Study: Health Insurers are Near Monopolies A few firms get biggest share of Medicare drug enrollment GAO Report Finds Lack of Competition Among Insurers Offering Health Plans to Small Businesses How’s that working out, again?
Interesting. Ronni Bennet posts an account of her interactions with Medicare Part D, on Time Goes By. The majority of her post is about dealing with her private insurance company, who can’t seem to get their act together. A commenter says “I have had similar experiences helping the elderly as well as myself. Anyone who thinks ANY program should be… Read more »
As a tribute to my ill-advised Sonic experience this weekend, I would like to direct you to a reality check on the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit via this post at Suburban Guerrilla. Selected bullet points: A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body. She was hospitalized for eight days, during… Read more »
I had seen a reality check on the estate tax back in 2005: no one can find any farmers who have been forced to sell their farms because of the estate tax. Now via a post on Echidne’s blog, we find a report by Public Citizen detailing the insanity of the estate tax repeal efforts. Super-wealthy people have spent lots… Read more »
You should check out Hard Green by David Roberts, posted at Gristmill: What, then, is environmentalism? We want to save the set of ecosystems and species that happen to exist at this point in the earth’s history. Why this set? What makes it more special than the six other sets that have come and gone? Here’s an obvious answer: This… Read more »
My sister was in the habit of dressing up her first daughter in pink whenever I was coming to visit, because she knows the girly-girly look grates on me. Now she doesn’t have to pick my niece’s clothes to make sure they’re pink. My niece does it herself, being somewhat Barbie-inspired currently. I wear a little pink myself these days,… Read more »
From the World War II era, but relevant today. From just last month, but I haven’t tried the numbers yet. (Hat tip to small hands on that second one.)
I suppose I wasn’t really minding my own business, since I was reading the newspaper. But I was reading a nice Statesman article by Jean Scheidnes on the Austin Craft Mafia and their TV show on DIY, when all of a sudden: The dialogue assumes a fair amount of viewer knowledge about sewing, of which I have none, but the… Read more »
Kate Steadman blogs at Healthy Policy, and she has an interesting bit up about health care polling based on a piece by Thomas Bodenheimer in Health Affairs: It’s one thing for people to agree that they want universal insurance. It’s a whole other side of the beast when you ask how much they would be willing to pay. And herein… Read more »
Abstinence promoters are upset about the HPV vaccine because it will make sex safer, thus undermining their message that premarital sex isn’t safe? I just can’t even make that fit together in my head. Because of course, as Hope at Appalachian Alumni Association points out, safety isn’t their real motivation.