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Washington Post: Like millions of other Americans, Stacy Newton turns to Healthcare.gov to shop for health insurance for her family. The Affordable Care Act website, according to the government, is where consumers are supposed to find “a menu of health insurance plans.” But for the Newtons and many others in the country, next year’s menu […]
Erin McGroarty For years, the couple chose the high-deductible plans in order to secure a more affordable monthly premium. In recent years it’s cost the two about $300 a month. Without the tax credits, that monthly cost would more than double to around $800. The expanded tax credits had saved the family enough that LaCasse-Ford […]
Sally Pipes: In other words, Obamacare has been an engine of insurance premium inflation. Democrats have tried to cover up that fact with ever more taxpayer subsidies. Yet another round of subsidies will not fix that fundamental problem. Rising premiums were not some unexpected consequence of Obamacare. They were baked into the law’s very structure. […]
Chris Rickert: A majority of Madison School Board members appeared to be in favor Monday of significantly boosting their pay and making themselves eligible for the district’s employee health care coverage. Board members cited the amount of work they do and a desire to make the seats more attractive to run for as reasons why […]
Adam Bertram: The good news is that you don’t have to choose between frustrating your staff and leaving the door open to hackers. Here are some key considerations for fighting MFA fatigue. Get smarter with risk-based authentication. Not every login needs MFA. Adapt your process to risk level. Low-risk actions shouldn’t need them, saving your staff […]
WMC: Wisconsin’s health care costs remain the fifth highest in the country, and 88% of survey respondents predict their costs will increase even more this year. Of these, the majority say these increases will necessitate increasing employee contributions. “Wisconsin’s business community has serious concerns about extreme health care costs,” stated WMC’s Executive Vice President of […]
Harriet Torry: Key Points What’s This?
Wall Street Journal: Friday’s labor-market report for April showed employers continue to add jobs, albeit at a slower pace. Most notable was that more than half of the new jobs last month were in government, healthcare and social assistance. Government spending is conjuring job growth, but they aren’t the kind that add to long-term productivity […]
JUST OUT: New "Chart of the Century" with data through December 2023. Increases in College Tuition and Fees continue to far outpace increases in Average Wages and the Overall CPI. If College Tuition had increased at the rate of the Overall CPI since 2000, it would be 28% LESS… pic.twitter.com/kWlo1nP7I6 — Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) […]
Jill Barshay: In a Department of Education survey released in October 2023 of more than 1,300 public schools, 60 percent said they were partnering with community organizations to provide non-educational services. That’s up from 45 percent a year earlier in 2022, the first time the department surveyed schools about their involvement in these services. They include access […]
ObamaCare was sold to Americans as something that would increase options, and allow people to keep plans they liked. Like most government programs, this has since been proven a lie. https://t.co/8YInTRGBbQ — Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 26, 2023
Josh Anderson: In 2024, eligibility will increase to include people whose only underlying condition is mental illness. By the way, in 2021, Mental Health Research Canada concluded that they’d found a correlation “between vaccine hesitancy and mental illness.” Not even COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy specifically, just vaccine hesitancy broadly speaking, because surely there are no legitimate reasons anyone might reasonably regard […]
Scott Girard: After the district’s insurance consultant, M3, received word from GHC in February about its premium increase, district officials and M3 worked with Quartz to see if there was a better solution. They were left with two options, according to the letter, neither of which raises the amount staff will pay for premiums this […]
Interesting letters section re: the NYT puberty blockers investigation. Three are tut-tutting NYT for playing into right-wing tropes and putting trans kids at risk, fourth is this, from one of the lead investigators behind the FDA approval of Lupron pic.twitter.com/wjFt3ejjfX — Park MacDougald (@hpmacd) November 29, 2022
Terrence Jeffrey: Americans spent more on taxes in 2020 than they did on food, clothing, healthcare and entertainment combined, according to newly released data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. American “consumer units,” as BLS calls them, spent a net total of $17,211.12 on taxes last year while spending only $16,839.89 on food, clothing, healthcare and entertainment […]
Logan Wroge: According to MTI’s memo, health insurance changes under consideration include: Moving future retirees from health insurance plans offered through the district to the state Department of Employee Trust Funds’ Local Annuitant Health Program, a relatively new program for retired public employees. Increasing employee premium contributions for teachers and other employees from 3% to […]
