How Insurers Exploited Medicare Advantage for Billions - The New York Times - 0 views
-
The health system Kaiser Permanente called doctors in during lunch and after work and urged them to add additional illnesses to the medical records of patients they hadn’t seen in weeks. Doctors who found enough new diagnoses could earn bottles of Champagne, or a bonus in their paycheck.
-
Anthem, a large insurer now called Elevance Health, paid more to doctors who said their patients were sicker. And executives at UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest insurer, told their workers to mine old medical records for more illnesses — and when they couldn’t find enough, sent them back to try again.
-
Each of the strategies — which were described by the Justice Department in lawsuits against the companies — led to diagnoses of serious diseases that might have never existed.
- ...41 more annotations...
Black law students see their futures tied to Ketanji Brown Jackson's success. : NPR - 0 views
-
More than 79 million people in the U.S. have had confirmed coronavirus infections and more than 960,000 have died of COVID-19. In the graphics below, explore the trends in your state. View the data via state-by-state charts (immediately below), a heat map that shows state risk levels, a table of trends in new infections over four weeks, and a map of case and death totals.
-
The above charts show average new cases per 100,000 people for each state over the last year. In most cases, three waves are visible in these charts: last winter's surge, the delta wave of late summer, and the ongoing omicron wave. In many places the omicron wave has already passed the peak of either previous wave.
-
To show trends, the table below shows the change in average new cases per day in each state, week over week for the last 28 days. States marked in shades of red have growing outbreaks; those in shades of green, are declining.
- ...1 more annotation...
What if We're Looking at Inequality the Wrong Way? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
By defining income as “post-tax, post-transfer, size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits,” Burkhauser and his co-authors achieved two things: a diminished degree of inequality and, perhaps more important, a conclusion that the condition of the poor and middle class was improving
-
Burkhauser has come up with statistical findings that not only wipe out inequality trends altogether but also purport to show that over the past 18 years, the poor and middle classes have done better, on a percentage basis, than the rich.
-
You get different answers depending on whether you measure income before or after taxes and transfers, whether you count fringe benefits (mainly health insurance), and whether you look at families or households, and whether you count the big hitters as the top 20% or the top 1 percent. Counting health care mutes the increase in inequality, but that really means that most of the increase in working class incomes has been siphoned off to medical providers. Looking at households has the same effect.
- ...21 more annotations...
How Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would tax the 1 percent, in one chart - Vox - 0 views
-
How Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would tax the 1 percent, in one chart
-
there’s at least one issue on which Clinton likes to stress that Trump does in fact have a set policy: tax cuts for the super wealthy.
-
There’s a certain irony to the discrepancy in the candidates’ plans: All of the evidence suggests Hillary Clinton is the candidate overwhelmingly preferred by the super wealthy.
- ...7 more annotations...
A final plea: The case against Trump's dangerous authoritarianism - in one chart - The ... - 0 views
-
At the heart of Trump’s case for the presidency lies two components. The first is a hyper-exaggerated narrative of national decay and decline — skyrocketing crime, rotting inner cities, decaying factories, a festering terror threat from within, a border that is being breached by dark hordes of invaders. The second is the notion that our elites are both fecklessly responsible for that perilous state of national decline and too corrupted to fix it — they’ve rigged the system against you, undermining American sovereignty to enrich themselves, while allowing American identity to be degraded by immigrants who are at best parasitic and at worst a lethal threat.
-
, the truly pernicious component of Trump’s argument is that our institutions and our democracy have themselves grown so hopelessly corrupted and compromised that they are no longer even capable of arresting and turning around that decline via conventional democratic processes.
-
The only outcome that can change this state of affairs is electing him president. Any other result would only confirm that our system has been so corrupted that it is fundamentally no longer capable of producing legitimate political outcomes.
Industrial Revolution Inventors Chart - 0 views
-
The Industrial Revolution that occurred in the 19th century was of great importance to the economic future of the United States. Three industrial developments led the way to industrialization in America:
Causes of the French Revolution - 0 views
-
Causes of the French Revolution 1. International: struggle for hegemony and Empire outstrips the fiscal resources of the state 2. Political conflict: conflict between the Monarchy and the nobility over the “reform” of the tax system led to paralysis and bankruptcy. 3. The Enlightenment: impulse for reform intensifies political conflicts; reinforces traditional aristocratic constitutionalism, one variant of which was laid out in Montequieu’s Spirit of the Laws; introduces new notions of good government, the most radical being popular sovereignty, as in Rousseau’s Social Contract [1762]; the attack on the regime and privileged class by the Literary Underground of “Grub Street;” the broadening influence of public opinion. 4. Social antagonisms between two rising groups: the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie 5. Ineffective ruler: Louis XVI 6. Economic hardship, especially the agrarian crisis of 1788-89 generates popular discontent and disorders caused by food shortages.
