“Thousands of votes were, in fact, thrown out, directly as a result of a new requirement in the law. A new AP analysis of data from Texas found that a whopping 13 percent of the state’s absentee ballots were discarded or uncounted.
And in the state’s biggest county, the new procedures it mandated contributed to a hugely messy vote-counting process.
“It’s been every bit as catastrophic as we feared it would be,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “I think the onus is on the legislature to acknowledge the harm that it did to Texas voters by passing Senate Bill 1 and make amends by repealing it next year.”
But that probably won’t happen given that key Republicans who pushed for the law have continued to defend it.”
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“The statewide rejection rate for mail-in ballots has typically been between 1 and 2 percent in past elections and was about 1 percent in the 2020 general election when mail-in voting rates were much higher. But in the 2022 primaries, county-level rejection rates ranged from 6 to 22 percent, according to data compiled by the Texas Civil Rights Project”
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“In four counties that reported the reason they had rejected mail-in ballots, those identification requirements were to blame over 90 percent of the time. In Harris County, which encompasses Houston and is the most populous county in the state, it was 99.6 percent.
This was foreseeable. Even some Republican officials were worried about mail-in ballot rejections ahead of the primary. Texas Secretary of State John Scott said during a February town hall that it was his “biggest concern” of this election cycle. In a statement Tuesday, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott, acknowledged the issues with mail-in ballots during the primaries and said his office is devoting a significant portion of its voter education efforts to the new ID requirements.”
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“Voters whose mail-in ballots were flagged for rejection did have the opportunity to correct them to ensure that they were counted. But the process proved confusing and looked different depending on when the problem with a voter’s ID number was discovered.
“You can see all the different ways that this can go wrong. What if the ballot never gets back to the voter? Or they don’t see it and think it’s junk mail? Or they correct the number issue online but don’t realize they need to send the ballot back?” Slattery said.
For some voters, the process was just too arduous.
“A lot of voters get these letters of rejection, and they just don’t bother,” said Michele Valentino, a Democratic election judge in Dallas.
Some flaws can be expected when implementing a new system for the first time, but this bodes poorly considering how low turnout was relative to general elections: Fewer than 1 in 5 voters cast ballots in the primaries, which is higher than in the past six midterm primaries but still a lot lower than the roughly 46 percent of Texans who showed up for the last midterm general election in 2018.
“I can see this issue compounding and worsening as we reach the midterms this year,” said Jasleen Singh, counsel in the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, where she focuses on voting rights and elections. “That there’s even this much hardship that voters are encountering at this stage is incredibly concerning and dangerous for democracy.”
The AP analysis showed a higher rate of rejections in Democratic than Republican counties (15.1% to 9.1%). That was also predictable: Voters of color typically bear the biggest burden from any restrictions on voting, and they make up a large share of many of those Democratic-leaning counties.”
“In recent weeks, as Republican politicians in several states have introduced increasingly draconian measures designed to crack down on the lives and well-being of trans teenagers”
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“A bill in Idaho, currently being considered by the state Senate after being passed out of the House, perhaps goes furthest in this regard. That bill would make providing medical care to trans youths a felony, punishable with up to life in prison. It would also effectively trap families of trans children in Idaho by forbidding them to travel elsewhere for treatment.”
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” exas Gov. Greg Abbott directed that state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to open child abuse investigations into parents who pursue gender-affirming health care for their trans children. A judge issued an injunction against the directive being carried out, but a tweet from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton suggested that the state will ignore the injunction and continue investigations into families of trans children.”
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“There is a reason every major American medical body recommends giving trans children the chance to transition. (Here’s an article from the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics making this argument 11 years ago.) Children first transition socially — with changes to their clothing, haircut, and name. Then, with a physician’s guidance, they can block the onset of puberty in early adolescence, and finally start hormone treatment in later adolescence.
This method works. We have records of trans children receiving hormone treatment as long ago as the 1930s. With this approach, trans kids can largely live lives that are indistinguishable from those of cis kids.”
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“It’s worth repeating some other basic facts: Affirming trans children’s genders reduces their risk of attempting suicide; the use of puberty blockers in trans kids is safe; children are having bottom surgery only in exceptionally rare cases; and almost every element of trans health care we have was originally developed for cisgender people. (Cis children with precocious puberty have been using blockers for decades!)”
“The president’s son remains under investigation for matters related to tax payments and his foreign work, the New York Times reported last week. And that report cites emails that, per the Times, are “from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop.””