Kyso: Globally, health expenditure as a percentage of GDP has increased in recent years, so evaluating the health care systems used in different countries is an important tool for identifying best practices and improving inefficient health care systems. Total health expenditure is the sum of public and private health expenditures as a ratio of total […]
Chad Aldeman: Consider the graph below, using data from the Census Bureau’s Public Education Finances reports. From 2001 to 2016, LAUSD increased overall spending by 55.5 percent, but its spending on salaries and wages increased just 24.4 percent. Meanwhile, employee benefit costs soared 138 percent. LAUSD is an extreme example, but this situation is playing […]
Robert Hart:: The consequences of this oversight are pernicious. Women are far more likely to suffer the deleterious side effects of medication than men. Pregnant women get sick, but the consequences of taking many medications when pregnant are chronically understudied, or worse yet, unknown entirely. Women are far less likely to receive the correct treatment […]
Tap for a larger version. March, 2017 School Board Presentation (PDF). Notes and links: health insurance. 2015: Health Insurance premiums account for 16% of the Madison School District budget MMSD will spend $61 million on health insurance this year. One of Every Six Dollars is Spent on Health Insurance in the MMSD budget. Health Insurance […]
Julia Powles: Data-driven tools and techniques, particularly machine learning methods that underpin artificial intelligence, offer promise in improving healthcare systems and services. One of the companies aspiring to pioneer these advances is DeepMind Technologies Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Google conglomerate, Alphabet Inc. In 2016, DeepMind announced its first major health project: a collaboration […]
NBC: Oral arguments are set to begin Thursday for the lawsuit of a Minnesota woman who is suing her transgender teen daughter along with a variety of local school and health agencies. Anmarie Calgaro’s lawsuit alleges that healthcare providers treated her 17-year-old as an emancipated minor without her consent when the teen began receiving transgender […]
Tap for a larger version. Madison School District Administration Slides (PDF): Compensation: Prior Years Strategy – Funded step advancement, lane movement, & base wage increase (varies), offset by multiple reductions in personnel / non-personnel areas For 2017-18: – With referendum resources, provide for step advancement, lane movement, and base wage increase (TBD), without multiple offsetting […]
David Barnes: ObamaCare won’t work without young Americans like me, and the Obama administration knows it. That’s why the president is holding a Millennial Outreach and Engagement Summit focused on the Affordable Care Act at the White House on Tuesday. But no matter what the president says, many young Americans simply aren’t buying what he’s […]
James Wigderson: Despite the administration’s plan to make sure no employee experienced a net loss in pay in the coming year, Loumos wanted the district to cover the cost of the employee contributions for the first year so every employee could have the full amount of their raises. “What would it be if we held, […]
The Lincoln Project (PDF): Measured in inflation-adjusted dollars per full-time equiv- alent (fte) student, states have been cutting this support for well over a decade, and spending cuts accelerated in response to the Great Recession. Between 2008 and 2013, states cut appropriation support per fte student in the median public research university by more than […]
Guy Boulton: The average premium for single coverage is $6,251 this year, with workers on average paying $1,071 of the cost. The average premium for family coverage is $17,545, with workers on average paying $4,955 of the cost. Premiums have increased an average of 5% a year since 2005, compared with 11% a year between […]
Pat Schneider: “I will consider contributions to health care, depending on what we see in terms of costs and the budget,” Burke said. “But we need to look at compensation in its entirety to make sure we remain competitive while we are accountable to the taxpayers.” The school district is in the process of preparing […]
David Wahlberg: Madison Teachers Inc. and five other Madison-based unions are so concerned about significant financial losses at Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin, they’re urging members to vote for particular candidates in Group Health’s board election Thursday. “MTI cannot stand idly by and watch GHC disappear,” John Matthews, the teacher union’s executive director, […]
Colleen Flaherty: Institutions say complying with the Affordable Care Act has caused them to pass on some costs to employees, according to a new survey from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. Since the act began to take effect, some 20 percent of institutions have made changes to benefits in an effort […]
One small governmental entity has shown the way. The West Bend School District went self-insured years ago, then bid out its network needs, then went CDHP and now is putting in its own on-site clinic. It’s in the vanguard in learning from the private sector payers about what works and being a fast-follower.
