From the still-ongoing Yates hearing (hearing-watching thread downstairs):
Sally Yates just shut down Ted Cruz on Constitutional Law. pic.twitter.com/ONlwEYm64D
— jordan ? (@JordanUhl) May 8, 2017
Thwack! Open thread!
by Betty Cracker| 191 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes
From the still-ongoing Yates hearing (hearing-watching thread downstairs):
Sally Yates just shut down Ted Cruz on Constitutional Law. pic.twitter.com/ONlwEYm64D
— jordan ? (@JordanUhl) May 8, 2017
Thwack! Open thread!
by David Anderson| 348 Comments
This post is in: America, Foreign Affairs, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Bring On The Meteor, Not Normal
Former Acting US Attorney General Sally Yates is due to testify at 2:30 PM EST on many things including what she told the Trump Administration about how the Russians had their hooks in deep (allegedly of course) into their National Security Adviser.
Open thread….
Here is the live stream:
by DougJ| 99 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I kind of like this defense, it seems like it could be lots of situations:
A senior Trump administration official acknowledged Monday that Obama raised the issue of Flynn, saying the former president made clear he was “not a fan of Michael Flynn.” Another official said Obama’s remark seemed like it was made in jest.
I thought US intelligence was kidding when they said “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S”!
by DougJ| 57 Comments
This post is in: Assholes
I’m no longer sure whether or not I’m kidding when I say that establishment journalists (better link for finding quote) should be first up against the wall when the revolution comes:
Trump-Ryan could be the perfect GOP partnership, so long as it lasts – a mix of legislative brawn and brains that delivers.
Paul Ryan is a wonk because he is a wonk.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Foreign Affairs, Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Trump Crime Cartel, Not Normal
The Trump-Kushner family businesses are no longer a hypothetical conflict. https://t.co/a0goo5vuwi pic.twitter.com/sQ3b9zGPKa
— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) May 7, 2017
After furor in Beijing, Kushner slide showing Trump as EB-5 decisionmaker remains in Shanghai @keithbradsher reports https://t.co/ryaCGTJ9Hw
— Mike Forsythe ??? (@PekingMike) May 7, 2017
Despite considerable attention over the weekend, the Kushner family has yet to be dissuaded from shilling their high-level “access” to Chinese investors hoping for a Disney-style FastPass to the front of the visa line:
… Kushner Companies’ China roadshow, promoting $500,000 investments in New Jersey real estate as the path to a residency card in the United States, moved to Shanghai on Sunday after a similar pitch on Saturday in Beijing. Security was tighter in Shanghai than it had been in Beijing, where reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post briefly attended the event before being kicked out.
Mr. Kushner has said he has stepped back from the day-to-day operations of the family business. But government ethics filings show that he and Ivanka Trump, his wife and the president’s daughter, continue to benefit from their stake in Kushner Companies’ real estate business and other investments, which is worth as much as $600 million…
NYMag adds:
… Kushner is also no stranger to EB-5 visas, as he reportedly raised $50 million in loans using the program to help finance a Trump-branded 50-story apartment tower in Jersey City called Trump Bay Street. Kushner, who has done repeated business with Chinese firms, has become a primary adviser within the White House regarding matters related to the country. He has promised to recuse himself from any White House discussions on the future of the EB-5 program, but his family is clearly still looking to benefit from the program before any decisions are made by the Trump administration.
This is also not the first controversy involving Kushner Companies and China since Jared took on his multitasked role in the White House. The company’s recently abandoned effort to negotiate millions of dollars in equity for a Manhattan redevelopment project from China’s Anbang Insurance Group was widely criticized by American lawmakers and government ethics experts as a scenario in which China might be trying to gain favorable treatment from the Trump administration…
Kushners selling visas in exchange for investments in their properties will be a fun sub-bullet in impeachment docs https://t.co/Nv4SY7ABwk
— laura olin (@lauraolin) May 6, 2017
To be clear: Trump chokes off immigration while his son-in-law & chief adviser's gang literally SELLS visas. https://t.co/tcdzFVjCN3
— David Waldman (@KagroX) May 6, 2017
In fairness visas are worth even more when you choke off immigration. Just good business sense! https://t.co/gkMLzNLgUV
— Gady Epstein (@gadyepstein) May 6, 2017
Open Thread: Still Grifting the “Golden Visas”Post + Comments (50)
by Betty Cracker| 129 Comments
This post is in: Dolt 45, Election 2016, Election 2018, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, DC Press Corpse, Decline and Fall, General Stupidity, Our Failed Media Experiment
Someone sounds awfully worried about Sally Yates’ testimony before the senate today:
Yates will be questioned this afternoon about her warning to the Trump people regarding Flynn’s Russia problem. So Trump is preemptively intimidating her like a sub-literate mafia goon while simultaneously blaming the Obama administration for his own shitty personnel decisions.
President Obama FIRED Flynn before Trump picked him off the trash heap, wound him up and sent him on the “LOCK HER UP!” tour. And apparently Trump’s band of grifting idiots didn’t bother to vet the utterly compromised crackpot Flynn before sharing highly classified information with him as erstwhile NSA. But President “The Buck Stops Anywhere But Here” can’t be bothered with such details.
