Must watch tv:
Annnnnd scene!
John Oliver on Jill stein and Gary JohnsonPost + Comments (99)
by John Cole| 99 Comments
This post is in: Election 2016
by David Anderson| 17 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
This is a community service announcement and open thread.
Medicare started its annual open enrollment period over the weekend. It goes until December 7, 2016.
For people who are happily on traditional Medicare Fee for Service (FFS), you need to do very little except for your Part D drug coverage. For people who are either unhappy on FFS or are on a Medicare Advantage plan (MA) you have some work to do. We’ll talk about that.
We’ll start with Part D as everyone needs to deal with it.
Part D is the prescription drug coverage. The program is set up to have the insurer pay 75% of the costs of drugs after a $400 deductible and before the shrinking doughnut hole that starts at $3,700 where the individual is on the hook for all of the costs of the drugs until they spend another $1,250 in retail price drugs. After that catastrophic coverage kicks in where the individual is paying a small co-pay or small co-insurance with no out of pocket limit.
The one last thing that needs to be discussed is low income subsidies. People who make under 150% of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL) can get extra help on their out of pocket expenses. If you’re close or you know you’re under, talk to someone!
Every Part D plan is different in what they actually cover. Their benefit structure is similar but the covered items differ. The key item of difference is the formulary. The formulary is the list of covered drugs and which level of benefit/hoop jumping is needed. If you are on a set of drugs that work for you, you need to check the formulary of the plans to make sure they will still be covered for next year. The plans are required to cover a drug in each class but a particular brand may be in Plan A but not in Plan B. The least expensive Plan D offerings will tend to have the most restrictive formularies.
Medicare Advantage plans are also known as Part-C. Quite a few plans will offer to wrap up prescription drugs with their offerings. That can be easier but you need to make sure that the drugs you need are covered at an affordable price.
Let’s get into Medicare Advantage below:
MA plans replace Medicare Part A and Part B (docs and hospital coverage) of FFS Medicare. You need to pay your regular Medicare monthly fee and you could also be on the hook for a Medicare Advantage premium as well. Medicare Advantage looks a lot like Exchange or employer sponsored coverage. It has a network, it has a deductible, it has co-insurance and co-pays and it has a maximum out of pocket. The maximum out of pocket limit is, in my mind, the biggest selling point of Medicare Advantage.
Under traditional Medicare, as we saw when we looked at a million dollar a month patient in Iowa earlier this year, there is no catastrophic cap.
….They’ve run up $68,000 in personal responsibility payments just for inpatient care. And their benefit is exhausted by October. This is the case in Year 1, if it is a multi-year case, their benefit in Year 2 is gone in August in the best case scenario.
Now let us also assume that they are seeing three specialists per day (which is a very low estimate if they are in the ICU). Each specialist is getting $200 from Medicare of which the Part B co-insurance is 20%. So each day, the patient is running up $120 in medical bills. Over the course of a year that is another $44,000 in co-insurance.
If drugs cost $500,000 per month and they have a basic Part D plan with no extra help, they will pay a 5% co-insurance on everything above $7,000 per year. In Year 1 that means they’ll be on the hook for $300,000. In Year 2, they qualify for extra help so they’ll pay a $7.40 co-pay per brand name prescription. So Year 2 their prescription costs go down to the high four figures to the low five figures.
This is a worse case Medicare scenario.
If the individual has Medicare Advantage or a full Medicare Supplemental policy, their total exposure is capped from anywhere between $3,500 to $7,000 depending on what they bought.
Plenty of carriers offer Medicare Advantage plans. The key things to look at are the carriers’ Medicare Stars ratings. More stars is better. Four and Five Star plans are able to offer better benefits because they get paid more. After that, look at networks to see if your docs and hospitals are in network. And then figure out what you can pay per month and what your maximum exposure is.
Agents are willing to help you a lot because Medicare Advantage enrollment is a period where they can make some good money reasonably fast. Agents are paid by the carriers and their rates are capped by CMS. The incentive structure of paying a full commission for an unlike plan switch in the first year and then a half commission if someone keeps basically the same coverage for the second year does produce a skewed incentive. Agents will have an incremental incentive to produce churn. Churn makes them more money. So as a buyer, be aware that if you see an agent push a plan that looks a lot like your current plan and costs in both premium and expected out of pocket expenses but it is by a different insurer that their interests are diverging from yours. If they are pushing a different plan that is better, then great, the interests are close enough to aligning.
So open thread….
