Walter Mondale (1928 - 2021) American politician, diplomat, and lawyer . He served as the 42nd vice president of the United States from 1977 to 1981 during President Jimmy Carter administration.
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They knew the neighborhood would revolt. It was early May, and officials in this Northern California city known for its farm-to-table dining culture and pumped-up housing prices were frantically debating how to keep covid-19 from infiltrating the homeless camps proliferating in the region’s celebrated parks and trails. The number of people living homeless in Santa Rosa and the verdant hills and valleys of broader Sonoma County had surged, exacerbated by three punishing wildfire seasons that destroyed thousands of homes in four years....... Read more
"Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. It is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Understanding this effect can help you avoid falling for propaganda, says psychologist Tom Stafford".....
...."The key finding is that people tend to rate items they've seen before as more likely to be true, regardless of whether they are true or not, and seemingly for the sole reason that they are more familiar".... Click to read Tom Stafford's article published by the BBC on October 26, 2016
Kyunghee Lee’s right hand hurts all the time.
She spent decades running a family dry cleaning store outside Cleveland after emigrating from South Korea 40 years ago. She still freelances as a seamstress, although work has slowed amid the covid-19 pandemic.
While Lee likes to treat her arthritis with home remedies, each year the pain in the knuckles of her right middle finger and ring finger increases until they hurt too much to touch. So about once a year she goes to see a rheumatologist, who administers a pain-relieving injection of a steroid in the joints of those fingers.
Her cost for each round of injections has been roughly $30 the past few years. And everything is easier, and less painful for a bit, after each steroid treatment.
So, in late summer she masked up and went in for her usual shots. She noticed her doctor’s office had moved up a floor in the medical building, but everything else seemed just the same as before — same injections, same doctor.
Then the bill came.
The Patient: Kyunghee Lee, a 72-year-old retiree with UnitedHealthcare AARP Medicare Advantage Walgreens insurance who lives in Mentor, Ohio
Medical Service: Steroid injections into arthritic finger joints
Service Provider: University Hospitals Mentor Health Center, part of the University Hospitals health system in northeastern Ohio
Total bill: $1,394, including a $1,262 facility fee listed as “operating room services.” The balance included a clinic charge and a pharmacy charge. Lee’s portion of the bill was $354.68.
What Gives: Lee owed more than 10 times what she had paid for the same procedure done before by the same physician, Dr. Elisabeth Roter.
Lee said it was the “same talking, same injection — same time.”
Lee and her family were outraged by the sudden price hike, considering she had gotten the same shots for the far lower price multiple times in the years before. Her daughter, Esther, said this was a substantial bill for her mother on her Social Security-supplemented income.
“This is a senior citizen for whom English is not her first language. She doesn’t have the resources to fight this,” Esther Lee said.
What had changed was how the hospital system classified the appointment for billing. Between 2019 and 2020, the hospital system “moved our infusion clinic from an office-based practice to a hospital-based setting,” University Hospitals spokesperson George Stamatis said in an emailed statement.
That was a change in definition for billing. The injection was given in the same medical office building, which is not a hospital. Lee did not need or get an infusion, which requires the insertion of an IV and some time spent allowing the medicine to flow into a vein.
Nonetheless, that change allowed the hospital system to bill what’s called a “facility fee,” laid out on Lee’s bill as “operating room services.” The increasingly controversial charge — basically a room rental fee — comes without warning, as hospitals are not required to inform patients of it ahead of time.
Hospitals say they charge the fee to cover their overhead for providing 24/7 care, when needed. Stamatis also noted the cost of additional regulatory requirements and services “that help drive quality improvement and assurance, but do increase costs.”
But facility fees are one reason hospital prices are rising faster than physician prices, according to a 2019 research article in Health Affairs.
“Facility fees are designed by hospitals in particular to grab more revenue from the weakest party in health care: namely, the individual patient,” said Alan Sager, a professor of health policy and management at the Boston University School of Public Health.
Lee’s insurance had changed to a Medicare Advantage plan in 2020. The overall cost for the appointment was nearly three times what it was in 2017 — before insurance even got involved.
The National Academy for State Health Policy has drafted model legislation for states to clamp down on the practice, which appears to have worsened, Executive Director Trish Riley said, as more private practices have been bought by hospitals and facility fees are tacked onto their charges.
“It’s the same physician office it was,” she said. “Operating in exactly the same way, doing exactly the same services — but the hospital chooses to attach a facility fee to it.”
New York, Oregon and Massachusetts are pursuing legislation to curtail this practice, she said. Connecticut has a facility fee transparency law on the books, and Ohio, where Lee lives, is considering legislation that would prohibit facility fees for telehealth services.
