Yeah, This Is Horrifying

It turns out that in addition to promiscuously sharing user data with anyone who would pay, Facebook was planning to use health data from hospitals for further refine their profiles of their users:

Facebook has asked several major U.S. hospitals to share anonymized data about their patients, such as illnesses and prescription info, for a proposed research project. Facebook was intending to match it up with user data it had collected, and help the hospitals figure out which patients might need special care or treatment.

The proposal never went past the planning phases and has been put on pause after the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal raised public concerns over how Facebook and others collect and use detailed information about Facebook users.

"This work has not progressed past the planning phase, and we have not received, shared, or analyzed anyone's data," a Facebook spokesperson told CNBC.

But as recently as last month, the company was talking to several health organizations, including Stanford Medical School and American College of Cardiology, about signing the data-sharing agreement.

Let's be clear about this:  The data would not have been meaningfully anonymized, because you COULD NOT meaningfully anonymize the data.

The data itself would indicate who the individuals in question were, and in fact HAD TO, because otherwise it would serve no use, because it had to be target at SPECIFIC PATIENTS who might, "Need special care or treatment."

The business plan here was to take the data, merge it with other data to get personalized medical information, and then sell it back to doctors and hospitals.

If that does not chill you, figure that the next step would have been making it available to businesses to allow them to pre-screen applicants to exclude those who would likely have expensive health problems.

Think of it as a FICO score for your life.

Are you horrified yet?

Brazil Shows Us What We Need for Good Healthcare

It appears that all you need is a community minded hyper-violent drug lord:

Thomaz Vieira Gomes, also known as 2N, is considered one of the most dangerous criminals in Rio de Janeiro, but recently he actually did something decent, albeit still illegal, for once.

He and his gang kidnapped two male nurses and made them vaccinate the poor people of his favela against yellow fever.

For months, Brazil has been dealing with a yellow fever epidemic that has already left dozens dead. Despite the Health Ministry’s plans to vaccinate millions of people in the hopes of containing the outbreak, immunisation centres struggle to keep up with the high number of patients, and, as always, the poorest communities are usually ignored.

………

On January 27th, the young gang leader and a few of his cronies descended on a local state-run clinic in two black cars, took as many syringes and vaccine doses as they could find, and kidnapped two of the male nurses on duty that night.

They then drove to the Amarelinho bar in Salgueiro where the two nurses spent hours administering yellow fever vaccines to members of the local community.

………

After doing their job, the two victims were reportedly taken back to their workplace.

………

Even the country’s former Minister of Environment took to Twitter to comment on this bizarre story, saying that while 2N is still an “a-hole” his actions were a “public service”.

I'm not entirely sure WHAT the lesson to be learned here, but I am sure that there IS a lesson to be learned here.

The Bottom Line Is That These Are Evil Hateful Ratf%$#S

Because hurting the chronically ill and infirm sexually arouses them, the Trump administration is looking to add lifetime limits to Medicaid.

This is in addition their proposal to add a work requirement:

After allowing states to impose work requirements for Medicaid enrollees, the Trump administration is now pondering lifetime limits on adults’ access to coverage.

Capping health care benefits — like federal welfare benefits — would be a first for Medicaid, the joint state-and-federal health plan for low-income and disabled Americans.

If approved, the dramatic policy change would recast government-subsidized health coverage as temporary assistance by placing a limit on the number of months adults have access to Medicaid benefits.

The move would continue the Trump administration’s push to inject conservative policies into the Medicaid program through the use of federal waivers, which allow states more flexibility to create policies designed to promote personal and financial responsibility among enrollees.

However, advocates say capping Medicaid benefits would amount to a massive breach of the nation’s social safety net designed to protect children, the elderly and the impoverished.

In January, the Trump administration approved waiver requests from Kentucky and Indiana to terminate Medicaid coverage for able-bodied enrollees who do not meet new program work requirements. Ten other states have asked to do the same.

These folks really should have drowned at birth.

I Think That's the Worst Thing I've Ever Heard, How Appalling

In what is most certainly not a Count Rugen^* moment, I give you the most depressing headline I've seen in quite a while.

It's about a man who just won the lottery, and decides that he can finally afford to see the doctor:

Man Uses $1m Win To Finally Visit Doctor, Gets Terminal Cancer Diagnosis, Dies Weeks Later

Clearly, the solution to our broken healthcare system is more capitalism.

^*The Princess Bride, watch it, watch it again, and then watch it again.

