This is huge

Looking for someone to blame for rapidly rising Health Care costs in Massachusetts?   Look no further than Partners Health Care Systems.   You've got the largest collection of hospitals and physicians in the region using their power to demand their rates be 15-60% higher than other groups for the same services.   Just because they bargain collectively.  Fuck that. 

Luckily, The Justice Department is finally calling bullshit: 

The US Department of Justice has opened a civil investigation into possible anticompetitive behavior by Partners HealthCare System Inc., the region’s most powerful hospital and physician network.

In a letter sent to Partners and the state’s three largest health insurers on April 19, investigators from the Justice Department’s antitrust division demanded documents relating to Partners’ “contracting and other practices in health care markets in Eastern Massachusetts.’’

The letter, obtained by the Globe, said the probe sought to determine whether the practices violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, which bars companies from using their market power to limit trade or artificially raise prices. The parties were told to respond by May 19.

The federal probe comes as Massachusetts business and government officials wrangle over how to control soaring medical costs, and who is to blame for a decade of skyrocketing insurance premiums.

Boston-based Partners has been under growing scrutiny because of its market power and ability to draw high prices from insurers. The company employs about 5,500 physicians and operates a half dozen smaller hospitals, in addition to their prestigious Harvard-affiliated Boston teaching hospitals, Mass. General and the Brigham.

Everyone is so quick to blame the insurers as profit hogs, but no one looks at how well groups like Partners have been doing for the last decade or so.  Remember, 90% of premiums collected by insurers from YOU go towards medical costs.  The biggest group of medical professionals and facilities get paid more than everyone else.   The insurers - a lot of whom are non-profit - are held hostage by their collective bargaining. 

This is how to stop the bleeding.   Bravo to the Justice Dept.

Bartlett on Epistemic Closure of the GOP

Bartlett rounds up some examples of the conservative establishment's ostracizing of anyone harboring a dissenting voice. 

Another example of how social pressure is brought to bear against dissident conservatives occurred shortly after this incident and also involved Heritage. Ryan Sager, then a columnist for the conservative New York Post, published a book in 2006 called The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party. His argument, similar to the one I made in my Impostor book, was that the Bush White House had abandoned the historical libertarian position of the Republican Party on many issues in pursuit of votes among anti-libertarian evangelicals.

Sager had been invited to talk to a group called the Prosperity Caucus, a loose-knit private group that meets about once a month in Washington to discuss economics and politics over pizza and beer. Usually, the group borrows a room on Capitol Hill or at a conservative think tank. As it had done often before, this particular month the Prosperity Caucus had booked a room at Heritage.

Even though Sager’s criticism of Bush was far milder than mine, he was deemed radioactive by Heritage, which canceled the Prosperity Caucus’s reservation and booted them out of the building when it came to its attention that Sager was speaking.

I have friends who chide me for "going liberal" in recent times.  It's something I love and hate all at the same time.   I love it because those who do are simply proving the point that the modern day GOP has only power-grabbing and obstructionism in mind and are mentally allergic to pragmatism.  I hate it because it's an indication that the battle for power in the GOP between the Libertarians and the Bible Thumpers is being controlled by the latter. 

I'm no liberal, this much I can assure you.  But I'm left only with a choice between these:

a) Cut taxes and spend heavily on Defense and Medicare while working to restrict Civil Rights
and
b) Leave middle class taxes alone, spend domestically on much-needed reform and be mindful of individual rights

Is there even a question which way I'd choose?

Drum Defends the New Atheists

Kevin Drum takes David B. Hart to task for his smear of New Atheists Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.  

But no matter how beguiling those questions are, surely the metaphysical one always comes first. To say merely that Christianity is comforting or practical — assuming you believe that — is hardly enough. You need to show that it's true. And if you want to assert that something is true, the onus is on you to demonstrate it, not on the New Atheists to demonstrate conclusively that it isn't. After all, in the end the only difference between Hart and Dawkins is that Hart believes in 1% of the world's religions and Dawkins believes in 0% of them. It's Dawkins' job only to question that remaining 1%. It's Hart's job to answer him.

I want this...

Winscape.  Just watch the vid...

Two 46-inch Panasonic TC-P46G10 plasma screens bring the images to life.  They are fed by an Apple Mac Pro workstation in the adjacent room running custom OS X software called Winscape.  Using the displays’ physical layout parameters, the Winscape software renders the proper portions of the video to fill the appropriate displays using Quicktime and OpenGL.  A Wii remote reports the position of a custom-built IR-emitting necklace in the room via bluetooth.  The Winscape software uses this tracker information (when available) to shift the view for the person wearing the IR necklace.  Sleep, Wake, and Scene Selection can be controlled by a web page served by the software or by the Winscape Remote iPhone App.

Sully on Tea wth Miss McGill

Meant to post this yesterday - or at least thought I had.   Sully breaks down the Tea Party express and the article may as well have sucked from my mind as if we were hooked up to a Frankenstein machine. 

The whole thing is worth a read.  His wrap:

In my view, this confluence of feelings can work in shifting the public mood, as seems to have happened. When there is no internal pushback against crafted FNC propaganda, and when the Democrats seem unable to craft any coherent political message below the presidential level, you do indeed create a self-perpetuating fantasy that can indeed rally and roil people. But the abstract slogans against government, the childish reduction of necessary trade-offs as an apocalyptic battle between freedom and slavery, and the silly ranting at all things Washington: these are not a political movement. They are cultural vents, wrapped up with some ugly Dixie-like strands.

When they propose cuts in Medicare, means-testing Social Security, a raising of the retirement age and a cut in defense spending, I'll take them seriously and wish them well.

Until then, I'll treat them with the condescending contempt they have thus far deserved.

Sully does well to leave Palin out of the mix, but I wonder if that was simply to avoid cheapening his criticism and catching guff for Palin Derangement Syndrome.  Still, it shouldn't ignored that she's the de facto leader and iconic face of the movement.  A truth that speaks volumes of the group's validity. 

The Pliable Romney

This couldn't possibly go over well with the Tea Partiers come 2012...

(via Sullivan)

Quote For The Day

16 Apr 2010 10:35 am

"If ever again somewhere down the road I would be debating [Obama], I would be happy to take credit for his [healthcare] accomplishment," - Mitt Romney.

I Love Willie!

Nelson that is...   He chatted with Larry King - interview to air tonight - talking up the greatness of getting kushed, even right before going on the show.  This guy is my fucking hero.