But Riley noted it’s difficult to fight powerful hospital lobbyists in a pandemic political climate, where hospitals are considered heroic.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has attempted to curtail facility fees by introducing a site-neutral payment policy. The American Hospital Association sued over the move and plans to take the case to the Supreme Court.
Resolution: Lee’s daughter, Esther Lee, was furious with the hospital over the fee. Her mom, who is fiercely independent, finally brought her the bill after trying for weeks to get the billing office to change it.
“This is wrong,” Esther Lee said. “Even if it was a lot of money for services properly rendered, then of course she would pay it. But that’s not the case here.”
When Lee called her doctor’s office to complain, they told her to talk to the billing department of the hospital. So Lee, with Esther’s help, repeatedly called the billing department and filed a complaint with Medicare.
“I don’t want to lose my credit,” Kyunghee Lee said. “I always paid on time.”
But after receiving a “final notice” in February, and then being threatened with being sent to collections, the Lee family gave up the fight. Esther Lee paid the bill for her mother. But she’s worried her mom will delay getting the shots now, putting up with the pain longer, as she knows they are more expensive.
The Takeaway: When planning an outpatient procedure like an injection or biopsy, call ahead to ask if it will happen in a place that’s considered a “hospital setting” — even if you think you understand the office’s billing practices. Ask outright if there will be a facility fee — and how much — even if there’s not been one before. If it’s an elective procedure, you can search for a cheaper provider.
One easy place to scout for more affordable care is the office of a doctor whose practice has not been bought by a hospital. It is the hospital, not your longtime doctor, that is adding the fee, said Marni Jameson Carey, executive director of the Association of Independent Doctors.
“This is one of the terrible fallouts of consolidation,” Carey said.
Sources:
Stephanie O’Neill contributed to the audio version of this story.
Bill of the Month is a crowdsourced investigation by KHN and NPR that dissects and explains medical bills. Do you have an interesting medical bill you want to share with us? Tell us about it!
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
Billions of people in the world are living in poverty. Adjusted for the purchasing power in each country, 85% of the world population live on less than $30 per day.
In an earlier post I said that ‘if we want global poverty to decline substantially then the economies that are home to the poorest billions of people need to grow.’ In this post I want to make this statement more concrete. I will look at the depth of global poverty today to get a quantitative sense of just how much the global income distribution would need to change to reduce global poverty substantially. Continue reading
Working from home is a dream come true for some people and a nightmare for others. It all depends on your perspective. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, some people who started working remotely were happy about the changes. For one thing, working from home saved them time and money that would have been spent on commuting to work every day.
However, the most important advantage of working from home is that it will keep you safe from getting infected by the novel coronavirus. Right now, this is the only reason that counts. Thankfully, software developers have the privilege of working from home. This has propelled some of them to consider relocation from Silicon Valley to more affordable cities in Texas.
Tech Talent Flee From Silicon Valley
Do you know that there are more than 225,300 high tech workers in Silicon Valley, San Francisco? To put this into perspective, there are 387,000 high tech jobs in the entire country. So, if there are 225,300 high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley, then you can understand why it is the best hub for web developers around the world. Unfortunately, the city is at risk of losing its position as the number one destination for tech talent. This is primarily because of two things: talent relocation and company relocation.
Without the companies and the hundreds of thousands of tech workers in Silicon Valley, the city is going to lose its title as the foremost destination for tech gurus in the United States. This makes it one of the most technologically innovative places in the world but it also makes it one of the most expensive. House rent in the Valley is unrealistically high and it's only going to keep increasing. Tech jobs pay more money than many other jobs in Silicon Valley. However, tech workers aren't satisfied with spending all the money they have on daily expenses.
A small one-bedroom apartment in Silicon Valley costs over $2,000 monthly. By the time you factor in food and other expenses, you might spend over $5,000 just to survive in Silicon Valley every month. This isn't something the average worker can afford. Some of the tech workers who can afford this expensive lifestyle don't think the Valley is worth all the hype. Since they can now work from home, many of these workers have decided to leave the expensive city for more affordable places.
Why should any average worker pay $5,000 monthly to survive when they spend $2,000 for the same standard of living in another city? The primary reason why many of these tech workers remained in Silicon Valley for this long is because of their jobs. Now that they no longer have to go to the office, they want out of the city. Some of them have already indicated an interest in moving to Texas while many others have moved out already.