How Special

Trump's head of the CDC, Brenda Fitzgerald, has resigned.

It has to do with the fact that she couldn't do her job, because she had active investments in opioid tracking systems and in cancer detection systems and actively invested in tobacco companies.

Doing this while running a organization dedicated to eliminating the scourge of tobacco is a rather perverse way to hedge one's bets:

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention resigned on Wednesday, in the middle of the nation’s worst flu epidemic in nearly a decade, because of her troubling financial investments in tobacco and health care companies that posed potential conflicts of interest.

Alex Azar, the newly appointed secretary of Health and Human Services, announced the resignation of the director, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald. An agency statement cited her “complex financial interests that have imposed a broad recusal limiting her ability to complete all her duties as the C.D.C. director.”

The statement continued: “Due to the nature of these financial interests, Dr. Fitzgerald could not divest from them in a definitive time period. After advising Secretary Azar of both the status of the financial interests and the scope of her recusal, Dr. Fitzgerald tendered, and the secretary accepted, her resignation. ”

………

The resignation was announced less than a day after Politico reported on Tuesday that Dr. Fitzgerald, 71, had traded in tobacco stocks even after taking the position at the public health agency. Her financial investments and potential conflicts of interest were a source of concern in recent months for some members of Congress, especially when she had to recuse herself from appearing before them on certain agency matters.

A former Georgia health commissioner, Dr. Fitzgerald was appointed to the federal agency last July by Tom Price, a fellow Georgian who served as Mr. Trump’s first H.H.S. secretary — until he too was forced to resign under fire, for traveling extensively on private jets and expensing more than $400,000 for those trips to the government. Both Dr. Fitzgerald and Mr. Price had controversial investments in health care and drug companies; Dr. Fitzgerald also had financial interests (along with her husband) in several major tobacco companies.

In a September ethics agreement, she said she would divest from many stocks, including the tobacco holdings, that might pose a conflict of interest. The companies included CVS Health, Quest Diagnostics, AbbVie, Merck, and Zimmer Biomet Holdings. But she also said that she and her husband, Dr. Thomas Fitzgerald, were unable to divest from some holdings because of legal or contractual restrictions. Those were GW Ventures and Greenway Messenger, which are limited liability companies formed to invest in Greenway Health LLC, an electronic health information company, and Isommune, a biotech company focusing on early cancer detection.

Did I forget to mention that, while Georgia health commissioner, she got funding from Coca Cola to run an anti-obesity program that downplayed the role of sugar?

To quote Elvis Costello, "Oh, I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused ."

End Stage of Empire

Deaths of mothers in child birth in the US are skyrocketing:

The rate of Texas women who died from complications related to pregnancy doubled from 2010 to 2014, a new study has found, for an estimated maternal mortality rate that is unmatched in any other state and the rest of the developed world.

The finding comes from a report, appearing in the September issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, that the maternal mortality rate in the United States increased between 2000 and 2014, even while the rest of the world succeeded in reducing its rate. Excluding California, where maternal mortality declined, and Texas, where it surged, the estimated number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births rose to 23.8 in 2014 from 18.8 in 2000 – or about 27%.

But the report singled out Texas for special concern, saying the doubling of mortality rates in a two-year period was hard to explain “in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval”.

From 2000 to the end of 2010, Texas’s estimated maternal mortality rate hovered between 17.7 and 18.6 per 100,000 births. But after 2010, that rate had leaped to 33 deaths per 100,000, and in 2014 it was 35.8. Between 2010 and 2014, more than 600 women died for reasons related to their pregnancies.

No other state saw a comparable increase.

In the wake of the report, reproductive health advocates are blaming the increase on Republican-led budget cuts that decimated the ranks of Texas’s reproductive healthcare clinics. In 2011, just as the spike began, the Texas state legislature cut $73.6m from the state’s family planning budget of $111.5m. The two-thirds cut forced more than 80 family planning clinics to shut down across the state. The remaining clinics managed to provide services – such as low-cost or free birth control, cancer screenings and well-woman exams – to only half as many women as before.

Part of the Texas spike seems to be a statistical and data collection artifact, but a 27% increase nationally is nothing short of catastrophic.

It is symptomatic of a some very serious and deep rooted problems that taken root in our society.

Tweet of the Day

Public Health officials in every industrialized nation: If you have the flu, stay home so you don't spread it

Capitalism: If you're five minutes late you're fired.

— Ed Burmila (@gin_and_tacos) January 15, 2018

Too true.