This post is in: Election 2016, Hillary Clinton 2016, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Woman in the Whitehouse 2016, Daydream Believers
“If you vote for someone other than Hillary, or if you don’t vote at all, you are helping to elect Hillary’s opponent”
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What’s on the agenda as we start another countdown week?
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Something to make you feel good about the world for once. https://t.co/qK8zX0uYCI
— Ben Yelin (@byelin) October 17, 2016
Less than 40 mins after going public, we met our goal and then some! Thank you all for showing that Americans are thirsty for civility and decency, and that we love our democracy above all our differences.
If you came in order to make a donation, might we suggest contributing to a North Carolina classroom through DonorsChoose?
This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Vagina Outrage, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All
(Beyonce original here)
“Who are you going to trust? A bunch of women you’ve never heard of? Or me, a guy you’ve seen tell hundreds of lies on your very own TV?"
— David Frum (@davidfrum) October 14, 2016
In role-playing games, Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are the no-name silhouettes who sell the real characters weaponry, provide clues as to the location of the treasure, and queue up to get slaughtered at the climax. They’re what theatre people call spear carriers; interchangeable bit parts labelled by role (the Butler, a Messenger, Soldiers) who show up to announce the play’s premise or to carry news from outside the stage setting. Scientists tell us that developing a theory of mind (“the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own”) — the understanding that, as the saying goes, Nobody is a spear-carrier in their own mind — is a key component of normal development.
Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have developed much of a Theory of Mind, especially pertaining to the female half of the human race (not that he’s alone among men in that respect). So I found Josh Barro’s tweets here interesting…
The creepy Trump line from Sunday's debate that keeps sticking with me is "I have tremendous respect for women. Women have respect for me."
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 14, 2016
Trump's reciprocity goes the other way: You don't respect me, I don't respect you.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 14, 2016
I'm sure Trump views his assaults as a kind of tit-for-tat reciprocity: She disrespected me by not offering, so I'll take.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 14, 2016
I think he believes he has a moral construct based around reciprocity, but the measures of what's "good" and "bad" are totally fucked.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 14, 2016
Two days later:
When Trump said "nobody respects women more than me," he meant he thinks everybody respects him more than they respect women.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 16, 2016
Open Thread: We’re All NPCs in Trump’s Tiny MindPost + Comments (41)
This post is in: Grifters Gonna Grift, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Post-racial America, Republican Venality, Assholes
Rudy Giuliani on FBI report on Clinton emails: "The fix was in from the very beginning" https://t.co/Kjdzd04Yoj
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 15, 2016
Giuliani can't get enough of the Tapper takedown https://t.co/7WLoHfB113
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) October 16, 2016
GOP Strong Angry Daddy Figure will defend his beau ideal to the last. Per the Washington Post:
… Giuliani, who has regularly appeared on the Sunday political-show circuit as one of Trump’s top surrogates, insisted Sunday on CNN that it is the Democrats who overwhelmingly engage in voter fraud because they “control the inner cities.”
“We do cheat,” Giuliani told “State of the Union” host Jake Tapper. “We have people who cheat in elections!”
“I’ve found very few situations where Republicans cheat,” Giuliani said, shrugging. “They don’t control the inner cities the way Democrats do. Maybe if Republicans controlled the inner cities, they’d do as much cheating as Democrats.”
“I think there are a lot of elections experts that would have very, very strong disagreements with you,” Tapper responded, shaking his head…
He won two elections in New York City! https://t.co/Da3a1yIEVU
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) October 16, 2016
He won two elections, running in a high-crime era as the Tough Sheriff who would put those people in their place (the inner city). But New Yorkers got Rudy’s number, just as they got Deadbeat ‘Developer’ Donnie Trump’s. If it hadn’t been for 9/11 — which Giuliani tried to use as an excuse for extending his last term — he’d be eking out a modest living on the rubber-chicken circuit. The Media Village Idiots’ romanticization of “America’s Mayor” greatly increased his marketability… just not always among those who knew first hand how badly he’d botched both the security preparations and the response.
How did Giuliani go from America's Mayor to a bug-eyed Trump surrogate? @paulschwartzman and I investigate. https://t.co/xsDozu1cyv pic.twitter.com/b5dtGatDaX
— Ben Terris (@bterris) October 14, 2016
As with everyone whose reputation ends up Trump-crumpled, Rudy was never a good person.
