Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

We still have time to mess this up!

Let there be snark.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

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

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

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

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Bark louder, little dog.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Second rate reporter says what?

The next time the wall wtreet journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

This really is a full service blog.

Infrastructure week. at last.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Not all heroes wear capes.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

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World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It)

Late Night Open Thread: Contagions, Viral & Financial

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It’s all fun & games, if you’re Sam Bankman-Friend and his polycule buddies, or the hordes of entranced journamalists who fell for his ‘Effective Altruism’ blather. But it’s a real tragedy if, for instance, you were one of the West Africans caught up in SBF’s ‘evangelical’ ‘multi-level-marketing like’ promotions.

And then there’s the broader social contagion, one not-very-visible part of which Dr. Rasmussen explains:

This dude is Sam Bankman-Fried AKA SBF. Until last week, he was the billionaire head of FTX, a crypto exchange, and was known for being an “effective altruism” philanthropist. Effective altruism is the idea of using evidence & reason to benefit the most people.

That all seemed to go fine for SBF until there was the crypto equivalent of a bank run and he went bankrupt overnight. Now there’s a whole lot of EA longtermist pet projects that are suddenly without funding.

So why am I talking about this? I’m not a billionaire. I’m a boring academic virologist on the Canadian prairies. Why should I care about the self-regarding strategies tech bros use to make themselves feel better about being unrepentant wealth-hoarding capitalist moneyphages?

Well, because SBF decided, in between meetings spent playing League of Legends and being inappropriately barefoot that one of these projects was to end risky pathogen research. And he was willing to spend cash, though evidently without due diligence on how that money was spent.

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Notes on needing/supporting Abortions in the US, now and Post-Roe (Open Thread)

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Everything below is from my prior awareness and information collected recently. Corrections welcome:

If you need assistance, or want to help the fight via donations and/or volunteering? This document focuses on local/state level support groups.
(Thanks to UncleEbeneezer for the hookup on this!)

A broader, if slightly older (just a couple years), set of guidance is the Handbook for a Post-Roe America by Robin Marty. I can recommend the author as someone I paid into the Patreon of, before she closed it. And that was due to the quality, and importance, of her work in this area.

I hear from some sources, including a Doula I know, that acquiring Plan B now is wise — if you can w/o impacting overall supply. For those unaware, Plan B is a “morning after” drug. However, you should be clear on it’s usage and esp. it’s weight restrictions. It’s not dangerous, just has key limitations.

In addition to http://reprocare.com, mentioned in 1st link above, someone here noted https://aidaccess.org/ as another site for Abortion via mail.

I’m providing a variety of approaches — different people will have different needs. Even today, Roe is a dead letter for poorer people, especially of Color, due to lack of Internet access and ability to take time off for the procedure, if needed — including for bullshit “waiting periods”.

Many of the agencies and advocates mentioned above have experience, and guidance, in these areas. It’s worth at least getting familiar with modern options now, even if you’re in a “safe” State.

We have a lot of threads on the Roe leak. This one’s Open.

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The Leopards Claim Another Party Member…

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There was this story in the Boston Globe a few days ago about a woman who switched from an Obamacare compliant plan to a “healthcare sharing ministry”–aka a Jesus be-draped sham plan:

Hargreaves, 58, of Chatham, a self-employed real estate agent, said the religious aspect of the plan was not the primary reason she chose it. She was shopping for savings.

Hargreaves said she had purchased traditional health insurance through a broker since 2015, but began discussing alternatives a couple years later when her premiums rose significantly. At the time, brokers were free to sell sharing ministry plans, and Hargreaves signed on to one such plan in March 2019 and switched to OneShare at the beginning of 2020.

So, not a religious move, but an economic one, which is fine; health insurance can be damn expensive in the Hub of the Universe, and lots of people try to save whatever they can.

But you can guess what came next.

For a while it worked, cutting her monthly premium by hundreds of dollars.

Then, in March, she had double hip-replacement surgery to relieve acute pain, followed by a four-day stay in the hospital and extensive physical therapy.

The surgery was successful, but Hargreaves’s “insurer” refused to cover any of the costs, saying her surgery was the result of a preexisting condition. She was saddled with nearly $75,000 in medical bills.

The Leopards Claim Another Party Member... 1

There are a couple of morals to draw from this utterly predictable tale. First is that “religious” business will be as vicious as any secular one in defense of the bottom line. Assuming otherwise is a mark’s move.

Another is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. If you buy “insurance” that says right on the box it isn’t insurance, well…

At the bottom of its website homepage, OneShare says it is not an insurer. In an e-mail, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit told me it’s different from a traditional insurer because it does not assume the risk of medical expenses incurred by its members, does not promise to pay expenses, and makes no guarantee of coverage.

Instead, it collects monthly “contributions” — the equivalent of premiums paid to insurers — from members and coordinates the payment of eligible medical expenses among members according to its own established rules.

