Another “Least Surprising Headline” for High Speed Rail

March 14, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty 

California voters made a terrible mistake back in 2008 when they narrowly approved a referendum for a $33 billion high-speed train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

Opponents said the project was a boondoggle and they made several predictions.

1. It will wind up costing far more than advertised.
2. It will take much longer to build than initially promised.
3. It will benefit special interest groups.

Lo and behold, skeptics were right.

Since I’m a fiscal economist, I was especially interested in the first concern. Based on real-world experience, we know that almost everything government does winds up being very expensive.

Indeed, this pattern is so clear that I wrote a column back in 2017 about the California project’s cost overruns and said it was the “least surprising headline ever.”

California's bullet train is hurtling toward a multibillion-dollar overrun,
a confidential federal report warns

New we have another “least surprising headline.”

It’s from KCRA in Sacramento, California’s capital. Here’s what was reported yesterday.

California bullet train project needs another $100 billion to complete
route from San Francisco to Los Angeles

If you want some of the grim details, I’ve excerpted a few sections of the story.

California’s mega high-speed rail project between San Francisco to Los Angeles also faces major funding hurdles, the project’s CEO Brian Kelly told state lawmakers… Kelly told lawmakers the project…was still a few billion dollars short to complete the Central Valley segment between Merced and Bakersfield. …Project leaders estimate it will still need an additional $100 billion to finish what voters were originally pitched in 2008: a bullet train that runs between San Francisco and Los Angeles. A timeline on its completion has not been set.

Here’s some additional analysis on this absurd boondoggle.

Charles Lane of the Washington Post opined on the California project in 2022. Here’s some of what he wrote.

Originally touted as a sub-three-hour link between San Francisco and Los Angeles, this mega-project has not carried a single passenger in the 14 years since the state committed to building it. It has made a lot of public money disappear, though: more than $10 billion…the public was told to expect completion by 2020. …Early on, France’s national railroad company ended its bid to help develop the California line and went somewhere with less red tape: Morocco. …At this point, the best thing for California might be to cut the project’s losses and abandon it. Yes, this would leave in place several massive concrete structures that have been completed. Passersby could look on them as monuments to magical thinking about infrastructure.

That same year, the Wall Street Journal editorialized about throwing good money after bad.

California Democrats once hoped that their 500-mile bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco would be a high-speed rail model for the nation. It’s a model, all right—in how politics can drive public works off the rails. …The California High-Speed Rail Authority this week increased its cost estimate for the bullet train to $105 billion from $100 billion two years ago. In 2008 when voters approved $10 billion in bonds for the choo-choo, the estimated price tag was a mere $40 billion. That’s enough to have built 10 large water reservoirs in the parched state. This latest $5 billion doesn’t even account for rapidly rising material and labor costs.

Last but not least, the folks at Reason (who have a long track record of being right on this issue) published a we-told-you-so column.

Here are excerpts from Matt Welch’s article.

The infamous, $113-billion-and-counting California high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which was supposed to be completed by 2020 for a cost of $33 billion yet has only begun tinkering on a 171-mile stretch in the Central Valley…there never has been, at any stage of this living monument to political unseriousness and hubris, even a “little chance” that the S.F.-L.A. line would zip passengers between the cities in just 160 minutes, let alone deliver on the whole ragbag of laugh-out-loud promises that the state and federal political establishment delivered with a straight face. …There is a point to rehashing these old arguments beyond saying we told you so. The fact is, these reality-based objections were widely known at the time. It’s just that the people who otherwise fashion themselves as serious thinkers about public policy made the conscious choice to jettison rationality in favor of pie-in-the-sky dreaming.

Sadly, this is not just a problem for California taxpayers.

People from every other state are coughing up a lot of money to finance this boondoggle.

One very obvious lesson, therefore, is to get the federal government out of the high-speed rail business, out of the long-distance rail business, out of the mass-transit business, and out of the transportation business.

