My club offers dinner-party events where I may find myself seated with people I’d never met. Last night was such an event and it had me puzzling all day, today.
I sat to the immediate right of a man who was a quintessential — no, that is the wrong word — a caricature of a New Yorker — the extreme image of what we Midwesterners visualize when we think of New York people.
Yes, I know. Generalizations are odious, especially negative generalizations, but this man could have been sent by Central Casting. He was that perfect.
Big. Loud. Rude. Interruptive. Overbearing, Overly opinionated. Braggart. He had only just sat down when he leaned over and began to tell me what a great businessman he was, even from the age of fourteen.
By the time he was thirty-six, he had retired.
He has a large house, a very large house. And the house rests on city property, but is so big it includes, not a garden but a small farm. So big he hired a farmer to tend it.
And he never needs to pay for anything because he trades his vegetables for every kind of merchandise.
And his children all are brilliant, all magna cum something. His infant grandchildren, too.
And he’s going to vote for Trump, because Biden is too old, and weak, and mentally shot. And yes, he knows Trump is a lying “sack of “sh*t,” and he wishes he didn’t have to vote for him.
And yes, he knows Biden grew the economy and cured inflation, but anyone could have done that.
And Biden gives too much to “those” people, “You know what I mean.” (I said I didn’t, but he was already on to another boast.”)
And the food here in the club is better than last year because he told the club manager the food was no good.
And he’s still mourning his mother who died three years ago. And he’s trying to reconcile with his stepmother (whom, incidentally, I know to be a sweet lady), and he’s happy his father is happy, but can’t get over the idea of a stepmother.
And the music at this party is too slow. And he’s not much into dancing.
And as he makes each point, he repeatedly lays his hand on my sleeve as though he were confiding in his buddy. Each time I would look down at his hand, then he immediately would withdraw it, as though he realizes he has crossed some boundary.
But shortly, some new revelation about his charmed life arrives along with his hand.
And all along he keeps telling me how much he likes me.
Had this been a movie, I would have said he was overacting to an amateurish script. But it was painfully real.
At one point, I smiled and said, “You know what I like about this club?”
He, “What?”
Me, “No one here talks money or politics.”
He agreed, then lurched into another soliloquy about how he travels to the most expensive destinations, and stays in the most expensive accommodations, eats at the most expensive restaurants, and engages in the most expensive activities.
Soon, I grew so weary of his voice I tried to comment but he interrupted me. Or tried to.
I was determined to say something, however insignificant. But he didn’t stop talking.
So, I didn’t stop talking.
I forced myself to finish my first sentence, then said, “You can’t interrupt me.” Over and over and over. And all the while he kept trying to interrupt. It was comical, the two of us talking over each other with nonsense.
And his wife, sitting to his left neither smiled nor spoke, but kept glancing at me with the saddest face.
My primary thought during this unpleasant experience was, “Why me?” Not in a self-pitying way, but rather as a scientific inquiry — why did he feel compelled to pour out all this magnificent personal history to me, a much older, total stranger?
Today, I’ve been trying to sort through his fire hose of unwanted information. As I recall, he’s in his fifty’s; he’d lost his father when he was only 14 (a bit confused because of the “stepmother” contradiction) and has had to work full time ever since.
I wondered whether he was under constant pressure to prove himself to a world dominated by people triple his age. Carrying my Freud act a bit further, I’ll guess he carries a lot of resentment toward circumstances that put him into that position.
So knowingly or not, he may have decided to fight back in the only ways he knew, with aggression and self-promotion.
At some point during the evening, he must have decided I either couldn’t be impressed, or I was sufficiently impressed, I don’t know which, because he suddenly turned to his wife and asked her to dance.
Perhaps a half hour later, he returned to the table, and announced they were leaving for another engagement. He then turned to me, told me how much he enjoyed talking with me and how much he “really liked me,” and shook my hand with a surprisingly weak grip.
And they were gone.
Now, I wonder if there was a better way to handle such a situation?
I could have turned away from him and studiously ignored him. But that would be cruel when he only had been boorish, not mean, so he didn’t deserve cruelty.
I could have humored him by nodding eagerly and repeatedly expressing false admiration for his marvelous exploits, but that would have been even crueler if he caught on to my act.
Instead, but for our moments of talking over each other, I simply sat there and looked at him, showing no emotion or reaction whatever, which upon reflection, may have been cruelest of all if he were fishing for approval.
Or perhaps, it made no difference if he was so wrapped up in his own world, he was oblivious to me, as though he were talking to a chair. I don’t know.
The point to all this is that he and I, and to some degree all of us — we each live in our own world, trying to survive in a harsh universe that every minute tries to kill us in many different ways, and eventually will succeed.
While fighting this battle we know we will lose, we each can be what other people find unpleasant.
The man (I still don’t know his name) may be the most generous, honest, kind human on the planet or he may be a scoundrel. Whichever he is, it’s unlikely he was born that way.
Each day of his life he received many trillions of inputs, which together chiseled him as though he were a piece of ice being carved by an ice sculptor, slowly we melt away, to irresistibly become a formless puddle.
There is a philosophic question about how much control we have over who we are. I suspect it is very little, perhaps none.
Most of my friends are “nice,” or at least they act in ways I find pleasing. Do they do that intentionally? Do they understand what pleases me or even care?