This is why I do have some sympathy for Hargreaves. She is a minnow, swimming with sharks:

Still, the nonprofit shares some of the look and feel of an insurer with its offerings of various coverage packages with names like “Catastrophic,” “Classic,” and “Complete,“ each with a schedule of per-visit payments (looking a lot like copayments) and different in- or out-of-network rates. (Hargreaves has the “Complete” plan, which is the most comprehensive.)

And the operation does try to put plenty of lipstick on their pig:

Health care sharing ministry members have “a common set of ethical or religious beliefs and share medical expenses in accordance with those beliefs,” according to the exemption in the ACA. Many of them are aligned with Christian ideals or principles.

The OneShare website displays biblical quotations, including one about carrying “each other’s burdens.”

Maybe they’ll carry your groceries across the street, especially if your hips aren’t doing well…but there are clearly limits to “Christian” charity in this instance.

So, yeah: these not-insurance insurance scams are just that…fine if you don’t need them, a possibly fatal, certainly expensive shit show if you do. The good news in Massachusetts is that since 2020, these “plans” can’t be sold in the state by brokers or agents. You really have to work at it to get one now.

But that still leaves Hargreaves on the hook, and, as noted while I do have some sympathy for her circumstances–hell, a lot from one angle; $75,000 is a potentially life-wrecking sum to have to pony up–there are limits, and this detail in the story tests them:

Hargreaves assumed coverage would be routinely approved. Her ailment was degenerative, attributable to aging, not a preexisting condition, she said.

Hargreaves said she did not hear back from OneShare on her request for preapproval of coverage until the day before her surgery on March 4. She said she was shocked by the denial.

Hargreaves said the surgery went forward nonetheless, in the belief that coverage would be granted on appeal.

But it wasn’t. In its denial, OneShare focused on her 2019 checkup, when her primary care physician wrote that Hargreaves had “osteoarthritis in both hips,” based on Hargreaves’s own description of pain and reduced mobility.

It’s the “I’ll win on appeal” assumption that gets me. I can think of ways to describe the thoughts and emotional perspective that might lead one to bet on that assumption, but perhaps that should be an exercise for the commentariat.

And last, this line is the one that we all could have anticipated:

“If I knew [OneShare] was this difficult and restrictive, I would have stayed clear of it,” she said.

Well…

The Leopards Claim Another Party Member...

This thread: open is it. Is it? It is.

Image: Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Étude de léopard, c. 1732

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The Coming Apocalypse

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Ed Yong, who has done really excellent work throughout the pandemic, has a tragic, terrifying piece up at The Atlantic just now, “The Hospitals Know What’s Coming.”

The story focuses on one institution, the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. It’s a major center of excellence, and as Yong reports was uniquely well-placed to deal with an epidemic:

After the SARS outbreak of 2003, its staff began specifically preparing for emerging infections. The center has the nation’s only federal quarantine facility and its largest biocontainment unit, which cared for airlifted Ebola patients in 2014. They had detailed pandemic plans. They ran drills. Ron Klain, who was President Obama’s “Ebola czar” and will be Joe Biden’s chief of staff in the White House, once told me that UNMC is “arguably the best in the country” at handling dangerous and unusual diseases.

But, as Yong meticulously reports, no amount of preparation can overcome a broad-based failure of basic public health measures.

In the past two weeks, the hospital had to convert an entire building into a COVID-19 tower, from the top down. It now has 10 COVID-19 units, each taking up an entire hospital floor. Three of the units provide intensive care to the very sickest people, several of whom die every day. One unit solely provides “comfort care” to COVID-19 patients who are certain to die. “We’ve never had to do anything like this,” Angela Hewlett, the infectious-disease specialist who directs the hospital’s COVID-19 team, told me. “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path.”

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That’s just from the top of the story. Read the whole thing–really. There are well-told human stories throughout, and my admiration for and sense of obligation to everyone working on the healthcare front lines of this have ratcheted way up from already high levels.

 

But the incidents and anecdotes are in service of the larger point, which is tragic and utterly infuriating. The conscious and willful failure of leadership that has persuaded so many people to ignore the risk has created the conditions for utter disaster. When–and it doesn’t appear to be an “if”–the disease exceeds hospital systems’ capacity the death toll will accelerate.
This will be bad everywhere, but worse in the places that are now hardest hit: the more rural states with fewer major hospitals to draw upon.
While cities like New York or Boston have many big hospitals that can care for advanced strokes, failing hearts that need mechanical support, and transplanted organs, “in this region, we’re it,” [critical care Dr. Dan] Johnson says. “We provide care that can’t be provided at any other hospital for a 200-mile radius. We’re going to need to decide if we continue to offer that care, or if we admit every single COVID-19 patient who comes through our door.”
Yong concludes his story with the same truth David Anderson keeps drumming into our thick skulls:
 It takes several days for infected people to show symptoms, a dozen more for newly diagnosed cases to wend their way to hospitals, and even more for the sickest of patients to die. These lags mean that the pandemic’s near-term future is always set, baked in by the choices of the past. It means that Ricketts is already too late to stop whatever UNMC will face in the coming weeks (but not too late to spare the hospital further grief next month). It means that some of the people who get infected over Thanksgiving will struggle to enter packed hospitals by the middle of December, and be in the ground by Christmas.
This is what makes this piece both a sober, meticulously reported and heart breaking story, and a call to action. It’s too late to deal with what’s heading at us, what will happen in the latter half of December and beyond remains subject to our choices, good or bad.
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On that happy note…open thread.
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Image: Gustave Doré, Jesus healing the sick, before 1883.

