Gimme some money.
We raised over 13K in the last 36 hours.
Do I have to come right flat out and tell you everything?Post + Comments (19)
by DougJ| 19 Comments
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M.
Gimme some money.
We raised over 13K in the last 36 hours.
Do I have to come right flat out and tell you everything?Post + Comments (19)
by David Anderson| 14 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
The Kaiser Health Network has a good article on legislation going through Congress right now on a proposed tweak to the HSA rules:
some insurers and employers are easing the strain on consumers’ wallets by covering certain benefits like doctor visits or generic drugs before people have reached their plan’s deductible. But there’s a hitch: Under Internal Revenue Service rules, high-deductible plans that are set up to link to health savings accounts can only cover preventive services like vaccines and mammograms until patients buy enough services on their own to pay down their deductible.
A bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress in July that would allow high-deductible plans that can link to health savings accounts (HSA) to cover care for chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease before plan members have met their deductibles….
“We need to spend money differently,” said Dr. A. Mark Fendrick, director of the University of Michigan Center for Value-Based Insurance Design. “We should put a very high deductible on those things we don’t need and incentivize consumers to get the care they need.”
For example, he pointed to people with diabetes who need to have annual eye exams to prevent adult-onset blindness, “yet the fastest growing type of health plan, HSA high-deductible plans, covers those exams not at all,” he said.
This is an improvement over the status quo and it should be supported. We know that high deductible plans lead to people indiscriminately cutting reducing utilization without reference to whether or not the the foregone care is high value, low value or counter-productive. The evidence is more mixed on whether or not this leads to lagged healthcare cost explosions. Even if there are no social cost savings, suffering savings should be a priority.
But I don’t think this goes far enough.
The original round of high deductible health plans (HDHP) were basically the only low actuarial value plans out there. Co-insurance and co-pays were tweaked and slowly made worse but none were jacked up suddenly when the HDHP/HSA rules were written for the first time. Today, a low actuarial value plan can be made with a smorgasbord of cost-sharing design choices. It is easily possible to create plans that have the same actuarial value with a $3,000 difference in deductible. It is easy to create plans with the same deductible but wildly different actuarial values because of what services are covered by deductible.
So how do we make this better?
Allow HSA’s to be attached to any plan that has less than 80% or 85% actuarial value without caring about the cost-sharing configuration. CMS would need to create an actuarial value calculator for different market segments with some type of regional cost variation but that is fairly “straightforward”.
This post is in: Election 2016, Open Threads, Post-racial America, Proud to Be A Democrat
Clinton up 5 points in national poll after Trump's renewal of birther controversy https://t.co/pWU4sml3CP
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) September 20, 2016
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Apart from running the numbers, what’s on the agenda for the day?
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The must-win states: https://t.co/lZRWJ8yZMs pic.twitter.com/Ga3RtKEpxH
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) September 20, 2016
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Inch by Inch, State by StatePost + Comments (182)
This post is in: Election 2016, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Republicans in Disarray!, Assholes
WSJ asked 45 former White House economists for their views on Trump and Clinton. Results: https://t.co/nqf8DUgPud? pic.twitter.com/nmmAE9jBqO
— WSJ Think Tank (@WSJThinkTank) September 18, 2016
Thing about Presidential Candidate Donald J. Trump: He has not made himself popular with quite a few people who would normally be voting Republican. That’s the Wall Street Journal, pointing out how many serious money guys would rather vote for a woman Demon-crat than Deadbeat Donnie! Not to mention, former Republican Presidents of sterling pedigree…
Ah. GHWB told *a group of 40 people* that he will vote for Clinton. https://t.co/JyS3WAqSft
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) September 20, 2016
Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and Republican President George H.W. Bush are voting for @HillaryClinton.
What else do we need to know?
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) September 20, 2016
So how the ever-loving hell is “Trump confidante” and former Nixon ratfvcker Roger Stone hoping to improve his guy’s standings with public comments like this?
Trump confidante refers to former President George H W Bush as "CIA Drug Trafficker" https://t.co/9wogf8dW0c
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) September 21, 2016
CIA Drug Trafficker George H. W. Bush will vote for @HillaryCinton.
He ran drugs will Hillary’s hubby#MENA @BushCrimes pic.twitter.com/WcohJGSQXg— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) September 21, 2016
Is this another indicator of the Trump campaign’s mooted “FML, we’re only getting votes from the neo-Nazis and Alex Jones late-night listeners, so we might as well go full tinfoil hat”? Because I can’t imagine many of those much-sought-after college-educated suburban white women voters thinking, Well, I always thought of Poppy Bush as a nice old gentleman, but now that his criminal past has been exposed…
Aaaand here comes official campaign manager, KellyAnne Conway!