Or are we all just corks bobbing in a crowded ocean, flung by twirling tides, rubbing and bumping.
Though I found the man annoying, I’m trying very hard not to dislike him. But then again, can I really control how I feel?
In a strange way, I hope we meet again, just to see what happens and has happened. How have the tides moved us?
More than 30 million older Americans are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans, wooed by lower premiums and more benefits than traditional Medicare offers.
Since Medicare is funded by the federal government (not by FICA taxes), how is Medicare Advantage able to “woo” people with lower premiums and more benefits? What is their secret to saving?
But a bipartisan group of lawmakers is increasingly concerned that insurance companies are preying on seniors and, in some cases, denying care that would otherwise be approved by traditional Medicare.
Is this a surprise? Preying on seniors and denying care is the whole point of Medicare Advantage. The government created the program to reward the rich.
Any thinking person could predict that a private, for-profit program, competing with a government not-for-profit program, would have to deny services and fool customers. How else can they make a profit while taking business from the government program?
“It was stunning how many times senators on both sides of the aisle kept linking constituent problems with denying authorizations for care,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in an interview, referring to a bevy of complaints from colleagues during a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing.
Businesses are strongly motivated to deny authorizations for the most expensive procedures, the exact procedures for which people most need insurance. Prior authorization is a notorious scam.
Congress has already gone after insurers for their celebrity-filled ads and misleading directories. But its scrutiny of these care denials, expected to continue into next year, could have a far greater impact and reshape the rules for one of the most profitable parts of the insurance industry.
The private health insurance industry cannot survive without prior authorization or some other process that skims away their highest costs.
“CMS is very attuned to what is going on on the Hill,” Sean Creighton, managing director of policy for consulting firm Avalere Health, said of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He added that next year will likely bring “more scrutiny by the Hill and CMS on this, and there will be more reporting requirements for the plans and actions the plans are required to take to lessen the burden on providers and patients.”
Yes, “more scrutiny and more reporting requirements” — anything to avoid doing what really should be done: Eliminate FICA and offer federally funded, comprehensive, no-deductible, no-copay Medicare for every man, woman, and child in America.
The federal government could pay for the whole thing by tapping a computer key, and it could do it without the need to supervise private insurance services.
The hugely profitable private healthcare insurers, who bribe Congress, would object.
And, of course, the rich who run America don’t want it, because it would narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest of us. Keeping the poorer poor is how the rich stay rich. That is what the rich bribe Congress to do.
Legislation requiring insurers to more quickly approve requests for routine care passed unanimously in the House in 2022, but stalled in the Senate over cost concerns.
What do we do now? Medicare Advantage won’t pay.
Federal “cost concerns” are unnecessary.
Because the federal government is Monetarily Sovereign, cost never should be a primary consideration.
The Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act, which mandates insurers quickly approve requests for routine care and respond within 24 hours to any urgent request, was reintroduced this year in the House and passed out of the House Ways and Means Committee this summer as part of a larger health care package.
Still, lawmakers are peppering the Biden administration with demands for reforming the commonly used tool called prior authorization, the process in which health insurers require patients to get insurer approval ahead of time for certain treatments or medications.
Without prior authorization, Medicare Advantage would have no price “advantage,” and scant ability to compete with Medicare.
It “has turned into a process of basically just stopping people from getting care,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), leader of the House Progressive Caucus.
Stopping people from getting care — i.e. stopping health insurers from paying big bills — is the point. Imagine a car insurer demanding that people get prior authorization before starting the car, and then denying any long or more risky drives.
Jayapal was one of more than three dozen House Democrats who told CMS this month of “a concerning rise in prior authorizations,” accused health insurers of prioritizing “profits over people” and asked for “a robust method of enforcement to rein in this behavior.”
Oh, really” A business that prioritizes profits? Who could have predicted that? There would be no need to “rein in this behavior” if the federal government funded health care.
Unlike traditional Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans can employ prior authorization and restrict beneficiaries to certain doctors within their network. Those are among the incentives private insurers have to participate in the program and enrollment has doubled during the last decade.
But Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said some hospitals in his state won’t take Medicare Advantage plans any more. “We can’t do it because we can’t afford the constant chasing from all the denials,” he said.
AHIP, the trade group representing insurers, told POLITICO that prior authorization was among the tools that can curb wasteful spending.
Prior authorization has very little to do with wasteful spending and everything to do with cutting big costs. If a doctor, who knows a patient, authorizes a procedure, and some lowly insurance company employee, who never met the patient refuses to pay for the doctor-authorized procedure, how does that prevent “wastefulspending?
“These tools are important when coordinating care, reducing unnecessary and low-value care, and promoting affordability for patients and consumers,” said spokesperson David Allen in a statement.
Utter nonsense. It’s double-talk for “the less we pay, the more we make.”
CMS has a track record of responding to liberal concerns, which could translate into big changes for Medicare Advantage in the coming years. Earlier this month, it proposed a rule to improve the standards for behavioral health networks following complaints from Congress about woefully inaccurate mental health provider directories, which some lawmakers said amounted to fraud.
How are we going to pay this? I thought we were covered.
It also for the first time this year is evaluating Medicare Advantage television ads before they air, following prodding from lawmakers and numerous complaints from elderly consumers who felt duped by the ubiquitous ads.