Bidenomics Backfires in War on Big Pharma

The administration's unintended consequences in the drug market.

by Andrew Moran | Jan 7, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News

President Joe Biden and his administration have repeatedly declared victory in the war on Big Pharma. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, Medicare can directly negotiate lower drug prices for about a dozen pharmaceuticals, such as Januvia (diabetes), Imbruvica (blood cancers), Entresto (heart failure), and many more. While the president touts his achievements, the proposals have already triggered a series of unintended consequences that could hurt US consumers.

The War on Big Pharma

The chief purpose behind President Biden’s war on Big Pharma was to lower costs for the American people. Instead, the White House’s efforts could do the opposite, as drugmakers intend to raise prices for hundreds of medicines while potentially delaying the creation of certain life-saving pharmaceuticals.

(Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Reuters published an exclusive report that found Pfizer, Sanofi, and Takeda Pharmaceutical plan to boost the US price tag for more than 500 drugs in January. The latest move is in response to the industry agreeing to negotiate discounts on ten high-cost drugs this past fall while also contending with high inflation, bloated manufacturing costs, and potential supply disruptions amid the conflict in the Middle East. In other words, while these companies are trimming prices for certain products, they are making other drugs more expensive to make up the difference.

Several other firms are reportedly delaying in-demand medicines to evade Biden’s new pricing scheme.

Roche Holding AG and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals are two entities postponing therapies, suspending clinical trials, and adjusting timelines. For example, Roche has produced a pill for treating ovarian cancer. It was in the process of studies, but the corporation will not seek approval for the drug right now, meaning it would not be available to fight ovarian cancer for at least three more years. Or, as another instance, Alnylam was about to study Amvuttra to treat Stargardt disease, a rare cause of vision loss. It was approved for treatment. The problem? The Inflation Reduction Act exempts drugs that treat one rare disease from price negotiations, but pharmaceuticals that treat two or more are still eligible.

Seagen, a firm recently acquired by Pfizer, halted research on treating a type of bladder cancer with one of its leading drugs, Padcev, due to coming price deliberations with the US government. The business is instead mulling over a comparable drug for the same kind of cancer despite being in an earlier stage of study. Ultimately, it could be three more years before it is available to patients.

President Biden recently suggested that his administration revoke drug licenses and seize patents of medicines that it arbitrarily determines to be too expensive. Officials say the president possesses the power, citing a 1980 law that permits the government to take a firm’s patent if it does not extend products to the public that taxpayer funds helped develop. Experts immediately sounded the alarm, warning that it would prevent the creation of advanced medications and undermine intellectual property rights in the United States. Biden proposed a similar policy in 2021 regarding the coronavirus vaccines.

Biden’s campaign against Big Pharma could have disastrous consequences for patients, from higher prices to a lack of supply. Plus, despite routinely claiming the White House accomplished something, medicinal drugs are up 5% year-over-year. According to the November consumer price index, prescription and non-prescription drugs have climbed at an annualized pace of 3.8% and 7.8%, respectively.

The 2024 Election

It is an election year, and the polling indicates most people detest inflation. Many individuals also loathe drug companies. Strategically, it makes sense for an unpopular president to target Big Pharma, although the US government will abstain from removing COVID-19 vaccine makers’ total immunity from liability, of course. The incumbent must look like he is doing something to rein in drugmakers’ exorbitant prices. Like every intervention by the state, these actions will breed unintended consequences. The present regime asserts it is doing everything possible to shield consumers from greedy corporations. But eminent economist Milton Friedman may have been right when he wrote, “A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”

 Tags: Articles, Business News, Good Reads, Opinion

 

Read More From Andrew Moran

Biden's New EPA Rule May Double Power Bills

By Daniel Greenfield April 27, 2023 @ Sultan Knish  Blog

Americans can’t afford to buy food, so Biden decided that they also shouldn’t be able to heat their homes during the winter. After an “environmental” measure that would prevent a majority of the country from being able to afford new cars, Biden is now going after their power bills.

The latest EPA proposal would mandate ‘carbon capture’ at power plants. A study by MIT showed that carbon capture raises the cost of electricity from 30% to 50% depending on the type of plant. Another study by Australia’s Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis however showed that prices could actually climb as high as 95% to 175%.

Imagine your power bills doubling? That will be the final blow for millions of Americans.