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“nearly a year and a half later, it’s worth revisiting what happened back in the heat of the 2020 campaign. Some decisions and claims look dubious in retrospect. Twitter briefly blocked links to the story for potentially containing hacked material and Facebook briefly restricted it as possible “misinformation” — but it may have been neither. And no evidence has emerged to back up suspicions from former intelligence officials, backed by Biden himself, that the laptop’s leak was a Russian plot.
But the emails were indeed being put out as part of an orchestrated campaign by Trump’s team to try to drive negative media coverage toward Joe Biden shortly before the election. And whatever the revelations about Hunter, claims from conservatives that the leaked emails proved Joe Biden acted corruptly in some way were false — they proved no such thing.”
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“There were two supposed “smoking guns” about Joe Biden that conservatives touted in the materials. The first was an email the Post called a “blockbuster,” in which an executive at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma thanked Hunter for the “opportunity to meet your father” in 2015. If you’re steeped in Trumpworld lore, this was damning because of the theory that Biden had the corrupt prosecutor general of Ukraine fired to benefit Burisma, and Biden had said he knew nothing about Hunter’s Ukrainian work, but look, a meeting! (Apparently, it was a dinner at Cafe Milano that Hunter had organized, with about a dozen people.) This appears to amount to Vice President Biden seemingly going to one dinner.
The second involved a business venture that Hunter tried to set up with a Chinese energy tycoon in 2017 (after Joe Biden was no longer vice president). One email mentions that the equity split would include “10 held by H for the big guy ?” A former business partner of Hunter’s named Tony Bobulinski came forward to claim “the big guy” was Joe Biden. But a subsequent email from Hunter says his “Chairman” gave him “an emphatic no,” and a further email clarifies that the chairman is his dad.
So this amounts to Joe Biden apparently refusing some deal Hunter tried to enmesh him in. An alternative possibility is that Joe was not actually ever involved and that Hunter had just been throwing his name around. By Bobulinski’s own account, he briefly met Joe Biden the day before and after an event, and the former vice president only said vague things to him (and the proposed deal never came together in the end).
All of this was indeed covered in the press in October 2020 (I wrote about it at the time). So the real objection from conservatives is that they didn’t get the narrative they liked out of the mainstream media.
Hunter’s emails contained a whole lot of embarrassing and arguably newsworthy material about himself, and the shady foreign business interests of the son of the potential next president are certainly a worthy topic of media coverage. But as for the Biden who was actually on the ballot, there was very little from him personally in those messages (other than an exchange where he comforts his despondent, drug-addicted son). The emails didn’t dominate mainstream media because, at least so far, they didn’t have the goods.”
“Hong Kong saw its Covid-19 death rate become the highest in the world, topping 37 deaths per million people. The recent outbreak was a brutal shock to the 7.4 million residents of the bustling metropolis, which had until recently kept Covid-19 cases to admirably low levels. Hong Kong was once applauded for its response to Covid-19. Then it became the global epicenter of the pandemic.”
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“the most important is the vaccination problem in Hong Kong, the extremely low vaccination rates among the elderly, especially those older than 80 years old. The vaccination rate for them was only about 20 percent by the end of 2021. That’s the most vulnerable population, and they’re not protected at all. The data from our pandemic on this wave is very clear: Those elderly who were not vaccinated actually had a much, much higher, death rate than those with the vaccination.
Another reason is the incidence of infection in Hong Kong was so low in the past. By the end of 2021, we had about 12,000 cases out of 7.3 million people in Hong Kong, which is less than 0.2 percent. So basically in Hong Kong, very, very few people have natural immunity against the virus.
Third, in the past waves, you got about a hundred or so cases in a day, and that’s already a lot. But in those days with only a hundred cases, you can actually put everybody in the hospital, in isolation, in quarantine camps. But when they are not hundreds but thousands of cases per day, then people can only be quarantined at home.
And, you know, Hong Kong is very crowded. Basically most people live in apartments and many of them live in very, very small apartments. Unfortunately, there are many poor people who actually share a flat with many other people. So this space is kind of impossible for you to do any preventive measures in those settings.
And of course, the virus this time is very different. In the past, we in Hong Kong see the virus, we see infections, and then we isolate people. Usually, the spread is very limited once you do that. But this time, especially at the beginning of the omicron wave, when we still had very, very few cases, we did a lot of investigations into each of the clusters.
You can see that in a restaurant, an infected patient sitting in one corner of the restaurant and another customer sitting at the other end of the restaurant got infected. It’s not just spreading to people around you, but can actually spread over long distances. For example, there are cases in apartment buildings. And what people have found is that spread is not because of direct contact between neighbors but because infected air that got removed from a flat from an exhaust fan can go up through the air to the other apartments.”
