Congress Passes ‘Bank Lobbyists Bill’ – An Unnecessary Giveaway to Banks →

Congress is captured by mega megacorporations.

...It rolls back key regulations on financial institutions that were put in place with the Dodd Frank financial regulation bill of 2010, which was passed in order to prevent another financial crisis similar to the one of 2008. Critics of the bill have called it the bank lobbyist bill, because as was largely written by them. However, defenders of the bill argue that it is badly needed in order to support community banks which are being hampered by too much regulation.
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DEAN BAKER: Well, a couple of points in that. First off, the idea of calling a bank with $50 billion in assets a community bank is kind of a joke. I mean, this is a very large bank. It’s not the largest, it’s not a JP Morgan. But these are very large banks, $50-250 billion. So PNC here, and you know, the East Coast. American Express falls into this category. There’s a lot of very large banks or financial institutions that fell into this category. They are not at all community banks. So that’s just silly.
...The main part of the law that they changed was that they had to undergo stress tests, I believe was every year... What that means is they just put their assets on a spreadsheet. So they say how many mortgage loans they have, how many car loans, business loans. And then they’re told, they say, assume, you know, they’re given a number by the Federal Reserve Board. Assume 10 percent of those go bad. And then they’ll have an extreme case, assume 15 percent. I’m taking those numbers out of the air. But they’re given numbers, and then they go, OK, how would our books look if that were the case.
That’s a very simple exercise, or at least it should be for any institution that size. So the idea this is some huge regulatory burden is basically utter nonsense. And then you say, why did the banks fight so hard to get that? Well, presumably because they want more risky, to hold more risky assets that might not look very good if they put them up on the spreadsheet. So yes, we should be worried about that, because there is no good reason for them to be fighting against this sort of regulation. It’s not an onerous burden.

He went to an in-network emergency room. He still ended up with a $7,924 bill. →

We have one of the most complex, inefficient healthcare systems in the world, which is routinely brutally unfair to individuals who need help. What this article describes is insane, and should be illegal. Yet, it's just one teensy problem among hundreds which ensure that medical bills are the #1 driver of bankruptcy in this country.

On January 28, 34-year-old Scott Kohan woke up in an emergency room in downtown Austin, Texas, with his jaw broken in two places, the result of a violent attack the night before.Witnesses called 911, which dispatched an ambulance that brought him to the hospital while he was unconscious.
“The thing I remember most was my lips were caked in blood and super dry,” Kohan says. “My head was throbbing, so I touched the top of my head, and I could feel staples there.”
Kohan called for a nurse, who explained that he would need jaw surgery that night. In the meantime, he tried to check whether the hospital — Dell Seton Medical Center — was in his insurance network. 
“I was on my iPhone lying there with a broken jaw, and I go on the Humana website and see the hospital listed,” Kohan says. “So I figured, okay, I should be good.”
Except he wasn’t: While the emergency room where Kohan was seen was in his insurance network, the oral surgeon who worked in that ER was not. That’s how Kohan ended up with a $7,924 bill from the oral surgeon that his health plan declined.
“In hindsight, I don’t know what I could have done differently,” Kohan says. “I couldn’t go home. I had a broken jaw in two places. I tried to check if the hospital was in network.”
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“It does happen quite a lot in the emergency room,” says Christopher Garmon, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri Kansas City. 
Garmon published a study last year that found as many as one in five emergency room visits led to a surprise bill from an out-of-network provider involved in the care.
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Unless states have laws regulating out-of-network billing — and most don’t — patients often end up stuck in the middle of these contract disputes. 

These surprise bills appear to be especially common in Texas, where Kohan lives. Garmon’s research, for example, finds that as many as 34 percent of emergency room visits lead to out-of-network bills in Texas — way above the national average of 20 percent.

Separate data from the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based think tank, finds that a staggering number of Texas emergency rooms have zero in-network emergency physicians — meaning that patients are guaranteed to see a doctor who does not accept their health insurance.

Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis →

Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — 11.3 per 1,000 black babies, compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies, according to the most recent government data — a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery, when most black women were considered chattel. In one year, that racial gap adds up to more than 4,000 lost black babies. Education and income offer little protection. In fact, a black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education.
This tragedy of black infant mortality is intimately intertwined with another tragedy: a crisis of death and near death in black mothers themselves. The United States is one of only 13 countries in the world where the rate of maternal mortality — the death of a woman related to pregnancy or childbirth up to a year after the end of pregnancy — is now worse than it was 25 years ago. Each year, an estimated 700 to 900 maternal deaths occur in the United States. In addition, the C.D.C. reports more than 50,000 potentially preventable near-deaths, like Landrum’s, per year — a number that rose nearly 200 percent from 1993 to 2014, the last year for which statistics are available. Black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as their white counterparts, according to the C.D.C. — a disproportionate rate that is higher than that of Mexico, where nearly half the population lives in poverty — and as with infants, the high numbers for black women drive the national numbers.
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The crisis of maternal death and near-death also persists for black women across class lines. This year, the tennis star Serena Williams shared in Vogue the story of the birth of her first child and in further detail in a Facebook post. The day after delivering her daughter, Alexis Olympia, via C-section in September, Williams experienced a pulmonary embolism, the sudden blockage of an artery in the lung by a blood clot. Though she had a history of this disorder and was gasping for breath, she says medical personnel initially ignored her concerns. Though Williams should have been able to count on the most attentive health care in the world, her medical team seems to have been unprepared to monitor her for complications after her cesarean, including blood clots, one of the most common side effects of C-sections. Even after she received treatment, her problems continued; coughing, triggered by the embolism, caused her C-section wound to rupture. When she returned to surgery, physicians discovered a large hematoma, or collection of blood, in her abdomen, which required more surgery. Williams, 36, spent the first six weeks of her baby’s life bedridden.
The reasons for the black-white divide in both infant and maternal mortality have been debated by researchers and doctors for more than two decades. But recently there has been growing acceptance of what has largely been, for the medical establishment, a shocking idea: For black women in America, an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism can create a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions — including hypertension and pre-eclampsia — that lead directly to higher rates of infant and maternal death. And that societal racism is further expressed in a pervasive, longstanding racial bias in health care — including the dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms — that can help explain poor birth outcomes even in the case of black women with the most advantages.
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Though it seemed radical 25 years ago, few in the field now dispute that the black-white disparity in the deaths of babies is related not to the genetics of race but to the lived experience of race in this country. In 2007, David and Collins published an even more thorough examination of race and infant mortality in The American Journal of Public Health, again dispelling the notion of some sort of gene that would predispose black women to preterm birth or low birth weight. To make sure the message of the research was crystal clear, David, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois, Chicago, stated his hypothesis in media-friendly but blunt-force terms in interviews: “For black women,” he said, “something about growing up in America seems to be bad for your baby’s birth weight.”

Young People Keep Marching After Parkland, This Time to Register to Vote →

...If voters in their teens and 20s vote in greater numbers than usual, as many promised during nationwide marches for gun control this spring, the groundswell could affect close races in key states like Arizona and Florida, where there will be competitive races for governor, the Senate and a number of House districts in November.
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Voter data for March and April show that young registrants represented a higher portion of new voters in Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, among other states. In Florida, voters under 26 jumped from less than 20 percent of new registrants in January and February to nearly 30 percent by March, the month of the gun control rallies. That ticked down to about 25 percent in April, as the demonstrations subsided, but registration of young voters remained above the pace set before 17 students and faculty were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
In North Carolina, voters under 25 represented around 30 percent of new registrations in January and February; in March and April, they were around 40 percent.

Partisanship and morality don't mix

Trying to claim some kind of moral high ground because "I belong to the party of [Lincoln, Roosevelt, etc.]" is pretty silly, if not self-defeating. Parties are never that ideologically coherent. They look really weird if you take a few steps back (which is easier to do a few generations afterward).