Tweet of the Day

Centrists: US healthcare system is the best.

Me: Shooting victim needs fundraiser to pay medical bills

Centrists: Fundraisers are awesome! https://t.co/U51pgBXlGb

— Salam Morcos (@SalamMorcos) October 16, 2017

Yea, pretty much.

Dried Out School Marm Cancels Recess

By "School Marm", I mean Mitch McConnell, and by "recess", I mean that he is delaying the Senate recess in an attempt to pass some variant of TrumpCare.

I understand where he is coming from, Republican politicians are getting savaged at their public meetings by their constituents, and one of the things that goes on when the Congress is on recess is meetings with the public.

McConnell is clearly trying to minimize opportunities for members of his caucus to interact with the public before they vote on the bill, because being screamed at by the mother of a profoundly disabled child who would lose coverage tends to make politicians skittish.

If this weren't literally a matter of life and death, I would be amused at the Republican discomfort at their current situation.

The Republicans May Not Have toRepeal Obamacare

Obamacare is good only in comparison to the status quo.

The best part of it, of course, is Medicaid expansion, which is basically single payer.

One of the claims made by Republicans is that Obamacare has reduced the quality of healthcare.

This is not true.

Another claim is that it is in the process of collapsing under its own weight.

This is (IMNSHO) untrue as well, but it appears that the ACA is at risk of collapsing its own insubstantiality:

Karen Slessor’s health insurance is hanging by a thread.

Slessor, a Reinbeck widow who has diabetes and arthritis, is one of nearly 72,000 Iowans who are on the brink of losing coverage as Congress tries to overhaul the country’s health care system. The at-risk Iowans buy their own health insurance policies, usually because they don’t work for employers that offer coverage and they don’t qualify for government insurance programs, such as Medicaid and Medicare.

Iowa is the first state where consumers face the likelihood of losing all access to individual health insurance policies, but experts say other states could soon follow.

The two largest health insurers offering individual coverage in Iowa, Aetna and Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield, announced last month that they would stop selling such policies for next year because of heavy financial losses and uncertainty in the market. In most of the state, that left just one relatively small carrier, Medica. The situation became critical on Wednesday, when Medica leaders said they probably also will pull out of Iowa.

If you know your Streetcar, you know that Blanche DuBois depended on the, "Kindness of strangers," and Obamacare depends upon the, "Kindness of insurance companies."

Of course, insurance companies have no kindness, and this problem with a lack of providers is not limited to Iowa, Tennessee has s similar (though less dire) situation, and huge swaths of the country have only one provider on the exchanges, meaning that Obama's neoliberal^* vision for healthcare reform would have been in trouble if Hillary hadn't lost the election.

Barack Obama's merry band of free market mousketeers may have created a system that is fundamentally unsustainable.

^*At Naked Capitalism, in the aptly named post, "Neo-liberalism Expressed as Simple Rules," gives two basic rules:

1. Because markets.
2. Go die!

This is an Interesting Way to Deal with Anti-Vaxxers

Michigan, which is a hotbed of anti-vaxx sentiment has boosted vaccination rates through the simple expedient of making getting a waiver slightly less convenient:

No amount of objective discussion or scientific data may ever be enough to convince some people that vaccines are indeed safe and effective at wiping out a slew of hellish and deadly diseases. But what does seem to work at convincing people to vaccinate their children? Bureaucratic hassle.

By adding an extra, in-person step to the process of obtaining a vaccination waiver (which allowed a child to forego the necessary vaccinations), Michigan quickly and significantly boosted its vaccination rate, as Kaiser Health News reports.

In the 2013-2014 school year, the state had the fourth highest rate in the country of children entering kindergarten with a vaccine waiver. But just one year after the extended waiver application process went into effect in 2015, the number of waivers issued dropped by 35 percent statewide. Vaccination rates rose accordingly.

………

“The idea was to make the process more burdensome,” Michigan State University health policy specialist Mark Largent, who has written extensively about vaccines, told KHN. “Research has shown that if you make it more inconvenient to apply for a waiver, fewer people get them.”

………

State legislators added the inconvenience factor after outbreaks of whooping cough and measles hit Michigan children. At the time, parents who didn’t want to vaccinate their kids could easily apply for a waiver over the Internet, by mailing in a form, or even via phone call in some places. But in a quiet, unfussy ruling in December of 2014, the state’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules changed the waiver application process to require that parents consult in person with a county health educator before a waiver would be granted. 

