Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

Most of you should go to bed and try to be better Jackals in the morning.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Is trump is trying to break black America over his knee? signs point to ‘yes’.

We will not go back.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

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Risk adjustment in the ACA at both ends of the spectrum

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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released the 2023 risk adjustment report earlier this week.  Risk adjustment is intended to make insurers risk agnostic.  Transfers are paid within state between insurers with no additional federal dollars entering the market.  The one exception is an insurer funded catastrophic risk pool that covers a portion of claims over $1 million dollars. My friend and colleague Wesley Sanders combined the data with a few different sources of enrollment data to produce a per member per month (PMPM) transfer calculation. 

I have a few observations that I want to pull out from the Top 10 recipients and payers of risk adjustment.

Largest Reciepents of RA PMPM Largest Payers of RA PMPM
MM PMPM Transfer MM PMPM Transfer
1 68,267 738.62 45,130 -209.73
2 53,801 722.59 878,706 -184.31
3 62,943 522.43 306,751 -178.48
4 19,085 465.33 619,292 -169.04
5 334 375.05 76,501 -124.72
6 5,079 352.79 1,975,515 -116.11
7 5,555 290.13 1,489,464 -106.33
8 99,663 254.91 109,178 -103.41
9 30,680 219.52 7,331,524 -102.75
10 98,887 213.65 13,659,170 -102.37

First, look at the difference in the size of the transfers. The #1 payer pays $209 PMPM into risk adjustment.  This is smaller than the PMPM of the 10th largest recipient.  The tails are very different in the PMPM size of the transfers.

More interesting to me is the sheer difference in member months.  An enrollee can have anywhere from 1 to 12 enrolled months in a year.  Dividing total member months by 10 or 11 probably gives a decent approximation of total unique individuals enrolled.  The Top 10 net recipients are SMALL to TINY insurers.  I am trying to figure out how insurer #5 with 334 enrolled member months generates enough revenue to justify hiring an actuary to file their rates.

The net risk adjustment payers range from small-ish to really BIG.  This is interesting.  It is not unusual to see extremes of a distribution to be heavily composed of smaller entities because each enrolled individual has more variance in a small cluster than a big cluster.  But we don’t see that here.  Instead, we see some national and regional carriers having substantial payables.

We probably should think about the market dynamics where the big companies are actively seeking to enroll low risk enrollees and the small companies get extreme tail risk.

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Republicans Love the Classics

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Republicans Love the Classics

Same as it ever was:

Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) on Tuesday lambasted GOP claims that Vice President Harris is in her role because she’s a “DEI hire,” saying that is a cover-up for a racial slur and among “racist dog whistles” being used against her.

“Whenever you hear DEI, I want you to think about the N-word. I want you to think about racial slurs. That’s what they actually mean,” Frost said during a CNN interview Tuesday.

CNN anchor Jim Acosta then asked Frost if Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) — who called Harris a “DEI hire” a day earlier, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion — was being racist when he made that remark.

“I have a good relationship with the congressman. I think sometimes, though, he does use rhetoric that is racist. And whether people know it’s racist or not, I’m here to tell them that is racist. And I hope they won’t use that rhetoric anymore,” Frost responded.

It’s who they are.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Passing the Torch

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Lots of details here, worth reading the whole thing — “Democratic convention planners are working to pull off a dramatic Biden-Harris role reversal”:

After nearly a near year of careful planning, organizers of the Democratic National Convention are in a mad dash to accommodate a new nominee, a re-crafted program and a highly compressed deadline to pull everything off as though this was the plan all along.

With President Joe Biden now out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris pursuing the party’s nomination, a dramatic role reversal for the two is likely to play out before a nationally televised audience when around 5,000 delegates, 12,000 volunteers and 15,000 media members gather for four days in Chicago starting Aug. 19.

Harris is banking on introducing her vice presidential pick to the country and standing at center stage to accept her party’s nomination. Biden — who until mere days ago thought he’d be the one getting the nod — will have a more peripheral and ceremonial role akin to the treatment of second-term presidents set to leave office.

He will still give a speech and have his achievements feted, but the whole thing will require a delicate political balance between the president and his No. 2.

“If it’s a Biden-Harris reelection convention, it’s all about doubling down on the great accomplishment. The challenge, obviously, will be how to sort of bank that, but also talk about the future,” said William M. Daley, a former Obama White House chief of staff whose father and brother were Chicago mayors…

“It lights a fire under national Democrats. It’s an added level of history,” said Christian Perry, political director for Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. He added that Harris would break more barriers in a city that produced a series of history-making Black Democrats, from the Rev. Jesse Jackson to Barack Obama…

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On The Road – BretH – On The Road – BretH – Australia! Melbourne and Sydney Part 2

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BretH

Continuing my series from my trip to Australia we’re still in Melbourne and I have several days on my own to do as much exploring as I can.

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On The Road - BretH - On The Road - BretH - Australia! Melbourne and Sydney Part 2 9
MelbourneMay 15, 2024

I am an avid tennis player and spent weekends in my youth watching tennis on TV – Jimmy Conners, John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, the US Open, Wimbledon, and the Australian Open. I woke up at 3AM in 2017 to see Roger Federer defeat Rafael Nadal in an epic match  at the Australian Open that marked the beginning of Federer’s renaissance just before retirement. So it was natural that I visit the site of the Australian Open in Melbourne. I had arranged for a tour of Rod Laver stadium but that was canceled at the last minute but the grounds are open for wandering and photographing. Highlights are the iconic statue of Laver outside his stadium, and a small tree-lined square surrounded by the busts of famous Australian tennis players, from the distant and the recent past.

