Complexification

In a terrific article in the NY Times Magazine section titled Those Indecipherable Medical Bills? They’re One Reason Health Care Costs So Much, Elisabeth Rosenthal discusses the arcane science of medical bills and how they screw the American public in ways truly astounding via complexification or the art of making something more complex than it should be in order to maximise profit.

In other countries, when patients recover from a terrifying brain bleed — or, for that matter, when they battle cancer, or heal from a serious accident, or face down any other life-threatening health condition — they are allowed to spend their days focusing on getting better. Only in America do medical treatment and recovery coexist with a peculiar national dread: the struggle to figure out from the mounting pile of bills what portion of the fantastical charges you actually must pay. It is the sickness that eventually afflicts most every American.

What’s less understood is the extent to which our current medical-billing system itself is responsible for the high prices patients are charged. There are, of course, many factors that have led to the United States’ record-breaking $3 trillion health care bill: runaway drug prices, excessive testing and sky-high charges for even the most basic medical interventions. But all of those individual price increases have been enabled — indeed, aided and abetted — by the complex system of billing and coding that underlies bills like those sent to Wickizer. That system, with its lines of alphanumeric codes and arcane medical abbreviations, has given birth to a gigantic new industry of consultants, armies of back-room experts whom medical providers and insurance companies deploy against each other in an endless war over which medical procedures were undertaken and how much to pay for them. Caught in the crossfire are Americans like Wanda Wickizer, left with huge bills and indecipherable explanations in languages they cannot possibly understand.

It gets better.

Individual doctors have complained bitterly about the increasing complexity of coding and the expensive necessity of hiring their own professional coders and billers — or paying a billing consultant. But they have received little support from the medical establishment, which has largely ignored the protests. And perhaps for good reason: The American Medical Association owns the copyright to CPT, the code used by doctors. It publishes coding books and dictionaries. It also creates new codes when doctors want to charge for a new procedure. It levies a licensing fee on billing companies for using CPT codes on bills. Royalties for CPT codes, along with revenues from other products, are the association’s biggest single source of income.

What is not stated is the fact billing, in effect, is forever separated from services rendered as the coding used in billing, as Rothenthal so eloquently describes is A. Completely different fromt the services provided by hospitals and doctors to the patient and B. Bills are always given out after said services are finished, thus insuring two realities.

1. The complete medical history of each and every patient is never truly complete as billing is not organically connected to services rendered, something totally different from buying a car, which always comes with the all important invoice detailing the specifications of the car in question and ...
2. The innate ability to obfuscate and complexify the bill to death, not only through the use of arcane codes to describe the bill in question but also to delay delivering said bill as this insures that the insurance company or hospital will have enough time to maximize profit by massaging the codes in their favor, something analogous to how investment banks massage credit default swaps and/or certificates of debt obligations in arcane ways to insure that unsuspecting investors never find out what kind of toxic crap may reside in these so called AAA rated investment packages of enormous complexity. Big Short anyone? Read the piece, you will learn a lot. Yours truly has. :)

Endless War ...

Endless war or how to keep the Deep State funded.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The United States launched more airstrikes in Yemen this month than during all of last year. In Syria, it has airlifted local forces to front-line positions and has been accused of killing civilians in airstrikes. In Iraq, American troops and aircraft are central in supporting an urban offensive in Mosul, where airstrikes killed scores of people on March 17.

Two months after the inauguration of President Trump, indications are mounting that the United States military is deepening its involvement in a string of complex wars in the Middle East that lack clear endgames.

Rather than representing any formal new Trump doctrine on military action, however, American officials say that what is happening is a shift in military decision-making that began under President Barack Obama. On display are some of the first indications of how complicated military operations are continuing under a president who has vowed to make the military “fight to win.”

To Scale

To Scale: The Solar System from Wylie Overstreet on Vimeo.

This shows, in small part, just how truly insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things.

Population Control :)

A novel way to radical population control is to enlist the aid of spiders ...

Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer published their estimate in the journal the Science of Nature earlier this month, and the number they arrived at is frankly shocking: The world's spiders consume somewhere between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey in any given year. That means that spiders eat at least as much meat as all 7 billion humans on the planet combined, who the authors note consume about 400 million tons of meat and fish each year.