It used to be easy for politicians to pander to anti-vaxxers, but since outbreaks in California and other states, the general public has become aware that they are a menace, and politicians have been less accomodating.

This is a very good thing.

I Want What He Is Smoking

In a discussion of the Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare, Cornell Professor Robert Frank drops this incredibly panglossian turd:

If the repeal effort stalls, attention will shift to what comes next. In an earlier column, I suggested that Mr. Trump has the political leverage, which President Obama did not, to jettison the traditional Republican approach in favor of a form of the single-payer health care that most other countries use. According to Physicians for a National Health Program, an advocacy group, “Single-payer national health insurance, also known as ‘Medicare for all,’ is a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health care financing, but the delivery of care remains largely in private hands.” Christopher Ruddy, a friend and adviser of the president, recently urged him to consider this option.

This is not going to happen.

I would like for this to happen, if just to see how both the Clinton and Obama wings of the Democratic party twist themselves into knots to oppose this, but it's NOT going to happen.

I know, yadda yadda yadda, Nixon going to China, but it ain't going to happen, particularly when he would have to get it through the Senate, where his own Vice President would oppose this as its presiding officer, and the filibuster still exists.

Na ga na happen.

Tweet of the Day

It's almost as if a shadowy cabal figured out how to get people to pay more to die faster. pic.twitter.com/9yvlvNZN0d

— Honest Hillary (@Honest_Hillary) February 8, 2017

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Yes. I know, it's an old tweet. I was cleaning up drafts, and felt the need to share this.

Oh, Snap!

The Congressional Budget Office (has scored Paul Ryan's Obamacare replacement bill, and says that it would strip health insurance from 24 million people.

Rather predictably, the Republicans completely lose their sh%$, and attack the CBO chief that they themselves appointed:

An hour after the Congressional Budget Office released its dire assessment of the GOP Obamacare plan, Donald Trump’s top health official went on the attack.

"We disagree strenuously with the report," Tom Price said. "The CBO report’s coverage numbers defy logic."

That initial Republican assault on Monday was the first of many that amounted to dismissing their own scorekeeper.

Left unmentioned by Price, Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary: When he was in Congress, he recommended the CBO’s current director, Keith Hall, for the job. Hall took the helm at the CBO in April 2015, chosen by Republican House and Senate leaders to provide advice to a GOP-controlled Congress.

Obamacare sucks, the Republican proposal sucks even more, and the pre-2009 state of affairs sucked even more.

This might explain why the ACA hasn't created a groundswell of political support for the Democrats, "We suck a little bit less," which these days seems to be the motto for the Dems, just does not motivate voters these days.

If RFK Were Alive, He'd Kick His Ass

Robert F. Kennedy, JR is in discussions with Donald Trump in an attempt to promote his anti-Vaxx agendaas chair of a "Vaccine Safety Committee":

Donald Trump reportedly has met with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and invited him to head up a planned “vaccine safety and scientific integrity commission” with an as-yet-unknown directive, although it looks like a shot across the bow of the nation's ship of public health. It also now looks unclear whether or not Trump and Kennedy are on the same page about the invitation itself.

The idea of Kennedy being a part of any federal initiative related to vaccines is appalling, given his record of ignoring scientific evidence that doesn’t fit in with his ill-advised, fantastical fear-mongering about them. Why Trump would choose a lawyer over, say, someone with expertise in vaccines, toxicology and epidemiology is unclear. Perhaps it was Kennedy's comparison of vaccines to "a holocaust" that drew Trump's attention. What is clear is that these two are leaping at the chance to leverage some brand synergy.

I’ve covered Kennedy’s problematic response (or nonresponse) to scientific evidence as it relates to vaccines before. I’ve also covered Trump’s equally problematic relationship with facts as they relate to vaccines and autism, and the ways in which people who cling to one conspiracy theory are so likely to glom onto others. Paranoia can be a hell of a drug, for sure, something that savvy showmen easily manipulate for attention.

But it should surprise no one that Trump and Kennedy found each other. They’re not just having a meeting of conspiracy-oriented minds over vaccine fear-mongering. Maybe paranoia or an attraction to conspiracy theories led them to their mutually shared beliefs. But they also share another feature that keeps them from admitting when they’re wrong, and that’s their commitment to their respective name brands.

Kennedy’s claims about vaccines are staggeringly, blatantly incorrect. He’s had that pointed out to him, repeatedly. It may be that optimistic people looked at his name and lineage and thought that he might be reasonable and objective in assessing these facts. They mistook this Kennedy, who refuses to acknowledge even the most direct evidence controverting his claims, for someone who would go where data led him. Their mistake.

