A little-discussed but transformative patient protection policy put into place by the Trump administration is proving to be an extremely effective tool in unwinding the tangled mess of American medical pricing. Under the orders, hospitals must provide the federal government with records on all the prices they negotiate with private insurers.

Some hospitals banded together to sue the administration (they lost…twice), and the insurers’ trade association wrote a 57-page letter to the government calling the Transparency Rule “unconstitutional” and insinuating that too much transparency would not be helpful to the average health consumer. //

When The New York Times decided to take a deep dive into just what compliance with the policy was revealing, they discovered there may be good reason for medical power brokers to keep their pricing systems hidden from the public eye.

But data from the hospitals that have complied hints at why the powerful industries wanted this information to remain hidden.

It shows hospitals are charging patients wildly different amounts for the same basic services: procedures as simple as an X-ray or a pregnancy test.

And it provides numerous examples of major health insurers — some of the world’s largest companies, with billions in annual profits — negotiating surprisingly unfavorable rates for their customers. In many cases, insured patients are getting prices that are higher than they would if they pretended to have no coverage at all.

As an example, NYT went on to list the comparative costs of a standard colonoscopy at the Mississippi Medical Center: $1463 with a Cigna plan, $2144 with Aetna, and a stunning $782 with no insurance at all.

Naturally, those who follow the logic of free markets understand that subsidies always increase cost.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/22/upshot/hospital-prices.html?smid=tw-share

Last year, a pipeline carrying compressed carbon dioxide mixed with hydrogen sulfide ruptured, engulfing the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, in a green haze, leaving many residents convulsing, confused, or unconscious. That explosion serves as a vivid warning about the risks posed by what could be the next generation of pipelines to crisscross the US, in a new investigation by HuffPost and the Climate Investigations Center. //

The story is a scathing investigation of the company, Denbury, that operates the pipeline, which did little to nothing to warn local officials and residents about the danger they faced, according to Zegart’s reporting. It’s also probably the closest thing to a PSA on the risks other communities could face if proposals to build out tens of thousands of miles of CO2 pipelines come to fruition.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gassing-satartia-mississippi-co2-pipeline_n_60ddea9fe4b0ddef8b0ddc8f

DoNotPay is excellent at fighting back against robocalls with a great feature called RoboRevenge. The idea is to hit the fraudsters where it hurts the most—their wallets. With the help of DoNotPay, you can get up to $3000 from the annoying spam callers.

You will need to engage with the caller, though. If you get a robocall that hangs up, you can expect another call to come your way within days, if not hours. That’s the opportunity for some sweet robocall revenge.

The process is easy because DoNotPay does all the hard work for you. All you need to do is:

1. Log on to DoNotPay via your web browser when you get the call
2. Choose the RoboRevenge option
3. Create a free virtual credit card
4. Provide the card details to the caller (rest assured that they will ask for it)
5. Wait for DoNotPay to obtain the caller’s details (it will happen as soon as they try to make a transaction)
6. Follow the instructions provided by DoNotPay to start a robocall lawsuit and get up to $3000

There is nothing dangerous or illegal about RoboRevenge. The DoNotPay virtual credit card is just a card number that is not tied to your bank account or any other funding source. It only appears like a real card to the caller.

Since calling you is illegal without written consent, the caller is already breaking the law. Even if your number is not on the Do Not Call List, the app will register you automatically. The Do Not Call List registration cannot expire, so if you are registered, your number will stay there until you request otherwise. The only issue is that lawsuits can only be made against callers and companies that are calling from the States.

"I have been fighting for 17 years. I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders, I demand accountability."

A reckoning will come for this catastrophe; military and political. For those of us who fought, it’s too much. //

Unfortunately, my colleague Streiff’s prediction came true — they just fired LTC. Scheller for what he said, and he likely knew he was risking his career to make that statement.

Scheller posted on Facebook, “I have been relieved for cause based on a lack of trust and confidence.”

Bill Hemmer asked what the former S.O.S. thought of how Biden laid out the deal he inherited from the Trump team. Pompeo laid it out in clear terms…

Bill, as for the deal we were very clear from the beginning with the Taliban we were negotiating with the Afghan government also we had to deal with them too, we weren’t just talking to the Taliban. We were clear with the Taliban, we had this understanding that you’re going to live up to it and we had a conditions-based withdrawal plan and we executed that. We whittled down from 15,000 to a little over 2500 troops and the last 13 months of our administration and we didn’t have a single American attack or an American killed and it wasn’t because of a piece of paper that was a set of understandings but it was because the Taliban understood that if they acted against Americans and took actions that were inconsistent with what they promised when they pushed on us in the Trump administration we responded with American power and American might. We made clear to the Taliban that deterrence was going to be maintained and the difference is with the Biden administration is that when the Taliban pushed they withdrew and showed weakness.

So how many Americans was that again? And she never answered if there was a plan past August 31. Assuming the numbers she’s saying today are correct, that means of the 105,000 people they claim to have evacuated, only 5400 were Americans, a little over five percent of the evacuees.

After numbers ranging from over 10,000 to up to 40,000 estimated Americans, the Biden team seemed to settle on the number of 6,000 Americans, claiming that’s the number they need to get out. That way they can claim they were actually successful. Except there will still be thousands stuck in Afghanistan. All their prior suggestions indicated that there were far more people.

So how many of the 105,000 people were SIV holders — the people who were also supposed to be getting high priority? The State Department can’t even say.

CDC initiated national surveillance of pregnancy-related deaths in 1986 because more clinical information was needed to fill data gaps about causes of maternal death. The first year of data reporting was 1987. //

In PMSS, a pregnancy-related death is defined as the death of a woman while pregnant or within 1 year of the end of pregnancy regardless of the outcome, duration, or site of the pregnancy — from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management. Pregnancy-related deaths as defined in PMSS generally do not include deaths due to injury. //

CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) reports the national maternal mortality rate: the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. A maternal death is defined as a death while pregnant or within 42 days of the end of pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management, but not from accidental or incidental causes. This definition and timeframe are consistent with that used by the World Health Organization for reporting on maternal mortality rates. NVSS uses two pieces of information on the death record to identify maternal deaths — the pregnancy checkbox and the certified recording of the cause of death to assign maternal mortality ICD-10 codes. Identification of maternal deaths using automated processing of death records alone relies upon the death certifier accurately reporting causes of death related to pregnancy and pregnancy status. More information on NVSS maternal mortality coding is available.

Like NVSS, PMSS uses vital records for identification of deaths, including descriptions of causes of death and pregnancy status information on death records. Different from NVSS, PMSS further uses linkages of death records of women of reproductive age to birth and fetal death records within 1 year of the death, media searches, and reporting from public health agencies, health care providers and the public in the identification process. PMSS uses a time frame that includes deaths during pregnancy through 1 year after the end of pregnancy; this timeline allows evaluation of all deaths which might be pregnancy-related. In PMSS, deaths are reviewed by medical epidemiologists who perform an in-depth review of vital records and other data as available (e.g., medical records, autopsy reports) for each death to determine the pregnancy-related mortality ratio. These linkage and review processes by PMSS result in slower reporting than NVSS, but a more rigorous identification of deaths related to pregnancy.