Or, for a slightly more disturbing comparison: The total biomass of all adult humans on Earth is estimated to be 287 million tons. Even if you tack on another 70 million-ish tons to account for the weight of kids, it's still not equal to the total amount of food eaten by spiders in a given year, exceeding the total weight of humanity.

In other words, spiders could eat all of us and still be hungry.

Food for thought, eh? :)

Asking the right questions

It's so rare for a politician to actually make sense, especially regarding the Middle East and the Syrian Fubar.

Without any official notification, Trump sent 500 new American troops into Syria, ostensibly to take part in the upcoming assault on the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa. News reports suggest this deployment may just be the tip of the iceberg, with some saying that the plan is for hundreds more American troops to be added to the fight in the coming weeks. No one actually knows how many troops are inside Syria now, because the administration has largely tried to keep the build-up a secret.

This deployment poses a significant, potentially catastrophic risk for the United States and the future of Syria and the Middle East. Congress cannot be silent on this matter. I have long been against putting U.S. troops on the ground in Syria—I opposed the idea during the Obama administration and I oppose it now, because I believe we are destined to repeat the mistakes of the Iraq War if we try to force political stability simply through the barrel of a gun. I would urge my colleagues who have not focused on the question of U.S. troop presence in Syria to, at the very least, demand the administration answer two basic questions before signing off on the money to fund this dangerous escalation.

First, what is our mission and what is our exit strategy? - CT Sen. Chris Murphy

This is exactly what Anthony Zinni said prior to the illegal C.F. "W" perpetrated in Iraq.

Too many GREAT pix! :)

Cassini yet again. :)

NASA's Cassini spacecraft zoomed in on Saturn's A ring, revealing narrow, detailed structures that get even finer as the cameras' resolution increases. Even at this level of detail, it is still not fine enough to resolve the individual particles that make up the ring.

High-resolution images like this help scientists map the fine structure of Saturn's rings. Features less than a half a mile (one kilometer) in size are resolvable here. But the particles in the A ring typically range in size from several meters across down to centimeters, making them still far too small to see individually here.

Don't want this mission to end. Have to put in another. :)

The wavemaker moon, Daphnis, is featured in this view, taken as NASA's Cassini spacecraft made one of its ring-grazing passes over the outer edges of Saturn's rings on Jan. 16, 2017. This is the closest view of the small moon obtained yet.

Daphnis (5 miles or 8 kilometers across) orbits within the 42-kilometer (26-mile) wide Keeler Gap. Cassini's viewing angle causes the gap to appear narrower than it actually is, due to foreshortening.

An Inner Darkness. :)

Never judge a book by it's cover, right? :)

Day into Night

In Transit

Lobster Fisherman

Street Lights

Solar Wind

Day into Night

A one day shoot going from day into night with shots of the LI Sound to a short nighttime trip to Bethel. Enjoy. :)

The Northwest Passage

On Aug. 16, the Crystal Serenity set out from Seward, Alaska, carrying 1,700 passengers and crew, and escorted by a comparatively minuscule, 1,800-ton icebreaker. She circled west and north around the Alaska Peninsula and through the Bering Strait before heading east into the maze of straits and sounds that constitute the Northwest Passage. For centuries, explorers tried to establish a sea route here between Europe and Asia. Many met with ruin. A few stranded sailors famously ate their boots—and each other. When the Crystal Serenity emerged free and clear of the maze on Sept. 5, there were no accounts of scurvy or cannibalism, only tales of bingeing on themed buffets and grumbles from shutterbugs about the Arctic’s monotonous landscape.

Operated by Crystal Cruises, the Serenity became on that day the first passenger liner to successfully ply the Northwest Passage. As climate change melts Arctic sea ice twice as fast as models predicted, more and larger ships have made their way along these fatal shores. In 2013, the Nordic Orion was the first bulk cargo carrier to transit the Passage, hauling a load of coal.

Rates on the Serenity started at around $22,000 per person. For that, passengers were anointed, by Slate, “the world’s worst people”—for venturing into a vulnerable ecosystem in a diesel-burning, 69,000-ton behemoth. Canada’s National Post described the cruise as an “invasion” of indigenous communities. Britain’s Telegraph hinted at Titanic hubris, asking, Is this “the world’s most dangerous cruise”?

