May 24
A group of scientists at UC San Diego are responsible for creating a tiny flexible monitor that can stick right to your sternum. Its purpose? Tracking your sweat.
May 24
This Father's Day, Record That Parent-Child Interview You Keep Meaning To Make
Posted in: Today's Chili
The Huffington Post is building a movement to spark conversations between parents and children. We’d love for you to be part of it.
This Father’s Day, join HuffPost and Facebook in New York’s Madison Square Park and record a conversation for our parent-child interview series Talk To Me.
We’ll provide everything you need (including a beautiful private studio booth, suggested questions, etc.) for a heart-warming interview session with your loved one. Plus, you’ll be able to share it via Facebook Live, a new feature that lets you broadcast your life wherever and whenever you like.
You know you’ll treasure the interview. It’s all free and we’ll have plenty of great giveaways for everyone who participates.
Where: New York’s Madison Square Park, right next to Shake Shack [map]
When: Father’s Day (Sunday, June 19) from noon to 6:00pm
What we’ll be doing: We’ll have a special Facebook Live studio booth where people can interview their parent (or grandparent, mentor, etc.) live on Facebook. It’s really fun! We’ll also provide suggested questions + free goodies, and HuffPost will be featuring your conversations all day long to our 7 million Facebook followers.
What you’ll be doing: You’ll be having a short (5-7 minute) conversation with your loved one about whatever topics you want. Join folks like Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg, Melinda Gates and hundreds of others who have already filmed their own Talk To Me videos.
RESERVE YOUR SLOT NOW!
Not in New York? No problem! Create your #TalkToMe interview at home and have it featured on HuffPost. Tips and details are all here.
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May 24
There is a raging debate going on in Washington about how the government pays for drugs used to treat cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, immunodeficiency diseases, and other serious medical conditions. Unfortunately, for patients, the debate has become political. When that happens, the “truth” has a way of becoming a mere inconvenience as patients, especially seniors, take a back seat to politics. We should all be scared of what is brewing.
Seeking to stop rising health care costs, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) wants to experiment with the way the Medicare program pays for drugs given to patients in doctors’ offices. These “Part B” drugs are complex, injectable medications, like chemotherapy, that must be given to patients by skilled medical professionals because they are potentially toxic and can cause severe reactions. Close supervision in a medical facility is a must!
The experiment came about because CMS believes that oncologists and other doctors are motivated to use higher-priced drugs since Medicare pays for them on a “cost plus” formula. The medical practice has to purchase the drug and is paid an additional percentage to cover the storage, preparation, and related costs. For the record, it should be noted that CMS and Congress came up with this formula–not doctors.
To hear it from the government, doctors are not heroes fighting cancer and other diseases daily in the trenches, but rather profiteers pushing costly and unnecessary treatments on ailing patients. That is not only insulting but an unsupported indictment of our nation’s medical care.
To “solve” this nonexistent problem of doctors purposefully prescribing more expensive drugs, CMS wants to drastically reduce payments to do the complete reverse–penalize the prescribing of high-priced drugs and incentivize doctors to give their patients cheaper ones, even if not appropriate.
The problem with the premise of this government medical experiment is that history holds some inconvenient truths showing that it will do the exact opposite of what CMS intends.
Believing the same thing as the government, the nation’s largest insurer, UnitedHealthcare, ran a pilot study to remove any financial incentive tied to drugs. The result–published in a peer-reviewed medical journal–was a 179% increase in spending on cancer drugs, not a decrease.
Even if CMS questions that result, it cannot deny the troubling and inconvenient fact that government payment cuts over the last 11 years have increased both spending on cancer care and drug prices. In 2005 and 2012, the government imposed significant cuts to Medicare drug payment rates, cuts that shifted cancer care to the more expensive hospital setting. In 2014 alone, this cost Medicare and taxpayers an extra $2 billion; and from 2004 to 2014, cancer drug prices have increased by at least 39%. So much for reducing costs and drug prices!