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“If Hong Kong was much, much better vaccinated, then I believe this wave could’ve been prevented.”
“Each year at America’s egg hatcheries, as many as 300 million male chicks are gruesomely killed — usually by being ground up alive or gassed — since they can’t lay eggs and have been bred to be too small to be worth the effort of raising for meat. Researchers around the world are using transgenic engineering and gene-editing tools in an attempt to solve this chicken and egg dilemma.”
“despite the great need for more doctors, there are still huge gaps between the number of aspiring physicians and the space available to train them, a dynamic that keeps perfectly well-qualified medical school applicants and graduates out of the pipeline.
In 2021, for instance, there were a record-setting 42,508 active applicants for residency programs — 3,741 more than in 2020 — but only 35,194 first-year positions, according to the National Resident Matching Program. Although the number of residency spots has been creeping upward in recent years, the growth has not been fast enough to close the gap.
At the root of the mismatch between physician supply and demand are decades-old limits on medical school enrollment and outdated rules governing the federal funding for most residency programs. While Congress has taken some baby steps toward increasing that funding, it has yet to make the kinds of bold changes necessary to create a sustainable and pandemic-resilient physician workforce.”
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“The US medical system falls behind those of our peer countries in so many ways. We have higher administrative costs and worse outcomes than other high-income countries — and we also have fewer physicians available per person.
“If you take a look at EU countries that have sophisticated medical systems,” explained Janis Orlowski, chief health care officer at the AAMC, “they have between 30 and 40 physicians per 10,000 people. In the United States, we have about 26 to 27.”
It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, in part because physicians use their time differently in different systems. But it’s clear the shortage is a burden, and it’s likely to get worse as the US population grows larger and older.”
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“In a December 2021 survey conducted by the American Medical Association, one in five physicians said they would likely leave their current practice within two years, and about a third said they’d likely reduce their work hours in the next year.
The larger workforce trend has been dubbed the “Great Resignation,” and the reasons doctors are quitting echo the factors contributing to shortfalls among other health professionals, including nurses, medical assistants, physical therapists, and pharmacists. Burnout, fear of exposure, pandemic-related mood changes, and workload were all associated with intent to leave the profession.”
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“It’s easy to imagine a simple solution for this problem: Incentivizing doctors from other countries to immigrate to the US. But this is not as quick a fix as it seems. Most states require doctors to complete residency training in the US, which takes at least three years. That applies even for doctors who practiced independently at expert levels in other countries; the chief of surgery at the fanciest hospital in India would still have to repeat residency in order to practice in the US.
About 13,000 of the residency match applicants this year were graduates of international medical schools, 8,000 of whom were not US citizens. But no matter how many additional doctors want to jump through the hoops necessary to practice in the US, long waits for visas and restrictive terms limiting where and for how long they can practice in the US make it unlikely many more will be added to the health care workforce in the near term.”
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“One major bottleneck in the physician pipeline is medical school admissions, which are only graduating about 27,000 students each year. “That started in the 1980s with the freakout over a physician surplus,” said Robert Orr, a social policy analyst at the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC. At the time, miscalculations about population growth and changes in medical care delivery contributed to a moratorium on medical school enrollment that lasted until 2005.
Although medical schools have since continued to grow, expanding too quickly could result in a surplus of medical graduates with nowhere to do their residencies. That’s because of the other major bottleneck in the pipeline — the low number of residency positions. This year’s 36,000 first-year residency slots are inadequate to meet the US need for physicians and inadequate to provide training positions for all the applicants seeking them — and like the dearth of medical school seats, it is a consequence of restrictions created long ago with arguably good intentions.
Since the Medicare and Medicaid Act was first passed in 1965, medical residents have been paid for mostly by the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The goal was to ensure Medicare beneficiaries had access to the best health care, which was thought to be found in teaching hospitals.
In 1983, Medicare made changes to the way it reimbursed hospitals for residency programs. At that time, it created formulas that calculated the dollar amount of residency training funds it supplied to each hospital as a percentage of that hospital’s care expenditures and its volume of Medicare patients — sort of like a restaurant tip, said Orr.
Those formulas have never been updated — and because they tie funding to the cost of care, they have resulted in better funding for hospitals providing high-cost care in high-cost (usually urban) areas.
Over the years, this inequitable distribution of residency program funding has meant that hospitals prioritizing primary care services in rural areas get less funding and fewer residents than those that perform lots of expensive procedures in cities. That leads to fewer primary care specialists, and because physicians often practice near where they train, fewer rural physicians.