Interesting that Medicare Advantage can provide “more benefits” at “lower prices,” and still afford all that television advertising, reap profits, and even pay taxes — and compete with Medicare. Do you believe in magic? Where does all the extra money come from? Service refusal.
CMS also proposed a rule earlier this month that plans be required to factor the impact of prior authorization denials on marginalized and underserved communities, part of a larger effort by the agency to close gaps in health equity. The rule, if finalized, would take effect in 2025.
You can be sure that the insurance companies will find a way around that one. Service denial is the bedrock of Medicare Advantage. Without service denial, the program could not exist.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who wants the agency to go further, has proposed an amendment that would require CMS to collect and publish data from Medicare Advantage plans on their prior authorization practices to make public the number of prior authorization requests, denials and appeals by type of medical care.
She has support from Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who said during a recent hearing that his support for Medicare Advantage plans “does not mean that I like the prior authorization process and that I do not see some problems here that need to be solved.”
Original Medicare does not require prior authorization. Congress could outlaw the whole prior authorization, service denial scam, but that would end Medicare Advantage and all those wonderful profits, along with all those wonderful political bribes.
Insurer advocacy group Better Medicare Alliance told POLITICO it supports legislation and regulations to create an electronic prior authorization process that could expedite prior authorization decisions that typically take up to a week or more.
No, expediting a failed process doesn’t make it a good process. The whole process says, “We know more than your doctor about your health needs” and/or “Your doctor is crooked, so we’ll have one of our flunkies make your healthcare decisions.”
“Our goal has always been to protect prior authorization’s essential function — coordinating safe, effective, high-value care— while also strengthening and streamlining this clinical tool to better serve beneficiaries,” Mary Beth Donahue, president and CEO of the group, said in a statement.
Pardon me if I laugh, but does anyone believe the purpose of prior authorization is to “coordinate safe, effective, high-value care, while strengthening blah, blah, blah”? The purpose of prior authorization is to save money via service denial. Period.
BY DAVID LIM AND ADAM CANCRYN | AUGUST 23, 2023 Creighton suspects insurers would be fine with implementing guardrails for prior authorization, as long as they can continue to use it.
“It is super important that in this case one doesn’t throw out the prior authorization with the bath water,” he said. “It is just finding that balance.”
No, that is exactly what should be done: Throw out prior authorization. It’s an invitation to cheating helpless, sick patients stuck with big bills or no service.
But many physicians complain that balance has tipped too far in favor of Medicare Advantage plans.
A survey released earlier this month by the physicians’ trade group Medical Group Management Association found 97 percent of medical group practices said an insurer delayed or denied medically necessary care.
Another 92 percent said they had hired staff specifically to process prior authorization requests. A December 2022 survey from the American Medical Association also found that 94 percent of physicians reported care delays due to prior authorization denials or processing.
“Even when you are doing the most cost-effective treatment, you are going through the [prior authorization] process,” said Vivek Kavadi, chief radiation oncology officer for U.S. Oncology, a network of more than 1,200 physicians.
Studies show that oncology faces the most prior approval requests.
“I’m sorry Mrs. Jones, but we can’t operate on your cancer until we get prior authorization. It could take weeks, while your cancer grows and metastasizes. Or the procedure could be denied in which case you’ll be on the hook for $50,000 which will bankrupt you and your family. Or maybe, you’ll just die. Which do you choose?”
Five oncologists told POLITICO that prior authorization requests are increasing as more patients migrate from traditional Medicare to Medicare Advantage. This surge of insurer prior approval demands has put a strain on their practices’ resources, they said.
The people who migrate tend to be the ones who least can afford to pay for denied procedures. As usual, the rich have found a way to cheat the middle and the poor.
Insurers may at times contract with radiation benefit managers, companies that manage claims processing and keep a cut of savings they generate.
This can encourage more services requiring prior authorization and create a “greater incentive to identify opportunities where denials can be pushed on to the provider,” said Constantine Mantz, chief policy officer for the oncology network GenesisCare.
If you pay people to deny services, they will deny services.
EviCore, a radiation benefit manager, said its work is meant to ensure patients receive care grounded in the latest clinical evidence as quickly as possible. “For requests that don’t meet evidence-based guidelines, the [physician] has the opportunity to discuss the case … which can help resolve any concerns prior to initiating a formal appeal,” the company said in a statement.
So, the goal is to prevent a doctor from prescribing an unnecessary procedure, and this will be cleared up when the doctor discusses the case with a “benefit manager”? Really?
BMA did not wish to comment and AHIP declined to respond to a list of questions on radiation benefit managers.
Medicare Advantage plans have been slow to update their coverage policies and at times lag Medicare in which treatments are covered, Mantz said. This can lead to situations where a Medicare Advantage plan denies care after a prior authorization request that would be covered under traditional Medicare.
Of course. What other outcome could there be? The whole purpose of prior approval is to deny payment.
BY ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN AND LAUREN GARDNER | OCTOBER 05, 2023 05:00 AM HHS’ Office of the Inspector General in a 2022 report found 13 percent out of a sample of claims from Medicare Advantage plans in which care was denied under prior authorization for services that should have been approved.
You can be sure the 13 percent figure is low, but even if were accurate, would you go to a hospital knowing there was a 13 percent chance your legitimate procedure would not be covered? I wouldn’t.
If a request is denied, a doctor can file an appeal and eventually speak with another physician to plead their case.
