Posts
Yeah.
I do think that.
I have a $1000 bill for a blood test ordered by my doctor - one tube of blood (from a 100% healthy patient who tried to refuse but was told it was mandatory for her exam) - from UNC Hospital.
Because I am uninsured due to being unemployed and poor in non-Medicaided North Carolina.
Yeah. Ain't health care in America grand? If you think there is something hinky in this story, read the essay below.
The average charge-to-cost ratios for hospital departments vary from a low of 1.8 for inpatient general routine care to a high of 28.5 for computed tomography (CT) scan, with anesthesiology right behind at 23.5. This means that a hospital whose costs in the CT department are $100 will charge a patient without health insurance and an out-of-network privately insured patient $2,850 for a CT scan.
Anderson, a professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health Policy and Management, says the impact of hospital markups is vast: “They affect uninsured and out-of-network patients, auto insurers and casualty and workers’ compensation insurers. The high charges have led to personal bankruptcy, avoidance of needed medical services, and much higher insurance premiums.”
Hospitals with strong market power, through either system affiliations or dominance of regional markets, were more likely to set high markups, as revealed by financial data in 2013 collected by the authors from all Medicare-certified hospitals with more than 50 beds.
In their paper, the authors examine the average hospital’s overall charge-to-cost ratio, which expresses the ratio of what the hospital charged compared to the hospital’s actual medical expense. In 2013, the average hospital with more than 50 beds had a charge-to-cost ratio of 4.32 ― that is, the hospital charged $4.32 when the cost was only $1.
However, certain types of hospitals had higher markups. In government-run hospitals, the ratio was 3.47; in nonprofit hospitals, 3.79; and in for-profit hospitals, 6.31. System-affiliated hospitals had an average ratio of 4.76, versus 3.54 for independent hospitals, and hospitals with regional market power had an average ratio of 4.56, versus 4.16 for hospitals that lacked such clout ― supporting the researchers’ finding that hospitals that can mark up prices will do so. The markups help their bottom lines; a one-unit increase in markup, such as from 3.0 to 4.0, is linked with a $64 higher revenue per adjusted discharge.
Debate Commission Enforces Exclusion By Having Jill Stein Escorted Off Hofstra
Did the debate (or its genesis) change anybody's mind?
Not Michael Moore's.
Who predicted Trump would win the Republican nomination waaaay before anyone else.
I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”
Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.
Maybe Ted Rall's?
Maybe not.
He pretty much nails why I lost interest shortly after it started.
They almost seemed about evenly matched.
Both at a loss about how to score telling points in a debate.
All things being equal, I would agree with the corporate media consensus that Hillary won. But that’s the thing – things are far from equal.
Hillary Clinton is a pro. She should have wiped the floor with Trump. Instead, she delivered a performance on the line between a B+ and an A-. Trump gets closer to a C-. That’s much closer than it ought to have been.
As they say in sports, Trump beat the spread.
It went down the same way during the Democratic primaries. Hillary Clinton had every advantage: domination of the Democratic National Committee, support of a sitting president, massive name recognition, experience and personnel from a previous run, a huge pool of wealthy institutional donors, a marriage to a popular ex-president fondly remembered for presiding over a great economic expansion. Despite all that, she nearly lost to Bernie Sanders – an aging self-identified socialist from a tiny, powerless state, with no name recognition. How, many people asked, could Hillary’s inevitable Goliath of a campaign have come so close to losing to such a David?
The answer was obvious. As we learned in 2008 when she lost to another obscure politician — Obama, with a weird name, who had little experience — Hillary Clinton underperforms. She has no charm. She doesn’t learn from her mistakes. She relies on outdated fundraising methods, like sucking up to big corporate donors. Not only does she lie, she insults our intelligence as when she emerged from her daughter’s Manhattan apartment days after being diagnosed with pneumonia. “I’m fine,” she said. What’s the matter with “pneumonia sucks”?
During the debate, I was struck by how many chances Trump had to nail Hillary. If he were a better debater, she’d be toast.
Hillary tacitly confirmed that the United States was behind the Stuxnet virus that attacked Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, implying that she deserves credit for forcing the Islamic Republic to the negotiating table. Because cyber-warfare is illegal, U.S. officials have always refused to comment on whether or not we helped create Stuxnet – so it remains classified. If Trump had been smarter, he would have said: “Jesus, Hillary! There you go again, revealing America’s secrets to our enemies.”
