Vermont Becomes Latest State to Limit Private Equity's Influence on Healthcare

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Vermont is now the third state, after Oregon and California, to pass new restrictions on the corporate practice of medicine since the start of last year. In addition, states including Massachusetts and Indiana recently enacted laws to scrutinize private equity’s healthcare investments. Connecticut last month passed a law to ban a type of transaction critics say private-equity firms use to extract money from hospitals.

The action may soon shift to the federal level. The American Medical Association, the nation’s largest doctors’ group, last week voted to seek a nationwide prohibition on corporate interference with physicians’ patient care, and to oppose certain legal structures commonly used by private-equity firms to invest in healthcare practices.

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These actions reflect how public opinion may be moving against private equity’s activities in the medical sector. The bankruptcies of formerly private equity-backed hospital operators Steward Health Care System and Prospect Medical Holdings in 2024 and 2025, which led to hospital closures and cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, helped galvanize anti-private-equity sentiment.

In addition, a growing body of research suggests private-equity investment can lead to higher medical costs and worse care. For instance, last year researchers at Harvard Medical School, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Chicago found that patient deaths increase at hospitals that are taken over by private equity.

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https://archive.ph/XsQVw

Here's the real Democratic autopsy - Doug Sosnik

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A good political rule of thumb is that a handful of moments determine the outcome of an election, and they seldom happen in a campaign’s final days or weeks. That held true in 2024. There were three decisions President Joe Biden made that ultimately determined his party’s fate.

The first was his choice to run for a second term. Campaigning in Michigan in March 2020, the then-77-year-old said he viewed himself as a transitional figure, a “bridge” to a new “generation.” That tapped into the American zeitgeist. The country was exhausted from Trump’s first term and viewed the former vice president as an acceptable short-term fix. Nothing more. Voters weren’t looking for a return to “normal” or a defender of the status quo. They were, and remain, desperate for a generational change in leadership.

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That led to the second factor that proved decisive in 2024. After taking office, Biden, under pressure from reform groups, immediately relaxed or rescinded a series of Trump administration immigration enforcement policies. This led to an unprecedented increase in illegal immigration that reversed more than a decade of decline. Pew estimates that the unauthorized immigration population in the United States reached approximately 14 million in 2023, up from 10.2 million in 2019. By the time the White House adopted emergency border restrictions in 2024, the damage had been done.

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The third factor that led to the Democrats’ 2024 defeat was the party’s misreading of the 2022 midterms. In the run-up to those elections, the public had grown increasingly concerned about Biden’s age. There was a broad expectation that Democrats were going to lose, and badly, putting more pressure on the president not to run for a second term.

But in June, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, supplying an animating issue for the Democrats that fall. The party was further aided by a favorable Senate map and poor Republican candidate recruitment in federal and state races. The Democrats went on to outperform historical trends for the party in power, and the White House touted the success as a sign of support for Biden’s presidency. It used the results as a cudgel against anyone daring to primary him in 2024.

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https://archive.ph/cKgqY

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Doug Sosnik, a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000, is a counselor to the Brunswick Group.

New Rule: No Jews, No News Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

You may hate Bill Maher but as a Democrat, a liberal, you should watch it and then pass judgement.

The Truth About Hamas

Reading “Silenced No More,” the new report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, we were transported back to Oct. 27, 2023, and a screening of the raw footage of Hamas’s atrocities. The mouths of journalists were agape, but time dulls horrific reality.

The new report is a catalogue, for memory’s sake, of Hamas depravity. Testimony from site after site attests to rape and assault. Screams and pleas. Gunshots to the face and genitals. Mutilation. Burning. Bodies naked, legs spread. Grotesque scenes staged. All forming an evidentiary record, the result of more than 10,000 photos and video segments and more than 430 interviews, testimonies and meetings with survivors, witnesses and experts.

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A male says he was gang-raped at the Nova site, providing medical records and a detailed account: “They laughed, they were really pleased, as if I was their sex doll.” The Hamas invaders had been given operational materials including Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase lists such as “take off your pants/take your clothes off,” “lie down” and “spread your legs.” The planned sexual degradation speaks to years of Palestinian propaganda that treats Jews as sub-human.

Sexual abuse continued for hostages, who are on video being groped and humiliated during abductions. In one video, a female hostage begs for her life while the narrator says, “This is one of the Jewish dogs.”

(snip)

We regret having to relate such details, but it is crucial to remember when the understandable human impulse is to forget such horrors. All the more so because the sexual violence by Hamas has been aggressively denied by an antisemitic global left that wants us to forget. Everywhere denial serves the same purpose: to distort Israel’s defensive war as if it were wanton violence. Such deniers prefer anything to reminding the world why Israel has no choice but to fight for its life.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/hamas-sexual-violence-report-civil-commission-october-7-israel-2e68d781?st=SMjMWv&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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The report Silence No Moe

https://cc4e0711-9401-400e-ae14-65ae0400675b.filesusr.com/ugd/aab121_882e9391df384e169d29f16c0faefeac.pdf

Quoting a character in a book: be yourself, everyone else is taken.