This is exactly what you don’t want your doctor spending his valuable time doing: Pleading his case to another doctor who has not seen you and doesn’t even know you.
Recent studies have shown that most appeals to a denial get overturned. In 2021, Medicare Advantage plans fully or partially denied more than 2 million claims through prior authorization, but 82 percent of those were overturned after an appeal, according to an analysis from the think tank KFF.
A 2019 survey from ASTRO found 62 percent of oncologists, who appealed on behalf of their patients, got their prior authorization denial overturned.
If the vast majority of denials are overturned, something clearly is wrong with the denial process. It would be informative to know why denials are overturned. What are the circumstances that cause all those “bad” denials and their cancellation.
Apparently, those denials were unnecessary, and when the doctors caught the insurance companies with their hands in the cookie jar, the denials were reversed. The insurance companies seemingly tell their people, “Deny everything you can, but if a doctor objects, reverse the denial. Just make the process as tedious as possible.”
But doctors say getting through the appeals process can take weeks.
“It feels more like the business model is a way for insurance companies to potentially reduce costs by feeling that physicians won’t want to participate in this peer-to-peer process because it is a burden on time,” said Amar Rewari, chief of radiation oncology for the Maryland-based health system Luminis Health.Mei
The insurance companies increase profits by making the process difficult for patients and doctors. This is the opposite of what one would expect from a health service.
SUMMARY
No public purpose is served by transferring the cost of health care to the private sector, where profitability requirements can supersede healthcare needs.Though cutting prices is a selling strategy, it is a poor tradeoff for bad service.
Innocent consumers, lured in by lower prices and coverages not offered by Original Medicare, too often find themselves uninsured at just the times when they need help most, with bankruptcy-causing bills or not receiving medical care at all.
The federal government already had proved its capability of funding healthcare services with Original Medicare. a relatively no-hassle service.
Unnecessarily, Medicare saves money by not paying for everything. There are co-pays, deductibles, and some services not covered. But the federal government, being Monetarily Sovereign, does not need to save money. It has infinite dollars.
The federal government is financially capable of providing comprehensive, all-inclusive, no-copay, no-deductible Medicare to every man woman and child in America, without collecting a penny in taxes.
The purpose of government is to improve and protect the lives of the people. The U.S. government, having unlimited financial capability, and already having the experience funding medical care, should carry out its mandate.
The U.S. federal government is not like state/local governments, not like euro governments, not like businesses, and not like you and me.
It uniquely is Monetarily Sovereign. It cannot, unwillingly, run short of its own sovereign currency, the U.S. dollar. As real experts have said:
Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency. There is nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print the money to do that.”
Former Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke: “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”
Quote from 60 Minutes: Scott Pelley: Is that tax money that the Fed is spending? Ben Bernanke: It’s not tax money… We simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account.
Statement from the St. Louis Fed: “As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational.”
Press Conference: Mario Draghi, President of the Monetarily Sovereign ECB, 9 January 2014 Question: can the ECB ever run out of money? Mario Draghi: Technically, no. We cannot run out of money.
Because the U.S. federal government has the infinite ability to create its sovereign currency, the U.S. dollar, it never borrows dollars.Contrary to popular wisdom, T-bills, T-notes, and T-bonds do not represent borrowing. They simply are deposits, the purpose of which is to provide a safe place to store unused dollars and to help the Fed control interest rates.
The government never touches those dollars, which remain the property of the depositors.
Not only can our Monetarily Sovereign government not run short of dollars, but federal deficits are necessary to grow the economy, as evidenced by the formula: GDP = Federal Spending + Nonfederal Spending + Net Exports.
When we don’t have sufficient federal deficits, we have depressions and recessions:
1804-1812: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 48%. Depression began 1807. 1817-1821: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 29%. Depression began 1819. 1823-1836: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 99%. Depression began 1837. 1852-1857: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 59%. Depression began 1857. 1867-1873: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 27%. Depression began 1873. 1880-1893: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 57%. Depression began 1893. 1920-1930: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 36%. Depression began 1929. 1997-2001: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 15%. Recession began 2001.
Periodically, we publish yet another shrieking claim that the U.S. federal debt is “unsustainable”and a “ticking time bomb.” This lie has been told to you every year (really, almost every day) since 1940, and that bomb never has exploded, nor ever will.
Rather than repeat the entire list of the thousands of lies to which you have been subject, I will list samples here as a reference and add periodically, at the end, new “federal debt is a ticking time bomb” lies as I encounter them:
September 26, 1940, New York Times: The federal budget was a “ticking time-bomb which can eventually destroy the American system,” said Robert M. Hanes, president of the American Bankers Association.
By 1960, the debt was “threatening the country’s fiscal future,” said Secretary of Commerce Frederick H. Mueller. (“The enormous cost of various Federal programs is a time-bomb threatening the country’s fiscal future, Secretary of Commerce Frederick H. Mueller warned here yesterday.”)
In 1984: AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said. “It’s a time bomb ticking away.”
In 1985: “The federal deficit is a ticking time bomb, and it’s about to blow up,” U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell. (Remember him?)
Later in 1985: Los Angeles Times: “We labeled the deficit a ‘ticking time bomb’ that threatens to permanently undermine the strength and vitality of the American economy.”