Result? It is delivering first class health care for less than $10,000 per employee. That’s half of what many districts are playing for fully insured plans.
Think about the numbers. At a savings of $10,000 per employee and about 1000 employees, it is saving the taxpayers $10 million per year.
The district is giving raises; it has found funds for deferred maintenance; it found $5 million in reserves to put against a $25 million bond program for school construction.Smart, anti-orthodoxy thinking.
The Greendale School District’s high-deductible plan has been in place for the past four years but was not available to teachers until last year. When the district first offered the plan, nonunion employees agreed to try it out but teachers declined, Green said. Once Act 10 came into effect, the district offered the high-deductible plan to teachers again. The district allowed teachers to choose between the high-deductible plan and the traditional plan this school year, and 70% decided to go the high-deductible route after seeing how it was working for other staff members, Green said.
The district runs the plan in conjunction with a health reimbursement account.
In addition to a wellness plan, the Greendale district provides an on-site nurse practitioner from Aurora Health Care.
Green said the high-deductible plan significantly reduces the price of health insurance plans for school districts. When factoring in the cost of the high-deductible plan each year plus what the district is putting into the health reimbursement account, the total is about $1,000 less per family plan per year than the traditional plan.Related: The Madison School District recently ended their longtime support of a costly WPS healthcare plan.
As soon as the school day ended, the rush at the health clinic began.
Two high school seniors asked for sports physicals. A group of teenagers lined up for free condoms. A girl told a counselor she needed a pregnancy test.
The clinic, at Belmont High School near downtown Los Angeles, is part of a rapidly expanding network of school-based centers around the nation offering free or low-cost medical care to students and their families.
In California, there are 183 school health centers, up from 121 in 2004. Twelve more are expected to open by next summer, according to the California School Health Center Assn.
The centers have become a small but important part of the nation’s healthcare safety net, experts say, treating low-income patients who might otherwise not have regular medical care. Now, they add, campus clinics are serving as a model for health officials trying to reduce costs.
GE Healthcare, based in Waukesha, announced Monday that it was moving its X-ray business to Beijing, China.
Anne LeGrand, vice president and general manager of X-ray for GE Healthcare, told Bloomberg news that “a handful” of top managers would move to Beijing. She said there would not be any job cuts.
The move of the unit to China will help “make the business more nimble and responsive while continuing to strengthen our local focus and grow our global footprint,” she said.General Electric Co. said it is moving its X-ray business headquarters to China to accelerate sales in the country’s fast-growing health-care market, the latest sign of China’s growing importance to the giant U.S. conglomerate.
The X-ray unit will be the company’s first business to be based in China.
The business has already begun the move–which includes the unit’s chief executive and three other members of its executive team–and expects to complete the process by year end, said Anne LeGrand, vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare Global X-Ray. The senior leadership team’s move to Beijing is aimed in part at helping develop more medical equipment specifically for the Chinese market, Ms. LeGrand told a news briefing Monday.