The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy →

It is in fact the top 0.1 percent who have been the big winners in the growing concentration of wealth over the past half century. According to the UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the 160,000 or so households in that group held 22 percent of America’s wealth in 2012, up from 10 percent in 1963. If you’re looking for the kind of money that can buy elections, you’ll find it inside the top 0.1 percent alone.
Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. But not everyone in the 99.9 percent gave up a slice. Only those in the bottom 90 percent did. At their peak, in the mid-1980s, people in this group held 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that had fallen 12 points—exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1 percent rose.
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Let’s suppose that you start off right in the middle of the American wealth distribution. How high would you have to jump to make it into the 9.9 percent? In financial terms, the measurement is easy and the trend is unmistakable. In 1963, you would have needed to multiply your wealth six times. By 2016, you would have needed to leap twice as high—increasing your wealth 12-fold—to scrape into our group. If you boldly aspired to reach the middle of our group rather than its lower edge, you’d have needed to multiply your wealth by a factor of 25. On this measure, the 2010s look much like the 1920s.
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None of this matters, you will often hear, because in the United States everyone has an opportunity to make the leap: Mobility justifies inequality. As a matter of principle, this isn’t true. In the United States, it also turns out not to be true as a factual matter. Contrary to popular myth, economic mobility in the land of opportunity is not high, and it’s going down.
Imagine yourself on the socioeconomic ladder with one end of a rubber band around your ankle and the other around your parents’ rung. The strength of the rubber determines how hard it is for you to escape the rung on which you were born. If your parents are high on the ladder, the band will pull you up should you fall; if they are low, it will drag you down when you start to rise. Economists represent this concept with a number they call “intergenerational earnings elasticity,” or IGE, which measures how much of a child’s deviation from average income can be accounted for by the parents’ income. An IGE of zero means that there’s no relationship at all between parents’ income and that of their offspring. An IGE of one says that the destiny of a child is to end up right where she came into the world.
According to Miles Corak, an economics professor at the City University of New York, half a century ago IGE in America was less than 0.3. Today, it is about 0.5. In America, the game is half over once you’ve selected your parents. IGE is now higher here than in almost every other developed economy. On this measure of economic mobility, the United States is more like Chile or Argentina than Japan or Germany.
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Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and liver disease are all two to three times more common in individuals who have a family income of less than $35,000 than in those who have a family income greater than $100,000. Among low-educated, middle-aged whites, the death rate in the United States—alone in the developed world—increased in the first decade and a half of the 21st century. Driving the trend is the rapid growth in what the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair”—suicides and alcohol- and drug-related deaths.

The sociological data are not remotely ambiguous on any aspect of this growing divide. We 9.9 percenters live in safer neighborhoods, go to better schools, have shorter commutes, receive higher-quality health care, and, when circumstances require, serve time in better prisons. We also have more friends—the kind of friends who will introduce us to new clients or line up great internships for our kids.

These special forms of wealth offer the further advantages that they are both harder to emulate and safer to brag about than high income alone...

Most important of all, we have learned how to pass all of these advantages down to our children. In America today, the single best predictor of whether an individual will get married, stay married, pursue advanced education, live in a good neighborhood, have an extensive social network, and experience good health is the performance of his or her parents on those same metrics.

We’re leaving the 90 percent and their offspring far behind in a cloud of debts and bad life choices that they somehow can’t stop themselves from making. We tend to overlook the fact that parenting is more expensive and motherhood more hazardous in the United States than in any other developed country, that campaigns against family planning and reproductive rights are an assault on the families of the bottom 90 percent, and that law-and-order politics serves to keep even more of them down. We prefer to interpret their relative poverty as vice: Why can’t they get their act together?

Exclusive: 40% in U.S. can't afford middle-class basics →

At a time of rock-bottom joblessness, high corporate profits and a booming stock market, more than 40% of U.S. households cannot pay the basics of a middle-class lifestyle — rent, transportation, child care and a cellphone, according to a new study.
The study, conducted by United Way, found a wide band of working U.S. households that live above the official poverty line, but below the cost of paying ordinary expenses. Based on 2016 data, there were 34.7 million households in that group — double the 16.1 million that are in actual poverty, project director Stephanie Hoopes tells Axios.

What Business Do Universities Have Being Big-Time Real Estate Developers? →

As a lot of industries have died or left, colleges remain, because these institutions had inertia and are now increasingly important. Universities are taking over more and more of their communities' land and services, in order to survive.

In a famous 1976 essay, “The City as a Growth Machine,” sociologist Harvey Molotch outlined the coalition of private and public interests that had made economic growth the paramount goal of local government. “Most of those institutions have disappeared,” Wim Wiewel, the president of Lewis & Clark College and the editor of a pair of books on university development, observed in a recent conversation. “The department store is closed, the newspaper is bankrupt, the local bank is no longer local, and the manufacturing is gone.”
What remains is the university. A university is now the largest employer in two-thirds of America’s 100 largest cities (and a handful of states as well). Even in New York City, home to 45 Fortune 500 companies and a global capital of finance, media, and fashion, five of the top 10 private employers are anchor institutions like universities and academic medical centers. It can be easy to exaggerate the importance of higher ed as an anchor, an extreme example of which is the argument that Detroit’s bankruptcy might have been avoided by the presence of its own Case Western or Carnegie Mellon. But there’s no question that as cities have hollowed out, universities have enthusiastically seized more economic and urban development responsibilities.
In its most basic form, this mission creep represents the realization, on the part of university brass, that an institution is only as strong as its neighborhood...