Biden’s corrupt inflationary spending broke the economy and sent prices soaring. State environmental regulations in California, New York and other leftist areas increased the cost of electricity. Last year, 1 in 6 homes had fallen behind on their utility bills. A survey found that a third of households were cutting back on food and medicine to be able to heat their homes.

With more than 20 million households struggling, Biden decided to deliver the killing blow.

His administration’s illegal carbon capture mandates would hike electricity costs 30% to 175% and utilities will be forced to pass the cost of this expensive ‘green’ tech to their customers just as they are already being crushed under the burden of expensive and unreliable solar and wind systems. How many Americans can afford to pay twice as much for their utilities?

Not only would Americans pay more for the privilege of ‘carbon capture’ power, but the power plants would produce less power. Louisiana’s Cleco utility warned that its carbon capture experiment would cut power production by 30%. Pay more, get less: that’s carbon capture.

But that’s also all ‘green energy’.

Like most ‘green’ technologies, carbon capture is a scam. That’s not just a conservative position. Even the most fervent environmentalists, including Greenpeace, which calls it the “Great Carbon Capture Scam”, and the Sierra Club, have said it doesn’t work.

A Stanford study found that carbon capture actually increases air pollution.

A UC Berkeley study found that carbon capture would double water use which would be environmentally catastrophic in Southern California and other water-poor areas.

If carbon capture is unpopular with both conservatives and environmentalists, why is Biden so determined to impoverish Americans using a plan that both sides agree is a bad idea?

While carbon capture is a hypothetical technology that, like most green tech, doesn’t work, it does fulfill its primary purpose of making it too expensive for consumers to use power. Carbon capture technology doesn’t actually change anything about the environment, but it makes conventional gas and coal plants too expensive to operate.

And that is the whole point.

After being shut down by the Supreme Court which struck down the EPA’s power grab of regulating ‘carbon emissions’ , which is not a pollutant, the new move is meant to force power plants out of business so that they can be replaced with even more expensive and unreliable wind and solar. As expensive and inefficient as carbon capture is, wind and solar are monumentally more expensive and inefficient. A carbon capture mandate for power plants might hike power bills by 30% to 175%, but would in the long run be far more expensive than that when those plants are shut down and everyone is forced to depend on wind and solar.

While carbon capture is unpopular with environmentalists, some top Democrat donors have heavily invested in it including Bill Gates and George Soros. Carbon capture startups scored $882 million in capital last year so there’s a lot of Democrat donor money riding on it.

Millions of Americans will get poorer and freeze in the winter so Biden’s donors can get richer.

In the UK, which has even more fanatical environmental regulations than America, 50,000 people die every year because of “fuel poverty”. In December 2022, an estimated 1,000 people died because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes. Most of them were senior citizens.

This is the nightmare that Biden and his advisers want to bring to America.

France suffered its deadliest summer in a decade with thousands of deaths last year because of a lack of air conditioning. (The Biden administration has also been working to make air conditioners too expensive for working class Americans to afford.)

The EPA has tracked a growing increase in heat and cold-related deaths in America while falsely blaming them on its invented bogeyman of ‘climate change’ rather than environmental regulations that have made it too expensive for people to heat and cool their homes.

With a third of Americans struggling to pay their power bills, how many will die if Biden succeeds in illegally forcing carbon capture through and doubling power bills? With a population that is five times that of the UK and areas even colder, we could see as many as 250,000 deaths.

That is an outcome which environmentalists, who want a drastic reduction in the human population to ‘save the planet’, have enabled in the UK and which they are implementing here.

The Biden administration has destroyed our standard of living, is taking away our cars, our gas stoves and now wants us to freeze in the winter and suffer heat stroke in the summer. This brutal purge will enrich his donors and eliminate many of the elderly more likely to vote GOP.

The only thing carbon capture really ‘captures’ are our lives. 

 

 Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.  Thank you for reading.