GE said it doesn’t expect the move to result in any job losses in the U.S., where the unit has been based in Waukesha, Wis. The Wisconsin X-ray division has 120 employees. The company also said it is too early to say how many employees it will hire for the unit’s new Beijing headquarters.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is calling on Milwaukee Public Schools and union leaders to work quickly on ways to get more MPS employees to take less expensive health insurance.
In an interview, Barrett said, “I’m calling on the school district, on the School Board, on the representatives of the employees, to meet as quickly as possible to see if they can find a solution to stave off” what lies ahead for MPS, including projections of cuts in hundreds of teaching jobs and increases in average class size.
“I believe a big component of that is putting more people into the lower cost health care plan,” he said. MPS offers two health plans, and about 80% of employees take one that costs $7,380 a year more for a family than the other plan.
A new three-year agreement on healthcare announced Wednesday by the Los Angeles Unified School District will preserve a generous benefits package for about 250,000 employees and their families while also limiting district costs.
But the tentative deal also increases the district’s ongoing budget deficit and could lead to higher medical expenses for employees if healthcare costs continue to rise sharply.
The agreement maintains free lifetime benefits for district employees (there is no monthly payment to the district). But the pact sets benchmarks for when new workers become eligible.
Settling the healthcare issue — the teachers union’s top priority in negotiations — could diminish the immediate possibility of a strike. Just one day earlier, United Teachers Los Angeles leaders had scheduled a strike authorization vote over protracted contract talks.
The Madison School District Board of Education approved a collective bargaining contract with the custodial units last night in which the custodians agreed to move from their current health care plans (GHC and the Alliance PPO) to a 3 HMO plan which is GHC, Dean Care and Physicans Plus. MMSD continues to pay 100% of […]
Milwaukee reporter Amy Hetzner: A change in health insurance carriers was achieved by several Dane County school districts because of unique circumstances, said Annette Mikula, human resources director for the Sun Prairie School District. Dean Health System already had been Sun Prairie’s point-of-service provider in a plan brokered by WEA Trust, she said. So, after […]
Pasha Kamyshev: To understand America you MUST understand the perspective and incentives of the most important people in America: the people to whom the state gives all of the taxpayers’ money. You see, when the state is $40 trillion in debt, this money didn’t just magically disappear into a black hole. Rather, it was spent […]
Susan Shelley: Behested payments have funded the California State Protocol Foundation. In 2025, Newsom “behested” a payment of $220,000 from the University of California Berkeley for the “charitable” purpose of paying the costs of attending the Vatican climate summit. He “behested” the U.S. Energy Foundation out of $150,000 to pay for his “delegation” to the […]
Mike Solana: The ballot proposition was constructed in such a way as it can technically not solve any of the stated problems it was ostensibly written to address — chief among them, filling a massive budget hole in Medi-Cal (the state’s Medicaid program) following California legislation that guaranteed permanent funding for illegal immigrant healthcare. That […]
María Corina Machado I’d say the answer can be found in the full text of what Machado said after the meeting. This has some historical heft that is missing from the CBS report above: “I presented the president of the United States the medal … the Nobel Peace Prize, and I told him, ‘Listen to this, 200 […]
Will Flanders: “Affordability” has become the dominant theme in politics across the nation, including here in Wisconsin. Rising costs for housing, food, healthcare, utility bills and taxes are on the top of voters’ minds, while politicians of every stripe echo the language of affordability. However, our political leaders are failing to target the policies that actually drive-up […]
Alysia Finley: Diagnosis rates of autism among children have more than tripled over the past 15 years. One reason, which Minnesota’s welfare scandal lays bare with shocking details, is Medicaid fraud and abuse. Medicaid pays healthcare providers big bucks to diagnose and treat children with autism—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a month for a […]