Coronavirus is Changing Tech Salaries
As tech talent and companies flee Silicon Valley, they inspire even more people to leave the overpriced city. However, tech companies that are remaining in Silicon Valley aren't ready to let their talent relocate, remote work, or not. Facebook and other companies have given their workers ultimatums. They have the choice to remain in Silicon Valley and keep their fat salaries or relocate and face cuts. The salary cuts depend on the company but Facebook is threatening to remove up to 10% of the salary of remote workers. Some other companies claim that they will cut between 8% to 20% depending on where their workers choose to go after leaving the Valley. The cheaper the cost of living in the new place, the higher the salary cut.
Bottom Line
Covid-19 is changing tech salaries in the United States and every other part of the globe. Many similar things have been happening in tech companies around the world, but the most pronounced rate of relocation is in Silicon Valley. Tech companies like Oracle and Hewlett Packard have also left the Valley for Texas. Even Elon Musk has moved from his Silicon Valley home to the Lone Star State. If companies keep leaving the Valley, it will no longer be the most popular tech hub in the world.
"A third option is necessary: a way to rent without making someone else rich" Read Shane Philips article.
Most of us entered the Internet Age with high hopes and expectations of what it could bring to us. Now, we find an online world dominated by corporations in pursuit of increased revenues, profit, and higher valuations. A world, where we, the users of the services are the product, where disinformation reigns, radicalization is rampant, rage is out in the open and where every day our privacy slips away. Read the Atlantic article "How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire"
Good article - long, and worth reading.
When getting vaccinated against covid-19, there’s no sense being picky. You should take the first authorized vaccine that’s offered, experts say....read more
Covid-19 infections from variant strains are quickly spreading across the U.S., but there’s one big problem: Lab officials say they can’t tell patients or their doctors whether someone has been infected by a variant.
Federal rules around who can be told about the variant cases are so confusing that public health officials may merely know the county where a case has emerged but can’t do the kind of investigation and deliver the notifications needed to slow the spread, according to Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.
“It could be associated with a person in a high-risk congregate setting or it might not be, but without patient information, we don’t know what we don’t know,” Hamilton said. The group has asked federal officials to waive the rules. “Time is ticking.”
The problem is that the tests in question for detecting variants have not been approved as a diagnostic tool either by the Food and Drug Administration or under federal rules governing university labs ― meaning that the testing being used right now for genomic sequencing is being done as high-level lab research with no communication back to patients and their doctors.
Amid limited testing to identify different strains, more than 1,900 cases of three key variants have been detected in 46 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s worrisome because of early reports that some may spread faster, prove deadlier or potentially thwart existing treatments and vaccines.
Officials representing public health labs and epidemiologists have warned the federal government that limiting information about the variants ― in accordance with arcane regulations governing clinical labs ― could hamper efforts to investigate pressing questions about the variants.
The Association of Public Health Laboratories and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists earlier this month jointly pressed federal officials to “urgently” relax certain rules that apply to clinical labs.
Washington state officials detected the first case of the variant discovered in South Africa this week, but the infected person didn’t provide a good phone number and could not be contacted about the positive result. Even if health officials do track down the patient, “legally we can’t” tell him or her about the variant because the test is not yet federally approved, Teresa McCallion, a spokesperson for the state department of health, said in an email.
“However, we are actively looking into what we can do,” she said.
Lab testing experts describe the situation as a Catch-22: Scientists need enough case data to make sure their genome-sequencing tests, which are used to detect variants, are accurate. But while they wait for results to come in and undergo thorough reviews, variant cases are surging. The lag reminds some of the situation a year ago. Amid regulatory missteps, approval for a covid-19 diagnostic test was delayed while the virus spread undetected.
The limitations also put lab professionals and epidemiologists in a bind as public health officials attempt to trace contacts of those infected with more contagious strains, said Scott Becker, CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “You want to be able to tell [patients] a variant was detected,” he said.
Complying with the lab rules “is not feasible in the timeline that a rapidly evolving virus and responsive public health system requires,” the organizations wrote.
Hamilton also said telling patients they have a novel strain could be another tool to encourage cooperation ― which is waning ― with efforts to trace and sample their contacts. She said notifications might also further encourage patients to take the advice to remain isolated seriously.
“Can our investigations be better if we can disclose that information to the patient?” she said. “I think the answer is yes.”
Public health experts have predicted that the B117 variant, first found in the United Kingdom, could be the predominant variant strain of the coronavirus in the U.S. by March.
As of Tuesday, the CDC had identified nearly 1,900 cases of the B117 variant in 45 states; 46 cases of B1351, which was first identified in South Africa, in 14 states; and five cases of the P.1 variant initially detected in Brazil in four states, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, told reporters Wednesday.