New Yorkers and lawmakers howl over utility hikes; Con Ed says they’re not to blame

By Michael Gartland New York Daily News | Feb 08, 2022 

City and state lawmakers are amped up over a sudden rate spike that many New Yorkers are now seeing on their Con Ed energy bills — charges that could make it impossible for some to afford rent and their utilities. Brandy Bora, a corporate executive who rents a loft in Greenpoint, said her family’s Con Ed bill shot up from $300 in December to $850 last month — an increase, which, if sustained, will mean they’ll eventually be forced to move. “I don’t even know what to do,” Bora, who lives with her husband and their 6-year-old daughter, told the Daily News on Tuesday. “I literally can’t pay that.”..........To Read More...

My Take - Schadenfreude.  New Yorkers, they never learn.  They elect nitwits, and one after the other, and are then shocked they promote nitwit ideas.  Remarkable.

Government Schools: More Bureaucracy, Lower Performance, and Higher Costs February 16, 2021 by Dan Mitchell

February 16, 2021 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Whenever I’m asked to give an example of a powerful and persuasive visual, I always have an easy answer.

 

The late Andrew Coulson created a very compelling chart showing that huge increases in money and staff for government schools have not led to improvements in educational outcomes. All rational people who look at that image surely will understand that we’re doing something wrong. And if they review the academic evidence on government spending and educational results, they’ll definitely know we’re doing something wrong.  The international data, by the way, tells the same story. Which is especially disheartening since Americans taxpayers spend much more on education than their counterparts in other developed nations.

Let’s further investigate this issue.

 

I came across a 2017 tweet from Mark Perry that gives us another way of looking at the numbers.

He reviewed 64 years of data and found that government spending on education soared by 368 percent. And that’s after adjusting for inflation.

We got more teachers with all that money, but the main outcome was a massive expansion in the number of education administrators and other bureaucrats.

In other words, most of the additional money isn’t being used for classroom instruction.

And the numbers seems to get worse every year. In a recent article for Education Next, Ira Stoll uses two different data sets to document the growth of bureaucracy.

Here is some of the data he got from the Department of Labor.

Are schools really spending more on administration than they used to? The short answer is yes. …information to corroborate the idea of skyrocketing administrative spending may be obtained from a different source: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. …The category of “education administrators, kindergarten through secondary” in May 2019 included 271,020 people earning a mean annual wage of $100,340. In 1999, there were 186,220 people in this category, earning a mean annual wage of $65,480. That is 45.5 percent growth in the number of administrators. …The math works out to nearly three $100,000-a-year administrators for every school.

Here’s his table based on numbers from the Department of Education.

In each case, we see bureaucrats have been the biggest winners. There are a lot more of them than there used to be, and they enjoy lavish compensation packages.

Cory DeAngelis of Reason summarized Stoll’s findings in a pair of tweets.

Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute explains that all this additional funding and additional bureaucracy is not yielding worthwhile results.

…the U.S. spends more than $700 billion on K–12 education a year, or about $14,000 per student. That’s 39 percent more than the average OECD nation. And many big-city districts spend considerably more, with per-pupil outlays of more than $20,000 per year in places such as Washington, D.C., and Boston. …But it’s not clear that we’re spending all of this money in effective ways. For instance, …the ranks of non-instructional staff have grown more than twice as fast as student enrollment over the past 30 years. …in public bureaucracies, new dollars often double as a convenient excuse to avoid hard choices.

So what’s the moral of the story?

I don’t need to write anything because this article in National Review by Cameron Hilditch has a very apt summary.

American taxpayers have been hoodwinked by the whole idea of “public schools.” …We’ve been putting more and more money into the system for decades without reaping more returns for the nation’s children. …schools are advertised to taxpayers as institutions that serve every child in the nation. In reality, they serve the interests of no one other than the small group of Americans who work in these schools as teachers and administrators. …Since the teachers unions can shield their own avarice with claims of “public service” to children, they can manipulate the actual public into thinking that more money, job security, or political power for themselves is in everyone’s interest instead of their own. …a look at graduation rates, test scores, and graduate employability calls this into question.

P.S. While this column has mostly focused on the ever-expanding number of administrators and other education bureaucrats, as well as their lavish salaries, it’s worth noting that compensation for teachers also has been going up.