He also allowed her to weasel out of her on-again, off-again support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership “free trade” agreement. Why didn’t he reference the verbal diarrhea of close Clinton friend Terry McAuliffe, who let slip the all-too-credible assertion that President Hillary would sign TPP shortly after coming to office?
His response to Hillary’s demand that he release his taxes came close to disastrous. If ever there was a time to interrupt, there it was. Instead, he just stood there waiting for her to finish. Clearly Trump has a lot to hide. Then he made a lame gambit: “I will release my tax returns — against my lawyer’s wishes — when she releases her 33,000 e-mails that have been deleted. As soon as she releases them, I will release. I will release my tax returns. And that’s against — my lawyers, they say, ‘Don’t do it.’ I will tell you this. No — in fact, watching shows, they’re reading the papers. Almost every lawyer says, you don’t release your returns until the audit’s complete. When the audit’s complete, I’ll do it. But I would go against them if she releases her e-mails.”
It was incoherent and ridiculous. But once he decided to go that direction, why not mention her secret Goldman Sachs speech transcripts? At least that way, he would have conveyed that she has two types of things to hide (emails, speeches) as opposed to his one (taxes).
Rookie errors. But hey, Trump did great for a guy who has never run for political office before – and didn’t cram for the debate. Hillary has debated at the presidential level so many times she could probably do it half of it in her sleep. If I go into the ring with heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury and manage to survive a round with all but one of my teeth, it’s fair to say that I won.
What’s baffling to me is that she wasn’t able to deliver a knockout blow.
Some of it is her inability to just be real.
Part of coming off as an authentic human being is a self-deprecating sense of humor. We saw that when Trump asked Secretary Clinton how she wanted to be addressed: “Now, in all fairness to Secretary Clinton — yes, is that OK? Good. I want you to be very happy. It’s very important to me.” It was deferential. It almost seemed sweet. (Weirdly, she didn’t adjust to the honorific, failing to tack to “Mr. Trump.”)
Hillary seems allergic to humanism. Back to the TPP, for example, she could have countered Trump’s fictional assertion she “heard what I said about [TPP], and all of a sudden you were against it” with something along the lines of: “actually, that was Bernie Sanders.”
Another awkward moment was her apology for using a private email server. This should have been a win for her. It was the first time that she expressed regret in a straightforward manner. But she clearly wanted to keep talking, to make excuses, to mitigate. It was also a missed opportunity to make an email joke.
Maybe the herd is right. Maybe it’s a simple matter of she did better, he did worse. But I keep thinking, debates are graded on a curve. She was supposed to kick his ass. Yet there he is, dead even in the polls with her.
Did you enjoy the debate?
I can't think of anyone I know who did (unless it would be a pervert or two whom I happen to know who always take some personal satisfaction in others' sadness).
Most don't like either candidate and can only dream of what would have happened if Bernie Sanders' votes had been properly recorded, and he had been allowed to run against Donald the Trumped.
They also had fond ambitions to address some very pressing issues that matter to voters who've been left out of the governance equation since 2008 occurred and they learned that that they really didn't count with those they had worked hard to elect.
The People’s Issues Came Second in the First Debate
By
This was undoubtedly the first presidential debate in history to include a mention of Rosie O’Donnell. Even grading on a curve – something the press tends to do with Donald Trump – the Republican fared poorly on Monday night. Democrat Hillary Clinton took him down on issue after issue, from his tax returns to his business practices.
Unfortunately, that was not her most important mission. Clinton’s fate rests on her ability to turn out key Democratic voters in large numbers, especially young people and minorities. In her zeal to defeat her opponent, which she clearly did, Clinton didn’t do enough to inspire and motivate her base.
Trump has said that his adult children will run his business enterprises should be become president. But Trump will be in a position, just as a President Hillary Clinton would, to grant Wall Street mega banks their wish list for Chair of the Federal Reserve, Treasury Secretary, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair and appointees to head other Federal bank regulators. That certainly adds some leverage to the art of the deal.