A Feb. 12 memo from North Carolina public health officials to clinicians stated that because genome sequencing at the CDC is done for surveillance purposes and is not an approved test under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments program ― which is overseen by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ― “results from sequencing will not be communicated back to the provider.”
Earlier this week, the topic came up in Illinois as well. Notifying patients that they are positive for a covid variant is “not allowed currently” because the test is not CLIA-approved, said Judy Kauerauf, section chief of the Illinois Department of Public Health communicable disease program, according to a record obtained by the Documenting COVID-19 project of Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
The CDC has scaled up its genomic sequencing in recent weeks, with Walensky saying the agency was conducting it on only 400 samples weekly when she began as director compared with more than 9,000 samples the week of Feb. 20.
The Biden administration has committed nearly $200 million to expand the federal government’s genomic sequencing capacity in hopes it will be able to test 25,000 samples per week.
“We’ll identify covid variants sooner and better target our efforts to stop the spread. We’re quickly infusing targeted resources here because the time is critical when it comes to these fast-moving variants,” Carole Johnson, testing coordinator for President Joe Biden’s covid-19 response team, said on a call with reporters this month.
Hospitals get high-level information about whether a sample submitted for sequencing tested positive for a variant, said Dr. Nick Gilpin, director of infection prevention at Beaumont Health in Michigan, where 210 cases of the B117 variant have been detected. Yet patients and their doctors will remain in the dark about who exactly was infected.
“It’s relevant from a systems-based perspective,” Gilpin said. “If we have a bunch of B117 in my backyard, that’s going to make me think a little differently about how we do business.”
It’s the same in Washington state, McCallion said. Health officials may share general numbers, such as 14 out of 16 outbreak specimens at a facility were identified as B117 ― but not who those 14 patients were.
There are arguments for and against notifying patients. On one hand, being infected with a variant won’t affect patient care, public health officials and clinicians say. And individuals who test positive would still be advised to take the same precautions of isolation, mask-wearing and hand-washing regardless of which strain they carried.
“There wouldn’t be any difference in medical treatment whether they have the variant,” said Mark Pandori, director of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory. However, he added that “in a public health emergency it’s really important for doctors to know this information.”
Pandori estimated there may be only 10 or 20 labs in the U.S. capable of validating their laboratory-based variant tests. One of them doing so is the lab at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Dr. Alex Greninger, assistant director of the clinical virology laboratories there, who co-created one of the first tests to detect SARS-CoV-2, said his lab began work to validate the sequencing tests last fall.
Within the next few weeks, he said, he anticipates having a federally authorized test for whole-genome sequencing of covid. “So all the issues you note on notifying patients and using [the] results will not be a problem,” he said in an email.
Companies including San Diego-based Illumina have approved covid-testing machines that can also detect a variant. However, since the add-on sequencing capability wasn’t specifically approved by the FDA, the results can be shared with public health officials ― but not patients and their doctors, said Dr. Phil Febbo, Illumina’s chief medical officer.
He said they haven’t asked the FDA for further approval but could if variants start to pose greater concern, like escaping vaccine protection.
“I think right now there’s no need for individuals to know their strains,” he said.
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"The loss of Native American land during and after the colonization period remains one of the darkest points in US history, but in the past few decades, there has been a rise in land acquisitions from Native American tribes" ..... Read full article
As the pandemic sends thousands of recovering alcoholics into relapse, hospitals across the country have reported dramatic increases in alcohol-related admissions for critical diseases like alcoholic hepatitis and liver failure.
Alcoholism-related liver disease was a growing problem even before the pandemic, with 15 million people diagnosed with the condition around the country, and with hospitalizations doubling over the past decade.
But the pandemic has dramatically added to the toll. Although national figures are not available, admissions for alcoholic liver disease at Keck Hospital of the University of Southern California were up 30% in 2020 compared with 2019, said Dr. Brian Lee, a transplant hepatologist who treats the condition in alcoholics. Specialists at hospitals affiliated with the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Harvard University and Mount Sinai Health System in New York City said rates of admissions for alcoholic liver disease have leapt by up to 50% since March.
High levels of alcohol ingestion lead to a constellation of liver diseases due to toxic byproducts associated with the metabolism of ethanol. In the short term, these byproducts can trigger extensive inflammation that leads to hepatitis. In the long term, they can lead to the accumulation of fatty tissue, as well as the scarring characteristic of cirrhosis — which can, in turn, cause liver cancer.