Five Financial Blind Spots That Burden Grieving Spouses

Losing a spouse is a profound emotional blow, and it often triggers a second crisis: a financial fog of legal hurdles and hidden tax traps. From being locked out of assets to facing a “widow’s penalty” that can raise tax rates, the transition from a partnership to solo financial management is fraught with potential costs. The Wall Street Journal asked financial planners and other experts for their advice on ways to help ensure a grieving spouse is prepared for the road ahead.

Surprise debt
Survivors are often surprised to discover that the late spouse had individual credit-card debt. In many states, if a card is only in one spouse’s name, the survivor is generally not legally obligated to pay it. But rules vary: In “community property” states spouses might be liable for debts incurred during the marriage, even if they didn’t sign for them.

Locked out of accounts
Assets owned solely by the deceased must go through probate—the court process of validating a will—before they can be transferred to a surviving spouse. In some counties, this can take more than a year, leaving the spouse locked out of necessary funds.

To avoid these delays, Kestenbaum recommends:
Revocable trusts: Assets in these don’t go through probate.
Joint ownership: Property or accounts held jointly transfer automatically to the survivor.

Invisible credit records
Widows are sometimes surprised to find they have little or no personal credit history, said Carla Adams, a financial planner in Lake Orion, Mich. If one spouse handled all credit cards and loans, the survivor might appear essentially invisible to credit bureaus—even with significant household assets. To avoid this, both partners should maintain active credit in their names, Adams said.

More..

https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/five-financial-blind-spots-that-burden-grieving-spouses-57e52a85?st=gin9TP&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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The Beauty Queens of MAGA World

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In January, Abbie Stockard, the reigning Miss America, turned up at Donald Trump’s inauguration wearing a MAHA gown. When it came time to select a cabinet, Trump tapped South Dakota’s 1990 Snow Queen, Kristi Noem, as secretary of homeland security. Anna Kelly, a former Miss State Fair of Virginia, was appointed deputy press secretary. Last month, when the president needed someone to push through criminal charges against James Comey, the former FBI director, another beauty queen came to the fore: Lindsey Halligan. The one-time Miss Colorado semifinalist did the job after Trump pushed out the top federal prosecutor for eastern Virginia and elevated her.

Halligan’s turn in the spotlight has paled beside the glow of another pageant veteran. Erika Kirk, the widow of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, was Miss Arizona USA in 2012. At her husband’s funeral last month, she demonstrated preternatural poise addressing a stadium-sized crowd, extolling a traditional view of marriage in which he was the family’s spiritual leader while she maintained the home.

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To their proponents, pageants are a training ground for young women to succeed in a world beyond the swimsuit competition. They learn discipline and poise and how to think on their feet. The life of a Miss America—crossing the country to appear at events, speaking in public, developing a platform and smiling for endless pictures—isn’t so different from that of a campaigning politician.

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Margot Mifflin, author of the 2020 book “Looking For Miss America,” believes pageants and MAGA are “consonant” in their inclination to maintain the status quo. “MAGA culture is rewarding a certain kind of woman that beauty pageants reward,” Mifflin said. Both “revere conventional, traditional representations of women.”

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Trump, another Atlantic City hotelier, would become the pageant world’s king when he bought the organization that owns the Miss USA, Miss Teen USA and Miss Universe competitions. If Miss America is prim and studious, competing for university scholarships, think of Miss USA as the racier sister. Or as Mifflin put it, “It’s a little more of a skin show.” More than once, contestants complained about Trump going backstage when they were undressed—something he did not deny in a 2005 interview with Howard Stern. “I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready, and everything else, and, you know, no men anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant, and therefore I’m inspecting it,” he told Stern. “You know they’re standing there with no clothes…And you see these incredible looking women.”

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https://www.wsj.com/politics/the-beauty-queens-of-maga-world-23bf590b?st=TC5CCA&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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Cynthia Ozick: A New York Jewish Life of Letters

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Although she attends an Orthodox synagogue, Ms. Ozick prefers to describe herself as “just generically Jewish.” If there’s a theme that dominates her oeuvre, it’s Jewishness, particularly Jewish life in America, which has of late infected her with sorrow. Jewishness, she says, is “co-extensive, or coterminous, with American life. You couldn’t pull Jews and America apart. Until now.” She means the period since Oct. 7, 2023.

Seated at her dining table, Ms. Ozick trembles as she speaks of “the mystery of that day in October.” On the very morrow, “it was as if, in this country and everywhere in the world, permission was suddenly given.” She means permission for antisemitism. Her consternation is “profound,” she says: “How could an event like that, a terrible massacre so minutely recorded by the perps, open these permissive floodgates?”

The question torments her. “It’s a greater puzzle than antisemitism itself. The whole world was standing there, suppressing antisemitism, and when Oct. 7 happened, it said, ‘Oh, look. It happened. So we can do it, too.’ ” Her last published commentary, which appeared on these pages, addressed these events. Titled “Antisemitism and the Politics of the Chant,” it asked whether we’ve “come to the end of a Golden Age” in America, especially for its Jewish citizens. She fears we have. The massacre gave a green light for “Jew-hate,” she says. “But for some exceptions, there was no sympathy. It was as if this country changed overnight.

