Lone Candle – Page 492 – Champion of Truth

The American doctor deserts

Posted on July 22, 2023 by Lone Candle

“in hundreds of communities, the doctor shortage isn’t a distant concern; it’s happening. America doesn’t have enough physicians practicing in certain parts of the country and in critical specialties. There are not enough primary care doctors in small towns and poor city neighborhoods alike. There are not enough obstetricians in rural practices. There are not enough psychiatrists almost anywhere.
The vast majority of rural America, 80 percent, is considered by the federal government to be medically underserved. About 20 percent of the US population lives in rural communities, but only 10 percent of doctors practice there.

These localized shortages — call them doctor deserts — are not inevitable. They are, in part, the result of policy choices. Doctors tend to spend their careers near the place they spent their residencies, several additional years of training they undergo after medical school. These residencies are paid for by the federal government, through Medicare, and virtually all are at big, academic medical centers, rather than in the places where people most need care right now.

If the US wants more doctors practicing in small towns, then it needs to put residencies there.”

…

“The answer to “does America have enough doctors overall” is complicated and arguably somewhat unclear. The US has significantly fewer doctors per capita than some other wealthy nations, such as Germany and Sweden. But US numbers are actually about the same as a number of other developed countries — Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, France — that still generally rank better on measures of health care quality than the US does.
Groups like the Association of American Medical Colleges continue to project long-term workforce shortages. Demographic trends, including an aging patient population and boomer-generation doctors reaching retirement age, may lead to more overall pressure on the US health system’s capacity.

But the more acute shortages are already happening in individual communities and specialties.”

Why Japan’s Military is Gladly Getting Ready for War

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Lone Candle

The Supreme Court may be running out of patience for Trump’s worst judges

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Lone Candle

“by sitting on this case, a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republican appointees effectively let Tipton control ICE for more than a year.”

…

“Texas’s lawsuit was rooted in a federal statute which states that the United States “shall take into custody any alien” who commits certain immigration offenses. In effect, they argued that the word “shall” is a mandatory command that forces ICE to make mass arrests.
But this argument runs afoul of 150 years of well-settled law. As far back as Railroad Company v. Hecht (1877), the Supreme Court held that “as against the government, the word ‘shall,’ when used in statutes, is to be construed as ‘may,’ unless a contrary intention is manifest.”

One reason for this strong presumption that federal laws do not impose arrest or prosecution mandates on law enforcement is that it is often literally impossible for a law enforcement agency to arrest every single person who violates a law — imagine the massive police state that would be required, for example, to pull over every single driver who violates a traffic law.

As the Justice Department explained in a 2014 memo, “there are approximately 11.3 million undocumented aliens in the country,” but Congress has only appropriated enough resources to “remove fewer than 400,000 such aliens each year.” That means that leaders of immigration agencies like ICE necessarily must set priorities, and make choices about which deportable immigrants will be targeted and which ones will effectively be tolerated within US borders.

Indeed, as Kavanaugh writes in his Texas opinion, this ability to set priorities and to decide when not to enforce the law has been a regular feature of federal immigration law across many administrations. “For the last 27 years since” the immigration statutes at issue in Texas “were enacted in their current form,” Kavanaugh writes, “all five Presidential administrations have determined that resource constraints necessitated prioritization in making immigration arrests.””

Why streaming services are dumping shows left and right

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Lone Candle

“This was the promise of the streaming age: You can have everything, you can have it everywhere, and you can have it all, at once. Subscribe to our platform and you’ll have access to our huge library of “content” forever, on demand, whenever you want it. You want more? Look, it’s right there in the plus sign at the end of the platform’s name. (Why did everyone do that?)
This utopian fantasy was in serious contrast to the old way of watching TV, where you’d sit yourself down to watch your show at the time it aired or you wouldn’t see it at all unless you were lucky enough to catch it in reruns. Once your show was canceled, you couldn’t watch it anymore. We got VHS recorders, and then TiVos, sure, and eventually you could buy a show on tapes or DVDs after it had aired. But these all require intention and planning, an action on the part of the potential audience member. Streaming? That would be easy.

Turns out the utopian fantasy was a fantasy”

…

“The first way that removing a show from a platform saves money is tied up with some of the reasons that the WGA is striking and SAG-AFTRA is considering it: residuals. Production companies pay members of various guilds (like the WGA) a fixed percentage every year if their show is available on a streaming platform. Calculation of the precise rate is byzantine and renegotiated every three years by the guilds, and can range from a pittance to a livable income, depending on the deal that was cut for that show. But it’s a cost that the company incurs, and if they remove the show entirely, the cost is eliminated.