The assault on Earth continues unabated.

Protecting our privacy

Now that congress has deemed that our privacy means nothing does not mean we can't defend ourselves. The NY Times has an excellent piece with links to great resources like Tor, a browser yours truly has used with great success.

Those rules meant to protect the privacy of your internet activity that you may have heard about? Never mind.

In a 50-48 vote mostly along party lines on Thursday, the Senate moved to strip consumer privacy rules that had just been created in October. Next week, the House is expected to go along with the Senate measure, and the rule changes would then head to President Trump for his signature...

Washington’s zeal for privacy protection may have cooled, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have other means to keep what you do out of other people’s hands.

Various types of software can help protect internet traffic from prying eyes. A number of browsers, for example, have “stealth” settings that make it difficult to track a web surfer’s activities.

Terrific article well worth reading. I learned a lot, you will too.

Without our permission

Truly excellent, the Verizon's of the world will soon be able to share our browsing data in order to sell ads without our permission, forever. What can possibly go wrong?

The US Senate has voted to overturn consumer-friendly internet privacy rules that would have prevented internet providers from sharing your web browsing history without permission.

The privacy rules, passed last year by the FCC, required internet providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T to get each customer’s permission before sharing personal information like which websites they visit. But internet providers want to be able to sell that data and use it to target ads, so they’ve been vocal about opposing the rules since around the time President Trump took office.

It gets better.

What makes this reversal particularly damaging is that it won’t just undo these privacy rules, but it’ll prevent the FCC from passing similar privacy rules in the future. That means that the FCC won’t be able to pass strict privacy rules again, even if opinions change in Congress.

4th Amendment anyone? The corporate kleptocracy strikes again. The Water Thief looms. 

The image says it all.

This is your truly's take on Trumpenstein, the spawn of god knows what, and his minions who have the task of unraveling America as quickly as possible.

It's like the campaign never ended. It's the same all-Trump, all-the-time madness, only exponentially worse.

Morning, February 24th, National Harbor, Maryland, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Chin up, eyes asquint, Donald Trump floats to the lectern on a sea of applause and adulation. The building is shaking, and as fans howl his name – Trump! Trump! Trump! – he looks pleased and satisfied, like a Roman emperor who has just moved his bowels.

Taibbi nails it big time.

Our eye in the sky

On a heavily protected military base some 15 miles south of Washington, D.C., sits the massive headquarters of a spy agency few know exists. Even Barack Obama, five months into his presidency, seemed not to have recognized its name. While shaking hands at a Five Guys hamburger restaurant in Washington in May 2009, he asked a customer seated at a table about his job. “What do you [do]?” the president inquired. “I work at NGA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,” the man answered. Obama appeared dumbfounded. “So, explain to me exactly what this National Geospatial…” he said, unable to finish the name. Eight years after that videotape aired, the NGA remains by far the most shadowy member of the Big Five spy agencies, which include the CIA and the National Security Agency.

Despite its lack of name recognition, the NGA’s headquarters is the third-largest building in the Washington metropolitan area, bigger than the CIA headquarters and the U.S. Capitol.

Completed in 2011 at a cost of $1.4 billion, the main building measures four football fields long and covers as much ground as two aircraft carriers. In 2016, the agency purchased 99 acres in St. Louis to construct additional buildings at a cost of $1.75 billion to accommodate the growing workforce, with 3,000 employees already in the city.

The NGA is to pictures what the NSA is to voices. Its principal function is to analyze the billions of images and miles of video captured by drones in the Middle East and spy satellites circling the globe. But because it has largely kept its ultra-high-resolution cameras pointed away from the United States, according to a variety of studies, the agency has never been involved in domestic spy scandals like its two far more famous siblings, the CIA and the NSA. However, there’s reason to believe that this will change under President Donald Trump.

Combine this with NSA surveillance, AI and face recognition and we have a problem Houston.

I'll have one too :)

Now you're talking. :)

Trump was wiretapped

Well this is interesting. Not in love with Trump by any stretch of the imagination but Trump was, in fact, wiretapped if Nunes is telling the truth. End of story, for now.