Dank Grey Dawn Open Thread: Trump Says He *Will* Debate Harris

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TFG says a lot of sh*t, and my suspicion is that he’s only saying this now because he wants to pull media attention back to himself. (Given his RNC speech, I’m not sure his handlers would let him on stage again.)

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday committed to debating Vice President Kamala Harris — and said he would be “willing” to face off against her more than once.

The next debate, which is scheduled for Sept. 10, is to be hosted by ABC News. Trump in recent days has pushed for the more conservative Fox News to hold the debate, calling ABC “a joke.”

But during a conference call with reporters on Tuesday afternoon, Trump said he would debate Harris, regardless of whether it was on ABC, and said he “would be willing to do more than one debate actually.”…

Trump said he believed Harris would be “easier” to defeat than Biden “because he was slightly more mainstream, but not much.”

Still, on Tuesday afternoon the Trump campaign released a memo from pollster Tony Fabrizio, in which he argued that Harris would see a polling bump that would temporarily put her ahead of Trump in surveys.

“Given what has happened over the past couple of days and her impending VP choice, there is no question that Harris will get her bump earlier than the Democrat’s Convention,” Fabrizio wrote. ”And that bump is likely to start showing itself over the next few days and will last a while until the race settles down.”…

(Getting the feeling that Politico, and probably most of the other Savvy Journamalism outlets, are signalling that they’re willing to change course if TFG no longer looks like a winner. Live by the narrative, die by the narrative.)

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One of Our Jackals Has a Podcast (Open Thread)

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Well, this doesn’t fit under Artists in Our Midst, and it doesn’t fit under Authors for Our Midst, but since we like to share and promote the creative work of our BJ peeps, we bring you brendancalling and his podcast.  brendancalling is an interesting guy, I hope you’ll read on!

by brendancalling

Thanks to Balloon Juice for the exposure!

Some of you may remember the blog called Booman Tribune, which was run and founded by Martin Longman in 2005. For many years he was anonymously known only as BooMan. Booman Tribune was a progressive community site with contributor diaries, much like Daily Kos. A decade or so ago he dropped the anonymity, ended the diary feature, and renamed the site Progress Pond, where I occasionally contribute as a front-pager as well. You also may know Martin from his many years writing at the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, which has other great veterans like Kevin Drum, Steve Benen, Ed Kilgore and Nancy LeTourneau. Before all that, he worked for ACORN as a county coordinator and he’s done work for Howard Dean’s Democracy for America, too.

Most of you jackals know me from comments here at the blog, and my sporadic music threads. I also used to host Drinking Liberally in Philadelphia, back when our chapter was something of ground zero for the progressive blogosphere: Susie Madrak, Duncan Black, Upyernoz, Jim Cappazola, and many more were regulars. We got a bunch of great guests back then too: John Fetterman visited when he was running against Toomey, then mayoral candidate Michael Nutter dropped by, Joe Trippi showed up at a couple of times. Later, I wound up writing for Raw Story for a year or two.

About a year ago, Martin asked if I wanted to co-host a podcast together, and not thinking about how much work goes into editing, I said yes: thus, the Progress Pondcast was born. “Cantankerous progressive commentary on news, politics, culture, and whatever else we’re complaining about this week.”

If we were Public Enemy, the politically-charged hip hop band, Marty would be Chuck D—the guy with the knowledge—and I’d be Flava Flav, making jokes and cracking wise. Marty’s got a really deep knowledge about parliamentary procedures. For example, he predicted long before anyone else (to my knowledge), that we’d end up with some sort of bipartisan “functional majority” in the House, the one that pays our bills and allocates spending—which is where we are today.

In this most recent episode—lucky 13–we discussed the RNC shitshow, and the jaw-dropping willingness of Republicans to dispose of their dignity as they pretended to like Kid Rock’s “music.” We also talked about Balloon Juice commenter DougJ’s relentless trolling of the FTNYT, the overwhelming creepiness of JD Vance and Matt Gaetz, and we have a special guest: freelance journalist and folk singer Bill Hangley, who recently wrote “The Case for Kamala”, which in hindsight seems damned prescient. We also check out Bill’s new single, “For My Father, Who Loves the Law.” It’s a great song, and I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

A lot goes into doing these podcasts—it takes about three or four hours to edit the raw material down to a one-hour episode, and that’s if nothing goes wrong—but I think the important thing for the listener is that they hear us having fun, and that’s what we try to do. Well, that, and provide a unique perspective on the news and culture, and if you give us a listen I’ll think you’ll agree that we’re a little different.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the latest episode Give us a listen, and if you enjoy it, like and subscribe!

Spotify.
Apple.
Amazon.
Castbox.
I Heart Radio

And since it’s late evening, this is an open thread, too!

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Wednesday Night Open Thread

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Wednesday Night Open Thread 9

I guess I am pleasantly surprised to see the degree to which JD Vance is getting dragged for being an imposter. Hashtags like #shillbilly and #notfromhere are trending, and it is becoming quite glorious. Good stuff.

Not much to report here. Got caught in a downpour while out mowing the soccer fields, had dinner, and that’s pretty much it.

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