Fortune’s Tully pointed out another issue with Trump’s real estate debt in his August 24, 2016 article: it’s highly concentrated in just a handful of properties. Tully explains that “$846 million of Trump’s $1.11 billion borrowings” are owed on just five buildings, “or almost 80 cents of every dollar in debt, using the best estimates of the liability side of his balance sheet.” Those five buildings are in just three markets: New York City, Washington D.C. and San Francisco. If commercial real estate is in a bubble, those markets are unlikely to escape the downturn.
A quick glance at Trump’s financial disclosure form doesn’t produce the names of the big, bad Wall Street banks, other than Deutsche Bank, which the Department of Justice is currently negotiating with over a proposed $14 billion settlement for allegedly selling fraudulent mortgage investments. (If the settlement discussions drag on, of course, Donald Trump might be able to appoint the new Attorney General who might finalize the terms of that settlement billions of dollars lower. Deutsche has said it doesn’t plan to pay anything near $14 billion.)
The other major Wall Street banks are definitely involved in Trump’s loans, however, through an entity listed on his financial disclosure form as Ladder Capital. According to Ladder Capital’s prospectus for its initial public offering (IPO), its underwriters were Deutsche Bank Securities, Citigroup Global Markets, Wells Fargo Securities, Merrill Lynch, and J.P. Morgan Securities. As Wall Street On Parade reported in March, the prospectus outlines the close relationship Ladder Capital has to these mega Wall Street banks:
“Some of the underwriters and their affiliates have engaged in, and may in the future engage in, investment banking and other commercial dealings in the ordinary course of business with us or our affiliates. They have received, or may in the future receive, customary fees and commissions for these transactions. Examples include but are not limited to:
“Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC acted as underwriters in connection with the offering of our Notes by two of our subsidiaries;
“Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, or certain of their affiliates, are counterparties to financing arrangements with certain of our subsidiaries, including, as applicable, our existing revolving credit facility, master repurchase agreements relating to loans and/or securities, global master securities lending agreements and a master mortgage loan securities contract;
“Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, or certain of their affiliates, are counterparties to financing arrangements with certain of our subsidiaries, including, as applicable, our existing revolving credit facility, master repurchase agreements relating to loans and/or securities, global master securities lending agreements and a master mortgage loan securities contract;
“An affiliate of Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. is, and certain other underwriters or their affiliates may be, lenders under our new revolving credit facility, which is currently being negotiated, for which Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. is acting as lead arranger;
“Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, or certain of their affiliates, are counterparties to International Swap Dealers Association, Inc. Master Agreements with one of our subsidiaries;
“Affiliates of Wells Fargo Securities, LLC act as loan servicer for our conduit loans, document custodian for all of our loans and custodian for our managed account securities; and
“J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and its affiliates act as our prime broker and also provide us with securities pricing services;
“From time to time, we may also co-fund commercial real estate mortgage loans or enter into other commercial real estate financing transactions with certain of the underwriters and/or their affiliates.”
The other elephant in the room at tonight’s presidential debate between Clinton and Trump will be the five justices on the U.S. Supreme Court that enabled the campaign finance corruption that has placed America on a trajectory of serial economic disasters by voting to allow unbridled corporate financing of political advertisements in their Citizens United decision. Those five justices are: Justice Anthony Kennedy (author of the decision), Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Justice Samuel Alito.
If you are repulsed by what you hear tonight during the presidential debate, feel free to curse those five men and think about what Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer. Stevens wrote:
“The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case. In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.”
Michael Moore didn't change his opinion.
For very good reasons:
Well, folks, this isn’t an accident. It is happening. And if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic, then you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his juggernaut. As of today, as things stand now, I believe this is going to happen – and in order to deal with it, I need you first to acknowledge it, and then maybe, just maybe, we can find a way out of the mess we’re in.
Don’t get me wrong. I have great hope for the country I live in. Things are better. The left has won the cultural wars. Gays and lesbians can get married. A majority of Americans now take the liberal position on just about every polling question posed to them: Equal pay for women – check. Abortion should be legal – check. Stronger environmental laws – check. More gun control – check. Legalize marijuana – check. A huge shift has taken place – just ask the socialist who won 22 states this year. And there is no doubt in my mind that if people could vote from their couch at home on their X-box or PlayStation, Hillary would win in a landslide.
I'm a big Tom Engelhardt fan - and really admire Nomi Prins.
Have you seen his explication of the Two Donalds?
To die for.
September 29, 2016
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Trump’s Future Piggy Bank, Our Country?