P.P.S. Though the real problem is not teacher pay. Some deserve more pay, some deserve less pay, and some deserve to be fired, but we can’t separate the wheat from the chaff because teacher unions and local politicians have created an inefficient system that delivers mediocrity.

P.P.P.S. We need school choice so that competitive pressure rewards the best teachers as part of a system that focuses on better results for students.

Immigration and Affirmative Action

Thomas Jackson, American Renaissance, January 1996

The Immigration Invasion, by Wayne Lutton & John Tanton, Social Contract Press, 1994, 190 pp
.
Affirmative Action for Immigrants, by James Robb, Social Contract Press, 1995, 120 pp.

Of all the threats to our national stability, immigration is in many respects the most obvious and ominous. Anyone with the slightest understanding of history and human nature knows that the arrival of large numbers of aliens can dramatically change any society. When those aliens are culturally and racially different from a society’s original majority, change will be profound and probably irreversible.

Non-white immigrants are transforming America. This is obvious in Texas, Florida, New York, and California, which receive the most immigrants, but newcomers are pushing their way steadily into every part of the country.

No healthy society permits this kind of transformation if it can help it. Every non-white nation, including ones like Mexico and China that send huge numbers of their own people to the United States, controls its border with a firm view to keeping aliens out. The urge to protect one’s tribal, racial, or national boundaries is almost as old and almost as strong as the urge to protect one’s family. Every non-white group does this instinctively, without reflection or apology.

White nations appear to have lost this primeval urge. All have officially rejected race as a necessary element of nationhood and some, like Canada and the United States, have even rejected language and culture. Any group, we are told, in virtually any number, can become American or Canadian. The United States, in particular, is said to be an “idea” in which Kurds and Xhosas can participate just as authentically as descendants of the Pilgrims...........To Read More.....

Congress, Not the Free Market, Raised Drug Prices

By Chuck Muth | March 15, 2019

Ronald Reagan Reagan once said, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I'm from the government and I'm here to help.’”

But the stuff of real nightmares is when it's Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-OR) voice announcing the words, full of scorn, arrogance, and unearned authority.

Wyden could easily fill in as an Ayn Rand villain, except critics would have savaged her for including such an unrealistically loathsome caricature.

The far-left Oregon Democrat was in his element at a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing, heaping scorn on people who run businesses employing thousands of Americans from his perch as a lifelong politician who's accomplished exactly nothing except leaving us all a little less free.........To Read More...

Subsidies for Higher Education Are Emptying the Pockets of Students and Lining the Pockets of Bureaucrats

December 21, 2018 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I’m not as eloquent on the issue as Professor Daniel Lin, but I recently explained on Fox Business that government subsidies for higher education have enabled big increases in tuition, an outcome that has been good for bureaucrats and bad for students.



In effect, this is simply a story of “third-party payer,” which happens when consumers get to buy something with other people’s money.

Sellers respond by increasing prices since they know that consumers won’t care as much about price.

Indeed, this is the main problem plaguing America’s health sector.  Simply stated, government subsidies are a recipe for higher costs and inefficiency, regardless of the product or sector.

We definitely see the bad consequences in higher education. Mitch Daniels, the head of Purdue University, correctly identifies the problem of third-party payer in a column for the Washington Post.

…let’s design an economic sector guaranteed to cost too much. …we will sell a product deemed a necessity, with little or no option for the customer to avoid us altogether. Next, we will arrange to get paid for inputs, not outputs — how much we do, not how well we do it. We will make certain that actual results are difficult or impossible to measure with confidence. And we’ll layer on a pile of complex federal regulations to run up administrative costs. Then, and here’s the clincher, we will persuade the marketplace to flood our economic Eden with payments not from the user but from some third party. This will assure that the customer, insulated from true costs, will behave irrationally, often overconsuming and abandoning the consumerist judgment he practices at the grocery store or while Internet shopping. Presto! Guaranteed excessive spending, much of it staying in the pockets of the lucky producers. You say, “Oh, sure, this is American health care.” …Your answer is correct but incomplete. It worked so well in health care, we decided to repeat the formula with higher education. …by evading accountability for quality, regulating it heavily, and opening a hydrant of public subsidies in the form of government grants and loans, we have constructed another system of guaranteed overruns. It is the opposite of an accident that the only three pricing categories that have outpaced health care over recent decades are college tuition, room and board, and books.

