This seems important…
open thread
by TaMara| 67 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
This post is in: Open Threads, Assholes
This big article at the NYT raises some questions for me:
Anna Ruch had never met Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo before encountering him at a crowded New York City wedding reception in September 2019. Her first impression was positive enough.
The governor was working the room after toasting the newlyweds, and when he came upon Ms. Ruch, now 33, she thanked him for his kind words about her friends. But what happened next instantly unsettled her: Mr. Cuomo put his hand on Ms. Ruch’s bare lower back, she said in an interview on Monday.
When she removed his hand with her own, Ms. Ruch recalled, the governor remarked that she seemed “aggressive” and placed his hands on her cheeks. He asked if he could kiss her, loudly enough for a friend standing nearby to hear. Ms. Ruch was bewildered by the entreaty, she said, and pulled away as the governor drew closer.
“I was so confused and shocked and embarrassed,” said Ms. Ruch, whose recollection was corroborated by the friend, contemporaneous text messages and photographs from the event. “I turned my head away and didn’t have words in that moment.”
Before we get into the article, let me state first and foremost that I have said for years, and continue to believe, that it is a national priority to keep Andrew Cuomo out of the White House. He is, in my opinion, an authoritarian and a bully, and like Bloomberg, that means sometimes his more liberal positions makes me find common cause with him, but he is still a fucking fascist. That was particularly clear during the covid early days, when his authoritarianism was appreciated in the leadership vacuum created by the White House. Second, there is ZERO doubt in my mind about the accuracy of the two previously reported allegations of sexual harassment, and I have no doubt there will be many more of them coming out in the next weeks and months.
Having said all that, I don’t know why this story is being pushed other than add to the narrative. Ruch was not his subordinate, he was not in a position of power, and he asked her if he could kiss her. That’s asking for consent. That’s what you want men to do. Obviously it made her feel uncomfortable and awkward, and he’s a cad for doing so, but asking someone if you can kiss them and then not doing anything when they say no strikes me as EXACTLY what you want men to do these days.
Am I out in left field on this?
by Betty Cracker| 102 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Politics
I read a depressing article in The Atlantic recently called “The 5 Turnip Amendments to the Constitution” (only it didn’t cite a winter vegetable). The author argues that The Former Chode changed our system of government in five profound ways with the following informal amendments:
Put another way, Agent Orange exposed the fragility of our system due to overreliance on good faith. Now that one party has discovered that shamelessness is a democracy-annihilating superpower, we should codify what we can while we have the opportunity. Here’s Senator Whitehouse attempting to claw back Amendment 2 above:
Sen. Whitehouse accuses FBI Director Wray of giving politically sensitive info to GOP while withholding answers from Democrats for years
“You’ve been asked questions for the record. Are they going to go into the same hole where questions for the record go to die at the FBI?” pic.twitter.com/fzd8v7FjhQ
— CBS News (@CBSNews) March 2, 2021
Whitehouse is PISSED about the FBI stonewalling for partisan gain. Good. Everyone should be. As Whitehouse notes, oversight is as an important part of lawmakers’ jobs as legislating.
I really don’t know what to think about Wray. The Former A-Hole appointed him, but Wray has shown signs of independence. Let’s see if he coughs up the documents now without the “rigmarole,” as Whitehouse calls it.
Open thread!
This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus
I had my second dose of the Moderna m-RNA vaccine yesterday. What comes next?
It takes three weeks to build immunity, and I don’t plan to change what I’ve been doing until then. I have been isolating rather thoroughly. I haven’t been inside a store since last October. I’m taking piano lessons via Zoom. I wear double masks held tight with a clip that pulls the ear loops to the back of my neck. I haven’t seen friends in person since sometime late last summer. My family is at distances that make a year’s separation not extraordinary.
The CDC has promised guidelines on what to do after you’ve had your vaccine, but they haven’t published them yet. Guidelines are difficult to develop because there are so many variables.
I look at it as a risk assessment problem. What risk are you willing to take? What risk do various situations present? Here’s my assessment for myself. Yours may differ.