In 1987: Richmond Times-Dispatch – Richmond, VA: “100TH CONGRESS FACING U.S. DEFICIT’ TIME BOMB'”
Later in 1987: The Dallas Morning News: “A fiscal time bomb is slowly ticking that, if not defused, could explode into a financial crisis within the next few years for the federal government.”
In 1989: FORTUNE Magazine: “A TIME BOMB FOR U.S. TAXPAYERS“
In 1992: The Pantagraph – Bloomington, Illinois: “I have seen where politicians in Washington have expressed little or no concern about this ticking time bomb they have helped to create, that being the enormous federal budget deficit, approaching $4 trillion.“
Later in 1992, Ross Perot said, “Our great nation is sitting right on top of a ticking time bomb. We have a national debt of $4 trillion.”
In 1995: Kansas City Star: “Concerned citizens. . . regard the national debt as a ticking time bomb poised to explode with devastating consequences at some future date.”
In 2004: Bradenton Herald: “A NATION AT RISK: TWIN DEFICIT A TICKING TIME BOMB“
In 2005: Providence Journal: “Some lawmakers see the Medicare drug benefit for what it is: a ticking time bomb.”
In 2006: NewsMax.com, “We have to worry about the deficit . . . when we combine it with the trade deficit, we have a real ticking time bomb in our economy,” said Mrs. Clinton.
In 2007: USA Today: “Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen.“
In 2010: Heritage Foundation: “Why the National Debt is a Ticking Time Bomb. Interest rates on government bonds are virtually guaranteed to jump over the next few years.
In 2010: Reason Alert: “. . . the time bomb that’s ticking under the federal budget like a Guy Fawkes’ powder keg.”
In 2011: Washington Post, Lori Montgomery:”. . . defuse the biggest budgetary time bombs that are set to explode.”
June 19, 2013: Chamber of Commerce: Safety net spending is a ‘time bomb’, By Jim Tankersley: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is worried that not enough Americans are worried about social safety net spending. The nation’s largest business lobbying group launched a renewed effort Wednesday to reduce projected federal spending on safety-net programs, labeling them a “ticking time bomb” that, left unchanged, “will bankrupt this nation.”
On June 15, 2014: CBN News: “The United States of Debt: A Ticking Time Bomb“
On January 27, 2017: America’s “debt bomb is going to explode.” That’s according to financial strategist Peter Schiff. Schiff said that while low interest rates had helped keep a lid on U.S. debt, it couldn’t be contained for much longer. Interest rates and inflation are rising, creditors will demand higher premiums, and the country is headed “off the edge of a cliff.”
February 16, 2018 America’s Debt Bomb By Andrew Soergel, Senior Reporter: Conservatives and deficit hawks are hurling criticism at Washington for deepening America’s debt hole.
April 10, 2019,The National Debt: America’s Ticking Time Bomb. TIL Journal. Entire nations can go bankrupt. One prominent example was the *nation of Greece which was threatened with insolvency, a decade ago. Greece survived the economic crisis because the European Union and the IMF bailed the nation out.
SEP 12, 2019, Our national ticking time bomb, By BILL YEARGIN SPECIAL TO THE SUN SENTINEL | At some point, investors will become concerned about lending to a debt-riddled U.S., which will result in having to offer higher interest rates to attract the money. Even with rates low today, interest expense is the federal government’s third-highest expenditure following the elderly and military. The U.S. already borrows all the money it uses to pay its interest expense, sort of like a Ponzi scheme. Lack of investor confidence will only make this problem worse.
JANUARY 06, 2020, National debt is a time bomb, BY MARK MANSPERGER, Tri City Herald | The increase in the U.S. deficit last year was about $1.1 trillion, bringing our total national debt to more than $23 trillion! This fiscal year, the deficit is forecasted to be even higher, and when the economy eventually slows down, our annual deficits could be pushing $2 trillion a year! This is financial madness. there’s not going to be a drastic cut in federal expenditures — that is, until we go broke — nor are we going to “grow our way” out of this predicament. Therefore, to gain control of this looming debt, we’re going to have to raise taxes.
February 14, 2020, OMG! It’s February 14, 2020, and the national debt is still a ticking time bomb! The national debt: A ticking time bomb?America is “headed toward a crisis,” said Tiana Lowe in WashingonExaminer.com. The Treasury Department reported last week that the federal deficit swelled to more than $1 trillion in 2019 for the first time since 2012. Even more alarming was the report from the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicting that $1 trillion deficits will continue for the next 10 years, eventually reaching $1.7 trillion in 2030
August 29, 2020, LOS ANGELES, California: America’s mountain of debt is a ticking time bomb The United States not only looks ill, but also dead broke. To offset the pandemic-induced “Great Cessation,” the U.S. Federal Reserve and Congress have marshalled staggering sums of stimulus spending out of fear that the economy would otherwise plunge to 1930s soup kitchen levels. Assuming that America eventually defeats COVID-19 and does not devolve into a Terminator-like dystopia, how will it avoid the approaching fiscal cliff and national bankruptcy?
April 16, 2021, NATIONAL POLICY: ECONOMY AND TAXES / MARK ALEXANDER / The National Debt Clock: A Ticking Time Bomb: At the moment, our national debt exceeds $28 TRILLION — about 80% held as public debt and the rest as intragovernmental debt. That is $225,000 per taxpayer. Federal annual spending this year is almost $8 trillion, and more than half of that is deficit spending — piling on the national debt.