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After Oct. 7, she confronted a question about the country to which her Jewish parents fled from Russia, and where they found great happiness in their lives as Americans. “Is it now the beginning, little by little, of the disintegration of what we’ve come to call the Judeo-Christian in America. Is the legacy of the Founding Fathers coming to an end?” (After that question, she apologizes for using a “cliché.”)

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/cynthia-ozick-a-new-york-jewish-life-of-letters-52aff38e?st=sZPMcc&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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The Meaning of Gaza's Tunnels - Bret Stephens, NYT

(From last year but still relevant)

Ever since Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, critics have accused it of blockading and immiserating the territory — turning it, as they say, into an open-air prison. The charge was always preposterous. Gaza shares a border with Egypt. Gazans were often treated in Israeli hospitals for cancer and other life-threatening conditions. Israel provided Gaza with much of its electricity and other critical goods even after Hamas came to power in 2007. Now, as Israeli troops uncover more of Gaza’s vast underground city, the falsity of the accusation has become even more apparent.

According to a report this month in The New York Times, Israeli defense officials now estimate that Hamas’s tunnels measure between 350 and 450 miles in a territory that’s just 25 miles long. (By comparison, the London Underground is only 249 miles long.) Some of Gaza’s tunnels are wide enough for cars; some are more than 150 feet deep; some serve as munitions depots; others are comfortably kitted out as command bunkers.

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All this should radically reconfigure the world’s understanding of what Hamas has done in, and to, Gaza. It has turned the territory into a gigantic military fortress purpose-built to attack Israel, endure Israeli retaliation and interpose civilian lives and infrastructure as part of its means of defense. Imagine any other government doing something similar to its people — say, putting the NORAD command center directly below Times Square — for a sense of the outrage Hamas is perpetrating against its own people.

That’s not the only outrage. How much did it cost to build these tunnels? How much concrete, steel and electricity did it divert from civilian needs? How many millions of hours of labor were given to the effort? What was the cost of building up its stockpile of thousands of rockets, which continue to be fired at Israel? How many ordinary Gazans had to be conscripted into the effort of miserably shoveling dirt deep underground — and how many perished in the effort?

We may never know for sure. But in 2014, around the time Israel first started to get a sense of the scale of Hamas’s tunnel network, The Wall Street Journal, citing Israeli military officials, reported that the cost of building 32 tunnels (a small fraction of what has since been uncovered) came to around $90 million.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/opinion/tunnels-gaza-hamas.html?unlocked_article_code=1.a08.YCsi.CrimHrUxLUwa&smid=url-share

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I was thinking about the border with Egypt: why can't supplies come from there?

Trump's Imperial Presidency? - Henninger, WSJ

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With Mr. Trump, however, we may be heading to the outer limits of what America’s traditional system of checks and balances can absorb. Among Mr. Trump’s first acts was to instruct his Justice Department not to enforce a ban on TikTok imposed by an act of Congress and affirmed unanimously by the Supreme Court. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Trump never mentioned Congress, exhibiting a disdain for the legislative branch also shared by his White House predecessors.

A remarkable deference to Mr. Trump’s use of his powers is happening, or being allowed to happen, because so many Americans think the political system is broken, a point he hit hard in his inaugural speech: “For many years, the radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens. While the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair, we now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home.” In a blink, Mr. Trump went from zero to 60 on exercising presidential authority, declaring two national emergencies—on the border and energy policy. If energy is a crisis under the National Emergencies Act, anything is.

(snip)

The term “imperial presidency” was coined in the 1970s by the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. In practice, Democrats have invoked the threat of an imperial presidency as a cudgel against Republican presidents. It started with Richard Nixon and the political crisis over the Watergate break-in and Nixon’s impoundments of congressional spending. I’d argue you can draw a line from what happened to Nixon to the public’s elevation of Donald Trump, who is certain to be accused of conducting an imperial presidency. He will love it.

(snip)

House reformers also created a labyrinthine system of new subcommittees with overlapping jurisdictions. The House speaker became more a traffic cop than a setter of priorities. The gerrymandering of House districts proliferated, ensuring political polarization. The result of these flawed congressional decisions today is a household word: gridlock. Like it or not, Washington still has to function, and the void left by Congress’s decline as a coequal branch was filled by the administrative state down the street on Constitution Avenue. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is supposed to fix that. He may plant a flag on Mars first.

(snip)

The breadth of the Trump presidential orders is impressive but also a sign of a system that isn’t working as originally designed. Congress is supposed to represent the country’s varied interests, down to 435 separate congressional districts. And they are different. Mr. Trump is displacing that federalism of interests with the simpler idea of a uniform national interest, defined and executed by the president.

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We are about to enter another age of strong, if not imperial, presidential authority. And perhaps some of it is necessary, with no end in sight to Congress’s underperformance. But Mr. Trump’s instinct, evident this first week, is to be unbound by much of anything. Conservatives, not least his own people, will need to hold the 47th president to account.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-imperial-presidency-we-may-be-headed-to-outer-limits-american-system-checks-and-balances-ef6e6c99?st=3aqTSg&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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