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

True Costs of Employee Healthcare

Maggie Mahar would cite Phillip Longman and his book the Best Care Anywhere when she was on her own blog and also at Angry Bear afterwards. Mr. Longman has a history of detailing the healthcare given by the Veterans Administration. His proposal then was commercial healthcare should be replaced by a similar organization such as […]

Making Drugs Affordable for All

I am running late on posting for tomorrow. This piece by Merrill Goozner of GoozNews is one half of his piece on pharmaceuticals. The article is entitled “A plan to make drugs affordable for all.” The link is GoozNews above. You can read the entire article, scroll down to “Trust Bust,” or just click on […]

Is Jay Bhattacharya a libertarian?  Does it matter?

Is Jay Bhattacharya a libertarian?  Does it matter? Jay Bhattacharya was an author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that we should let covid spread freely among healthy people to reach herd immunity as quickly as possible.  The elderly and those whose health made them vulnerable to covid should be given “focused protection”.  Bhattacharya […]

What is Happening in 2025 with Healthcare

A plus now and a potential negative year end. January 8, 2025: ACA Open Enrollment is, was running over 16% ahead (I am sure it increased) of roughly the same point a year earlier in 2024, On January 8, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced “Nearly 24 Million Consumers Have Selected Affordable Health Coverage in […]

Government bailout for for-profit healthcare

The right-wing mantra is that private enterprise is always more efficient than government. As far as I can tell, private enterprise is more efficient at extracting dollars from citizens, yes. And banks have proven to be efficient at extracting bail-outs when their judgement leads to insolvency. Recently, the bankruptcy of for-profit Steward Health Care closed […]

Twenty-six percent of Labor in the lowest 10% of wage earners had access to employer healthcare plans 

Compare the above numeric in the title to the 96% of employees in the highest 10% of wage earners. having access to employer sponsored healthcare. In 2022, seventy percent of private sector workers had access to medical care benefits. Less than half of them obtained coverage that way (a take-up rate of just 66%). As […]

Calling on Congress to Stop Threatening Medicaid

The upshot of a Republican led Congress threatening Medicaid kind of makes sense. They can’t threaten Musk, Zuckerman, or the other bunch of billionaires. They would pay for that occurrence. So, in order to look good they pick on those who have little political clout. They are not going to loudly mention how they cleaned […]

2024 year end Coronavirus dashboard: the year COVID-19 turned into the flu

 – by New Deal democrat A year ago I said that I would only update information about the state of COVID-19 if there was something significant to report. And as of the end of the year 2024 there is: deaths from COVID in 2024 have fallen to the point where they are equivalent to the upper […]