Think of American politics today as a tale of two Donalds. First, there’s Donald Trump, political provocateur, a man with his eye on the Oval Office who’s ready to say just about anything to get into it. That includes insisting, in his “America First” campaign, that he -- and he alone -- will bring back millions of manufacturing jobs to this country (that are unlikely ever to return) and that he’ll create boom times for both the coal and natural gas industries (though they are in direct competition with each other). And then, of course, there’s the other Donald Trump, the one who will do anything for a buck (or a million bucks, for that matter), including offshoring jobs galore for his own product lines and hiring cheaper foreign labor for his hotels and resorts (or building projects).
You might think that, in the heat of this election campaign, he’d decide to take a modest hit by hiring American labor rather than foreign “guest workers,” and by repatriating the making of those Trump shirts (Bangladesh), Trump ties (China and Mexico), and similar products; that, at the moment, he might put his money where his mouth is when it comes to "America First." As it happens, we have a curious snapshot of The Donald and outsourced products from the latest Trump International Hotel, the one he recently opened just down the street from the White House with full campaign trail publicity and at prices meant only for the super-rich.
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank spent a night there (on Jeff Bezos’s tab) and in his room ($856 plus tax) he found one all-American product: a “small package of milk-chocolate Trump gold bullion ($25).” Here was his description of what the room otherwise contained: “a Trump logo bathmat and towels from India, bone china from Japan, Italian cutlery and tiles, two telephones from Malaysia, a Swiss refrigerator, German coffee cups, Trump soaps and lotions from Canada and, from China, all four lamps, the coffee machine, the bathroom scale, the valet stand, and the shower cap.” Milbank adds, “The hotel’s managing director is from France. Most hotel workers I met during my stay had Caribbean or African accents.”
That hotel room fits a pattern, and don’t think of it as a case of Trumpian hypocrisy either. That doesn’t begin to catch the flavor of what’s going on. No, when it comes to The Donald’s businesses, political positions be damned. He’s happy to rouse Rust Belt and other communities with talk about the nightmare of outsourced jobs for American workers and to slam companies like Ford and Nabisco for sending their factories abroad. There’s one thing he’s not prepared to do, however: give up what’s best for Donald Trump. And if that’s true now, imagine how essential it is to the man and how likely it is, as Nomi Prins, TomDispatch regular and author of All the President’s Bankers, indicates today, that it’s one trait - even obsession - that would enter the Oval Office with him and change the nature of the American presidency big time. Tom
Madoff in the White House?
How Trump’s Conflicts of Interest Could Become Ours
By Nomi Prins
Imagine for a moment that it’s January 2009. Bernie Madoff, America’s poster-child fraudster, has yet to be caught. The 2007-2008 financial crisis never happened. The markets didn’t tank to reveal the emptiness beneath his schemes. We still don’t know what’s lurking in his tax returns because he’s never released them, but we know that he’s a billionaire, at least on paper. We also know, of course, that he just won the presidency by featuring the slogan -- on hats, t-shirts, everywhere -- “Make America Rich Again!” On a frosty morning in late January, before his colleagues, his country, God, and the world, Madoff takes the oath of office. He swears on a Bible to uphold the constitution.
The next day, everything comes crashing down. The banks. The markets. His fortune.
Madoff is a businessman, not a politician. He’s run and won as an anti-establishment maverick. Now, he’s faced with a choice: save the United States or his own posterior. During the campaign, he promised that he could separate the two, that his kids could run his empire, while he did the people’s business. But no one wants to talk to his progeny. They want him. They want the man in the suit who owes them money.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
US Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson Fails to Name a Foreign Leader He Admires
Wells Fargo claws back millions from cheating executives
You know how things never change unless they're changing for the better?
I don't.
Because since 2008 (and long before for many) there has been very little job stability - no matter the PR statistics.
Unless you think part-time, contract jobs without benefits are signs of returning stability.
OK, we get it. We saw the havoc that the financial crisis, the bailouts, QE, and ZRIP wreaked on jobs. We saw the effect on jobs and the general economy when the corporate focus shifted even more to deploying the nearly free capital to buy back shares and engage in financial engineering – and enrich the elite of Wall Street and corporate America in the process – rather than investing in labor and train,, thering.
