Oy vey…
OMG. Joe Arpaio will keep the birther bullshit going until Obama leaves office pic.twitter.com/6Aj4ffBEWl
— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) December 14, 2016
by Adam L Silverman| 103 Comments
This post is in: America, An Unexamined Scandal, Because of wow., Domestic Politics, Election 2008, Election 2012, Events, Open Threads, Politics, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security, General Stupidity, OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUDS, Our Awesome Meritocracy, Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment, Outrage
Oy vey…
OMG. Joe Arpaio will keep the birther bullshit going until Obama leaves office pic.twitter.com/6Aj4ffBEWl
— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) December 14, 2016
by David Anderson| 16 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Bitter Despair is the New Black, Bring On The Meteor
And now for something really depressing:
The toll that Zika virus takes on pregnancies appears to be even higher than was previously estimated, with a newly updated study from Brazil suggesting that 42 percent of infants infected in the womb may have significant birth defects.
When the authors factored in stillbirths and miscarriages suffered by women who had been infected with Zika, 46 percent of pregnancies were affected. Microcephaly — a condition in which babies are born with smaller than normal heads — was seen in only about 3 percent of babies in the study.
“Microcephaly is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s definitely not where the focus should be,” said Dr. Karin Nielsen-Saines, the paper’s senior author. “For every case of microcephaly you’re probably going to have 10 cases of other problems that haven’t been recognized.”
In the United States, roughly half of all births are covered by Medicaid. Medicaid and CHIP cover a good number of kids and these two programs cover a disproportionate number of children with significant, expensive life long conditions. We also know that locally transmitted Zika infections will not be uniformly distributed. Alaska will have far fewer proportional Zika infections than Florida. We also know that one of the major policy planks of the Republican trifecta will be to block grant Medicaid on a per capita basis.
We know that treating and caring for an individual with microcephaly will have a lifetime cost of $10 million dollars. Other neurological and cognitive conditions will have lower lifetime incremental costs but these individuals will cost more than their non-Zika effected peers. We know that state Medicaid budgets will cover a high proportion of these individuals. If Zika is not quickly isolated and reduced to a random outbreak here and there and instead is endemic, we have a serious Medicaid financing crisis at hand if the federal funding is transformed into a block grant.
The Medicaid block grant procedures would give states a fixed head payment for each enrollee. It could vary by category of assistance and a few other criteria but the fee would be flat within subgroups by the number of enrollees. From here, the states could have the choice to top-up the Federal match or spend state supplied money in other manners. This is different from the current system where the Feds give the states an open ended funding stream that is a state specific multiple of the state contribution. The block grant removes the variability of the federal spending commitment. In the Ryan plans, it also shrinks in terms of real purchasing power over time so states either spend more money to maintain current level of enrollment and services or cuts to enrollment and services have to occur.
And here is where there is a problem. The capitated payments would be based on average expected costs in year 1 and then get weaker. States with disproportionate clustering of high cost conditions will be significantly worse off. Long run Zika neurological impairments will hit warmer states’ Medicaid budgets much harder and more disproportionally than Zika will hit cold weather states’ Medicaid budgets. This could be adjusted for by having a Zika bump in the block grant calculation much like there could be a diabetes bump or a maternity bump or any other number of risk adjusted bumps to capitation payments. But what happens when there is a new high cost and very concentrated disease that will have major impact on a few states’ Medicaid budgets? The block grant system fails unless there is a side payment of new federal funds. And given the political fights over natural disaster relief bills and the Zika bill, I have a hard time seeing Congress routinely providing multi-billion dollar cash infusions to a few states for new diseases or threatening epidemics.
ZIKA, Medicaid and Risk Adjustment under block grantsPost + Comments (16)
by Betty Cracker| 351 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Assholes, General Stupidity, WTF?
If he lives another thousand years and keeps using that time to oppose the fascist kleptocrat who hijacked his party of reckless neocons, bible-humpers and plutocracy minions, David Frum might yet work off a fraction of the karmic debt he acquired in the run-up to the Iraq War:
Curious how many of those who identified with John Milius' “Wolverines” back in 1984 now do media work for the occupying force pic.twitter.com/mm9nqpnuMS
— David Frum (@davidfrum) December 14, 2016
For those of you who are not fellow old farts, Frum is referring to “Red Dawn,” a Reagan-era film that depicted brave American patriots taking on Soviet invaders. And Frum is right — the same people who envisioned themselves picking off Russians with pa’s squirrel rifle in 1984 are filled with admiration for Putin’s steely man-boobs today.
It’s not just the Republicans with a media platform either. Check out this remarkable turnaround in Putin’s poll numbers among a certain subset of our population:
Of course, we suspected Republicans of being nascent fascist lackeys all along. Still, the stampede to the docks to welcome the conqueror with vodka and caviar is remarkable.
Open thread, comrades!
by David Anderson| 45 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, Free Markets Solve Everything, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Tonight Tomorrow night at midnight is the deadline on Healthcare.gov to sign up for coverage that starts January 1.
If you are already in a plan for 2016 and do nothing, you will be auto-assigned to a plan that (hopefully) is similar to what you have now.
If you are not covered, get covered tonight.