William Galston: Beneath the ebb and flow of daily events, a long-term trend is reshaping the U.S. economy and society. Americans lately have been focused on artificial intelligence, but demography is likely to prove equally important. To maintain a stable population, women need to give birth to 2.1 children on average during their lifetimes. This […]
Alysia Finley: Diagnosis rates of autism among children have more than tripled over the past 15 years. One reason, which Minnesota’s welfare scandal lays bare with shocking details, is Medicaid fraud and abuse. Medicaid pays healthcare providers big bucks to diagnose and treat children with autism—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a month for a […]
Anna Wilde Mathews, Ruth Simon, Stephanie Stamm and Elizaveta Galkina: “If healthcare costs go up faster than the economy in general, that means there’s less money left over to go to wages,” said Gary Claxton, a senior vice president at KFF. J.H. Berra Paving Co., in St. Louis, is struggling with this trade-off. The company […]
Brianna Abbott: In 1980, the third edition of the manual—the DSM-3—said children needed to show severe language deficits, bizarre reactions to their environment and a lack of interest in people, starting before 30 months old, to get a diagnosis. By 1994, the DSM-4 expanded the definition to more social and behavioral traits including repetitive behaviors […]
County Highway: The Homestead Act — proposed by President Abraham Lincoln and signed into law during 1862, at the height of the Civil War — was a brilliant and farseeing effort to oppose the Southern slave economy with a Jeffersonian vision of a continent-sized nation of independent property-holders, stretching from ocean to ocean. The device […]
Erkmen G. Aslim, Wei Fu, Caitlin K. Myers, Erdal Tekin & Bingjin Xue We study how abortion access affects economic hardship and crime. Using a database of abortion provider locations and operations in Texas from 2009–2019, we exploit variation in travel distance to the nearest facility created by clinic closures following the enforcement of Texas […]
Dean Ball: The plaintiffs (Raine’s parents) are suing for damages in tort (both products liability and negligence) as well as under California’s Unfair Competition Law for injunctive relief, which means a request for a court to require (“enjoin”) a defendant to either do something or stop doing something. In this case, the plaintiffs are requesting […]
Austin Berg: Chicago’s finances were already on life support. Now, with a single piece of legislation, the state of Illinois has pushed the city closer to fiscal collapse—and put every American taxpayer at risk of footing the bill. On August 1, Governor J. B. Pritzker signed a bill that ranks among the most financially reckless […]
Wisconsin Policy Forum: The number of Wisconsinites employed as apprentices has grown considerably over the last decade and reached a record high in 2024, according to data from the state’s Department of Workforce Development. That year, 17,509 individuals participated in Wisconsin’s Registered Apprenticeship Program, which was more than 77% higher than in 2013 (Figure 1). This is welcome […]
Dana Levenson The good news: The combined funding level of Chicago’s four direct pension funds — fire, laborers, municipal employees, and police — increased by 2.4%, reaching 25.4% at the end of 2024 compared to 2023. The bad news: That funding level is still just 25.4%. To put this in perspective, publicly held companies are […]
Antonio Gracias: While I disagree with the statements of the AFT, I also want to thank them. I appreciate their efforts to safeguard the pensions of teachers and other public servants across America. As a nation, we are united in service to our country, as well as in gratitude to the many who sacrifice and […]
Andrew Ellison Restaurants will have to tell the government what their customers order under plans drawn up by Labour to tackle Britain’s obesity epidemic The Department of Health intends to use the data to force big restaurant chains and fast food giants to cut customers’ calorie intake to help improve the nation’s health. Under the […]
Richard Rubin, Anthony DeBarros and Rosie Ettenheim: Take a spin in the time machine, back to an era when the federal budget deficit didn’t look like a problem at all. In 2000, the federal government actually ran a surplus and the Congressional Budget Office, Capitol Hill’s nonpartisan scorekeeper, projected the Treasury would keep collecting enough […]
Samuel Z. Alemayehu We’ve seen this before. Scribes in medieval Europe once held monopoly power over the written word — until Gutenberg’s press flattened that hierarchy. Textile artisans were once the pride of cities — until industrial looms made their mastery irrelevant. In the 20th century, travel agents, typists, and retail stockbrokers all watched their […]