Principal Dates and Time Line of the French Revolution - 0 views
-
Principal Dates and Time Line of the French Revolution
David Frum: HBO's 'Game Change' Charts Sarah Palin's Revenge - The Daily Beast - 0 views
-
Game Change the movie shows a Palin of almost unfathomable ignorance. Staffers discover that she has never heard of the Federal Reserve and does not know why there are two Koreas; she answers a prep question about the military alliance with Britain by saluting John McCain’s excellent relationship with Queen Elizabeth. Efforts to instruct her send Palin into what one staffer describes as a “catatonic stupor.” And when Palin emerges, she is seized by the grievances that defined her public message from the autumn of 2008 onward. In those dying days of the campaign, she discovered the idea that would shape the final month of the campaign and the rest of her career: the divide between the “real” America—the America-loving America—and the despised rest of the country.
-
By luck or by some deep political instinct, Palin launched her attack on the credentialed urban elite at exactly the hour that this elite was discrediting itself as at no time since the urban crisis of the 1960s.
-
It was the mighty brains of Wall Street who first enabled the financial crisis—and then escaped scot-free from the disaster, even as ordinary Americans lost their jobs, homes, and savings. Palin was speaking to and for constituencies who had steadily lost ground through the previous decade—and who now confronted personal and national disaster. Meanwhile, the people asking for bailouts—and the people deciding whether to grant bailouts—boasted résumés that looked a lot like Obama’s private school/Columbia/Harvard Law School pedigree. That is, when they weren’t outright Obama supporters and donors. And at the same time, the position of America in the world—and of the white majority within America—seemed in question as never before. There, too, Obama could be made to represent every frightening trend: the flow of immigrants (12 million of them between 2000 and 2008, half of them illegal); the rise of non-Western powers like China and India; the deadly threat of terrorism emanating from people with names like “Barack,” “Hussein,” and—give or take a consonant—“Obama.”
- ...1 more annotation...
How the War on Poverty Succeeded (in Four Charts) : The New Yorker - 0 views
-
As Ryan pointed out during last year’s election campaign, there are close to fifty million people living in poverty, according to the standard government measure—nearly one in six Americans. In 1964, the poverty rate was about about nineteen per cent. By 1966, it had fallen to just under fifteen per cent. Almost half a century later, in 2012—the last year for which the Census Bureau has provided an official estimate—the poverty rate is still fifteen per cent. Doesn’t this suggest Ryan is right, and the War on Poverty has been a monumental failure? No, it doesn’t. If you measure poverty properly, which is only now being done, you find that the poverty rate has fallen pretty dramatically since the middle of the nineteen-sixties.
-
in 1967 was close to thirty per cent, and fell to eighteen per cent by 2012, a drop of about a third. That doesn’t mean child poverty has been eliminated—far from it. But it does suggest that progress has been made, both in measuring human need and in tackling it.
-
In focussing on subsistence income, Orshansky’s poverty thresholds provided a reasonable first approximation of the number of families in great need. But they were based on pre-tax income, the only income measure for which Orshansky had reliable figures. They ignored the impact of taxes, and tax credits—such as the Earned Income Tax Credit—which, over time, have become increasingly important to poor families. And they also failed to account for government transfer programs, such as food stamps and free school lunches, which effectively expand the spending power of poor households.
- ...3 more annotations...
Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us? | Mother Jones - 0 views
-
There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.
-
Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.
-
at this point our tale takes a darker turn. What do we do over the next few decades as robots become steadily more capable and steadily begin taking away all our jobs?
- ...34 more annotations...
In Defense of Anonymous Political Giving - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
In partisan terms, the growth of secrecy in campaign finance has been driven by the political right, as shown in the graphic at Figure 2. Of the $310.8 million in total political spending by nondisclosing groups in 2011-12, $265.2 million, or 85.5 percent, was spent by conservative, pro-Republican organizations (red in the pie chart), and $10.9 million, or 11.2 percent, was spent by liberal, pro-Democratic organizations (blue in the chart).
-
do you have a principled answer to the argument that efforts to influence the political and policy-making process should be as transparent and open as possible because voters deserve to know who is trying to persuade them to take stands on issues of major public importance? More simply: Is transparency an essential ingredient of democracy? What overrides transparency?
-
“The rationale behind donor anonymity, which is a form of First Amendment speech, is to protect against the threat of retaliation when someone or some group takes a stand, espouses their point of view or articulates a position on issues that may (or may not) be popular with the general public or the political party in majority power. There are many precedents to this: the Federalist Papers were published under pseudonyms and financed anonymously, out of fear of retribution.”
- ...1 more annotation...
This chart might make you feel better about American inequality - 1 views
‹ Previous
21 - 40 of 257
Next ›
Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page