Links are at the end, including to samples of our music to write by. Click some, that they may feel fulfilled.
We had blizzard warnings at altitude last week, where we are not; our sympathies and hopes for safety to everybody who had blizzards on the ground.
Surf’s up. We gotta get up north this year. Dip a toe.
The work force is shrinking, and it’s not just absent dead people
The New York Times has a story about older people punching a hole in the labor force by retiring sooner than expected, thereby extending the labor shortage. The pandemic (which as we all know is over now) created more dead people than usual, and at the same time our economic woes slowed immigration as businesses stopped hiring from overseas.1
Those two factors accounted for about 1.5 million of a 3.5 million worker deficit. Another million are evidently boomers who said fuck it and retired earlier than they might have absent the pandemic, and another million are boomers who retired on schedule and haven’t been replaced.
Millions of Americans left or lost jobs in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic as businesses laid off employees, schools closed and workers stayed home. Child care disruptions, Covid-induced disability and other lingering effects of the pandemic have kept some people on the sidelines. But for the most part, workers went back quickly once vaccines became available and businesses reopened.
Older workers were the exception. Among Americans ages 18 to 64, the labor force participation rate — the share of people working or actively looking for work — has largely rebounded to early 2020 levels. Among those 65 and up, on the other hand, participation lags well below its prepandemic level, the equivalent of a decline of about 900,000 people. That has helped to keep overall participation steadily lower than it was in 2020.
“Despite very high wages and an incredibly tight labor market, we don’t see participation moving up, which is contrary to what we thought,” Mr. Powell from the Fed said during his final news conference of 2022, adding: “Part of it is just accelerated retirements.”
Our parents both retired at 62 with pensions and, later, social security adding up to almost as much as they made during their last years on the job. You don’t see much of that anymore. Imagine how many more people of retirement age might have pulled the plug on the job during the pandemic if the U.S. offered at least a living-wage pension for the oldsters and the not-quite-oldsters.
Anyway, it’s good that the Fed’s attempt to combat inflation by torpedoing workers isn’t going so well, and it’s good that boomers are contributing to the welfare of their juniors by GTFOH.
With pay climbing so swiftly, Fed officials worry that they will struggle to bring inflation fully under control. Wages were not a major initial driver of inflation but could keep it high: Businesses facing heftier labor bills may try to pass those costs along to their customers in the form of higher prices.
Emphasis ours. Fuck the Fed, of whom it must be said that they’re as much responsible for inflation as anybody, and the tidal wave of privilege they rode in on.
The Atlantic notices something amiss with Medicare
Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel may be the more objectionable of the Emanuel brothers despite Rahm’s tendency toward vindictive, bilious authoritarianism, but he has noticed that the privatization rampage through Medicare by Medicare Advantage plans is costing the government and sometimes recipients a bunch of money.2
Insurers have discovered other ways to game the system to collect even more government money. MA plans get extra government payments if they enroll patients who are sicker than the average Medicare beneficiary. This “risk adjustment” payment makes sense; sicker patients generally cost more to treat than healthier ones. But this structure also creates perverse incentives for insurers to make their enrollees look sicker than they really are. As reported recently in The New York Times, some insurers sift through old medical records of Medicare Advantage patients to look for conditions that those patients’ doctors either failed to identify or chose not to treat. For instance, by coding “anxiety” as “mood disorder,” an insurer can get paid more. Experts estimate that this practice of “upcoding”—or reclassifying conditions and care with treatment codes linked to higher payments—adds $12 billion to $25 billion annually to MA’s cost.
Emanuel, who moonlights as a venture capitalist investing in health care-related startups — including the charmingly-named VillageMD, now part of the Walgreens vertical — is lightning quick to dismiss eliminating privatization in Medicare and Medicaid, and ignore studies from left and right showing that a Medicare for All plan along the lines proposed by Bernie Sanders and others will generate savings which dwarf the ones he suggests can come from reforming Medicare Advantage even with dental and vision care included.