June 17, 2022Time Bomb On National Debt Is Counting Down Faster Thanks To Fed’s Rate Hike, Tim Brown /We are now staring down the barrel of the end of the U.S. economy based on fiat money, printed out of thin air but charged back to the people at ridiculous interest rates. Now, the national debt is approaching $31 trillion,which is $12 trillion more than when Donald Trump took office in 2017 and more than half of that debt was tacked on in his final year. Then we’ve had the disastrous year and a half of Joe Biden. Now, the Fed is now hiking its rates and that spells even more trouble for the national debt and the economy at large.
December 4, 2022 America’s ticking time bomb: $66 trillion in debt that could crash the economy By Stephen Moore, The national debt is $31 trillion when including Social Security’s and Medicare’s unfunded liabilities. Wake up, America. That ticking sound you’re hearing is the American debt time bomb that with each passing day is getting precariously close to detonatingand crashing the US economy.
January 13, 2023.A ticking time bomb in the U.S. economy is running perilously close to detonation. Long considered a harbinger of bad luck, Friday, Jan. 13 came with a warning for Congress that the country could default on its debt as soon as June. With the U.S. reaching its debt limit of $31.4 trillion on Jan. 19, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged lawmakers to increase or suspend the debt ceiling.
April 22, 2023The Debt Ceiling Debate Is About More Than Debt, Jim Tankersley, WASHINGTON — Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California has repeatedly said that he and his fellow House Republicans are refusing to raise the nation’s borrowing limit,and risking economic catastrophe, to force a reckoning on America’s $31 trillion national debt. “Without exaggeration, America’s debt is a ticking time bomb that will detonate unless we take serious, responsible action,” he said this week.
November 3, 2023 The Fuse on America’s Debt Bomb Just Got Shorter,J Antoni Heritage Organization. The Treasury is now on track to borrow almost as much in just six months as it did in the previous 12 months. That’s nearly a doubling of the deficit. Because the federal debt is $33.7 trillion, just a 1 percent increase in yields adds $337 billion to the annual cost of servicing the debt over time. Absent spending reform, eventually no one will be willing to hold the bomb anymore, and the yields on U.S. debt will begin to resemble those in Argentina.
February 2, 2024How Florida can help defuse the nation’s debt bomb By BARRY W. POULSON,professor emeritus of economics at the University of Colorado Boulder and DAVID M. WALKER,former comptroller general of the United States. Washington’s out-of-control spending, combined with fiscal and monetary policies have resulted in trillion-dollar-plus annual deficits, over $34 trillion in federal debt, over $125 trillion in total federal liabilities and unfunded obligations, and excess inflation. Excessive spending and loose monetary policy increase inflation in the short term, and mounting debt burdens serve to reduce future economic growth and shift the economic burden and consequences of mounting debt burdens to future generations.
February 8, 2024Legendary investor Paul Tudor Jones says a ‘debt bomb’ is about to go off in the U.S.: ‘We’re fast-pouring consumption like crazy’. The U.S. economy may seem like it’s firing on all cylinders, but underneath the surface, a “debt bomb” could be on the verge of exploding, according to billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones. The esteemed investor said in an interview with CNBC that he couldn’t deny the economy was strong, but that it was actually “on steroids” due to massive government spending and borrowing.
Jones is not the only one to call attention to the growing deficit issue in the U.S. On Sunday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell took a rare dive into politics, telling CBS’s 60 Minutes that the national debt was “growing faster than the economy,” and calling for lawmakers to get the federal government “back on a sustainable fiscal path.”
Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said she is not yet worried about the increasing national debt as long as the government keeps in check the net payments it makes on its debt relative to GDP. Those payments are projected to rise from 2.5% last year to 2.9% next year, according to the Office of Management and Budget—below their level in the early 1990s.
Jones told CNBC that the strong economy could postpone the effects of the government’s deficit spending, but only for a little while. “The only question is … when does that manifest itself in markets?” he added. “It could be this year, it could be next year. Productivity may mask and it might be three or four years from now. But clearly, clearly we’re on an unsustainable path.”
———————–//———————–
Or it could be in ten years or maybe fifty years or a hundred years. But clearly, if we wait long enough, something will happen to prove them right, perhaps in a thousand years.
Today, his makes “only” 84 years of the debt nuts being wrong. If prophets are wrong, wrong, wrong, for 84 years, at what point does the world stop believing them?
Year after year we see the federal deficit yielding economic growth. When deficits are insufficient, we have had recessions, which were cured by increased deficits.
When deficits decline, we have recessions (vertical gray bars) which are cured by increased deficits.
If, year after year, respected economists keep predicting something terrible is imminent, yet exactly the opposite happens, at what point do they reexamine their beliefs?
Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.
The conclusion was that consciousness is hard to define because we make false assumptions about it.
One assumption is that consciousness is a mystical reality concerning a brain’s self-awareness.
Or, we assume consciousness is a state occupied only by living creatures, animals only, “higher” animals only, or things that can recognize themselves in a mirror.
Thus, because there is no agreement on what consciousness is and who or what can have it, we have created a hard problem when, in fact, the “hardness” is of our own making.
Bacteria can communicate, and they speak multiple languages! Bacteria use chemicals as their “words.”