Unfortunately, the inconvenient truths for the government don’t stop there. In modern-day cancer care, with over 200 different types of cancer, there are simply very few situations where doctors have a choice between two equally effective drugs that differ in price. The newer drugs, such as the immuno-oncology treatment that saved former President Jimmy Carter, cost more. Choosing to prescribe them is not a matter of doctors seeking more money but one of saving lives.
Having run a cancer research network, I don’t use the word “experiment” loosely to describe the CMS proposal. But that is what it is. CMS’ own description of dividing three-quarters of the country into a “test” arm and the remainder into a “control,” all “randomized” by clusters of zip codes, screams “experiment”–especially when it will impact doctors’ abilities to deliver life-saving medicine to cancer patients. Fortunately, some are realizing this and are questioning CMS, such as Senator Charles Grassley who has asked about the government’s plans to force patients to participate in experimental research that has none of the established patient safeguards.
This experiment also presents an inconvenient legal dilemma for the government. Congress created the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), the branch CMS is using to run this experiment, to test health care reforms on a controlled scale–not in a national, mandatory way. Is CMS simply using CMMI to circumvent Medicare Part B drug payment rates passed into law by Congress? If so, it appears that CMS is purposefully overstepping its powers to overturn existing law. If not, then Congress mistakenly gave CMS too much power in the Affordable Care Act to be able to use CMMI to effectively circumvent any Medicare law. Either way, this presents a very inconvenient constitutional problem. If tested in a court of law, this could invalidate the entity (i.e., CMMI) that has been behind so many innovative health care reform programs to date.
Cancer care is experiencing a revolution like never before. There are so many exciting new cancer drugs that are saving lives every day, with many more breakthroughs coming down the pike. The bad news is that these drugs are being priced to an unsustainable level and are fueling the fight we face today. Solving this quandary will require more than just thoughtless payment cuts and politics. It will require everyone–patients, providers, government, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies–to work together towards effective, thoughtful solutions. What is clear is that the CMS’ Medicare experiment is certainly not that solution. It is bad medicine and represents the worst of public policy and politics.
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May 24
The last time an international trade agreement surfaced as a major issue in a presidential campaign was in 1992, when Ross Perot predicted that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would create a “giant sucking sound” as jobs headed to Mexico. Bill Clinton won that election and NAFTA went into effect the following year — ultimately proving Perot right.
The outlook is still uncertain, however, for the massive trade pact known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was signed this year but still requires approval by Congress. The Obama administration hasn’t sent the agreement to the Hill because, at this point, it doesn’t have the votes. Part of the reason is that all three of the remaining Democratic and Republican presidential candidates have said that they don’t support the TPP — at least not in its current form.
On the one hand, that’s good news, because the TPP is deeply flawed. It would be bad for the environment, bad for workers, bad for human rights, and bad for public health. For details on just how devastating the TPP would be to the global climate, see the Sierra Club report Climate Roadblocks. It’s sobering reading.
But here’s the perverse thing about the TPP (and similar agreements such as one currently under negotiation with the European Union): Increasing international trade doesn’t actually require that we sacrifice our environment, health, jobs, or human rights. To be clear, the reasons why these so-called trade agreements are so dangerous has little to do with trade. They’re terrible because the powerful corporate insiders who do the negotiating (in secret, of course) pack them with provisions that protect and empower giant, multinational corporations — including some of the biggest polluters on the planet.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no reason we couldn’t have trade agreements that prohibit corporations from suing governments over public health or environmental protections (as TransCanada is currently threatening to do over the Keystone XL pipeline rejection). In fact, we could negotiate agreements that would do the opposite.
Why not adopt a model for international trade that not only allows nations to tackle climate disruption but actually requires stronger action? This could include incentives and protections for clean energy investments but not for investments that harm our climate. We could restrict and even ban fossil fuel exports, put limits on shipping emissions, and offer powerful incentives for trade in goods that dramatically reduce climate pollution while penalizing trade in goods that do the opposite. We could accelerate progress rather than undermine it. Strengthen rather than weaken our movement.