What are we to conclude from this, aside from the obvious, which is that the person who occupies the Oval Office is a lying, irresponsible, addled dolt — which we already knew? He’s worried about this Russia thing, which just won’t go away. Should he be?
I hope very much that the Russia investigation turns up a bombshell that removes Trump from office, but I have zero faith it will. Comey is a preening hack who seems convinced that hostility from Republicans and Democrats validates his “last honest man in D.C.” conceit. The GOP controls congress, and they’ve already sold out the country to a demented demagogue, so they’ll hamstring every investigation that could endanger their hold on power.
But 2018 hasn’t happened yet, and there’s still time to prevent the next round of interference. The Democrats have their role to play to stop a hostile foreign power from undermining democracy. The FBI and intelligence communities have theirs. And the media has a responsibility here too.
This might sound like a crazy suggestion, but maybe media outlets like the NYT, etc., could use recent developments abroad as well as upcoming events like the Yates testimony as an excuse to reset the way they approach the gigantic elephant in the room: a hostile foreign power’s ongoing meddling in U.S. elections. The way their colleagues in France dealt with a similar attempt by the same outfits to sleaze a fascist into power might be instructive.
Yates’ testimony is expected to directly contradict what Spicer and Priebus told the media about Team Trump’s handling of Flynn. Trump, knowing the testimony is likely to be damaging, implied that Yates committed a crime in the above tweet. We know Trump lied about President Obama’s “wire tapp” — the mainstream press was surprisingly forthright in saying so. I guess there’s a slim chance they’ll treat Trump’s slander of Yates in a similar manner.
I understand that ironic detachment and profitable horse race babbling are tough addictions to overcome, but it’s no exaggeration to say democracy is on the line. And while the Beltway hacks like to pretend they don’t want to be part of the story, the opposite is true: they glory in a scenario that allows them to be players rather than merely covering the game.
Well, here’s your chance, hacks. The Trump administration has lied to you and vilified you for months. You’ve refused to engage in serious introspection about your 2016 political coverage, but here’s a flashing red neon scandal that doesn’t even require that: a recognition that this meddling isn’t going away, and a chance to do something about it. Go be little Murrows. Your country needs you, God help us.
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
One of the core heuristics in health policy is it is a good to keep people out of the hospital. It is a good as hospitals are expensive. It is a good as hospital admissions are an indicator of declining function and capacity. It is a good as hospitals are a reservoir of germs. It is a good as hospital stays are just not where most people want to be.
Prescription drugs can serve as a partial substitute for hospitalization. If someone takes a pill that lowers their heart attack risk, the drug is replaces a hospitalization for a heart attack. If the number of pills needed to avoid a hospital day costs less than a hospital day, we as a society should encourage it on cost, quality and quality of life grounds.
Austin Frakt at the Upshot looks at how Medicare crosses the incentive structure by how it is structurally fractured.
some conditions — diabetes and asthma, to name a few — certain drugs are necessary to avoid more costly care, like hospitalizations. This simple principle gives rise to a little-recognized problem with Medicare’s prescription drug benefit…
Medicare stand-alone prescription drug plans do. They achieve lower premiums by raising co-payments. This acts to discourage the use of drugs that would help protect against other, more disruptive and serious health care use, like hospitalization….
A stand-alone plan never has to pay for hospital or physician visits — those are covered by traditional Medicare. Another way to get drug benefits from Medicare is through a Medicare Advantage plan that also covers those other forms of health care and is subsidized by the government to do so….
A study by the economists Kurt Lavetti, of Ohio State University, and Kosali Simon, of Indiana University, quantifies the cost. Compared with Medicare Advantage plans, stand-alone drug plans charge enrollees about 13 percent more in cost sharing for drugs that are highly likely to help patients avoid an adverse health event within two months.
The business model for the stand along drug plans is a hack on the fact that hospitalizations are someone else’s problem. They are off-loading risk to Medicare Part A and Part B. Medicare Advantage prescription drug benefits don’t have the ability to off-load their cost to someone else so they have a different behavioral incentive to actually look at the total cost of care for a patient. In most cases, that means working really hard to find the simplest and cheapest ways to keep people out of the hospital.
Austin suggests integrating a prescription drug benefit directly into Medicare fee for service. I have a hard time seeing how that works for traditional Medicare as Medicare is not allowed to say no and their active care management capacity is limited. I think it could make sense for Medicare Fee for Service Accountable Care Organizations and other alternative payment methodologies to push value based incentive compatible prescription drug plans. But this only works well, I think, when the payer has near universal responsibility for the cost of care.
At the same time, things like this reiterate why I am fundamentally optimistic about healthcare reform over the time span of decades:
Things like this is why I am fundamentally optimistic about health care reform in the United States. This is not genius level work. It is basic work and rejiggering of incentives to avoid being stupid. We have several iterations of being less stupid before we actually have to get too smart.
Crossing incentives to keep mom out of the hospitalPost + Comments (5)