Amen.

Daniels has done a great job controlling costs at Purdue, but I’m even more impressed that he is willing to look at the problems for our entire system of higher education (as such, I’ll forgive him for being the Budget Director during the big-spending Bush Administration).

I especially like his solution, which in part would require colleges to repay taxpayers if there are loan defaults, thus ensuring that they have some skin in the game.

…a promising movement is advancing in education to put some of the risk of lousy results — students who do not graduate or who graduate without having learned enough to earn their way in the world — on the institutions that “educated” them. It is about time. This game has been skinless far too long. …even a small degree of risk-sharing in higher education would cause significant behavior change. …Even a small charge, plus the embarrassment of its public announcement, would probably jar many schools from their complacent ruts.

By the way, some people (including Paul Krugman) claim higher tuition is caused by budget cuts. Preston Cooper shared some of his research on this issue in the Wall Street Journal.

A typical student in an American public college pays thousands of dollars more in tuition than just a decade ago. Students and parents are worried and frustrated, and many point the finger at state legislators… Hillary Clinton blamed “state disinvestment” in higher education for soaring tuition and declared her support for “free college.”While the “disinvestment” narrative is simple and appealing, it collapses under scrutiny. …Tuition goes up no matter what state legislators do. Public colleges, with state boundaries insulating them from competition, and generous federal student aid programs at their disposal, charge as much as they can get away with. Changes in state funding are largely irrelevant.

He’s right about federal aid enabling higher tuition. Academic scholars have found a very clear link.
Now let’s focus on the problem of ever-expanding bureaucracy.

David Frum points out in the Atlantic that college bureaucracies have done a marvelous job of….drum roll…advancing the interests of college bureaucracies.

One of the most famous essays on bureaucracy ever written was built upon a deceptively simple observation. Between 1914 and 1928, the number of ships in the British Navy declined by 67 percent. The ranks of officers and men shrank by 31 percent. But the number of Admiralty officials administering the shrunken force rose by 78 percent. …Here was the origin of Parkinson’s famous laws of bureaucracy, including “work expands to fill the time available” and “officials make work for each other.” …Why does college education cost so much? The Parkinson of American academia is Ralph Westfall, a professor at California Polytechnic University in Pomona. He computed in 2011 that over the 33 years from 1975 to 2008, the number of full-time faculty in the California state university system had barely increased at all: up from 11,614 to 12,019. Over the same period, the number of administrators had multiplied like little mushrooms: 3,000 had become 12,183. …with our universities. We’ve been thinking of them as institutions for teaching and learning—and wondering why we seem to be spending so much without achieving more. But if you think of them as institutions generating a perpetual cycle of employment in specialties for which there would otherwise be no demand at all? Why in that case, they are succeeding brilliantly.

George Will, in a column about political correctness and campus snowflakes, shares this factoid about bureaucracy in California’s higher-education system.

…between the 1997-1998 academic year and the Great Recession year of 2008-2009, while the University of California student population grew 33 percent and tenure-track faculty grew 25 percent, senior administrators grew 125 percent. “The ratio of senior managers to professors climbed from 1 to 2.1 to near-parity of 1 to 1.1,”

Writing for the Boston Globe, Professor Benjamin Ginsberg warned that higher tuition is feeding an ever-expanding bureaucracy

…over the last half-century, America’s universities have slowly been taken over by a burgeoning class of administrators and staffers who are less interested in training future entrepreneurs and thinkers as they are in turning institutions of learning into cash cows for a growing academic bureaucracy. …Every year, hosts of administrators and staffers are added to university payrolls, even as budget crises force schools to shrink their full-time faculties. There are armies of functionaries – vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, each commanding staffers and assistants. In turn, the ranks of administrators have expanded at nearly twice the rate of the faculty, while administrative staffs have outgrown the academics by nearly a factor of five. No wonder college is so expensive!

Let’s close with this bit of satire from libertarian Reddit.