Often, however, shows removed from a platform don’t go away entirely. In the case of Westworld, for instance, Warner Bros. Discovery removed the show from its platform (now called Max) but licensed it to free, ad-supported channels operated by Roku and Tubi. That means you can actually watch Westworld now, entirely for free, as long as you’re willing to sit through some ads — and it means Warner Bros. Discovery starts making some money on Westworld again.

What you can’t necessarily do is watch it at literally any time you want to. These free channels, called FAST (for Free, Ad-Supported Television), operate on a linear model, which is basically the same way cable TV works. You flip through channels and watch whatever is “on TV” right now. What makes FAST different from traditional cable or network TV is that it’s distributed over the internet, so you can watch on your laptop or device or smart TV, instead of over cables or airwaves.

But wait, you might ask: Doesn’t Warner Bros. Discovery now have to pay residuals to everyone involved with Westworld? Yes, it does — but the residual rates for FAST are currently lower than the SVOD rates on streaming platforms, which in turn are far lower than on broadcast television like network or cable. Additionally, Warner Bros. Discovery is getting payment from Roku and Tubi — that’s what it means to “license” your show. So there’s income and less outflow, and that’s a net positive on the balance sheet.

Speaking of balance sheets, there’s one more reason this might happen. For companies like Disney, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery, every show on their platform is an asset. If an asset’s value declines more rapidly than anticipated, you can “write down” its value, meaning it’s now worth less; that ultimately creates a loss on your balance sheet, which translates to a tax deduction. If you remove a show from your platform, it’s now “impaired” in terms of earning power, and thus literally worth less. It’s all pretty complicated, but companies seem very eager to incur write-downs, perhaps in part to show their shareholders that they are serious about getting their financial houses in order. (That’s key for companies like these, which are feeling a squeeze after years of relentless, profligate spending on content to populate their platforms — especially during the pandemic.) Disney, for instance, announced that it will incur a whopping $1.5-$1.8 billion impairment charge from removing content from its platforms, which translates into a very sizable write-down and a lower tax burden.”

The monstrous arrogance of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Lone Candle

“Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion for the Court’s six Republican appointees faults the two universities for having affirmative action programs that “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race.” But there’s an obvious reason why they do not. The Court’s previous decisions permitted some limited forms of affirmative action, but they explicitly ban racial quotas and other mathematical formulas that could allow universities to determine whether they are achieving “focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race.”
The Harvard case, in other words, is rooted in a Catch-22. Universities may neither have mathematically precise programs that violate the Court’s earlier decisions, nor may they have the more vaguely defined programs that the Court prohibits in its newest decision.

I wish that the Court had shown more humility instead.

That’s because the military leaders’ views are shared by an equally long list of America’s largest employers — a list that includes companies as diverse as Apple, Levi Strauss, Northrop Grumman, Starbucks, and United Airlines — all of whom warn that American business will be less dominant because of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions.

To appeal to diverse markets, the business brief argues, major employers need “university admissions programs that lead to graduates educated in racially and ethnically diverse environments.” “Only in this way,” their brief emphasizes, “can America produce a pipeline of highly qualified future workers and business leaders prepared to meet the needs of the modern economy and workforce.”

And then there’s the medical profession’s brief. This brief, filed on behalf of a wide range of medical organizations including the American Medical Association itself, argues that “an overwhelming body of scientific research compiled over decades confirms” that “diversity literally saves lives by ensuring that the Nation’s increasingly diverse population will be served by healthcare professionals competent to meet its needs.””

…

“six lawyers with little specialized expertise in business, education administration, national defense, or medicine, declared that they have found the answer to America’s longstanding questions about race and diversity — and that they know more than individuals and institutions with far greater expertise than someone who spends their days reading documents in a marble palace could ever have.”

How Republicans turned a must-pass defense bill into an “extremist manifesto”

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Lone Candle

“House Republicans narrowly passed their version of an annual defense bill 219–210, after stacking it with controversial amendments on social issues that are dead on arrival in the Senate.
The debate on the National Defense Authorization Act, or the NDAA for short, now heads to the Democrat-controlled upper chamber, which is set to consider its own take on the bill later this month. Eventually, the two chambers will work to reconcile their differences between the two in the hope of finding a compromise.

The NDAA, one of Congress’s must-pass bills, effectively lays out what the military’s budget could look like for the next year and which programs will be funded. This year’s House bill authorizes $886 billion in funding, including a 5.2 percent pay raise for service members and the appointment of an inspector general to oversee Ukraine funding.

Much like the debt ceiling legislation and annual spending bills, the NDAA is a prime opportunity for lawmakers to add unrelated amendments making policy changes to pet issues, since it has to pass every year. This week, Republicans capitalized on this opportunity to put forth controversial amendments favored by their right flank, including restrictions on abortion and LGBTQ rights. It’s a move that’s meant to send a message about their position on social issues, and it’s also one that makes what was a bipartisan bill much more contentious.”