We don’t know what the Repeal bill will do that market as we have not seen enough of the language in it. We don’t know if there will be a Replace bill or what will be in it. If there is a Replace bill, it will most likely count on the idea of continuous coverage as its mandate analogue. So now is the time to build the history to survive Replacement.
Get covered tonight!
UPDATE: I missed a day
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads, Pet Rescue, Science & Technology, Make The World A Better Place
Sure, there are some dogs (hi, Ellie) who hold their dignity too high to willingly participate in these ridiculous human rituals. Walter says there’s worse ways to spend one’s days than with a full belly, a soft warm bed, and a household of welcoming companions.
(And if you send me a jpg of your holiday-celebrating household companions, yes I will front-page them, too also.)
Apart from happy rescue updates, what’s on the agenda for the day?
***********
I owe a couple commentors a hat tip for this — If you are looking to make a year-end tax-deductible contribution to a very worth cause, consider throwing a few bucks or bitcoins at the people responsible for the Wayback Machine site:
You have come to the Internet Archive in search of knowledge, or perhaps to find a part of the Web you may have lost.For 20 years through the Wayback Machine, we’ve backed you up. Now we ask for your help in return.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit library with a huge mission: to give everyone access to all knowledge. By making a tax-deductible donation today, you can ensure that everyone has free and open access to information, forever.
The history of libraries is one of loss. Libraries like ours are susceptible to different fault lines: earthquakes, legal regimes, institutional failure.
So this year, we have set a new goal: to create a copy of Internet Archive’s digital collections in another country. We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because lots of copies keeps stuff safe. To achieve our goal, we aim to raise $5 million by January 20, and we need your help to get there.
Right now a generous supporter will match your donation 1‑to‑1. So you can double your impact! For every dollar you donate right now, the Internet Archive will receive $2!…
Gosh, I wonder if there’s any significance to that “January 20” deadline, she said piously.
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Walter Says Happy HolidaysPost + Comments (196)
This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece, Music, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity
Trump should just make it a suburban Detroit trifecta, & to Kid Rock & Ted Nugent add Insane Clown Posse https://t.co/dj3WXNvuws
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 13, 2016
But the Juggalos are more politically aware than your average Trump voter! At least according to Nathan Rabin, interviewed (before the election) at PopMatters:
Nathan Rabin is a respected writer for respectable publications. He was the first head writer of the The A.V. Club (where he continues to write the popular feature My Year of Flops). He writes for Rotten Tomatoes and Splitsider. He is also a Juggalo. This past summer, he took the proceeds of a successful gofundme campaign to write a book that documented a whirlwind week that included attending both the yearly Gathering of the Juggalos and the Republican National Convention, where Trump went from being a perpetual annoyance of the Republican establishment to the party’s official nominee for president…
It seems like a lot of Trump supporters and Insane Clown Posse fans share similar experiences. You talk about how each of them feel like they’ve been marginalized from mainstream society.
Totally. I think they both [Trump and ICP] speak to people who feel oppressed, people who feel angry, people who feel like the mainstream of American culture doesn’t speak either to them or for them. But I think they both take these ideas in very different directions.
Covering both events in a week, did you see much overlap between Trump supports and Insane Clown Posse fans?
I do not. Every gathering, there’s kind of an angle that you’re supposed to approach. I was supposed to write about how Juggalos were huge Trump fans. I said “That’s a wonderful idea. That’d be a great piece. I think it’s probably impossible. I’m not sure these people exist.” It would have been amazing and fascinating to talk to people who embraced both the ideology of Insane Clown Posse and the ideology of Trump. But it just didn’t happen.
While there are a lot of commonalities, there are also a lot of ways that they are starkly different. They’re both very anti-establishment. But I feel like Trump and his ideology are about punching down. They’re about scapegoating. They’re about blaming people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder for the problems of America. Whereas Insane Clown Posse, they’re about punching up. They’re saying “We’re angry at law enforcement. We’re angry at rich white people who are evil. We’re angry at the corrupt establishment. We’re angry at people who have everything while you have nothing.”
This post is in: Energy Policy, Open Threads, Science & Technology
Next Week We Will Have a Supermoon and a Meteor Shower on the Same Night https://t.co/kk3BRqlC5J pic.twitter.com/Hl3N0QlNQn
— Popular Mechanics (@PopMech) December 10, 2016
… The Geminids are the last meteor shower of 2016, and you should be able to catch them between December 12 and December 15. The peak of the shower will be late at night on December 13 and early in the morning of December 14.
You’ll see the most meteors at around 2 a.m. local time, when the meteors radiate from directly overhead. The supermoon will also be visible, and even though the bright moon will make it harder to see the meteors, the Geminids are large enough that you should still be able to catch the brightest shooting stars.
Anybody going to be out there watching for meteors tonight?
(Our attempt this summer to see the Leonids shower was a major #FAIL, which ended with us & three wired little dogs stuck in a six-hour pre-dawn traffic tie-up, so I’m not even gonna mention this to the Spousal Unit… )
Speaking of immense fusterclucks, here’s a small piece of good news from The Resistance:
Wow. Energy Department says it won’t provide individual names who worked on climate polices to Trump’s team https://t.co/UGtazl4mAN
— Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) December 13, 2016
.
Apart from scienterrific scienterrorism, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Stay WatchfulPost + Comments (206)