Sorry, folks, lost track of time. England is beating Colombia 1-0 and France is beating Mexico 3-0. If the scores hold up, things will be interesting.
Archives for June 2015
Wednesday Afternoon Open Thread
From yesterday’s afternoon thunderstorm:
Clouds are building up for today’s show. Please feel free to discuss whatever.
Don’t Give Jeb That Good Ol’ Religion
Suddenly the party of the Moral Majority, culture wars, and freedom of religious expression uber alles isn’t too keen on religion and politics mixing anymore. The leader of Jebya’s Catholic faith is no longer welcome in his 2016 campaign.
“I hope I’m not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope,” said Bush, a devout Catholic. He added that he wanted to see exactly what the pope recommended “before I pass judgment, but I think religion ought to be about making us better as people, less about things [that] end up getting into the political realm.”
I wonder how that’s going to play with the Huckster/Santorum/Rubio “strong faith guides my policies”crowd. The guy has bigger issues though.
In an hourlong town hall, held in a narrow, three-story opera house, Bush, in his shirtsleeves, spent considerable time talking about entitlement reform and the need to fix programs like Social Security, something he noted his brother tried, and “got totally wiped out.” But on those big-ticket issues, he said, both parties need to find common ground.
“We have to reweave the web of civility,” he said, a message that plays well in a state where firebrand conservatives have not done as well. “I have deep disagreements with liberal Democrats, but I don’t assume they have bad motives.”
And on national security issues, he said, “I would like to get back to the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy,” where everyone understands “if we engage, it’s not to create war, it’s to create peace.”
“I’m like my brother, only I’ll make the absolute failure policies he implemented work!” is a hell of a campaign slogan, yes?
Facility Fees and hacking Medicare billing guidelines
Before my vacation, there was a comment asking about facility fees attached to medical bills. Facility fees are charges from hospitals or hospital owned outpatient clinics that are supposed to cover the cost of running a hospital. That makes some sense as hospitals are expensive to run and expensive to open the door. I don’t have a problem of paying more to keep Community Hospital General open. From an insurance point of view, these facility fees are one of the big drivers of insurers trying to divert patients to lower cost outpatient facilities as usually a service that is performed in a hospital is more expensive than a service performed anywhere else.
However the problem is that the definition of outpatient clinic is extremely variable and expansive. The common source of complaint about facility charges is when a hospital buys out a private physician practice and the only visible change in the situation is new signage and stationery for the office. Patients who have been going to see their doc at 123 Main Street for years are still seeing their doc at 123 Main Street. They are still paying their regular PCP co-pays when they see Dr. Jones, but then they get hit with a $347 facility fee for a visit that they had done dozens of times at $20 co-pays. What changed is that the hospital now is claiming the office location as an outpatient clinic and can now legally charge a facility fee.
It is legal, and it is scummy. I’ll talk about where this came from below the fold.
Facility Fees and hacking Medicare billing guidelinesPost + Comments (13)
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Ramadan Kareem!
It’s official, this year Ramadan begins on Thursday, June 18 — or, if I understand it correctly, when the crescent moon is sighted on Wednesday evening, the exact timing of which varies by location. Observant Muslims will abstain from eating or drinking from sunrise (3:45am here on Eastern Daylight Time) until sunset (8:31pm).
Best wishes to those in the Balloon Juice community who observe this month (and please excuse me if I’ve made any inadvertant errors here)!
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Apart from preparations/observance, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Ramadan Kareem!Post + Comments (91)
Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: “Boardroom Palin”
Unless Trump loses 50% of his support in six weeks, he’s going to keep a legit candidate out of the first GOP debates.
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) June 16, 2015
That said, Trump currently leads Christie, Cruz, Carson and Huckabee in New Hampshire. http://t.co/DZPl8fx3sI
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) June 16, 2015
Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire:
… Trump’s vaguely paragraph-like globs of words were shot through with magical spells. There’s this doctor he knows who doesn’t like the Affordable Care Act. There’s this manufacturer he knows who’s having trouble with China. They all call Trump — perhaps through his bridgework, perhaps not — and unburden themselves on him because they know that Trump is the person who can solve their problems because he is a problem-solver on the art of the deal, the four bankruptcies notwithstanding.
He is the inevitable result of 40 years of political conjuring, mainly by Republicans, but abetted by far too many Democrats as well. He is the inevitable product of anyone who ever argued that our political institutions should be run “like a business.” (Like whose businesses? Like Trump’s? Like Carly Fiorina’s Hewlett Packard?) He is the inevitable product of anyone who ever argued why the government can’t balance its books “the way any American family would.” He is the inevitable result of the deregulated economy that was deregulated out of a well-cultivated wonder and awe directed at the various masters of the universe. Sooner or later, all of this misbegotten magical thinking was going to burp up a clown like Donald Trump…
Trump: "Thanks to fracking, and the other things, the oil is all over the place." This is basically Boardroom Palin.
— Big Sexy Jeb! Lund (@Mobute) June 16, 2015
.@simonmaloy with a classy, a very bigly classy, take on Trump http://t.co/WtAlJAAHtr
— Jim Newell (@jim_newell) June 16, 2015
Gilded coprolite Donald Trump held a very classy, very beautiful event today at one of his many very classy, very beautiful properties in Manhattan. Trump said many words as part of this event, though I hesitate to call that assemblage of words a “speech,” as that would unjustly imply that any level of organization or forethought went into his remarks. The polite adjective for Trump’s performance is “meandering,” but such courtesies are wasted on that leathery slug. More accurately, Trump offered a roughly 50-minute stream-of-consciousness extrusion of verbal diarrhea that seemed to be influenced primarily by Trump’s garish ego and/or an undisclosed but serious head injury. But sandwiched in between all of Trump’s insane braggadocio and aggressive ignorance was one key phrase: “I am officially running for president of the United States.”
Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: “Boardroom Palin”Post + Comments (113)
This is the beginning of a new age
As many of you know, I’m fueled creatively by my massive hatred of David Brooks. David Zwieg has a great article taking down one of Bobo’s new money lines:
It was one thing if Brooks made erroneous claims in a one-off lecture. It was something else entirely to put those same claims in a book. Now I had to get to the bottom of this…
It’s a good, thorough piece that shows once again that facts are for the little people. It touches on Bobo’s immense popularity with totebaggers and about his big applause lines at Aspen and on “Morning Joe”.
Here’s my question though: are we living in a golden age of pseudointellectual charlatanism or have things always been like this? I’m not enough of a historian to know. Certainly, idiotic ideas like Spenglerism took hold and did more damage than Applebees apocrypha are likely to do. But I wonder if the cut-and-paste simplicity of the internet, plus more figures available than ever before, plus the TED industrial complex, plus an awe-inspiring level of innumeracy among both media elites and their ostensibly educated but intellectually mediocre audience have made a whole new kind of bullshit possible.