Zeke addresses only glancingly the massive fraud routinely committed by the health insurance giants dominating the Medicare Advantage playing field. Of the top 10 companies in the business, five have been accused of fraud by the government (and a sixth, CVS, is under investigation), and eight have been caught overbilling short of fraud. As with our massive financial institutions, fraud is part of the business model. And these aren’t just one-time offenses; these top 10 players have been dinged dozens of times collectively.3
Medicare Advantage and the creeping privatization of Medicaid have fueled an enormous increase in revenue and profits since 2010, following the passage of Obamacare. Former insurance executive turned whistleblower Wendell Potter examined the fortunes of the six largest insurance companies between 2010 and 2021.4
Those six companies–Anthem, Centene, Cigna, CVS/Aetna, Humana, and UnitedHealth–are massively bigger today than they were 12 years ago as a result of numerous mergers and acquisitions and a new love interest: the government. In 2010, the companies took in a combined total of $245.2 billion dollars in revenue. Last year, that number had more than quadrupled to $1.1 trillion.
The three biggest–United, CVS/Aetna and Cigna–are five times bigger now than in 2010 in terms of revenue. Back then, their combined revenues totalled $149.5 billion. Last year: $753.8 billion. (Note: I used Aetna’s 2010 earnings report for this comparison. It merged with CVS at the end of 2017.)
Two of those companies–United and CVS/Aetna–have grown so fast they have leapfrogged into the top five of the Fortune 500 of America’s biggest companies. Only Walmart, Amazon and Apple took in more money last year than those two companies. (Cigna, the third largest in terms of revenue and my former employer, is now the 13th largest on the Fortune list.)
The large majority of that growth is courtesy of government money — taxpayer money, your money — via Medicare Advantage and Medicaid enrollees. During that same period, our overall health care spending has increased just shy of 100%. Inflation accounts for some of the increase, but most of it is profiteering. Emanuel’s suggestions for reform might trim some of the excess but, again, nowhere near what various iterations of Medicare for All would do.
Ah well.
‘Junk Science’ Needs a New Name
ProPublica has a long story on cops and prosecutors convicting innocent people using what amounts to magical thinking, and in most cases concealing their use of it from defendants. The theory, devised by a former cop with no experience of murder investigations, is that analysis of 911 calls can determine whether the caller is guilty of the crime they’re reporting.5
Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers’ speech patterns — their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as “hi” or “please” or “somebody” can reveal a murderer on the phone.
So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn’t be used to lock people up.
Prosecutors know it’s junk science too. But that hasn’t stopped some from promoting his methods and even deploying 911 call analysis in court to win conviction. So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn’t be used to lock people up.
In 2016, Missouri prosecutor Leah Askey wrote Harpster an effusive email, bluntly detailing how she skirted legal rules to exploit his methods against unwitting defendants.
“Of course this line of research is not ‘recognized’ as a science in our state,” Askey wrote, explaining that she had sidestepped hearings that would have been required to assess the method’s legitimacy.
We’re guessing that as usual, people who can afford to mount a good defense aren’t as affected by this as people who can’t. One hopes that the ProPublica story will help to remove the tactic from the prosecutorial bag of tricks.
Greta Thunberg KOs a professional kickboxer.
Andrew Tate has become the subject of mockery after taking more than 10 hours to come up with a limp response to Greta Thunberg on Twitter.
The “social media influencer” posted a video in a tweet, showing himself dressed in a dressing gown and smoking a cigar as he explained his comeback, which was branded by Twitter users as “pure cringe”.
It comes after Thunberg responded to a tweet by Tate, in which he boasted about his car collection and “their respective enormous emissions”, by inviting him to “enlighten” her by emailing “smalldickenergy@getalife.com”.
Guy just decided to take a shot at Thunberg with no provocation, and got slapped.6
Why do people like being tipsy, wonders the Washington Post
Turns out they like getting buzzed and hanging out with friends. Science!7
Music to write by
Surprise Chef, “All News Is Good News;”8 Japanese Television, “Space Fruit Vineyard;”9 Goat, "Oh Death;"10 Tamar Aphek, "All Bets Are Off;"11 Clinic, "Fantasy Island;"12 Electrelane, "Rock It to the Moon."13
We were going to try a new-to-us Sleaford Mods album, and we will later, but those guys are definitively not music to write by.
Played Out
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For the 911 "analysis" to have a chance in court would require a totally incompetent defense lawyer and/or a terminally stupid judge. I can't believe it's been approved on appeal anywhere in the country.
As you say, the medicare advantage scam is just that.