This fee structure also incentivizes hospitals to raise the cost of the care they deliver, and results in lower funding for residency programs at hospitals that treat younger populations less likely to be covered by Medicare.
Worse yet, to reduce Medicare expenditures, the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 capped the number of resident slots that could be funded by Medicare each year. It also capped the number of residents each hospital could have at their 1996 levels, which meant hospitals couldn’t get additional residents even if the population they served ballooned in size. Obamacare undid this restriction in 2010, and since then, the number of residency spots has grown modestly.
In 2020, Congress passed a federal budget bill that provided for 1,000 new Medicare-funded residency slots to be added over the next five years. But that’s nowhere near enough to close the current gaps.
Money donated by private insurers funds some residency positions at “the hospitals with the prestige and market power to extract it,” said Orr, but “it’s not a super-equitable way of trying to get residents out to different hospitals where maybe the population isn’t as well served.””
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“There are also some solutions that sidestep the residency bottleneck entirely. One of the more promising fixes to the physician shortage is to allow other highly trained providers, like nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and pharmacists, to practice independently of doctors. The American Medical Association has vigorously fought this change for more than 30 years, and physicians who oppose the move often cite patient safety concerns, although they are not substantiated by safety studies.
Much of the real motivation to prevent these providers from practicing independently may be about money and professional sovereignty; private practice doctors in particular are financially disincentivized from expanding the scope of other practitioners.”
“Inflation is at a 40-year high in the United States and accelerating around the globe. The situation may very well get worse before it gets better, as Russia’s war on Ukraine stands to exacerbate price pressures, as does a new round of lockdowns in China due to Covid-19.
Among economists and experts, there’s no strict consensus about what exactly is to blame. There are certain factors widely agreed upon that we’ve been hearing about for months: supply chain woes, rising oil prices, shifting consumer demands. These concerns have hardly subsided. But there are other arenas where there’s more disagreement, such as the role government stimulus has played in increasing prices, and the possibility that corporate greed is an important factor.
There’s also no clear agreement on what the solution is. The Federal Reserve is starting to make moves to try to tamp down inflation, but it’s going to take time for that to have an impact. It’s still uncertain how aggressive the Fed will be or what risks those fixes could pose for the broader economy. The White House is trying to combat price increases, but there’s not really a ton it can do.
“They’re actually doing the right thing, they just don’t have many tools,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former adviser to President Barack Obama. He said one thing they can do and are doing is to be “realistic in leveling with people” that of course they don’t like inflation, and this isn’t a problem that will solve itself overnight.
While a lot is unknown, one thing seems pretty clear to most: Much of this is the result of factors that have been brewing for quite some time; some back to the start of the pandemic, many even longer. As for when it will be over, we’re likely to be in this situation for a while.”
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“As much as many people say that they feel bad about the economy right now, the economy is actually pretty decent. Unemployment is relatively low, many people still have quite a bit of money to spend, and the recovery, in a lot of ways, looks pretty solid. But again, therein lies part of the problem: People have money to spend, but not so many places to spend it. “There are multiple things that are happening all at once right now. The pandemic is still going on, we still have supply chain bottlenecks around the globe, parts of the economy are getting up to speed,” Amarnath said.”
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“Expectations play a role here — when everybody thinks inflation is happening, then businesses start charging more and workers start charging more money to compensate, which makes the whole thing worse.
“Once you have inflation, there’s some self-perpetuation of it,” Furman said. “There’s some passthrough of wages to prices, and some passthrough of prices to wages. Inflation expectations matter.””
“The nation’s affordable housing crisis has gotten some semblance of attention — with journalists writing stories on the rising cost of rent, the scarce supply of new housing, the looming threat of eviction — but one aspect of the crisis has gone consistently overlooked. On top of the severe housing shortage that currently exists, nearly 6 million homes nationwide have moderate to serious home health hazards. They require repairs that, if left ignored, will make them uninhabitable, and eventually they’ll disappear from the market altogether.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition, a research and advocacy group, estimates a shortage of 7 million affordable housing units for low-income renters, but those figures don’t account for all the existing affordable units that stand at risk of demolition.
Issues like lead paint, leaky roofs, and knob-and-tube wiring don’t just leave tenants and homeowners in substandard, unsafe housing. They also leave families — mostly poor families — shut out from energy efficiency programs the federal government already funds to upgrade homes. Due to inflexible program restrictions, homes with outstanding repairs aren’t eligible for existing weatherization subsidies, despite those families arguably needing them the most. Addressing this problem could help solve both the affordable housing and the climate crisis at once.”