At the same time, we could negotiate trade deals that protect workers around the globe. Rather than shipping jobs overseas and throwing our wages overboard, we could have trade pacts that, for example, encourage the local production of goods, which would not only generate new jobs but also create vibrant local economies.
Trade agreements can be powerful agents of change, which is why bad ones are so dangerous. But the power of trade could and should be harnessed to advance the public’s interest. It’s reassuring that Trump, Sanders, and Clinton have all come out against the TPP. But it would be even more encouraging if they proposed forward-thinking trade policies that put even more wind in the sails of the global climate movement by keeping fossil fuels in the ground, promoting clean energy, and prioritizing human rights over corporate protectionism.
For now, though, our first job is to stop corporate lobbyists from convincing Congress to pass the TPP. Let your representatives know that trade agreements should be used to help us achieve our climate goals — not take us in the opposite direction.
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May 24
There’s an old adage attributed to many pundits that aptly applies to Donald Trump’s campaign to become our next president: “I don’t care what you say about me, as long as you say something about me, and as long as you spell my name right.”
To Trump, any publicity is good publicity. It’s like a bad commercial repeated ad nauseum. Sooner or later you start singing along with the Kars4Kids jingle.
And the media is compliant. Instead of pressing him for details, the media simply regurgitates his mouthings. Over the weekend, Trump called Hillary Clinton “weak.” The press didn’t ask for any proof; they merely and freely publicized this unfounded and clearly misogynist allegation. (To be fair, the media haven’t treated Hillary any differently than Trump’s Republican primary opponents. The press simply repeated over and over his unsubstantiated slurs and insults.)
Given the choice of showing a plodding Clinton artfully explaining why she is better qualified to be president, or Trump popping out a new absurdity that on the surface reinforces her argument, the media become his co-conspirator in co-opting the electoral dialogue. To the media, both old and new, both print and electronic, Trump is the sexier story. It’s an eyeball economics game they are playing, so naturally they go with Trump, the future of the republic be damned.
With each passing day we are treated to a new version of Donald Trump. After the massacre at the Sandy Hook School he praised President Obama for taking a strong stance against gun violence. “President Obama spoke for me and every American in his remarks in #Newtown Connecticut,” Trump tweeted. Last Friday he told the National Rifle Association annual convention he would do away with gun-free zones, even in schools. Over the weekend, he appeared to reverse fields yet again.
How did he go from gun control to gun proliferation? He doesn’t tell us. It’s okay to change positions if the reasons for the change are carefully, logically explained. But Trump just spouts positions based on the audience before him.
Moving from position to position makes it difficult to effectively attack him. Even in the face of video tape proof he denies contradiction. And the public seemingly does not care about his inconsistencies.
He is the political equivalent of Cassius Clay’s boxing bravado before his 1964 title bout against Sonny Liston: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Hard to hit but adept at striking sharply at his opponent.
After vanquishing Liston, Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Trump won’t change his name, but his title could become Mr. President if Hillary and the media let him enjoy free publicity without accountability through November.
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May 24
FUBAR: The Shame of Our V.A.
Posted in: Today's ChiliWhile the national media today devotes its pages and airtime to Donald Trump’s twitter feeds, and our President is taking center stage issuing bathroom decrees, a huge scandal, the shame of our Democracy, is all but ignored.
An NPR program aired last night told the story:
Remember the Veterans Administration scandal of 2014? Veterans had earlier been induced to enlist in the Armed Forces by our government’s promise that upon their honorable discharge they would receive, “all the necessary care… to promote, preserve, and restore your health.” Then they were screwed over by their country. The wait for care: months and months– was so long that some VA administrators cooked the books to hide the disgraceful delays.
When the matter became public, the finger pointing commenced. There was enough blame to go around.
First, in the eight years of the Bush wars, the size of our military grew, as did the injuries to be treated after discharge. The Administration came up with the cash to acquire the guns and bullets, but failed to acquire the hospital beds and medical personnel sure to be needed when the troops came home. While Bush and Cheney ignored the issue, Congress slept.