They use chemical communication to distinguish their own species from others and, in doing so, presumably reveal friend from foe.
Bacteria release their chemical communication molecules into the extracellular environment. When these chemicals build up to a critical level, a signal is relayed to the cell interior, which alerts each bacterial cell that other bacterial brethren are in the neighborhood and that they have reached a “quorum.”
The entire population of bacteria then acts as a large, coordinated group, carrying out tasks that would be unsuccessful if a single bacterium acted alone.
This process, called “quorum sensing,” controls bacterial behaviors ranging from symbiosis to virulence, biofilm formation, and natural product production.
By most reasonable measures, quorum sensing and other bacterial communications could be termed “consciousness.”
When a person dies, he/she loses some consciousness, but not every cell dies instantly. Often, some bodily functions continue for a time, and those cells continue to be conscious of the cells and chemicals around them.
We die, bit by bit. Even our brains die bit by bit. At what point is our consciousness gone?
A brain-dead person might be kept alive, artificially, by heart and breathing machines. His body will continue to be conscious of its internal workings — digestion and oxygen consumption. But he will have drifted down the consciousness continuum.
I suggest that rather than embracing the hard problem (actually impossible problem) of “consciousness,” we should talk about “sensingness,” the ability to sense and react to stimuli.
Consciousness is a “hard problem” only because philosophers arbitrarily have made it hard. They made the unnecessary decision that something they call “consciousness” requires life, and not just life, but so-called “advanced life,” having a human-style brain.
But why? Why does science limit consciousness to human-style brains.
It’s especially mystifying when you realize that many creatures have far superior abilities to sense their environment and to communicate than we do.
(One is reminded of geometry, where mathematicians arbitrarily decided the problems must be solved using only a compass and straightedge. Because some problems could not be solved using just those tools, the problems were considered impossible to solve.)
(One also is reminded of arguments about defining “beauty.” A bacterium might feel a warm, phosphorus laden pool is the ultimate of beauty.)
Rather than arbitrarily limiting our investigations to something called consciousness — something that has no real definition — we should decide how much sensingness each object has. “How sensing is an adult person? How sensing is a dog, an octopus, a sunflower, a virus?”
How much ability do they have to sense and react to stimuli?
Suddenly, the problem becomes straightforward. It’s a big number, a monster number, but there is an algorithm: A finite sequence of instructions to solve a problem.
List and measure every conceivable stimulus an object receives, and list the object’s reaction to each stimulus individually and in combination with all other stimuli, and you have its total sensingness.
Yes, we can argue about the relative values of different stimuli. Still, at least with sensingness, we would argue in concrete terms, not in the vague, hazy, undefined wonderworld of consciousness.
==========//////////==========
Conscious, thinking, or sensing?
In this regard, here are excerpts from an article in the February 2024 issue of Scientific American:
The answer may be ‘ yes, ‘ thanks to new research on slime molds.’
Scientists from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University have discovered that a brainless slime mold called Physarum polycephalum uses its body to sense mechanical cues in its surrounding environment and performs computations similar to what we call ‘thinking‘ to decide in which direction to grow based on that information.
Unlike previous studies with Physarum, these results were obtained without giving the organism any food or chemical signals to influence its behavior. The study was published in Advanced Materials.
‘People are becoming more interested in Physarum because it doesn’t have a brain, but it can still perform a lot of the behaviors that we associate with thinking, like solving mazes, learning new things, and predicting events,’ said first author Nirosha Murugan, a former member of the Allen Discovery Center who is now an assistant professor at Algoma University in Canada.
‘Figuring out how proto-intelligent life manages this type of computation gives us more insight into the underpinnings of animal cognition and behavior, including our own.’
Think about it. The Physarum can solve problems. Is it conscious, or is it sensing?
Slimy action at a distance Slime molds are amoeba-like organisms that can grow up to several feet long and help break down decomposing matter in the environment, like rotting logs, mulch, and dead leaves.
A single Physarum creature consists of a membrane containing many cellular nuclei floating within a shared cytoplasm, creating a syncytium structure.
Physarum moves by shuttling its watery cytoplasm back and forth throughout the entire length of its body in regular waves, a unique process known as shuttle streaming.
‘With most animals, we can’t see what’s changing inside the brain as the animal makes decisions.
Physarum offers a fascinating scientific opportunity because we can observe its decisions about where to move in real-time by watching how its shuttle streaming behavior changes,’ said Murugan.
While previous studies have shown that Physarum moves in response to chemicals and light, Murugan and her team wanted to know if it could make decisions about where to move based on physical cues in its environment alone.
Again, does that sound like consciousness or more like sensingness?
The researchers placed Physarum specimens in the center of Petri dishes coated with a semi-flexible agar gel and put one or three small glass discs next to each other atop the gel on opposite sides of each dish.
They then allowed the organisms to grow freely in the dark over 24 hours and tracked their growth patterns.
For the first 12 to 14 hours, the Physarum grew outwards evenly in all directions; after that, however, the specimens extended a long branch that grew directly over the surface of the gel toward the three-disc region 70% of the time.
Remarkably, the Physarum chose to grow toward the greater mass without first physically exploring the area to confirm that it contained the larger object.
The Physarum “figure out” where the larger mass was. Is “figuring out” evidence of consciousness?
How did it accomplish this exploration of its surroundings before physically going there? The scientists were determined to find out.