Matt Taibbi: The station doubtless thinks it’s engaged in “public service journalism” by cranking out piles of stories with headlines like Trump nominee gives misleading testimony about ties to alleged ‘Nazi sympathizer,Trump cuts demolish agency focused on toxic chemicals and workplace hazards, Asian American voters backed Trump in Nevada. Here’s how they feel about him now, The U.S. […]
Larissa Phillips Despite this alarming statistic, some educators believe it’s impossible to teach these adults to read. However, this notion is misguided and requires a different approach. Marian* was in her late 30s when we first met, and she asked me to help her learn to read. This was in 2007. I was the new-ish […]
Jessica Grose: Florida would join Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Alaska in lowering their testing standards or graduation requirements of late. After the absolutely dismal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores from 2024, which showed that a higher percentage of eighth graders scored “below basic” in reading than at any point in the test’s 30-year history, you would […]
Emily Kopp: A researcher who argued that infant mortality is higher for black newborns with white doctors because of racial bias omitted a variable from the paper that “undermines the narrative,” according to the researcher’s internal notes. The study forms a keystone of the racial concordance field, which hypothesizes patients are better served by medical […]
Duncan Campbell: An unprecedented letter from the US Congress, released today, accuses the UK of “a foreign cyber attack waged through political means”. The claim refers to a Home Office secret demand last month (reported by Computer Weekly here, hereand here) that Apple break the security protecting its Advanced Data Protection cloud security system to let British spies […]
Unlockaid: Meanwhile, many communities cannot access the very resources that were created for them. In August, The Guardian reportedthat the U.S. government’s Inflation Reduction Act created $60 billion for environmental justice investments, but “many of the small, community-based organizations that would benefit from funding the most … simply don’t have the time or resources to navigate the […]
Elyse C. Goncalves and Akshaya Ravi: Harvard Medical School canceled a planned Jan. 21 lecture on wartime healthcare and a subsequent panel with patients from Gaza receiving care in Boston in response to objections that students would hear from Gazans impacted by the war and not also Israelis. Course instructors and students were notified Tuesday […]
Julia Turner, Kathryn Blanchard, and Rajeev Darolia: In this report, we explore which public sectors are most commonly represented among individuals who have benefitted, or are on track to benefit, from the PSLF program. Specifically, we present new data detailing which sectors borrowers have most commonly worked in to be eligible for PSLF. We show […]
Via my open records request: Debt schedule Standard & Poors Debt Rating September, 2024 “ai” summary: Madison Metropolitan School District – S&P Rating Summary (September 2024) Current Ratings SP-1+ rating on $50M Tax Revenue Anticipation Notes (due Sept 2025) AA+ rating on existing General Obligation debt Outlook: Stable Financial Strengths Stable operating performance with conservative […]
Holman Jenkins: Last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a survey finding a decline over 12 years in adult-population functional intelligence in most of its 31 surveyed members, including in the U.S. You can always question such comparisons. But the 12-year period coincided with the rise of social media. It coincided with […]
Allysia Finley: a similar phenomenon exists in K-12 education—is helping to drive the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. Bigger government has benefited the health-industrial complex but not Americans. One problem is that simply having insurance doesn’t change people’s behavior. It does, however, cause them to use more care. This is a particular problem in Medicaid, […]
Liz Essley Whyte: He isn’t yet sure how to measure academic freedom, but he has looked at how a nonprofit called Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression scores universities in its freedom-of-speech rankings, a person familiar with his thinking said. The nonprofit scores schools based on a survey of students’ perceptions of factors such as […]
University of Sheffield: Machine Learning and by extension artificial intelligence has so many applications that this blog-post could be a dictionary, it can be used to help us solve abstract problems like helping healthcare providers to treat patients, to speech recognition (in fact, if you own an Alexa, Google Home, or even a normal smart-phone, you’ve […]
Justine Moore: A PhD student used both Claude and Gemini as an AI therapist. She vented her frustrations around getting a cancer diagnosis, and joked about how much it was costing the healthcare system. The difference in responses is staggering.