We got that the jobs scenario in America will never be the same again. Things have changed. We moved on. Learned to cope with it. We adjusted the statistics, removed people from the official labor force, and thereby brought the unemployment rate in line where we can feel comfortable with it. Life goes on, as they say.
But now there’s a whole new problem, and an ancient one, one that is getting worse by the day, one that we as society cannot deal with easily by simply removing people from the labor force – though that will likely be part of the solution. The problem isn’t really a problem. It’s a solution to a problem. We’re proud of it. It speaks of the greatness of the human mind and is testament to its true genius: automation.
Automation used to be an effort to build machines to replace inefficient and weak human muscles. But now it’s increasingly becoming a replacement for human brains. It’s already happening, but no one is ready for it.
Automation is inevitable, the hard-hitting video below points that. It’s a tool to create abundance with little effort – but “we need to start thinking now as to what to do when large sections of the population become unemployable due to no fault of their own.”
The stock market in many ways is no longer a human endeavor. It’s mostly bots, that taught themselves to trade stocks, trading stocks with other bots that taught themselves.”
These bots rule. News media carry stories that were written by these bots – or algos, as we like to call them – and they’re read by bots that then trade with other bots and enter and cancel orders in a fraction of a second to drive stocks one way or the other. And other bots can write more stories about bot trading with other bots, and about stories that other bots had written, so that more bots can react to them instantaneously [This Chart Shows How You Get Screwed in the Stock Market].
Which makes me think: Is that why the mainstream media are stumbling so badly? Because humans don’t want to read stories written by bots for bots?
Even professional jobs such as lawyers are being taken over by bots. Not their rare courtroom appearances, or their roles in negotiations with other humans, but their daily grunt work, which is much of what lawyers do, such as preparing reams of documents. And then there’s discovery: “It’s already no longer a human job in many law firms.” Bots are sifting through millions of emails and memos and documents in a fraction of the time that an army of humans pulling all-nighters used to spend on it. These bots are much cheaper, don’t need pizza after midnight, and work much more accurately.
And doctors. IBM is positioning its Dr. Watson for that. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It only needs to be better than humans. And that’s pretty easy to do, given human limitations. Human doctors can only learn through their own efforts and experiences. But doctor bots can instantly learn from the entire body of research out there, from anything and everything in the entire medical data base, and from all the other doctor bots. While “not all human doctors will go away, the need for them will be less.”
And the highly paid coders of the current tech bubble? Other coders are designing bots that replace those coders who haven’t been replaced already by bots. And the cashiers at the grocery store, now being replaced by self-checkout machines? Or bank tellers, the remaining few? And the millions of jobs up and down the scale?
What are they going to do, these lawyers and doctors and coders and “many bright perfectly capable humans” who are no longer needed and have become “unemployable” due to no fault of their own? What is society going to do?
There is no way to back off from automating what the human muscle and brain used to do. It has been tried before, but automation has always won – and it will always win. Automation is inevitable. But the consequences are becoming increasing mindboggling.
And here is the CEO of a startup who delineates the prevailing attitude in today’s business world, and one of the most harrowing problems for millions of unemployed job seekers: you must have a job to get a job. And there is a system in place with convenient low-cost tools to lock the unemployed out. Read…. Startup CEO (Unwittingly) Explains Biggest Problem in America’s Unemployment Crisis
Comments:
The replacement of intellectual workers with bots might explain some strange developments and occurrences.
In law, Citizens’ United and its progeny that have provided corporations with the rights of humans would appear not to be what rational humans would do. Why would humans increase the rights of corporations while their own rights are being diminished?
In coding, the website for the Affordable Care Act could not seem to be made to function correctly for a protracted period in spite all the money and resources that was invested in it. A human coder told me that the bots were just writing new code on a platform of preexisting bad code instead of correcting or discarding the underlying errors.
In medicine, patients like Joan Rivers die during minor operations at out-patient facilities because of the failure to provide CPR at the facility. A bot in charge of the operation doesn’t do CPR.
In trading, previously active individuals refrain from trading rather than compete with bots. Rational humans would not buy the junk stock or pay the nutty prices that has driven the markets higher recently without much of a pull back. Occasionally, if a human thinks he understands the bots’ programs, e.g., GTAT, he/she still had better tread cautiously. When the bots are wrong they do not lose their own money.