Update: House Intel Chairman Nunes spoke to reporters when he left the briefing at The White House and had some more stunning things to say:

*NUNES: BRIEFED PRESIDENT ON CONCERNS OVER INCIDENTAL COLLECTION
*NUNES: `PRESIDENT NEEDS TO KNOW' THESE INTEL REPORTS EXIST
*NUNES: SOME OF WHAT I'VE SEEN SEEMS TO BE `INAPPROPRIATE'
*NUNES: TRUMP, OTHERS IN TRANSITION PUT INTO INTELLIGENCE REPORT
*NUNES: QUESTION IS IF TRUMP SHOULD BE IN THESE `NORMAL' REPORTS
And the punchline: there are "multiple FISA warrants outstanding against Trump" Nunes also told reporters:

Bloomberg's take is spot on.

The Intelligence Committee chairman is taking a risk in providing a measure of cover for the president. His committee is one of the congressional panels that’s supposed to be providing oversight of the investigation by the FBI and other agencies into Russian meddling in last year’s presidential campaign. Nunes -- who served on Trump’s transition team -- said the surveillance that picked up Trump’s associates wasn’t aimed at Russia.

Schiff said Nunes has to decide whether he’s going to lead the Intelligence Committee or “act as a surrogate of the White House. He cannot do both.” The Democrat said an independent investigation is needed to investigate Russia’s interference and any contacts between those around Trump and the Russian government.

Any questions?

Event Horizon

Another wonderful graphic, this time describing the event horizon of a Black Hole, the point of no return for all things related to matter, photons and all things inbetween. :)

Detecting Exoplanets

There everywhere. Here's how to find them.

The Worm Moon & The Ides of March

Changeable weather is the watchword for this short clip with wet and dry snow, biting cold and a clear night for the Worm Moon. The Ides of March were originally keyed to religious rites and, you guessed it, to the Worm Moon. Go figure. :)

Jimmy Breslin RIP

Another giant is gone, Jimmy Breslin, the plain speaking journalist who touched the hearts of millions as a reporter for the NY Post.

WASHINGTON — The gravedigger doesn’t have any reason to lie to you.

If the grave is deep enough and wide enough, that’s all that matters. The lies can be told by the shiny casket going into the dirt, by the funeral parlor salesman who talked the grieving relatives up the gold-patina model, and by those mourners who didn’t really want to be there.

But the man who shovels out the deep hole in the ground with a back hoe has no reason to embellish. He’ll just tell you what he thinks, if you ask.

He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. November 1963

The lesson is, if you want truth, you have to leave your desk, step away from your computer, and must certainly ignore your Twitter feed.

“Breslin hardly ever came to the office. He just sent his stuff in,” said Anthony Mancini, a journalism professor at Brooklyn College who worked at the New York Post in the late 1960s when Breslin wrote for the then-liberal paper.

“Jimmy got up in the morning, and put on his shoes. He never learned to drive, so he walked, took the subway, a cab, whatever,” said Denis Hamill, a former New York Daily News columnist and friend of Breslin’s.

“He wouldn’t sit at a desk and think up what to write. He would form his opinion based on the legwork that he did,” Hamill said. “He went out and really did the work.”

He will be missed, big time. RIP

George Carlin on Euphemisms

George Carlin, in his own amazing way is like George Orwell as both are masters of concise and clear language. A very close friend of mine turned me onto this gem. Awesome to a fault. :)

CB - Nothing Else needs to be said

Chuck Berry, the real father of R&R. RIP
Rolling Stone has it covered as to why Chuck Berry mattered.

Had to do another.

Nature finds a way - Always

We all have heard about Ebola and how we dodged a bullet on that one, for now, but there are other dangers lurking out there beyond our comprehension as nature finds a way - Always.

ABOUT 4 MILLION years ago, a cave was forming in the Delaware Basin of what is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. From that time on, Lechuguilla Cave remained untouched by humans or animals until its discovery in 1986—an isolated, pristine primeval ecosystem.

When the bacteria found on the walls of Lechuguilla were analyzed, many of the microbes were determined not only to have resistance to natural antibiotics like penicillin, but also to synthetic antibiotics that did not exist on earth until the second half of the twentieth century. As infectious disease specialist Brad Spellberg put it in the New England Journal of Medicine, “These results underscore a critical reality: antibiotic resistance already exists, widely disseminated in nature, to drugs we have not yet invented.”

