Why the GOP Healthcare Plans Won’t Fill the Prescription

So is this the best they can do?

Dean Baker in Beat the Press

During his first term, after repeatedly promising the country a terrific healthcare plan, Donald Trump famously commented, “Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated.” In fact, everyone who spent even a few minutes looking at the issue knew that healthcare was complicated. 

That is why Obamacare ended up being a hodgepodge that was pasted together to extend healthcare coverage as widely as possible. It is also the reason Trump and the Republicans never produced a healthcare plan in Trump’s first term.

The basic problem is that healthcare costs are hugely skewed. Ten percent of the population accounts for more than 60% of total spending, and just 1% accounts for 20% of spending. Most people have relatively low healthcare costs. The trick with healthcare is paying for small number of people who do have high costs.

Individual Choice, Cherry-Picking the Pool, and Screwing Cancer Survivors

The Republicans in Congress, along with Trump on alternate days, are pushing plans that are supposed to give choice to individuals and somehow take it away from insurers. It’s not clear what they think they are saying. They seem to still envision that people will buy insurance, as they do now in the Obamacare exchanges, but somehow that they will have more control in the Republican option.

There is one story they could envision, which would make it much easier for insurers to skew their pool. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) restricted what sort of plans could be offered in the exchanges in order to limit the ability for insurers to avoid high-cost individuals.

It would be possible to relax these restrictions to allow insurers to cherry pick their enrollees. For example, they could offer high-deductible plans, say $15,000 in payments, before any coverage kicked in.

No person with a serious health condition would buy this sort of plan since they know they would be paying at least $15,000 a year in medical expenses, and then a substantial fraction of everything above this amount, in addition to the premium itself. 

On the other hand, a low-cost plan with $15,000 deductible might look pretty good to someone in good health, whose medical expenses usually don’t run beyond the cost of annual checkup.

They know exactly what they're doing

Not counting freebies from friends

Turn Your Christmas Tree into Fish Habitat

Here's a smart way to dispose of your xmas tree

Spruce up wildlife habitat this holiday season! For the eighth year, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) and the Rhode Island Chapter of Trout Unlimited (TU) team up for  “Trees for Trout,” recycling donated conifer trees to restore habitat for wild brook trout and other aquatic life. 

Drop off your trees Saturday, Jan. 10, between 10 AM – 3 PM at the Arcadia Check Station, Wood River Arcadia Management Area, 2224 Ten Rod Rd, Exeter.

Is RFK Jr. backing Big Food’s drive to overturn tough new state laws?

Bobby Jr. echoes industry talking points on food safety laws

Stacy Malkan, U.S. Right to Know

For months, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. has crisscrossed the nation advancing his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda — spotlighting plans to crack down on unhealthy ultra-processed foods, and praising state-level efforts to restrict chemical food additives and bolster consumers’ right to know. 

At least 90 proposals in dozens of states seek to restrict, ban or label ultra-processed food or synthetic ingredients. The push is based on strong scientific evidence that the poor health of many Americans may arise in part from eating so much ultra-processed food. 

Two new COVID vaccine studies show shots keep kids out of the emergency room and reduce risks to pregnant women and their babies

While Bobby Jr. peddles fake science, real science reinforces value of vaccine 

Two articles on two new studies

Updated 2024-25 COVID vaccine cut emergency visits among kids, study suggests

Laine Bergeson 

A new analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finds that the 2024-25 COVID-19 vaccine substantially reduced the risk of emergency department (ED) and urgent care (UC) visits among US children and adolescents. The findings, published yesterday in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, draw on data from more than 98,000 pediatric cases in nine states. 

Researchers looked at data from electronic health records to assess how well the updated vaccines, which target the Omicron JN.1 and JN.1-derived sublineages, protected against COVID-related ED and UC visits from August 2024 to September 2025. The test-negative, case-control study measured the added protection provided by the 2024-25 dose in children and adolescents, many of whom already had some immunity from prior infection, previous vaccination, or both.

76% effectiveness against severe disease in young kids

Among children aged 9 months to 4 years, vaccine effectiveness (VE) against COVID-associated ED/UC visits was 76% during the first 7 to 179 days after vaccination. Protection remained stable through 299 days. 

These VE estimates are similar to or higher than those observed in adults during the same season, and they exceed that reported in young children during the 2023-24 season. According to the authors, the higher 2024-25 estimates might be related to different infection patterns compared with previous seasons or fewer changes in circulating variants in 2024-25. 

During the 2024-25 season, hospitalization rates among US infants aged 6 to 11 months were higher than those of all adult age-groups except those aged 65 years and older. These findings underscore the potential benefits of COVID-19 vaccination in eligible infants, note the authors.

In children and adolescents aged 5 to 17 years, the 2024-25 vaccines reduced the risk of an ED/UC visit by 56% during the first 7 to 179 days after vaccination. Protection declined slightly to 45% when the window was extended from 7 to 299 days.

Who’s the Last Person in the World to Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?

