Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Healthcare Insurance History

run75441: I have been fortunate to run across incredibly intelligent people here and other places who continue to impress me with their command on particular topics. Esmensetoo has an excellent knowledge of healthcare and healthcare insurance and how it has evolved. I was not expecting quite this much. It does cover all of the bases […]

Preventive Drugs in the Last Year of Life

I had thought these types of treatment had gone by the wayside in treatment during the last year of life. According to an Medscape article they have not. “‘Physicians should carefully consider whether the prescribed drugs are likely to achieve their benefit within the patient’s remaining lifetime,’ the authors concluded. The study included 151,201 patients […]

Seema Verma Spends $Millions of Taxpayer Funds Trying to Improve Her Reputation

Spoiler: It isn’t working. Charles Gaba at ACA Signups had this up. In an excellent scoop by Dan Diamond and Adam Cancryn this morning, Politico reports CMS Administrator Seema Verma, the person in charge of Medicare/Medicaid and who takes great joy in trashing Medicare and Medicaid, has spent millions of dollars on partisan consulting firms […]

Back To School

In an earlier post, My Education In Going to College, I commented: what was done most recently by some wonderfully-over-funded people in an effort to get their children into a Tier one school certainly did not have to happen in the manner it did. They could have just approached school authorities and with a “Thornton […]

My Education in Going to College

As I explained in a conversation, what was done most recently by some wonderfully-over-funded people in an effort to get their children into a Tier one school certainly did not have to happen in the manner it did. They could have just approached school authorities and with a “Mellon’s” (Back to School’s – Rodney Dangerfield) […]

PFAS Contamination, the New Flint at Military Bases and Again in Michigan

In parts of Livingston and Oakland counties, the people have been warned not to eat the fish from the Huron River and Kent, Strawberry, Zukey, Gallagher, Loon, Whitewood, Base Line and Portage lakes as well as Hubbell Pond due to the fish being contaminated with PFAS and similar chemicals coming from industries. In 2016, Michigan […]

Brooklyn Heights, NY

Click on the picture to get a great, detailed view of these magnificent and architecturally significant structures. Claude Scales’s Photo of the day: there is a lot of Brooklyn Heights literary history in this photo. The poet W.H. Auden lived in the top floor apartment of the brownstone row house at One Montague Terrace, nearest […]

Light Sentence

“Legal observers were surprised by the relatively light, 47-month sentence received Thursday by President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted in August on charges of tax and bank fraud. The 69-year-old, who appeared in the court in Virginia in a wheelchair and pleaded for compassion, could have been sentenced to up to […]

Pentagon to Tap Leftover Military Pay Funding

“The Pentagon is planning to tap $1 billion in leftover funds from military pay and pension accounts to help President Donald Trump pay for his long-sought border wall, a top Senate Democrat said Thursday. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL ‘It’s coming out of military pay and pensions. $1 billion. That’s the plan. The funds are available […]

The Lost People . . .

Over heard in the Comments Section: EMichael: “I do love the term ‘Goober Safari’”. “I am as tired as anyone else is at the seemingly endless Goober safaris into those benighted precincts of Americans who helped hand us El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago as our president*. I am even more tired of being told that the […]