Nature finds a way - Always.

Thinking B & W

A short clip showing Shelton & Derby, two CT towns coming back from hard times. B&W for the most part with color touches to make it real. Enjoy.

Nuke Tests

Fascinating, terrifying and sobering, the power of nukes never ceases to amaze.

Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted over 200 nuclear tests up high in the atmosphere to learn about the power of nuclear weapons. The terrifying explosions were filmed from every possible angle and distance, and the movies — an estimated 10,000 of them — were then stored in high-security vaults scattered across the country.

Now, for the first time, about 4,200 of thee films have been scanned, and around 750 have been declassified by the US government. You can watch about 60 of them on YouTube. Some are in color, some in black and white, and all of them bear the whimsical names of top secret missions: Operation Hardtack, Operation Plumbbob, Operation Teapot.

Pig in a Poke

Pig in a Poke, you know, means that something is sold or bought without the buyer knowing its true nature or value, especially when buying without inspecting the item beforehand.
is exactly what has happened regarding the so-called benefits of GMOs in terms of increased crop yields and reduced pesticide use, concepts Monsanto endlessly touts when selling said GMOs to farmers in the US but unsurprisingly, these claims don't jibe with reality.

To whit

But an extensive examination by The New York Times indicates that the debate has missed a more basic problem — genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides.

Crop yield pix one, see any increase?

Or this?

On pesticide use, this claim is also refuted.

End result, Monsanto, in effect, owns the food supply through intense enforcement of patents due to genetic engineering while farmers in the US continue to buy a Pig in a Poke. Makes sense, right?

"What the real owners of the country don't want is people capable of critical thinking."
- George Carlin.

Top Secret Rules :)

Intense and really classy drum corps without question.

You Gotta have a Boogyman

Joseph Goebbels, head of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Jules Streicher, founder and publisher of Der Stürmer newspaper, and some propaganda.

A very good friend, DD, turned me onto Slate's amazing article, How Hitler Conquered Germany, a cautionary tale in terms of how people can be manipulated through the artful use of propaganda.

Propaganda was the operational method of the Third Reich, the idea that projected the ideology. Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, told the Nuremberg Tribunal “that what distinguished the Third Reich from all previous dictatorships was its use of all the means of communication to sustain itself and to deprive its objects of the power of independent thought.”5 Hitler was a magician of illusion. The cultural historian Piers Brendon has described propaganda as the “gospel” of Nazism and notes that Goebbels “liked to say that Jesus Christ has been a master of propaganda and that the propagandist must be the man with the greatest knowledge of souls.”

The other part of this twisted philosophy is the fact one must have a boogeyman in order to solidify the notion of us against them, something akin to the US using Russia as the boogeyman in order to continue funding the MIC, aka the Military Industrial Complex, while bankrupting the country.

The essence of the Nazi propaganda method was repetition. Goebbels argued that the skill of British propagandists during the Great War resided in the fact that they used just a few powerful slogans and kept repeating them.13 Historian Baruch Gitlis has argued that: “Wherever the German turned, he met his most ‘dangerous enemy,’ the Jew,”14 and that “while he walked in the street he encountered posters and slogans against the Jews at every square, on every wall and billboard. Even graffiti greeted the German at the entrance to his dwelling: ‘Wake up Germany, Judah must rot!’”

Goebbels channeled Bernays without question. Propaganda, written in 1928, was the blueprint Goebbels needed to enable Hitler to conquer Europe.

Edward Bernays the "godfather" of Goebbels

Slow Motion Death Machine

The Slow Motion Death Machine known as Fukushima makes US landfall and, It's Only the Beginning.

After the catastrophic triple meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011, the Japanese government and the plant’s parent company, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), worked to cover up the damage done and downplay the amount of radiation the disaster had released into the environment. Though the disaster’s many impacts have been suspiciously absent from mainstream media reports in the years since, the radiation pouring out of the plant’s damaged reactors have never stopped. To this day, 300 tons of contaminated, radioactive water flow into the Pacific Ocean every day as many of the leaks can never be sealed due to the extreme heat. Now, nearly six years after the meltdown, radiation from Fukushima has made landfall on the West coast of the United States, signaling a dangerous new era for residents and wildlife along the Pacific coastal region.

Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), a crowd-funded team of scientists, announced yesterday that they had detected, for the first time, seaborne cesium 134 in seawater on the shores of Tillamook Bay in Oregon. The group has been monitoring the waterborne radiation as it extends from Fukushima across the Pacific for years. According to WHOI as well as other scientists, cesium 134, a dangerous and carcinogenic radioactive isotope, could only have originated from the Fukushima disaster due to its short half-life, or rate of decay.

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury

Cassini yet again

Just another gift from Cassini, the little probe that can.

Center Line

 Blue Wind

Storm Warning

Prelude to a Nor'easter

This hill, with its lone dominant tree, reminds one of the Great Plains. Austere, spare and totally connected to a big sky, something not often seen in N.E. 

Speed Limit 15mph

Who controls the present ...

How easy it is to forget the fubar of "W" regarding his excellent adventure after 9/11 and his unique ability to get the world to hate us 24/7 beginning with his illegal and STUPID war with Iraq, the single worst strategic action in the history of this once great nation. 

"To think that we're going to, quote, 'stay the course,' the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course because it's been a failure." - Anthony Zinni

Combine this with the actions of Obama in continuing this fubar and we get

1. ISIS.
2. The destruction of Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan.
3. The loss of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghanis, Iraqis, Syrians & Libyans.
4. The dislocation of millions of people and the uncontrolled flood of immigrants to Europe.
5. All to the tune of 4 to 6 TRILLION DOLLARS. 

To yours truly, this is truly amazing but then again, DC is amazing, the center of delusions of grandeur and incompetence and now, the US version of Mad King George, the POTUS.

With Washington, DC, now transformed into a perpetual nonsense machine, it was easy to miss the George W. Bush Revisionist History Tour as it slid through the shallow plastic media trench last week on rails lubricated with old tears, but there he was. After eight years of almost complete radio silence, the former president was all over the place, yukking it up with the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Kimmel to peddle his new book and flash that folksy smirk we came to know so well.

So what? Every celebrity does a book, especially former presidents, and it is noteworthy that Bush had the common decency to put some rigging tape over his mouth while President Obama was in office. It didn't take long, though, for things to get weird. A lot of people who really should know better -- in the print, network and online news media, on social media and other forums, and in "real life" -- got all goo-goo-eyed over him. People I've known for years exclaimed over how funny and cute he was on Ellen! And how he's friends with Michelle Obama! And isn't he just so much better than Trump?

Full stop. We have just lost cabin pressure.

Truer words never spoken.

Ryancare

With great fanfare, Paul Ryan introduced his demolition derby approach to healthcare that will 

1. Invariably increase the number of uninsured people.
2. Reward insurance companies and significant others with tax breaks and
   financial bon bons.
3. Eliminate Obamacare no matter what the human cost may be because ...
4. It's all about the money.

JUST HOURS BEFORE House Speaker Paul Ryan held a press conference to sell his health care overhaul legislation — using a PowerPoint presentation mocked for misrepresenting basic facts  — he was doing something he’s much better at: fundraising.

The two things were related. The Thursday morning breakfast fundraiser he attended was hosted by a lobbying firm working to unwind the Affordable Care Act on behalf of health insurance company Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of the big winners of Ryan’s proposed legislation.

The breakfast, according to an invitation, was sponsored by McGuireWoods PAC, the political action committee for the lobbying firm McGuireWoods. Blue Cross Blue Shield pays McGuireWoods $120,000 a year to lobby on changes to health reform, records show. Attendees of the event paid were asked to pitch in as much as $10,000.

Ryan’s American Health Care Act (AHCA), which rolls back most of the revenue-generating provisions of the ACA, reduces premium subsidies, and imposes deep cuts to Medicaid, has largely been panned by medical professionals, health policy experts, and political advocacy groups from across the ideological spectrum.

It gets better.

As we reported earlier this week, insurance lobbyists are particularly fond of a tax change made by the Republican health bill that removes limitations on deductions for executive compensation. That reversal will reduce the tax bill for health insurance companies while incentivizing higher pay for insurance employees.