I don't know if RFK would be more upset at his kid spewing flat-earth anti-vaxx bullsh%$, or his offer to work with Donald Trump, but I'm pretty sure that he would be peeling the bark off of his kid right now if he were still here.

This Might Explain Anti-Establishment Votes for an Inverted Traffic Cone

Maybe all those people who voted weren't just deplorable racists.

Perhaps their lives are getting measurably worse.

Something is fundamentally broken in our society, as indicated by the fact that U.S. life expectancy declined last year:

For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year — a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States.

Rising fatalities from heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses, accidents and other conditions caused the lower life expectancy revealed in a report released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics. In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death.

“I think we should be very concerned,” said Princeton economist Anne Case, who called for thorough research on the increase in deaths from heart disease, the No. 1 killer in the United States. “This is singular. This doesn’t happen.”

A year ago, research by Case and Angus Deaton, also an economist at Princeton, brought worldwide attention to the unexpected jump in mortality rates among white middle-aged Americans. That trend was blamed on what are sometimes called diseases of despair: overdoses, alcoholism and suicide. The new report raises the possibility that major illnesses may be eroding prospects for an even wider group of Americans.

………

The number of unintentional injuries — which include overdoses from drugs, alcohol and other chemicals, as well as motor vehicle crashes and other accidents — climbed to more than 146,000 in 2015 from slightly more than 136,000 in 2014. Public health authorities have been grappling with an epidemic of overdoses from prescription narcotics, heroin and fentanyl in recent years. Xu said overdose statistics were not yet ready to be released to the public.

I would note that at least one of those, "diseases of despair," overdoses is being driven by our regulators allowing Pharma to both misrepresent the benefits and risks of opioids and aggressively promote their dangerous products.

Monopoly rents, and the ability of the powerful to loot our society may be nearing the point where we experience something akin to the destruction of the Soviet Union.

I would also note that Obamacare doesn't seem to help, but that is not surprising: High deductible plans that are beloved of the experts, because it means that people have "skin in the game", have been shown not to produce the desired effect: Consumers shopping for cheaper healthcare.

Instead they lead to people avoiding early, and less expensive, medical interventions.

Well, This is a Hoot

It appears that in discussions with the Republican Party leadership, representatives of the healthcare and insurance industries said that they Obamacare repealed and replaced with Obamacare:

The nation’s health insurers, resigned to the idea that Republicans will repeal the Affordable Care Act, on Tuesday publicly outlined for the first time what the industry wants to stay in the state marketplaces, which have provided millions of Americans with insurance under the law.

The insurers, some which have already started leaving the marketplaces because they are losing money, say they need a clear commitment from the Trump administration and congressional leaders that the government will continue offsetting some costs for low-income people. They also want to keep in place rules that encourage young and healthy people to sign up, which the insurers say are crucial to a stable market for individual buyers.

………

On Tuesday, Marilyn Tavenner, the chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a leading industry trade group, warned that the state marketplaces were already on unstable financial footing. Failing to continue the funding aimed at low-income Americans, she said, would have far-reaching consequences because the business would become much tougher for insurers.

………

Hospital groups also held a news conference on Tuesday to warn of what they said would be the dire financial consequences of a repeal if the cuts to hospital funding that were part of the Affordable Care Act were not also restored.

………

Ms. Tavenner did not give many details about her group’s positions, but she said its top priority was to stop the immediate threat of eliminating the subsidies for plans sold to low-income people. House Republicans have already sued to block these payments, and the lawsuit is now delayed. If the new administration chose not to defend the lawsuit, the money would disappear, and insurers would probably rush to the exits because fewer potential customers would be available.

Another of the industry’s concerns is ensuring that enough young and healthy people sign up to stabilize the market. Republicans have discussed eliminating one of the law’s main tools, the so-called individual mandate, a tax levied on those who do not enroll.

In talking with Congress, Ms. Tavenner said, her members are emphasizing the need for some alternative, especially after criticism by insurers that the penalty is not large enough to persuade enough people to enroll. “There’s not one magic solution,” she said. She pointed to some of the provisions in Medicare that encourage people to sign up before they become sick. And she discussed some options to ease how insurers price their policies to be able to offer plans that are less expensive to younger people.

She also argued that the insurers had no desire to return to the time before the law was passed, when people with pre-existing conditions were routinely denied coverage in the individual market.