Second, when the Harvard Law Professor and Community Organizer Barack Obama, became President, he was full of policy ideas, and successfully crammed Obamacare down the throats of the Republicans in Congress. Having napped for 8 years, the R’s were now awake and well rested, and instantly became such experts in health care, they could piss all over The Affordable Care Act. But neither the President nor the Congress looked out for the vets. Their care was left to the slumbering Veterans Administration, an agency that is almost a perfect model of what is wrong with Government.
So for each of the ten years after taking office, our head of The Executive Branch failed to do his duty, failed to monitor the V.A., failed to appoint supervisors who would supervise. And so the veterans got screwed again and again.
When it was reported that not only were there unacceptable delays in the delivery of medical services, but local administrators were fraudulently covering them up, the head of the V.A., General Shinseki was forced out. Congress rushed through a bill providing $10 billion to fix the problem, but the legislation was wildly unrealistic: it gave the V.A. 90 days to patch up a system hosted by a crumbling infrastructure.
The fix failed.The bill required the agency to create a whole new network of alternative health care providers. The hospitals, doctors and other health care personnel would be paid by the V.A. But when the V.A. tried to put the pieces together, it failed, and hired an outside firm to do the job. The result was chaos. The heart of the fix was that vets could go to non-V.A. doctors when the wait at V.A. facilities was more than 30 days or they lived more than 40 miles away. Not only did the V.A. need to enroll patients and doctors in the program, promulgate regulations, fashion a billing system, etc, it then had to execute: it had to make sure the doctors and hospitals received timely payments for their services. Asking the Veterans Administration bureaucracy to organize and administer such a plan was like asking pigs to fly. Duh, when the doctors and hospitals complained the government did not pay at all, or did not pay within 90 days, they dropped out of the program. And we were back to GO.
The result, NPR reported, is that delays at V.A. hospitals are today as bad as they were before!
I know the President is busy. But so are lots of chief executives who run successful enterprises. They manage to succeed because they know that policy is only the first half: you must then administer the execution of the policy. (Cf. the famous Seinfeld scene when he is told the car rental agency does not have the car they reserved for him. He says to the attendant “Sure you know how to take a reservation, but the important part is to keep the reservation.”)
In the few months left to his Presidency, is it too much to ask that Mr. Obama fix this–permanently? Talk about the Obama legacy!
And Congress, they ain’t about to sit down and draft a new complicated bill. One of the two sponsors of the defective bill (Senator Bernie Sanders) is too busy now anyway.
So here is my simplistic suggestion: Do not try to reinvent the wheel. Why not just put all eligible vets into Medicare? And then appoint somebody like Mike Bloomberg as head of the V.A., with power to effect the regulations and attend to the details of the merger. The R’s should love it because the government can probably fire thousands of ineffective clerks and managers whose jobs are duplicates of existing medicare personnel.
Let’s leave FUBAR back in the history of WWII, and not reimpose its consequences on today’s veterans.
A bientot.
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May 24
The middle class has been taking a shellacking for years. It began in the 1970s, when the business and political elites separated from the people and it has been accelerating ever since, according to Hedrick Smith, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and editor, an Emmy award-winning PBS producer and correspondent, and a bestselling author. In short, an establishment figure.
Add to Smith’s establishment credentials schooling at Choate, the private boarding school, a stint at Oxford, and you have the picture of someone with the credentials to join the elite of his choosing. Instead Smith is a one-man think tank, a persuasive voice against the manipulation of the public institutions, like Congress, for money and power.
But Smith is not a polemicist. He uses the reporter’s tools, honed over decades in Moscow and Washington and on big stories, like the civil rights movement and the fall of the Soviet Union, to make his points against the assault on the middle class.
It all began with Smith’s looking into what was happening to American manufacturing, which led to his explosive 2012 book, “Who Stole the American Dream?” Encouraged by the book’s success, he created a Web site, reclaimtheamericandream.org, which now has a substantial following. In the past three years, he has lectured at over 50 universities and other platforms on his big issue: the abandonment of the middle class by corporate America and its corrupted political allies.
