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

More on Arizona Politics and one particular representative

And Arizona has its share of nut-jobs too. One representative is more interested in controlling the lives of others. In particular those being the lives of women. And yes, one representative is making the right of women to control their lives an issue in Arizona. This is much like those creatures of control found in […]

An Admission of Guilt in Medicare Advantage Healthcare

The message can not get any clearer than what is being stated by CVS management. The discussion now being had is things will be better in 2025. Kind of doubtful as MedPac zeroes in on Medicare Advantage plans. I suspect more will be done to rein in MA plans. Read on and also the article. […]

A machine learning algorithm can identify 500 people, who go on to be shot within 18 months.

– by Sara B. Heller and Max Kapustin Econofact, November 2022 Let me be clear on the topic before you read the article. The full text is: “In a research  paper with colleagues, we find that it is possible by using data such as arrest and victimization records that cities already collect, to accurately identify specific […]

Decoding Medicare Advantage

Decoding Medicare Advantage by Andrew Sprung xpostfactoid Can STAT’s exposure of UHC’s exhortations to goose Medicare Advantage enrollees’ risk scores spur action to reduce MA overpayment? Load these Codes It is beyond reasonable doubt that the federal government’s payments to Medicare Advantage plans are grossly inflated by the plans’ gaming of the program’s risk adjustment […]

This Weeks Covid spiel includes current details on variant proportions

– by R.J. Sigmund Most of the demographic indicators of this summer’s Covid wave continued to recede rapidly in this week’s reports, and wastewater levels of the virus, the most definitive indicator of infections, have fallen to “low.” Among the CDC’s “early indicators” “test positivity”, or the percentage of tests for Covid that were positive, […]

Medicare Advantage Plan Members Will See Higher Prices and Less Service

While this is called Medicare, it is Medicare which has been commercialized. Medicare pays additional fees subsidizing the insurance plan companies (United Healthcare, WellCare, Script, etc. offering Medicare Advantage plans Not only have healthcare plans are cutting services, healthcare systems are also pulling out of Medicare Advantage Plans. Both Joel and I discussed twenty-something different […]

Healthcare Premiums Soaring Even as Inflation Eases

If we were to look at the costs of healthcare insurance for families and businesses, it has not remained the same percentage-wise for employers or employees. My initial sentence is a backwards way of saying costs are increasing faster than gains in income for either. Nothing has changed here and the foes to single payer […]

Private practice docs are cutting off Medicare patients

The old model of a single doc running a practice is disappearing in America. Between the overhead and the reduced compensation, this model of health care delivery looks increasingly anachronistic. When I started as an assistant professor at a medical school in 1987, there was a lot of money sloshing around. Patients and their insurance […]

COVID infection can cause brain damage

I’ve posted here before about herd immunity. Prior to inoculation/vaccination, herd immunity was the result of enough people dying or surviving that the transmission of the disease (plague, smallpox, etc) was arrested in that population until the next generation of uninfected people grew up, whereupon the substrate for another round of death appeared. But let’s […]

Healthcare Insurance Benefits In 2024: Higher Premiums Persist

This is just a partial of a much longer commentary by Health Affairs on Employer healthcare insurance for single employees am employees with families. “Health Benefits In 2024: Higher Premiums Persist, Employer Strategies for GLP-1 Coverage and Family-Building Benefits,” Health Affairs. I have used two of the charts to emphasis what is occurring. The first […]