So basically, they want the subsidies, marketplaces, and mandates, but apart from that they are fine with whatever is done.

Of course, subsidies, marketplaces, and mandates are Obamacare:  The rest is commentary.<sup>*

*</sup>Yes, I am applying a quote from Rabbi Hillel.

Yes

Over at FT, Gillian Tett asks, "Did Obamacare help Trump?"

The answer, of course, is yes, and it did Even If It Improved Medical Outcomes for one very simple reason:

Or to put it another way, Obamacare is not just a tale about healthcare and costs; it is also a story of people who feel trapped in a capricious system that they don’t understand, much less control. Little wonder, then, that Trump’s message about empowerment and fixing Obamacare turned out to be so popular this year. Now let’s see if he can deliver.

(emphasis mine)

This is typical of incrementalist "squish" progressives.

They create a program with overweening bureaucracy with extensive means testing, and create a system that is opaque and abusive to to its recipients.

For them, it's a win-win:

• They think that they can sell this to conservatives, because they ensure that all recipients are "deserving". (Note: this never happens)
• They create jobs for the professional class that is the base of the Obama/Clinton wing of the party.
• They create opportunities for private gain, which is an independent good according to their neoliberal worldview, because it will create market driven innovations.

Of course, this makes any of their programs about as pleasant as a trip to the DMV, and convinces the general population that government screws up anything.

The Answer Should be, "No".

While I am not a big fan of Nancy Pelosi, she learned the lesson of the Social Security fight with George W. Bush in 2005, when her response was simply "no."

No counter proposals, no deals, just, "No".

It worked, and it did a lot of damage to the both Bush and the Republican Party.

Paul Ryan, the "zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin" is proposing to privatize Medicare.

Nancy Pelosi gets it, and once again, her strategy will be "No", no counter proposals, no deals, just, "No":

Democrats are wandering around in the wilderness once again, shut out of power in Washington after losing a close, hard-fought presidential battle. The last time this happened, after the 2004 elections, the newly reelected president, George W. Bush, over-read his mandate and launched an ill-fated effort to partially privatize Social Security, providing a rallying point for Democrats to begin turning things around.

In an interview with me, House Dem leader Nancy Pelosi argued that history might repeat itself, if House Speaker Paul Ryan — with Donald Trump’s blessing — makes good on his hints to press forward with his plans to privatize Medicare. Pelosi vowed that Democrats would remain united in the battle to stop Ryan’s plan, a goal she described as crucial to defeating it, just as unity enabled Dems to block Bush’s Social Security plan.

“At that time, we committed to each other that we would be unified and disciplined,” Pelosi said. “Bush had just been elected. He gave us an opportunity by saying he would partially privatize Social Security. Everybody stuck together. The opportunity that we have now is the equivalent of the opportunity we had in ’05.”

In that 2005 fight, Pelosi recalled, Democrats actively avoided developing an alternative plan to Bush’s. Instead, Democrats said their plan was to defend Social Security, a very popular government program. At the time, some Democratic strategists warned against uncompromising opposition. But the gamble paid off. Observers noted that Bush’s plan sank in popularity as Dems remained unified behind a refusal to budge in defense of Social Security, a move that was widely credited with helping to put Dems on track to winning back Congress in the 2006 elections.

Now is not the time to listen to the the professional political consulting class of the Democratic Party, who will advise a counter-offer, and compromise, and bipartisanship.

Their advice is horrific policy, and even worse politics, and Pelosi is right to eschew the inevitable calls to capitulation.

These consultants are, with the possible exception of Dick Cheney, the most excessively overemployed people on the eastern seaboard, and they should be fired ……… Out of a cannon ……… and into the sun.

The Upside of the Measles Outbreak in California

It appears that parents are now looking for pediatricians who refuse antivaxxers as patients, because they are affraid of their wee bairns picking up something in the waiting room from unvaccinated kids:

Pediatricians around the country, faced with persistent opposition to childhood vaccinations, are increasingly grappling with the difficult decision of whether to dismiss those families from their practices to protect their other patients.

Doctors say they are more willing to take this last-resort step because the anti-vaccine movement in recent years has contributed to a resurgence of preventable childhood diseases such as measles, mumps and whooping cough. Their practices also have been emboldened by families who say they will only choose physicians who require other families to vaccinate.

Here's hoping this this becomes far more wide spread.

The science is bad, and they are putting other people's lives at risk.