Since the metabolism of alcohol varies among individuals, these diseases can show up after only a few months of heavy drinking. Some people can drink heavily without experiencing side effects for a long time; others can suffer severe immune reactions that rapidly send them to the hospital.
Leading liver disease specialists and psychiatrists believe the isolation, unemployment and hopelessness associated with covid-19 are driving the explosion in cases.
“There’s been a tremendous influx,” said Dr. Haripriya Maddur, a hepatologist at Northwestern Medicine. Many of her patients “were doing just fine” before the pandemic, having avoided relapse for years. But subject to the stress of the pandemic, “all of a sudden, [they] were in the hospital again.”
Across these institutions, the age of patients hospitalized for alcoholic liver disease has dropped. A trend toward increased disease in people under 40 “has been alarming for years,” said Dr. Raymond Chung, a hepatologist at Harvard University and president of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease. “But what we’re seeing now is truly dramatic.”
Maddur has also treated numerous young adults hospitalized with the jaundice and abdominal distension emblematic of the disease — a pattern she attributes to the pandemic-era intensification of economic struggles faced by the demographic. At the same time these young adults may be entering the housing market or starting a family, entry-level employment, particularly in the vast, crippled hospitality industry, is increasingly hard to come by. “They have mouths to feed and bills to pay, but no job,” she said, “so they turn to booze as the last coping mechanism remaining.”
Women may be suffering disproportionately from alcoholic liver disease during the pandemic because they metabolize alcohol at slower rates than men. Lower levels of the enzyme responsible for degrading ethanol leads to higher levels of the toxin in the blood and, in turn, more extensive organ damage in women than in men who drink the same amount. (The CDC recommends that women have one drink or less per day, compared with two or fewer for men.)
Socially, the “stress of the pandemic has, in some ways, particularly targeted women,” said Dr. Jessica Mellinger, a hepatologist at the University of Michigan. Lower wages, less job stability and the burdens of parenting tend to fall more heavily on women’s shoulders, she said.
“If you have all of these additional stressors, with all of your forms of support gone — and all you have left is the bottle — that’s what you’ll resort to,” Mellinger said. “But a woman who drinks like a man gets sicker faster.”
Nationwide, more adults are turning to the bottle during the pandemic: One study found rates of alcohol consumption in spring 2020 were up 14% compared with the same period in 2019 and drinkers consumed nearly 30% more than in pre-pandemic months. Unemployment, isolation, lack of daily structure and boredom all have increased the risk of heightened alcohol use.
“The pandemic has brought out our uneasy relationship with alcohol,” said Dr. Timothy Fong, an addiction psychiatrist at UCLA. “We’ve welcomed it into our homes as our crutch and our best friend.”
These relapses, and the hospitalizations they cause, can be life-threatening. More than 1 in 20 patients with alcohol-related liver failure die before leaving the hospital, and alcohol-related liver disease is the leading cause for transplantation.
The disease also makes people more susceptible to covid: Patients with liver disease die of covid at rates three times higher than those without it, and alcohol-associated liver disease has been found to increase the risk of death from covid by an additional 79% to 142%.
Some physicians, like Maddur, are concerned the stressors leading to increased alcohol consumption and liver disease may stretch well into the future — even after lockdowns lift. “I think we’re only on the cusp of this,” she said. “Quarantine is one thing, but the downturn of the economy, that’s not going away anytime soon.”
Others, like Lee, are more optimistic — albeit cautiously. “The vaccine is coming to a pharmacy near you, covid-19 will end, and things will begin to get back to normal,” he said. “But the real question is whether public health authorities decide to act in ways that combat [alcoholic liver disease].
“Because people are just fighting to cope day to day right now.”
Ulysses S. Grant - (1822 – 1885) A war hero but a reluctant politician. Served as the 18th president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. Before his presidency, Grant led the Union Army in winning the American Civil War. As president, Grant was an effective civil rights executive who worked during Reconstruction to protect recently freed African Americans and reestablish the public credit. He was focused on rebuilding the U.S. Navy, which at the time lagged behind other world-power navies.
Apologies for paraphrasing Tennyson
How one man went from attending President Barack Obama’s inauguration to dying in the mob protesting Donald Trump’s election loss during the Capitol insurrection.............. Read the full article at ProPublica
If you’re like most Americans, there’s a good chance you’re going to wear a cloth mask today. Doing so makes sense...... Continue reading
The New York Times - Jan 7 2021 "The 147 Republicans Who Voted to Overturn Election Results" || By Karen Yourish, Larry Buchanan and Denise Lu.
Kudos 365 wishes you all the best for 2021!
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