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Friday Evening Open Thread: World’s Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It)

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Good thing for him the Oval Office Occupant is on the Gold tier of the public dole…

I don’t want him to die (at least not until November 3rd), but the Goddess of Consequences knows he’s earned whatever he’s due to endure.

Also, it looks like the “President’s” physician doesn’t run his own twitter account:

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The President Announced He’s Signing an Executive Order To Cover Pre-Existing Conditions: If You Think It’s a Joke, You’ve Missed the Point!!

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During his press conference yesterday at his golf club, the President announced he’d be signing s series of executive orders (EOs) over the next several weeks. Almost all of these are actions that are outside his authority to take. One in particular, however, has drawn a lot of derision.

It was then trumpeted by several surrogates in both the administration and the campaign:

The response have ranged from the humorous to the fully sarcastic:

This is not a joke, nor should it be treated as one. If you think it is a joke, you’ve missed the point. This, like so many other things I keep pointing out here, is a type of influence operation. What most Americans, even those of us who are hyper-vigilant when it comes to political news and information about health insurance because we’ve got Dave Anderson keeping us informed here every day, either don’t know or don’t remember is that THERE ARE A LOT OF HEALTH INSURANCE PLANS THAT WERE PITCHED AT BOTH TRUMP SUPPORTERS, LOW INFORMATION AMERICANS, AND LESS AFFLUENT AMERICANS THAT DO NOT COVER PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS!!!!!!!

And the reason that these health care plans exist is because Republican elected officials complained about them not existing from the time the Affordable Care Act, now doing business as ObamaCare, passed. They had a screwy version of them in their nebulous replace plan that they were allegedly going to pass after they passed repeal, which would then, supposedly, force them to actually introduce something that could be called a replacement bill. And they exist because the President signed an executive order allowing for them when the Republican efforts to repeal and replace the ACA failed in 2017.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to consider expanding health-insurance coverage in low-cost plans that are not subject to Affordable Care Act rules, a move that could raise costs for sicker people.

The order is designed to provide what the White House calls “alternatives” to plans offered through Obamacare markets. It comes after the implosion last month of Republicans’ latest attempt to dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature health-care law, a chief policy goal that Trump and GOP lawmakers campaigned on.

Speaking before signing the order at a White House ceremony, Trump said consumers “will have so many options.”

“People will have great, great health care,” he added.

Everyone who is making fun of the President’s announcement or his administration, campaign, and media surrogates doing victory laps about this on social media because they think it is a joke since it is already the law because of the Affordable Care Act need to sober up because they have missed the point. It is not a joke, it is a psychological operation aimed by the President, his administration, his campaign, and his surrogates, included Republican elected officials at Americans (emphasis mine):

Psychological operations (PSYOP) are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.

The real objective of this executive order is not to ensure that insurance plans cover people with pre-existing conditions. Rather, the objective is to convince Republicans and conservatives who have hated the ACA/Obamacare, especially those that don’t know what is in it because they don’t want to because it is Obama’s plan. It is also targeted at less affluent and lower information Americans who have internalized the misinformation and agitprop about the ACA/Obamacare that Republican elected and appointed officials and conservative elites and notables have been pushing through conservative news, digital news, and social media for a decade and, as a result, actually believe that any plan that they could purchase through the ACA/Obamacare is both prohibitively expensive and does not actually cover anything because the policies are full of loopholes! And who were gullible enough to then buy one of the short term plans created by the President 17 October 2017 EO. This is the target audience. The better informed ones don’t care that the Administration is supporting the Republican Attorneys General’s lawsuit trying to have the entire ACA struck down, which would actually remove the pre-existing condition protections in the law for everyone in the US not on one of these short term plans. And the low information ones simply don’t know. What they know of current political events, including what is going on with health insurance, is either very little or is filtered through their local news, where Sinclair has an overwhelming influence and impact, or their or their families’ and friends’ social media, which means it is highly influence by Fox News, OANN, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, the Daily Caller, and dozens more purveyors of misinformation, disinformation, and agitprop.

This is NOT A JOKE! It is an influence operation intended to further solidify a base that the President’s campaign leadership is worried might get shaky, the larger Republican party and conservative movement, which is a bit wobbly right now, and less affluent and low information Americans, especially low information voters, who will see or hear or read this and think the President has done something good for them.

That’s not the joke, that’s the point.

Open thread!

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So About That Third Party Spoilers Thing… The Libertarian Presidential Candidate And A Possibly Rabid Bat Edition

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What effect might his have on Ms. Jorgenson’s views on the US healthcare system? Well let’s just say kvetching was involved!

There is, as of 11:10 PM EDT, no word on the condition of the bat and whether it has contracted anything serious or life threatening from coming into contact with Ms. Jorgenson.

Open thread!

Obligatory:

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