“I respect the 92-year-old-former president very much… that’s his right” @KellyannePolls on HW backing HRC https://t.co/qdJVGuOtZP
— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) September 21, 2016
If there's one thing that'd piss Dubya off enough to publicly chuck grenades at Trump, it's if Trump goes after… https://t.co/fzweoJch5m
— Zeddonymous (@ZeddRebel) September 21, 2016
Gosh, she said, it’s a good thing for Trump that the Bush family doesn’t hold grudges!
Late Night WTF Open Thread: All the <em>Best</em> PeoplePost + Comments (27)
by Adam L Silverman| 100 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security
There are ongoing demonstrations against the Charlotte Mecklenberg Police Department’s shooting of an African American man this afternoon.
#BREAKING Keep hearing loud pops, protesters clashing with police @WBTV_News pic.twitter.com/SszFDeRm0V
— Alex Giles WBTV (@AlexGilesNews) September 21, 2016
#BREAKING It appears gas has just been sent into the crowd @WBTV_News pic.twitter.com/LTXk8w0vDX
— Alex Giles WBTV (@AlexGilesNews) September 21, 2016
Early today plainclothes, undercover officers from the Charlotte Mecklenberg Police Department (CMPD) shot and killed 43 year old Keith Lamont Scott.
The shooting happened around 4 p.m. at The Village at College Downs apartment complex on the 9600 block of Old Concord Road. Officers said they were searching for a person with an outstanding warrant when they saw a man get out of a vehicle with a firearm.
When the man, later identified as 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, got back into the vehicle, the officers approached. The report states Scott then got back out of the vehicle “armed with a firearm and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers who subsequently fired their weapon striking the subject.”
His family has argued that he was waiting in his truck and reading a book while waiting for his son to be dropped off from school.
The brother of the man police shot and killed tells me he was holding a book and waiting for his son to be dropped off from school @wsoctv
— Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) September 20, 2016
And they are directly contradicting the CMPD account that he was armed:
Sister of the man police shot and killed: "he didn't have no gun, he wasn't messing with nobody" @wsoctv pic.twitter.com/37k55Lt70H
— Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) September 21, 2016
Not that it makes anything better, but WSOC 9’s Joe Bruno has just reported out that the officer who shot Mr. Scott is also African American:
From CMPD sources: both of the officer and the victim involved in this shooting are African-American @wsoctv pic.twitter.com/fUFYYESz1m
— Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) September 21, 2016
Given the community response to today’s events and the CMPD’s response to the community, this is going to be a fluid, dynamic, and quickly changing situation. As more info comes in, I’ll update until I rack out for the night.
Updated at 11:55 PM EDT
Here’s the link to WSOC TV 9’s Live Feed.
And here’s WBTV 3’s Live Feed.
The Mayor of Charlotte has just tweeted out the following:
The community deserves answers and full investigation will ensue. Will be reaching out to community leaders to work together @CMPD @ncnaacp
— Mayor of Charlotte (@CLTMayor) September 21, 2016
Breaking News: Ongoing Demonstrations in CharlottePost + Comments (100)
by Tim F| 171 Comments
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads
I spent a year and a half investigating the Clinton Foundation and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.
***Update***
OK, enough Clinton-Trump for now. You know what this blog needs? A pug named Dumpling.
Treat?
Crap, I’m out of treats.
Chat about whatever.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Election 2016, Hail to the Hairpiece, Republican Venality, Seriously
"Donald Trump took money other people gave his charity and used it to pay his businesses' fines."
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) September 20, 2016
David Fahrenthold deserves at least one Pulitzer. And if his excellent reporting saves our country from the horrors of a Trump presidency, possibly a Medal of Freedom as well.
From his latest Washington Post article:
Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.
Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses…
If the Internal Revenue Service were to find that Trump violated self-dealing rules, the agency could require him to pay penalty taxes or to reimburse the foundation for all the money it spent on his behalf. Trump is also facing scrutiny from the New York attorney general’s office, which is examining whether the foundation broke state charity laws.
More broadly, these cases also provide new evidence that Trump ran his charity in a way that may have violated U.S. tax law and gone against the moral conventions of philanthropy…
The four new cases of possible self-dealing were discovered in the Trump Foundation’s tax filings. While Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns, the foundation’s filings are required to be public…
By all means, read the whole thing. Of course it’s been clear since the beginning that Trump wouldn’t release his personal returns because they’d show just how much of a petty thief and two-bit chiseler he is, but now it looks more and more like an attempt to avoid legal repercussions.
RYAN: Did you really pay your legal fines w/ charity money?
TRUMP: Just going forward, "I did it" is the answer to all questions, OK, rube?— Owen Ellickson (@onlxn) September 20, 2016
“Think what the reaction would be if Clinton used her foundation’s money to pay off personal lawsuits.” https://t.co/Gr53pwDJUJ
— David Frum (@davidfrum) September 20, 2016