… Eight years after his own presidential bid failed, Giuliani has emerged as Donald Trump’s unflinching chief apologist, cheerleader and rhetorical Rottweiler, even as GOP leaders far and wide abandon their party’s candidate.
It’s a role that confounds allies and admirers who remember Giuliani’s rise as a law-and-order Republican twice elected in the country’s largest bastion of liberalism. Giuliani has long been an attention seeker, but his bombast was tempered by moderate, socially liberal politics — a model for many Republicans hoping to expand their base….
At a Florida rally Wednesday, Giuliani even suggested that Clinton, when she was a New York senator, was AWOL from Lower Manhattan after the 2001 attacks. “I heard her say she was there that day,” Giuliani told the crowd. “I was there that day, I don’t remember seeing Hillary Clinton.”
Within moments, social media was rife with photos of him touring Ground Zero the day after the attacks with Clinton, whom in fact he had praised at the time. Giuliani, who did not respond to multiple requests for interviews, apologized for his remarks, saying, “I made a mistake.”…
Another former adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he doesn’t want to offend the former mayor, said he is astonished by Giuliani’s willingness to play Trump’s understudy.
“From his days as U.S. attorney, he was at the top of the organizational chart,” the former adviser said. “Now he’s staff. He carries bags. He walks behind Trump. It’s just amazing to see.”…
Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who has known Giuliani for five decades, described the relationship between Giuliani and Trump as merely “cordial” before the presidential campaign. “Once Rudy got into it, he wouldn’t stop,” King said. “He enjoys center stage. He certainly has it now — and he hasn’t had it for a while.”…
Rudy craves the attention. And the fact that he used a face-saving medical diagnosis to withdraw from his 2000 Senate race after it became obvious Hillary Clinton was going to win bigly probably makes it that much sweeter for him to attack her now. But, of course, Trump promptly betrayed Rudy’s trust, as he does to anyone dumb or venal enough to stand in his orbit…
Nobody puts baby in the corner. pic.twitter.com/6tX4fghmcu
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) October 16, 2016
Kinda hoping Matt Taibbi is right about Rudy’s future:
… How Giuliani isn’t Trump’s running mate, no one will ever understand. Theirs is the most passionate television love story since Beavis and Butthead. Every time Trump says something nuts, Giuliani either co-signs it or outdoes him. They will probably spend the years after the election doing prostate-medicine commercials together…
Evil Minions Open Thread: Rude-y GhoulianiPost + Comments (54)
by Adam L Silverman| 99 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Military, Open Threads, Silverman on Security, War
Here's Ash Carter on the start of Iraq's campaign to take back Mosul. pic.twitter.com/zxarBkTXvb
— Patricia Zengerle (@ReutersZengerle) October 17, 2016
Here’s the link to the strike press releases by Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve.
There will be more to come on this in the coming days. In the meantime here’s a link to the CJTF Spokesman doing a briefing – he’s one of my former students and an excellent Public Affairs Officer. Three other former students of mine are also with him at CJTF OIR.
Updated at 11:05 PM EDT
I missed it, but Secretary of Defense Carter issued another, very important press release today as well:
Statement by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter on the Liberation of Dabiq
Release No: 16-110 Oct. 16, 2016
Release No: NR-369-16
Oct. 16, 2016I welcome today’s news that Syrian opposition forces liberated the Syrian town of Dabiq from ISIL control, aided by strong support from our ally Turkey and our international coalition. This is more than just the latest military result against this barbaric group. Dabiq held symbolic importance to ISIL. The group carried out unspeakable atrocities in Dabiq, named its English-language magazine after the town and claimed it would be the site of a final victory for the so-called caliphate. Instead its liberation gives the campaign to deliver ISIL a lasting defeat new momentum in Syria. Again I want to congratulate the Syrians who fought to free Dabiq and thank our ally Turkey for the close coordination during this operation.
by TaMara| 135 Comments
This post is in: Dog Blogging
Sorry if I’m stepping on anyone, but I figure I have about 10 minutes of peace before I have to focus all my attention on the 9 month old Great Dane.
We picked her up a couple of hours ago from the Big Bones rescue. She’s adorable and I’ll tell you all about her when we’ve all had some time to settle in.
We are testing out names right now, and I’m thinking Bailey. She seems to like it. I won’t use her old one because I don’t think it has happy memories – though nothing too traumatic in her life, just a lot of stress.
She won’t be as big a Bixby, but she’s gonna be taller….we’ll see how he reacts to that.
Meet The Newest Member Of The BJ FamilyPost + Comments (135)