Smith documents the end of the implicit contract with workers, where they shared in corporate growth and stability. He outlines how money has vanquished the political voice of the middle class.
Instead, according to Smith, corporations have knelt before the false god of “shareholder value.” This has resulted in the flight of corporate headquarters to tax-friendlier climes, jobs to cheap labor, and a managerial elite indifferent to those who built the companies they manage.
In Smith’s well-researched world it is not only the corporations that have abandoned the workers, but the political establishment is also guilty, bowing to lobbyists and fixing elections through redistricting. Two villains here: money in politics and gerrymandering electoral districts.
The result is a democracy in name only that serves the powerful and perpetuates the power of those who have stolen the system from the voters.
Smith cites the dismal situation in North Carolina, where districts have been drawn ostensibly to ensure black representation in Congress, but also to ensure Republican domination of all the surrounding districts. The two districts that illustrate the mischief are called “the Octopus” and “the Serpent” because of the way they are drawn to identify the voter preference of the inhabitants.
The rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are testament to the broken system, says Smith. They are symbolic of the rising up of the middle class against the predations of the elites.
But Smith is hopeful because, he says, the states have taken up arms against the Washington and Wall Street elites. People should “look at the maps,” he says, “They will be surprised to find out that 25 states are engaged in a battle against partisan gerrymandering, or that 700 cities and communities plus 16 states are on record in favor of rolling back ‘Citizens United’ and restoring the power of Congress to regulate campaign funding.”
Smith sees the middle class reclaiming America: a great social revolution that again unites the government with governed, the creators of wealth with the managers of the wealth. Smith is no Man of La Mancha, tilting at windmills, but a torchbearer for a revolution that is underway and overdue.
“My thought is that more people would be emboldened to engage in grassroots civic action if they could just see what other people have already achieved,” he told me.
Smith’s Web site has drawn 82,000 visitors in the past year, and Facebook posts have reached 2.45 million, he says.
Smith cautioned me to write about the Web site and cause and not the man. But the man is unavoidable, and unique. He has as much energy as he had when I first met him in passing in a corridor at the National Press Club in Washington decades ago. At 82, Smith still plays tennis, skis, hikes, swims and dances with his wife, Susan, whom he describes as a “gorgeous dancer.”
At 6 feet 2 1/2 inches, Smith is an imposing figure at the lectern, but his delivery is gentle and collegiate: a reporter astounded and pleased with what he has found in the course of his investigation of the American body politic. — InsideSources
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May 24
When a field of work traditionally dominated by men is “feminized,” guess what happens. Wages drop! This shows that gender bias is a factor – maybe a big one – in the ongoing “gender wage gap.”
Women are said to earn somewhere between 77 and 79 cents for every dollar earned by men. One key explanation given for the wage gap is women’s selection of fields that pay less. For example, teachers and social workers earn less than airline pilots and accountants — and it just so happens that more women choose the low-paying fields and more men go into the higher-paying fields.
Which is the chicken and which is the egg? Could certain fields pay less because there are more women in them? Could gender drive pay scales up or down? In her recent NY Times piece titled, “As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops,” Claire Cain Miller reviews several studies that indicate this is how it works. One from Cornell University shows that “the differences between the occupations and industries in which men and women work” is now the “single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it.”
Miller cites statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that “the median earnings of technology managers (mostly men) are 27 percent higher than human resources managers (mostly women).” And the same pattern exists in lower-paying jobs: “janitors (usually men) earn 22 percent more than maids and housekeepers (usually women).”
Most distressing, Miller refers to a study published in Oxford Journals and titled “Occupational Feminization and Pay.” That study used census data from 1950 to 2000 and found that “when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography.”
