Category: Article Share
The prices hospitals post online can be wildly different than what they tell patients over the phone
” The new study..compared the prices hospitals posted online (as required under new federal regulations) with the prices obtained in phone calls conducted by the team posing as potential patients.
They contacted 60 hospitals across the country, a mix of top-ranked facilities, hospitals that primarily serve low-income people, and the other hospitals in between. They asked about two procedures for which comparison shopping is more common: vaginal childbirth and a brain MRI.”
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“It was rare for the advertised price on the web to be the same as the price quoted over the phone. Less than 20 percent of hospitals provided the same price through an online price estimator as they did when someone spoke to a member of the billing department. In many cases, the disparity was significant, with more than a 50 percent price difference depending on whether you checked on a website or called for a quote.
And in a handful of cases, the price more than doubled depending on how you asked. At two hospitals, MRIs were listed online at $2,000, but “patients” were given a price of more than $5,000 when they called. Five hospitals offered a price of $10,000 for vaginal childbirth over the phone, but the price posted online were twice that much.
There didn’t seem to be a clear pattern of which quotes were higher. Sometimes they were higher over the phone, sometimes higher on the website.
The researchers said they took pains to make sure they were getting apples-to-apples comparisons, going so far as to give specific billing codes during their scripted calls with hospital staff. It didn’t matter.”
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“Research had already found prices for the same services vary wildly at different hospitals. The top-line findings of this new study reveal that it can be difficult to even determine what the price for a given service is at a given hospital. That is a problem both for the 10 percent of the US population that is uninsured as well as people enrolled in high-deductible health plans, which are becoming more common.”
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“the researchers made one other note in their study: They found poor correlation between brain MRI and vaginal childbirth prices within an individual hospital. In other words, some facilities would have high MRI prices compared to others but low prices for delivering babies — with no discernible economic reason for that disparity. It’s chaos.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/23892276/us-hospital-prices-transparency-study-mark-cuban
I Confronted A White Man In My Gym. What I Realized In That Moment Left Me Shaken.
Anti-white bias is real, and apparently some people don’t think it’s a bad thing?
Also, in NYC, businesses still have mask requirements? Or is the article old?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/confronted-white-man-gym-realized-123027069.html
Hamas gunmen paraglide into Israeli festival to launch deadly dawn attack
https://www.yahoo.com/news/paragliding-hamas-gunmen-descend-upon-135926648.html
Hamas surprise attack out of Gaza stuns Israel and leaves hundreds dead in fighting, retaliation
https://www.yahoo.com/news/palestinian-militants-launch-dozens-rockets-035044600.html
Biden Administration Announces New Measures To Get Migrants to Work
“Yesterday, the Biden administration announced new actions to help get recent immigrants to work, including offering almost half a million Venezuelans a status that will let them live and work in the U.S. legally for the next 18 months. The new measures come at a critical time, as labor shortages persist and cities struggle to provide for newcomers.
Certain Venezuelan migrants are eligible for temporary protected status (TPS), a designation offered to migrants who can’t safely return to their home countries due to armed conflict, environmental disaster, or another temporary safety hazard. Venezuela was first designated for TPS in 2021 due to a severe political and economic crisis perpetuated by Nicolás Maduro’s regime. Under that designation, Venezuelans who came to the U.S. before March 2021 qualified for protection; now, the status will apply to Venezuelans who arrived before the end of July this year. There are currently 16 countries designated for TPS.”
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“The Biden administration announced a raft of other immigration and border enforcement measures.., including harsh actions like deploying military personnel to the border and expanding family deportations.”
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“The administration is also aiming for quicker review of work authorization requests filed by migrants who enter the country through mobile app appointments or through the private sponsorship program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. DHS says it’s aiming to improve the median processing time for those work authorization applications from 90 days to 30 days. U.S. immigration agencies have long struggled to efficiently process various kinds of applications, so it remains to be seen whether those improvements will happen.”
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“in the absence of broader immigration reform spearheaded by Congress, these are welcome actions. Getting immigrants to work is an obvious economic good—the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate there are 8.8 million job openings in the country—and it’ll also reduce the burden of government spending. The Biden administration has sent nearly $770 million to localities to help fund services for new arrivals. Without a clear legal pathway to employment, many migrants simply wouldn’t be able to provide for themselves and turn away from city-provided services. Encouraging migrant self-sufficiency is particularly important in New York City, which has a “right-to-shelter” law that has proven costly.”
https://reason.com/2023/09/21/biden-administration-announces-new-measures-to-get-migrants-to-work/
Trump’s Abortion Triangulation Makes Political Sense but Belies His ‘Pro-Life’ Pose
“Before he ran for president, Donald Trump described himself as “pro-choice.” But when he was seeking the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, he promised to appoint “pro-life” Supreme Court justices. “I am pro-life,” he declared in his October 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton. He said Roe v. Wade would be overturned “automatically” if he were elected thanks to the justices he would choose, meaning that the issue of abortion regulation would “go back to the individual states.”
After that prediction came to pass last year, Trump called it “the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation.” He bragged that the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was “only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.” But now that Dobbs has shifted public opinion and political energy toward abortion rights, Trump is trying to position himself as a moderate on the issue.
On NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday, host Kristen Welker asked Trump if he would “sign federal legislation that would ban abortion at 15 weeks.” That cutoff would allow the vast majority of abortions—more than 93 percent, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But Trump still was reluctant to endorse the idea.
“No, no,” he replied. “Let me just tell you what I’d do. I’m going to come together with all groups, and we’re going to have something that’s acceptable. Right now, to my way of thinking, the Democrats are the radicals, because [they would allow abortion] after four and five and six months.”
As that response makes clear, Trump’s objection is not based on federalist principles. Last year, he told Fox News that Dobbs “brings everything back to the states, where it has always belonged.” Now he is saying that, as president, he would hammer out “something that’s acceptable,” meaning he thinks the federal government does have a role in determining when and under what circumstances women may terminate their pregnancies.”
https://reason.com/2023/09/22/trumps-abortion-triangulation-makes-political-sense-but-belies-his-pro-life-pose/
Could Another Baby Formula Shortage Be on the Horizon?
America’s Immigrant Brain Drain
“The United States boasts more international students, immigrant inventors, and foreign-born Nobel laureates than any other country. But thanks to our dysfunctional immigration system, the U.S. is slowly surrendering that advantage to other countries.”
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“Demand for H-1Bs far outpaces supply, and the annual cap of 85,000 visas has not changed in more than 15 years. Three-quarters of America’s H-1B workers are Indian. But thanks to caps on the number of green cards a given country’s nationals can receive each year, there is a massive backlog of workers waiting for permanent residency. It can take decades for Indians to achieve that status.”
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” It is not just foreign workers who suffer under the U.S. immigration system. American employers are increasingly unwilling to navigate such complex processes to hire foreigners, depriving them of employees who might otherwise be perfect fits. Envoy Global, an immigration services provider, reported in March that 82 percent of the employers it surveyed “had to let go of foreign employees in the past year due to difficulties securing or extending an employment-based visa in the U.S.” A similar share transferred foreign workers to an office abroad for similar reasons. And a staggering 93 percent of the businesses that Envoy surveyed said they were considering nearshoring or offshoring.”
https://reason.com/2023/09/26/americas-immigrant-brain-drain/