The person who’s been waging illegal wars

Robert Reich

Trump recently had his name engraved on the U.S. Institute of Peace — now renamed the “Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace.” The White House confirmed the renaming, calling it “a powerful reminder of what strong leadership can accomplish for global stability.”

Actually, it’s a reminder of what a strong malignant narcissist can accomplish when untethered from reality.

Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, the world football league, awarded Trump the first (and likely last) annual FIFA Peace Prize — along with a hagiographic video of Trump and “peace.”

What FIFA has to do with peace is anyone’s guess, but Infantino is evidently trying to curry favor with Trump. (Infantino, by the way, oversaw the 2020 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, defending and minimizing Qatar’s miserable human rights record. He also played a key role in selecting Saudi Arabia to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup, notwithstanding the Saudi murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.)

Both Trump’s absurd renaming of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the equally absurd FIFA award are parts of Trump’s campaign to get the Nobel Peace Prize — something he has coveted since Barack Obama was awarded it in 2009 (anything Obama got credited with, Trump wants to discredit or match).

Check your history - this is how it works

 

Happy Kwanzaa!

Why are Trump's latest inflation numbers so low?

Answer: He cheated.

Note in the chart below that the only numbers included are for gasoline and cars. Food, housing, energy and health care are excluded.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

Don't forget that Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for producing data he didn't like. When this happened, economists warned this may make future federal data untrustworthy. And so it is.

2025: The year the US gave up on climate, and the world gave up on us

US not only walked away from its promises but committed to more climate-destructive policies

Naveena Sadasivam, Senior Staff Writer

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."

Well, except for Trump's billionaire friends

As the year comes to a close, 2025 looks like a turning point in the world’s fight against climate change. Most conspicuously, it was the year the U.S. abandoned the effort. The Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which unites virtually all the world’s countries in a voluntary commitment to halt climate change. And for the first time in the 30-year history of the U.N.’s international climate talks, the U.S. did not send a delegation to the annual conference, COP30, which took place in Belém, Brazil.

The Trump administration’s assault on climate action has been far from symbolic. Over the summer, the president pressed his Republican majority in Congress to gut a Biden-era law that was projected to cut U.S. emissions by roughly a third compared to their peak, putting the country within reach of its Paris Agreement commitments. 

In the fall, Trump officials used hardball negotiating tactics to stall, if not outright derail, a relatively uncontroversial international plan to decarbonize the heavily polluting global shipping industry. And even though no other country has played a larger role in causing climate change, the U.S. under Trump has cut the vast majority of global climate aid funding, which is intended to help countries that are in the crosshairs of climate change despite doing virtually nothing to cause it. 

It may come as no surprise, then, that other world leaders took barely veiled swipes at Trump at the COP30 climate talks last month. Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement and a longtime Costa Rican diplomat, summed up a common sentiment.

“Ciao, bambino! You want to leave, leave,” she said before a crowd of reporters, using an Italian phrase that translates “bye-bye, little boy.” 

These stark shifts in the U.S. position on climate change, which Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “con job,” are only the latest and most visible signs of a deeper shift underway. Historically, the U.S. and other wealthy, high-emitting nations have been cast as the primary drivers of climate action, both because of their outsize responsibility for the crisis and because of the greater resources at their disposal. 

Real snow likely tonight and into Saturday

 

NOAA puts the odds of 2" or more at 70%. Three inches expected and a range of 1"- 4" or 5" possible.

The National Weather Service is calling it a 90% probability of snow tonight with an accumulation of 2-4".

Temps rise to above freezing on Sunday with a 90% probability of rain Sunday night into Monday that should pretty much wipe out any accumulation we receive.

Nonetheless, be careful out there.

Tax Prosecutions Plummet to Lowest Level in Decades as Trump Guts Enforcement Efforts

Trump's Xmas present to his oligarch friends

Brad Reed for Common Dreams

Donald Trump’s administration has drastically slashed resources for enforcing tax laws, and the result has been a massive plunge in tax-related prosecutions.

A Tuesday report from Reuters found that federal tax prosecutions in 2025 fell to “their lowest level in decades this year,” falling by 27% over the last year.

The report noted that the Trump administration has made “deep cuts to the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigative unit,” and has also reassigned some agents who worked in the unit to focus more on immigration cases.

The Trump administration has even assigned more than 20 IRS agents in the agency’s DC office to conduct patrols alongside city police officers as part of the president’s purported plan to reduce crime in the capital city, Reuters reported.

Reuters also observed that the US Department of Justice closed its Tax Division, and that “a third or more of the criminal lawyers who worked there quit.”

Sources told Reuters that the Trump administration explicitly told DOJ prosecutors earlier this year that tax prosecutions were not a top priority, and one source said that DOJ leadership under the second Trump administration was “very skeptical about white-collar crime and whether we should be doing those cases.”

Some powerful Christmas messages

Holiday greetings from alternate universes

And then, there's this

Donald Trump's heart-warming message