The One Percent Rule: For most of the 20th century, IQ scores steadily climbed, a phenomenon so consistent it was named the “Flynn effect” after the psychologist James Flynn, who first documented it. Generations across the globe were getting smarter, or at least, their scores on intelligence tests were improving. Explanations ranged from better nutrition […]
Andrew Sullivan:
Christopher Snowbeck Most carriers in the state’s individual and small markets are raising rates by roughly 9% to 15%. The rate jumps, revealed in state data Friday, are bigger than during each of the past two years. They will be offset for many in the individual market by larger tax credits from the federal government […]
Nidhi Subbaraman Four years ago, a team of researchers led by a heavyweight in the field of microbiology made a stunning claim: Cancers have unique microbial signatures that could one day allow tumors to be diagnosed with a blood test. The discovery captured the attention of the scientific community, as well as investors.
Ben Landau-Taylor: That year, neuroscientist Matthew Schrag discovered doctored images in this and many of Lesné’s other papers, including others purporting to provide evidence for the amyloid hypothesis. These images had been manually edited and cropped together to falsely show support for the papers’ hypotheses. Notably, these frauds all made it through the formalized “peer […]
Vivek: greater risk to our future than, say, climate change – yet most politicians are too scared to talk about it & now it’s apparently taboo. But here are the facts: our nation’s birth rate is now down to 1.62 births per woman, the lowest in history and well below replacement rate. It’s not even […]
Tom Dotan:: The blue screen of death has been a dreaded symbol of technological failure since Microsoft’s Windows became the world’s dominant operating system in the 1990s. On Friday, it showed up on millions of computers around the world at once, highlighting both Microsoft’s continued ubiquity in workplaces and decades-old design choices that allowed the […]
Aimee Picchi: While 55% of Americans are “cost secure,” meaning they can afford care and medicine, that’s a decline from 61% who fell into that category in 2022, the study found. Americans spend an average of $12,555 per person annually on health care, according to the Peterson-KFF Health Care Tracker. By comparison, typical health care spending across other developed […]
WILL: In May, RAND released the fifth iteration of their hospital price study which ranked Wisconsin as having the 5th highest hospital prices, and the most expensive professional fees in the nation. The RAND report is an important tool for employers to better understand their costs and make the best financial decisions possible for their employees’ health […]
Madeleine Rowley According to a letter written by Haim’s lawyers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari admitted that she hadn’t reviewed the purported evidence against Haim and was instead relying on what FBI agents told her. In the same discussion, Ansari insisted that the documents Haim sent to Rufo included children’s names, but nothing in the documents Rufo saw identified any […]
By Niall Ferguson But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?” I […]
Shannon Najmabadi: Last summer, a rural hospital on the Kansas plains began filing dozens of lawsuits against patients who hadn’t paid their medical bills. In July and August 2023, four of every five sheriff-delivered court summonses in Pratt County were from Pratt Regional Medical Center. In September, 95% of civil cases set to be heard […]
Jill Barshay: Schools spend billions of dollars a year on products and services, including everything from staplers and textbooks to teacher coaching and training. Does any of it help students learn more? Some educational materials end up mothballed in closets. Much software goes unused. Yet central-office bureaucrats frequently renew their contracts with outside vendors regardless of usage or efficacy. […]
Freddie DeBoer: In 1963, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act. Its order to close the state psychiatric hospitals was followed, and hundreds were shuttered; the community mental health centers that were meant to replace them were never built. With far fewer beds for a growing patient population it should not have surprised anyone that […]
Will Flanders: Among the key findings of this report: Few single pieces of state-level legislation have garnered as much attention and controversy in the 21st Century as Wisconsin’s Act 10. Passed by Republican Governor Scott Walker over the strong objections of Democrats, 3 the legislation introduced several important reforms to public sector unions around the […]
