atlantic. Peter Baker from the NY Times was supposed to have been there, but he ended up canceling. Woodruff opened by thanking the crowd for such a warm welcome, “…the warmest I’ve received since my early days covering in the McKinley Administration.” Ha!
The three correspondents were all clearly excited to be a part of the proceedings, and Woodruff kept things flowing along nicely. So nicely that amongst the anecdotes about the ins and outs of covering the White House and the many irritations of dealing with social media, it would have been easy to miss two key exchanges.
The first was when Woodruff shifted the conversation towards covering the 2024 candidates for president. Barron’ Lopez took a pretty assertive stance that the media needed to quit presenting ‘both sides’ and calling it ‘being objective’. (Be still my heart!) She went off at some length about what being objective really means – ie, reporting what people are actually saying and doing, reporting on what the likely impacts of their policies and proposals would be – as opposed to ‘horse race journalism’ (swoon!) She actually said (without attributing it to NYU professor Jay Rosen, unfortunately) “tell readers the stakes, not the odds” (triple swoon!!!)
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics
It’s down to one issue on the ballot. It’s not taxes, it’s not abortion. The one issue is: do you believe in democracy, or do you believe in authoritarianism? That’s what we should be voting on.
⭐️
It’s really this simple. One issue.
— Jack E. Smith ⚖️ (@7Veritas4) October 31, 2023
⭐️
TOTALLY OPEN THREAD.
by David Anderson| 13 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
Yesterday TF79 asked a great question about Venture Capital (VC) backed insurers in comments:
“The VC backed insurers that attempted to buy marketshare without a concern of profitability…” can you expand on this? I would have assumed that VC’s in general would be hyper-focused on profitability at the exclusion of all else. Are they taking a loss in the short-run in exchange for long-run market power or something?
There have been three major venture capital backed ACA insurers, Oscar, Bright and Friday. Oscar is still alive at a stock price 85% below their IPO but with decent cash reserves. Bright and Friday were shut down by regulators over the past year as the state regulators were terrified at the capital reserve to potential obligation ratio.
So what do I mean “buy marketshare without a concern of profitability…”
Let’s assume that the insurers are competent-ish. This is actually a fairly large assumption as the alternative story is that these three insurers lit several billion dollars on fire to pay for learning by doing (and at that, slow learning by doing….)
We know that the enrollees who are flipping a coin between buying insurance and not buying ACA insurance are buying almost entirely on price. We know that these enrollees are relatively healthy/low cost compared to the rest of the ACA pool. We know that these enrollees likely generate a big risk adjustment payable obligation as they don’t use many services. We also know that most enrollees are like this. We know that insurers that barely miss being the least expensive plans in a metal level don’t get a lot of enrollment. We have a winner take most market.
If an insurer is mainly competing for this market segment, they want to drive down premium as far as possible below the benchmark silver plan. Assuming an insurer is constrained to price in a way that makes them break even or better, the three big options are to reduce the benefit value (low acturial value/high expected cost-sharing plans) and/or get great provider pricing (usually by having a narrow network) and/or reduce utilization (either lots of prior authorization and gatekeeping or value based arrangements to reduce dumb spending). An insurer can do all three things. Most try to do all three things.
However if we relax the constraint that the insurer needs to make a profit in a given year, we can tweak the parameters. For the same premium (partially paid for by capital reserves or VC/IPO cash), the insurer can offer better benefits, or a bigger network or less restrictions. Or for the same network, benefits and network, the insurer can take a bit off the premium. Winning the bottom price slots is really valuable in terms of head count.
So why would you want head count that you’re losing money on in the first year?
There are three legitimate business case reasons why a VC backed insurer might want to lose money in the first year to get a lot of new membership.