The numbers change with new information. We’ve known this virus and its effects only a year now. So my risk assessment is qualitative rather than quantitative.
I see becoming ill with Covid-19 as an unacceptable risk. My age group is more likely than others to be hospitalized or die from Covid-19. Additionally, it can cause lasting effects as “Long Covid.” These risks are a lot more than for the flu. Unacceptable in my judgment.
My risk management strategy is aimed at never contracting the disease. The first Moderna shot is supposed to give 85% immunity, and the second, well over 95%. Nobody who has had the vaccinations has died from Covid and few have been hospitalized. Those are good numbers, but the second is three weeks away for me.
Besides what the vaccine does to protect me, I also consider the numbers of cases and whether they are increasing or decreasing. They have decreased rapidly for the past month or so, but they are now at the levels of last summer, which we thought then was pretty bad. The more cases around, the more likely I am to be exposed. Will a larger dose of virus still make me sick? We don’t know. Could I catch an asymptomatic case and spread virus? Possibly.
The first thing I will do in three weeks will be spend time with friends who have been vaccinated. We will probably stay outside, on my deck, with masks.
Sometime after that, if cases continue to decrease, I will start going to stores. I quit when cases were going up and people were not distancing properly. I’ll start with the Farmers’ Market, which is in a large building or outdoors. In three weeks, it should be at least partially outdoors. Then I’ll try Trader Joe’s, which was particularly crowded and people particularly rude, even during alleged senior hours. I do like their products, though. Costco was good before, and I’ll head back there.
I’m working down my stockpiles of cleaning products and frozen and nonperishable food that I acquired through spring and summer last year. That feels good.
Next week I have a dental hygiene appointment. My last one was in October. The dentist made their hallways one-way, added barriers, and increased ventilation. I felt pretty good about their safety then and better now.
After three weeks, I’ll contact my massage therapist to find out if she is working. She’s always been scrupulous about cleanliness, and I really really need a massage. That will be a great pleasure.
I’ve been cutting my own hair. It doesn’t look bad – curly hair is very forgiving. But I know there are things wrong with the haircut and am looking forward to having it corrected. I’ll let it grow out now so that my hair stylist has something to work with.
My piano teacher doesn’t have a date for her vaccination yet. I am looking forward to having in-person lessons but don’t know when that will be.
I will, of course, mask up when I go out in public. It looks like vaccination cuts down on virus transmission, but not entirely. Masks will be required at least through the summer. People in Santa Fe have been good about masking, although I saw one man yesterday with his nose sticking out. Since they didn’t tattoo my vaccination date on my forehead, nobody can tell that I’m vaccinated.
Restaurants? Movies? Not until at least 50% of the population is vaccinated and case numbers are well below last summer’s. That might come as soon as this summer.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
by $8 blue check mistermix| 148 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I know I’m becoming a one-trick pony, but Jesus Christ, look at the expression on this woman’s face:
The latest allegation against Andrew Cuomo comes with a photo, via @NYTimes: https://t.co/OySz5Gc0v7 pic.twitter.com/ZJ3xk5nYeu
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) March 2, 2021
The tl;dr if you don’t want to burn a Times click, is that Cuomo was at a wedding, put his hand on her bare back, and after she removed it, he grabbed her cheeks as pictured above, asking if he could kiss her. Blegh. If the picture isn’t enough, her friend heard him ask for the kiss.
This is what I was talking about in my post yesterday about the delusion of middle-aged men who think that 20-something or early 30-something women (she was 31/32 at the time) have any interest in any kind of relationship except a professional or friendly one. Clearly, this kind of unwanted attention from any man is wrong, but the added creep factor of being an old man makes it just pure yuck. Obviously there are exceptions to every rule, but those are mostly in books and movies written by middle-aged men.
Update: Forgot to mention, New York’s vaccine rates are not that great. I think the groundwork is there to make them better, but still.