Leon Sapor: Imagine if American doctors told parents the following truths. The mental health benefits of puberty blockers are highly uncertain, according to multiple systematic reviews of the evidence, the bedrock of evidence-based medicine. The World Health Organization says the evidence is “limited and variable.” There is no research into long-term harms, but some evidence suggests decreased IQand brittle bones. Permanent sterility is guaranteed for […]
Matt Barnum: Nationally, average teacher pay has barely budged since 1990, despite states pumping more funding into public schools. Across the country, new education dollars have instead gone toward additional staff, rising healthcare costs and pension obligations. Now, some lawmakers are championing new pay mandates to force the issue, amid elevated teacher-turnover rates and a […]
Claire Jones: Swagel, who served in the US Treasury under Republican president George W Bush, acknowledged that next year would be important “for fiscal policy in particular”, given debate over extending the tax cuts and Obama-era healthcare subsidies that are also due to expire. The CBO projections issued this week showed debt-to-GDP levels surpassing their […]
Sarah Shaffer: Coming together around the question “What could we win together?” this broad cross section of Minnesota’s working class decided to go on the offensive, developing a set of guiding principles over months, made possible in turn by years of relationship building through street uprisings and overlapping crises. Shortly after we spoke that day, Villanueva and her colleagues felt […]
Brianna Abbott:: Stacy Hernandez always had irregular periods. But when the bleeding wouldn’t stop, she got scared. She said she visited her general practitioner and urgent care at least six times. Doctors changed her birth-control medications, blamed her excess weight and suggested the bleeding would eventually subside. It didn’t. After more than a year, a […]
Natalie Yahr cites a University of Wisconsin Survey of families with young children. Conducted by the UW Survey Center and analyzed by UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, the survey went to around 3,500 people across the state. Researchers compared the responses of participants who have children under age 6 with those who don’t. […]
Wall Street Journal: The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine requires that first year students take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” as part of the standard curriculum. In one exercise for the course, students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts. This is known […]
Julie Wernau: Braxton is among thousands of teenagers and young adults who have developed delusions and paranoia after using cannabis. Legalization efforts have made cannabis more readily available in much of the country. More frequent use of marijuana that is many times as potent as strains common three decades ago is leading to more psychotic episodes, according to doctors and recent […]
Julie Wernau: Braxton is among thousands of teenagers and young adults who have developed delusions and paranoia after using cannabis. Legalization efforts have made cannabis more readily available in much of the country. More frequent use of marijuana that is many times as potent as strains common three decades ago is leading to more psychotic episodes, according to doctors and recent […]
Kelly Meyerhofer: Alex Mancilla graduated last month from Marquette University, an electrical engineering degree in hand and a job lined up at GE HealthCare. Behind the educational milestone is the story of a young south side Milwaukee man whose parents immigrated from Mexico and were unable to help him financially. College wasn’t even on Mancilla’s […]
Ling Xin: After more than a decade of research and teaching in the United States, Chinese-born maths star Sun Song has joined a university in eastern China as a full-time professor. The 36-year-old geometer started his role as a permanent faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (IASM) at Zhejiang University earlier […]
Liz Essley Whyte: Jessica Harris’s 15-year-old daughter was walking to her school bus in London, Ky., last month when a classmate offered her a piece of red candy. The square-shaped sweet seemed harmless at the time to Harris’s daughter. But it turned out it contained a form of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the intoxicating ingredient in […]
WILL: The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a lawsuit against the State Bar of Wisconsin for promoting discriminatory DEI practices including its “Diversity Clerkship Program,” which offers premier internship opportunities based primarily on race. WILL’s client must pay mandatory and annual State Bar dues, which not only fund this internship program, but […]