So what does all this say about societal values about gender? I have argued that the cultural preference of masculine over feminine values and styles is the root cause of the fact that men still dominate in the higher levels of business and the professions. Is that same root cause at play in the wage gap, which is, mathematically, the composite result of millions of individual decisions about wages or salaries? Is it at play in the dollar value placed on male-dominated fields vs. female-dominated fields? Do we, as a society, unconsciously think men are worth more?
Unconscious gender bias creeps into how we value an individual’s work — and the work itself. Isn’t it time we valued work for the importance of its contribution, the skills required, and the availability of people with those skills – and not by the gender of the talent pool?
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
May 24
E Ink, maker of the ePaper displays found in many e-readers (maddening to have three different e prefixes in one sentence, but it’s unavoidable), announced a brand new type of reflective display that can show a huge range of colors — but the tech is only going to be deployed as signage for now. Read More
May 24
In the early months of the primary season, Donald Trump’s personal reputation and his awkward attempts to bond with Christian conservatives persuaded political pundits that he’d be unlikely to attract the support of “values voters.” The pundits were wrong. Many explanations have been suggested for Trump’s unlikely popularity among Christian conservatives, including the draw of authoritarianism and a “cultural shift” in which evangelicalism has become a political rather than a “religious brand.”
I suspect that the phenomenon of Christian conservatives coming out for Trump is determined simultaneously by multiple factors–these and others. What I’d like to suggest, however, is that in addition to asking why Christian conservatives love Trump we should ask how they learn to love him. That is, what forms of political socialization are believers encountering that prime them to regard Trump and his candidacy favorably?
We don’t have to dive deeply into Christian conservative media to see pro-Trump messaging in the ordinary communications of movement moral entrepreneurs and followers. One example is the Presidential Prayer Team, a project that encourages Christians to pray for the President and other public officials and also delivers Christian conservative political rhetoric to subscribers. Recently, the PPT has delivered to the inboxes of its millions of subscribers “devotional news” and commentary that asks of the upcoming election, “Is It a Sin to Sit It Out? If Christians Don’t Vote Theere [sic] Will be Consequences.” The essay reminds readers of the dangers of a Clinton presidency, encourages them to vote, and bluntly warns them to reject the option of a third party candidate. Another piece delivered to subscribers addresses the “Never Trump” conservative campaign and warns Christian conservatives against splitting the Republican Party by opposing Trump.
“Member comments” in response to “The Anything but Trump Ticket” become visible in a pop-up window and include:
I believe Donald is the one God is backing because he is child-like and unpretentious. It is obvious he loves his country. He is not perfect, but he is genuine, a man with no guile and a true leader.
More interesting is this comment:
I am hearing from people of prophecy that God has raised up Donald Trump for such a time as this.
For such a time as this: the phrase, from Esther 4:14, was frequently used by Christian conservatives in the 2000s to suggest that George W. Bush was heaven sent to deal with the nation’s dilemmas and direct it back to God.
In addition to what moral entrepreneurs say in public discourse, political agendas are also shaped by what they don’t say. For example, as Trump campaigns for President, in its daily political alerts the Family Research Council continues to focus subscribers’ attention on challenges to Obamacare, transgender politics, and the Obama administration’s antagonism to religious liberty. Conspicuously absent are warnings about the perils of a Trump presidency or even non-partisan exhortations to Christians to pray without ceasing for the outcome of the 2016 election. After Trump referred to “2 Corinthians” in a January speech at Liberty University, FRC president Tony Perkins acknowledged that Trump is “not familiar with the Bible.” However, reservations about the likely Republican nominee are not showing up in the FRC’s political updates to believers, and that silence is significant.
One important path to understanding Christian conservatism is paying attention to the mechanisms inside the Christian Right movement through which elites formulate and followers negotiate the movement’s political goals, ideas, and arguments. Just as citizens don’t weigh evidence in order to rationally arrive at political views, adherents of social and political movements don’t just join a movement because it reflects their already crystallized beliefs. Political beliefs are also a product of social movements, which continually instruct and socialize followers. Sometimes this socialization operates far out of sight of outsiders. But it’s there if we know where to look.
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