This post is in: Open Threads, President Biden, Proud to Be A Democrat
Jill Biden supporting black owned businesses by patronizing them! Quite a change from the ‘Be Best’ $68,000 dollar handbag… pic.twitter.com/7c8yXuXoMl
— Daniel (@hullboydan) March 1, 2021
Isn’t it nice to have normal back on the schedule? Per the Washington Post:
… Biden came to Richmond to visit Massey Cancer Center at Virginia Commonwealth University downtown. There, on a panel discussion, she acknowledged that communities of color have been “carrying a heavier share” of the country’s more than 500,000 deaths to covid-19, and she spoke with doctors about ways to get more minorities into clinical trials and cancer research. “It’s time to address the health disparities in this country,” she said.
But just as resonant as her public remarks was her detour to Brewer’s Cafe, a Black-owned, family-run establishment located on a side street in Richmond’s Southside, a gentrifying, majority-Black neighborhood that Brewer likens to “Southeast D.C. 20 years ago.”
It was her third “casual” pit stop as first lady. The others included a trip to pick up Valentine’s Day treats at the Sweet Lobby, a popular D.C. bakery that is owned by Winnette McIntosh Ambrose, who originally hails from Trinidad; and a visit to the Newsroom, a D.C. bodega and newsstand run by a Stephen and Ana Maria Bota, a husband and wife from Kenya and Guatemala, respectively…
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Jill Biden, First LadyPost + Comments (58)
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
The March edition of Health Affairs came out last night. Two studies caught my eye that are seemingly non-related, but they made a good amount of sense to me together. The first by Desai et al looks at how people respond to an ad campaign to use the New Hampshire price transparency tool. The goal of price transparency tools is to provide information to patients who are then able to shop for better prices or quality of services. The research team bought just under $40,000 in ads and then looked at what happened in actual claims.
The average number of visits per week to the website was 265 in the preintervention phase and 1,931 in the intervention phase (exhibit 1). This represents a 629 percent increase in the number of weekly visits. The percentage of total visits that came through Google Ads (“paid visits”), on average, per week in the preintervention and intervention phases was 0 percent and 63 percent, respectively.
The ads drove eye-balls.
The average price paid for each of the three sets of services enrollees in New Hampshire received were not differentially lower during the advertising campaign than before it (exhibit 2). We estimate a 4.4 percent non–statistically significant increase (p=0.07) in the price paid for ED visits associated with the intervention. Our estimates implied no change in the price paid (estimate: 0.3 percent; p=0.26) for imaging services and a non–statistically significant change (18.3 percent increase; p=0.16) for physical therapy services.
Behaviors did not notably change.
The second paper looks at spending in employer sponsored insurance (ESI) after a bunch of employers configured several services as a bundled payment and split some of the potential savings with their employees/patients in the form of lower cost sharing (Whaley et al)
The program we studied negotiates preferred prices for selected providers that cover the procedure and all related care within a thirty-day period after the procedure and waives cost sharing for patients who receive care from these providers. After implementation, episode prices for three selected surgical procedures declined by $4,229, a 10.7 percent relative reduction. Employers captured approximately 85 percent of the savings, or $3,582 per episode (a 9.5 percent relative decrease), and patient cost-sharing payments decreased by $498 per episode (a 27.7 percent relative decrease).
This is real money at stake. It is a major redesign of care delivery and care financing. And it worked.
How do these things go together?
The change in behavior in the second paper was developped as a package and presented to the interested patient as a complete bundle. The bundle reduces cash costs (lower cost-sharing) and search, learning and information costs as well as backside uncertainty costs. The bundle is a whole lot cheaper on both the cash side and cognitive management side. And the information that this choice set was better/easier was actively handed out to them.
The first paper, merely reduced information costs directly and may or may not have reduced cash costs depending on patient cost-sharing structures in their policy. The patient is asked to do a lot more including setting up appointments with an unfamiliar proivder, driving out of area, or trying to figure out how one clinic interacts and transfers data back to their “home” specialist or PCP. There are a lot of friction points in between the provision of information and the change in behavior.
To get behavioral changes, people need to know about options, they need to see the advantages and then they need an easy enough path forward to change. Providing information is often only a small part of the path smoothing needed for change.