The ACHA would also permanently repeal the 2.3 percent excise tax on medical device tax, which was imposed by Obama’s health reform law. AdvaMed, the lobby group representing the largest medical device firms, released a statement commending the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee for the repeal of the tax.

While some media outlets praised Ryan’s “wonky” style and use of bar graphs to make his case for the bill on Thursday, many reporters noted that the speaker stumbled when asked basic questions about the legislation.

When looking at this ridiculous process of trying to ram through this version of HC as fast as possible with little or no due diligence required for managing something as truly complex as healthcare, no one actually asks the question of why healthcare doesn't work outside of the usual rhetoric of it's too complex, too expensive or too inefficient. 

It doesn't work because billing is separate from services rendered. It's akin to buying a  car. The invoice is the document describing. in very precise terms, what the buyer is buying. Said invoice comes directly from the car dealership selling the car and is part of the package being sold to the customer. In the case of healthcare, the insurance company, in effect, generates the PO payable to the practice or hospital with the gap being covered via the copay by the patient. 

This "invoice" given to the insurance company has no direct connect to the patient record set describing medical treatment like the car invoice has to the car as the invoice, aka the insurance claim, is not only separate and completely different than the patient record from the programming perspective but also is always generated after the service has been rendered, which means the connect of the bill, aka the claim, to services rendered, patient treatment, is tangential at best, thus giving rise to the inability of healthcare to be run like every other business on planet earth to include accurate profit and loss statements keyed to the services provided to each and every patient treated by the practice and/or hospital in question.

To cover costs, the insurance companies make doubly sure patient premiums more than cover healthcare costs as seen by the amazing financial perks given to the ceo's of companies like Aetna, Unitedhealthcare and Blue Cross & Blue Shield. 

When looking at Ryan's inept attempt at "improving" HC, one does NOT SEE this essential analysis of why HC doesn't work. It's all about tax cuts, financial compensation and increased power of the insurance companies to control the process more than ever. Simply unbelievable but, when Ryancare takes effect, the blowback will be intense given what this version of HC does NOT PROVIDE to the citizens of this once great nation.

Addendum: Had to add Krugman's take. A Bill So Bad It's Awesome

Trumpcare — the White House insists that we not call it that, which means that we must — preserves some version of all three elements, but in drastically, probably fatally weakened form.

Insurers are still barred from excluding the sick, but they’re allowed to charge older Americans — who need insurance the most — much higher premiums.

Subsidies are still there, in the form of tax credits, but they’re no longer linked to either income (as long as it’s below $75,000) or the cost of insurance.

And the tax on those who don’t sign up becomes a small surcharge — paid to insurance companies, not the public — on people who sign up after previously letting coverage lapse.

Affluent young people might end up saving some money as a result of these changes. But the effect on those who are older and less affluent would be devastating. AARP has done the math: a 55-year-old making $25,000 a year would end up paying $3,600 a year more for coverage; that rises to $8,400 for a 64-year-old making $15,000 a year. And that’s before the death spiral.

Same as it ever was - Talking Heads

Coring the Apple

The Intercept does news right. Investigative reporting done to the max with stories vetted for accuracy and dogged digging into info the deep state and other entities don't want exposed to rubes like us. 

To whit, the CIA attempt to steal Apple's secrets.

Question, why doesn't this surprise me?

RESEARCHERS WORKING with the Central Intelligence Agency have conducted a multi-year, sustained effort to break the security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, according to top-secret documents obtained by The Intercept.

The security researchers presented their latest tactics and achievements at a secret annual gathering, called the “Jamboree,” where attendees discussed strategies for exploiting security flaws in household and commercial electronics. The conferences have spanned nearly a decade, with the first CIA-sponsored meeting taking place a year before the first iPhone was released.

By targeting essential security keys used to encrypt data stored on Apple’s devices, the researchers have sought to thwart the company’s attempts to provide mobile security to hundreds of millions of Apple customers across the globe. Studying both “physical” and “non-invasive” techniques, U.S. government-sponsored research has been aimed at discovering ways to decrypt and ultimately penetrate Apple’s encrypted firmware. This could enable spies to plant malicious code on Apple devices and seek out potential vulnerabilities in other parts of the iPhone and iPad currently masked by encryption.

The CIA declined to comment for this story.

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