Alyssa Bowen and Evan Vorpahl, Staff Writers - truthout
Stephan:
If Biden isn’t re-elected and both the Senate and the House do not end up with Democratic majorities this is what is going to happen to destroy a fair judiciary based on law not politics. It all comes down to who votes, how many, and how the vote comes out.
A demonstrator holds a sign reading “Protect the right to choose” during a march at the U.S. Capitol on April 15, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Credit: Probal Rashid / Lightrocket / Getty
As state courts continue to hear cases related to abortion bans and protections across the country, following the overturn of Roe v. Wade, these institutions have come even more into the crosshairs of a few ultra-wealthy extremists who want to codify and impose their personal religious beliefs on all of us via binding law.
In April and May of this year, Arizonans and Floridians saw their reproductive rights limited by decisions handed down by their respective state supreme courts, but that isn’t the end of the story. Democrats in Arizona have since spearheaded legislation that Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-Arizona) signed to repeal the draconian 1864 near-total abortion ban their court deemed constitutional. And Floridians will likely decide in November on a ballot initiative that would guarantee them broader abortion access, counteracting their supreme court’s greenlighting of a near-total […]
Our population is aging, and as the article describes we are painfully unprepared for what that means in terms of social wellbeing. Take just one example, healthcare. Our illness profit system is not getting better it is deteriorating. You hear Republicans saying Medicare is already too expensive. It is a dastardly lie. What passes for healthcare in the United States is already orders of magnitude more costly than any other developed democracy pays. For example: In 2022, France which has far better healthcare than the U.S. spent $6,630 per person on health. I chose France because its costs are higher than the OECD average of $4,986. But note, France spent, not individuals spent. France has universal birthright healthcare.In contrast, in 2022, the average American spent $13,493 per person on healthcare, which was $4.5 trillion in total.
Illustration by: Lindsey Bailey / Axios
It’s little surprise that America is rapidly getting older — but now that we’re at the brink of that demographic shift’s major consequences, we’re still completely unprepared.
Why it matters: It’s not just that seniors are an increasing share of the population, which is a huge challenge in itself. The seniors of the future may also require care for longer, and aging inequalities are becoming more stark.
The big picture: Americans 65 and older will make up more than 20% of the population by 2030, according to Census Bureau projections, up from 17% in 2022. By 2050, they’re projected to make up 23%.
One of the most obvious impacts of the aging population is on the federal budget, as spending on health programs — namely Medicare — is expected to swell.
But the change will be felt economy-wide: A smaller share of the population will be working age and, without drastic course correction, more may drop out […]
David Wainer, Reporter - Micrsosoft Start / The Wall Street Journal
Stephan:
I have been warning readers not to get embroiled with the Medicare Advantage scam the health insurance corporations are pushing. Yes, you may need a supplemental to your Medicare policy. My wife and I both have such. But that is not Medicare Advantage. Here is a very good explanation from the conservative Wall Street Journal about why I keep warning you about this. And it also gives some little appreciated or even noticed good news about the Biden administration’s recent actions. Of course, you can expect massive renting, particularly of Republican Congress members, by these healthcare corporations through their lobbying. If Trump wins the election your healthcare like democracy itself will be severely degraded.
The Medicare Bubble Has Burst Credit: The Wall Street Journal
For years, the privately run Medicare Advantage business generated outsize profit growth for health-insurance giants.
With hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars flowing to insurers in a fast-growing market buoyed by aging baby boomers, there was little not to like as far as Wall Street was concerned. Companies like UnitedHealth Group and Humana bet big on the program, and investors generally rewarded them for it. Medicare Advantage, in which the government pays insurers a set amount to manage the care of seniors, recently surpassed traditional Medicare’s share of beneficiaries. It was 30% a decade ago.
But the gold rush is over for investors, at least for now. After years of reports, lawsuits and whistleblower accounts accusing big insurers of gaming the system and overcharging the government, the Biden administration has made a series of policy changes that have negatively affected what the plans get paid. Meanwhile, a post-Covid surge in seniors’ medical costs caught insurers by surprise.
The stark drop in profitability is rattling corporate boards and […]
Google is the largest search engine in the world, with a 90.91% market share and you probably use it every day. As this article tells us it is about to change radically.
Google Search is about to fundamentally change—for better or worse. To align with Alphabet-owned Google’s grand vision of artificial intelligence, and prompted by competition from AI upstarts like ChatGPT, the company’s core product is getting reorganized, more personalized, and much more summarized by AI.
At Google’s annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California, today, Liz Reid showed off these changes, setting her stamp early on in her tenure as the new head of all things Google search. (Reid has been at Google a mere 20 years, where she has worked on a variety of search products.) Her AI-soaked demo was part of a broader theme throughout Google’s keynote, led primarily by CEO Sundar Pichai: AI is now underpinning nearly every product at Google, and the company only plans to accelerate that shift.
“In the era of Gemini we think we can make a dramatic amount of improvements to search,” Reid said in an interview with WIRED ahead of the event, referring to the flagship generative AI modellaunched late last year. “People’s time is valuable, right? They deal with […]
It is my personal view that the Biden administration is making a major error in its policy about arming Israel. To me, it is very clear Netanyahu and his cronies are committing genocide. This is the best explanation I have found about why Biden is doing what he is doing and what the rationale is. I don’t agree with it, but I do understand it better.
The Biden administration is weighing selling Israel up to 50 new F-15 fighter jets, for $18 billion, as well as other weapons. Credit: Senior Airman Sophia Robello / U.S. Air Force
One day, President Joe Biden is pausing bomb shipments to Israel. Another day, he’s approving other arms deals. He’s threatening to cut off more shipments if Israel invades Rafah — but only those that are offensive in nature.
As tensions between the U.S. and Israel have risen over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza, Biden’s recent moves can be hard to follow.