P.S. You won’t be surprised to learn that Hillary Clinton, when looking for solutions to a problem caused by government subsidies, recommended even more government subsidies.

Midwinter Short Takes On Some Current Health Topics

February 5, 2018 By Michael D. Shaw @ Health News Digest

 

We just observed Groundhog Day, and now know whether or not we are facing six more weeks of winter. Of course, a quick check of the calendar will reveal that the elapsed time between February 2nd and this year’s vernal equinox (March 20th) is 46 days (six weeks and change). February 2nd is roughly halfway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, and has long been a time of celebration. The Celts had Imbolc, and the Christians have Candlemas (Presentation of the Lord).

Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study

This study, with the catchy acronym ABCD, is the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States. Launched by NIH on September 25, 2015, the study is recruiting approximately 10,000 children, at age 9 or 10, (i.e. before they are likely to have started using drugs), conducting behavioral interviews and gathering neuroimaging, genetic, and other health data at periodic intervals until they are young adults. The subjects will be followed for approximately ten years.

As such, the goal is to determine how biology and environment interact and relate to developmental outcomes such as physical health, mental health, and life achievements.

There has been no shortage of publicity on the study, and 2018 has already seen some major coverage, including Sciencemagazine; KTUL-TV; and the Today show.

While the original concept of the study focused on drug and alcohol abuse, the scope has expanded. Last November, the Medical University of South Carolina joined the project. Lead researchers at this facility are Lindsay Squeglia, PhD and Kevin Gray, MD. As Squeglia puts it, “We want to know how things like screen time, substance use, head injuries, hobbies, video games, how all of these things affect how the brain is developing.”

Gray emphasizes that every kid who visits a pediatrician is readily evaluated against norms for height and weight, but “We don’t have anything like that for brain development.”

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that spending 10 hours a day staring at screens may not be ideal for young brain development.

Patients Over Paperwork Initiative

Even the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) realizes that providers need to spend more time with their patients, and less time dealing with regulatory and administrative functions. As such, last October, CMS announced its Patients Over Paperwork initiative.

Specifically, this policy aims to:

** Increase the number of satisfied customers–clinicians, institutional providers, health plans, etc. engaged through direct and indirect outreach 

** Decrease the hours and dollars clinicians and providers spend on CMS-mandated compliance 

** Increase the proportion of tasks that CMS customers can do in a completely digital way

Since CMS sets the tone for the manner in which all insurers and medical plans operate, this is a welcome development.

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, And JP Morgan Chase Join Forces To Disrupt Healthcare

For sure, this announcement has caused a stir. Among other things, prices of various health stocks dropped.

Julius Hobson, health care lobbyist with Polsinelli in Washington, D.C. shared these thoughts:

“Health care costs have annually exceeded inflation for years. In 2015, health care was 18 percent of GDP. It should be no surprise, then, that large business corporations are combining to lower health care costs. The question is, why did it take so long? The new entity would cover about 900,000 employees worldwide. The volume alone will help cut costs. With a lesser incentive for profits, the new company can cut out middle entities, such as pharmacy benefit managers.” 

“Hospitals could contract directly with the new company. Initially, the company could buy drugs at a greater volume and demand lower prices. Later, it could manufacture generic drugs as a means for reducing costs.”

All true, but as retired vascular surgeon and blogger Chuck Dinerstein has noted, the supposed dream team collaboration is “missing actual healthcare.”

“If health care was solely about financing, logistics, and value investing we would be in fat city. But the absence of any indication of who will direct the actual health care suggests that this is only a game changer for how we pay for healthcare, not, in the office, in the emergency department, or in the operating room healthcare. Perhaps that is why the insurance companies stocks fell and the hospital stocks rose.”

It’s not just about the dollars.

Remind me again why fossil fuel companies are evil

By Jack Hellner September 3, 2017

Politicians and reporters are on the lookout for gouging by oil companies and gas stations. The current price of gas is around $2.50 throughout the United States, which is far below the over $4 price in 2008. The average price in September 2008 was $3.65 in the U.S. The current price isn't close to that.   Obama actually didn't mind high gas prices, and reporters and Democrats always liked him.

