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

What Does Vaccine Effectiveness Mean?

What Does Vaccine Effectiveness Mean? by Peter Dorman  When technical specialists adopt an everyday word, they often give it a meaning that differs from its everyday use.  This can be misleading for nonspecialists, especially when little effort is made to explain the difference.  A well-known example is “significance”, which means one thing when used in […]

A little Bit of Knowledge

Prof. Joel Eissenberg, Saint Louis University discussing Senator Rand Paul’s outburst on the beginnings of the Covid-19 virus. “A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.” ~Alexander Pope By now, we’ve all seen the spectacle of […]

Coronavirus dashboard for July 28: you’re reading the right blog, ghoulish edition

Coronavirus dashboard for July 28: you’re reading the right blog, ghoulish edition In writing about the economy, I make use of long and short leading indicators to forecast coincident indicators. In writing about COVID, the template isn’t much different: cases lead hospitalizations by about 2 weeks, which in turn lead deaths by about 2 weeks. […]

Medicare4All Rallies Shows Big Support for Universal Health Care

Dan sent this article to me and I scan-read it as it is done in generalities. This not a criticism of the content as much as my pointing out it is done in brevity. The push is big for some form of Single Payer healthcare if one were to call it “insurance.” At some point […]

Private Equity invests in “Primary Care” Medicine

I am adding a brief comment here (it fits and is on topic) rather than going back to the earlier post which I believe to be titled correctly; “Little Good can Come from Private Equity in the Healthcare Industry.” As my source of information I had identified two different articles taken from Modern Healthcare and […]

Brace yourself for the surge in deaths

Coronavirus dashboard for July 21: brace yourself for the surge in deaths I have been warning since late June that the situation would likely look very different by the end of July. By 2 weeks ago, I wrote: “In the near future, there appears to be bad news and *relatively* “good” news for the US. The […]

Distraction*

How the oligarchs stole our democracy So … . What was the House Un-American Activities Committee (1945-1975, with a few interesting precursors) really all about? Looking back through the lens of history, it was much about distracting the Nation’s attention from the racist atrocities being committed in southern states. Still today, all a red state […]

Little Good can Come from Private Equity in the Healthcare Industry

Little Good can Come from Private Equity in the Healthcare Industry, Angry Bear, Me @ Angry Bear This is almost two years ago. As if we did not have enough issues with the commercial healthcare insurance industry attempting to supplant single payer Medicare (minus setting hospital budgets, doctor fees, and pharmaceutical costs to the consumer) […]