The researchers experimented with several variables to see how they impacted Physarum’s growth decisions and noticed something unusual. When they stacked the same three discs on top of each other, the organism seemed to lose its ability to distinguish between the three discs and the single disc.
It grew toward both sides of the dish at roughly equal rates despite the three stacked discs still having greater mass. Clearly, Physarum was using another factor beyond mass to decide where to grow.
To figure out the missing piece of the puzzle, the scientists used computer modeling to create a simulation of their experiment to explore how changing the mass of the discs would impact the amount of stress (force) and strain (deformation) applied to the semi-flexible gel and the attached growing Physarum.
As they expected, larger masses increased the amount of strain, but the simulation revealed that the strain patterns the masses produced changed depending on the arrangement of the discs.
‘Imagine driving on the highway at night and looking for a town to stop at. You see two different arrangements of light on the horizon: a single bright point and a cluster of less bright points. While the single point is brighter, the cluster of points lights up a wider area more likely to indicate a town, so you head there,’ said co-author Richard Novak, PhD, a lead staff engineer at the Wyss Institute.
‘The light patterns in this example are analogous to the patterns of mechanical strain produced by different mass arrangements in our model. Our experiments confirmed that Physarum can physically sense them and make decisions based on patterns rather than signal intensity.’
Physarum makes decisions. That much is clear. Is making decisionsa sign of consciousness, or is it simply sensingness?
The team’s research demonstrated that this brainless creature was not simply growing towards the heaviest thing it could sense; it was making a calculated decision about where to grow based on the relative patterns of strain it detected in its environment.
“Making a calculated decision” seems to involve the question of consciousness vs. unconsciousness. If you struggle with defining “conscious,” what is your bright line separating conscious from unconscious.
Is the Physarum deciding to reach out toward a specific strain pattern more or less conscious than a human being under anesthesia?
But how was it detecting these strain patterns? The scientists suspected it had to do with Physarum’s ability to rhythmically contract and tug on its substrate because the pulsing and sensing the resultant changes in substrate deformation allows the organism to gain information about its surroundings.
Other animals have particular channel proteins in their cell membranes called TRP-like proteins that detect stretching. Coauthor and Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., had previously shown that one of these TRP proteins mediates mechanosensing in human cells.
When the team created a potent TRP channel-blocking drug and applied it to Physarum, the organism lost its ability to distinguish between high and low masses, only selecting the high-mass region in 11% of the trials and selecting both high- and low-mass areas of 71% of trials.
Think about how you make decisions. Say your bottom hurts, so you decide to shift in your chair. That mechanosensing in your bottom’s cells led to your decision. How different is that from the Physarum’s mechanosensing that led to its decision to reach out?
I suggest it’s not different at all, and further, if you were under sedation and did not sense any discomfort, the Physarum was more conscious — or more sensing — than you were.
‘Our discovery of this slime mold’s use of biomechanics to probe and react to its surrounding environment underscores how early this ability evolved in living organisms and how closely related intelligence, behavior, and morphogenesis are.
In this organism, which grows out to interact with the world, its shape change is its behavior. Other research has shown that similar strategies are used by cells in more complex animals, including neurons, stem cells, and cancer cells.
This work in Physarum offers a new model to explore how evolution uses physics to implement primitive cognition that drives form and function,’ said corresponding author Mike Levin, Ph.D…. This Wyss associate faculty member is also the Vannevar Bush Chair and serves as director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University.
“Cognition” is another part of consciousness.
‘This study confirms once again that mechanical forces play as important a role in the control of cell behavior and development as chemicals and genes, and the process of mechanosensation uncovered in this simple brainless organism is amazingly similar to what is seen in all species, including humans,’ said Ingber.
‘Thus, a deeper understanding of how organisms use biomechanical information to make decisions will help us to better understand our own bodies and brains, and perhaps even provide insight into new bioinspired forms of computation.’
Ingber is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital and professor of bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
The term “make decisions” hints at some mystical factors beyond the physical, chemical, or quantum. But I suggest there are no such factors.
Conscious, thinking, or sensing?
I suggest that all your decisions are the result of your entire body’s (not just your brain’s) reaction to everything your body experiences — gravity, heat, light, motion, odor, taste, sound, every field, every chemical in your environment and inside your body — now and in the past, even at the quantum level.
The word “reaction” is crucial. It is the measure of sensingness. You do not make decisions in a vacuum. Everything you touch and everything that touches you are part of your reaction, awareness, consciousness, and sensingness.
We call that “thinking.”
Animals sense and react. Plants sense and react. Bacteria, even viruses, sense and react. And depending on your bent, we could call those reactions “consciousness,” but more accurately, they are sensingness.
And there is no transition to thinking. They are one.
By that measure, the entire earth is sensing, or conscious, as changes in global weather patterns indicate. The earth has spawned life (however you define it), and life has done things the earth senses and reacts to; we are part of an enormous, sensing, one might say, “aware,” organism that reacts to everything on, in, and touching it.
The bottom line is that consciousness is not a thing but a continuum of reactions. The greater the reactions, the greater the consciousness, i.e. sensingness.
There is no mysticism involved. There is no special feature beyond chemical and quantum mechanics.
Arguing about whether something is conscious, thinking, aware, etc. is like debating the existence of angels. Fruitless. It’s all part of the sensing continuum.
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 