Meanwhile, as oil companies and gas stations have gas prices over 30% lower than nine years ago, the federal budget has skyrocketed over 50% from $2.7 trillion in F.Y. 2007 to over $4 trillion today. Health insurance costs have ballooned over 100%, and Illinois income taxes are up over 60%. I am hard pressed to think of other products or services that are 30% cheaper than nine years ago, but it is evil oil companies that are targeted. Think of how much additional purchasing power the poor and middle class have due to lower gas prices. If people want to look at gouging, maybe they could look at government at all levels, which continually raises taxes and fees despite no shortage of supplies............ Read more

Venezuela: Sean Penn's Socialist Paradise

By Rich Kozlovich

Last week Anthony Dipaola and Golnar Motevalli published an article entitled, “Venezuela Sees Crude inMid-$20s If OPEC Doesn't Act”, stating:

“Oil prices may drop to as low as the mid-$20s a barrel unless OPEC takes action to stabilize the market” which the desire of , Venezuelan Oil Minister Eulogio Del Pino.  It appears the government of “Venezuela is urging the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to adopt an “equilibrium price” that covers the cost of new investment in production capacity, Del Pino told reporters Sunday in Tehran. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are considering his country’s proposal for an equilibrium price at $88 a barrel”, and “OPEC ministers plan assess the producer group’s output policy amid a global supply glut that has pushed down crude prices by 45 percent in the last 12 months” 

Does anyone besides me see the humor in all of this?  The vast amount of the world’s oil – and the price of oil - has not been controlled by Exxon – or any of the other companies leftists scream about– it’s been in the hands of socialist nations.  These leftist hypocrites screamed against the greedy capitalists raising prices unendingly and now the very countries they laud are worried about …..watch out…..here in comes now….. falling prices.  

Well, in Venezuela’s case it’s a lot more dire than just the price of oil.  It’s the desire for anyone to purchase Venezuela’s oil in the first place.  Venezuela’s crude oil “is so viscous and thick with contaminants that only a handful of refineries anywhere in the world can process the stuff. Almost all f those refineries are on the Gulf Coast of the United States”.  That was written by Zeihan in his book The Accidental Superpower, which I highly recommend.  

The fact of the matter is this.  Fracking will kill Venezuela oil production, or at the very least – they will not be able to sell their oil at the prices they’re trying to get OPEC to demand.

 

Whereas Venezuela’s oil is “viscous and think with contaminants”, oil produced through fracking is sweet and light, in fact it “isn’t just sweet and light, it is ultra-sweet and ultra-light, and so is remarkably easy to refine into light distilled products, like gasoline."  At the current trend, “Venezuela will become the first energy producer in history to not have a market”.

That’s just a part of Venezuela’s problems.  Zeihan goes on to state Colombia and Venezuela “are for all practical purposes in another world”, because the roads that link them are remote and low-quality and their railroad doesn’t even connect Columbia and Venezuela, they don’t connect with any other country either.

 They don’t even have the ability to easily travel into their own interiors.  That means their only hope is to the north, where all their populated centers face…….north….to the hated United States, who is their only natural economic partner.  But the United States has no need to be involved in Venezuela – if Venezuela wants that economic relationship with the U.S. – they will have to initiate it.

Now that does present a bit of a problem – don’t you think?  Hugo Chavez – when he was alive and abusing his people with his insane leftist policies – wanted to “reduce his country’s economic  connections with the U.S. in general and those refineries” he needed to accept his rotten oil specifically.   He wasted huge sums promoting the very socialism throughout South America that  imposed crushing poverty on his own people.  And now if these socialist leaders in Venezuela want any kind of economy they’re going to have to kiss some capitalist butt.  And won’t Sean Penn – who just thought Hugo Chavez and his commie buddies were just dandy - be thrilled about that?

Is this a case of paradise lost, or reality overcoming delusion?

IRS: Cheapest Obamacare Plan Will Be $20,000 Per Family

By Matt Cover  January 31, 2013

 (CNSNews.com) – In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year. Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS. The IRS's assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan….To Read More……