I got a feeling about the future

by 8:53 pm. It has 0 Comments.

Some of you will be very annoyed by this post, but some of you will greatly enjoy it, so here goes:

What’s the endgame of the Russia probe? By this I mean:

(1) How many people get indicted?
(2) How many people go to jail?
(3) What’s the overall political effect of the whole thing?
(4) Does Trump end up getting impeached?
(5) Does the pee-pee tape or something like that drop?

Here are my answers:

(1) Two people get indicted. I’m not sure who exactly but Flynn, Page, Manafort, and Kushner are all candidates.

(2) No one goes to jail. Trump pardons everyone.

(3) Trump’s approval rating goes down a bit but not that far, into the low 30s. Fox, Breitbart, Woodward, and Greenwald defend him to the last but not too many others do. Trump remains popular with Republicans who continue to believe it’s all a witch hunt. His lack of popularity with the rest of voters hurts him though and Dems take 30-40 seats in the the House in the midterms.

(4) Not before 2018. If Dems take the House, I still think they not impeach. We might hear a lot of “look forward, not backward” type stuff.

(5) I have no idea but it would be fun if it did!

What are your answers?





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Friday Evening Russiagate News Dump Open Thread

by 7:32 pm. It has 86 Comments.


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So… what’s on tapp at the “Stupid Watergate” White House?…


He’ll Just Have to Remain Elf-Employed

by 7:15 pm. It has 37 Comments.

It ain’t Christmas, but this is a nice little gift to the nation:

On Wednesday evening, George T. Conway III — leading litigator, longtime partner at Wachtell Lipton, and husband of Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President Donald Trump — sent a letter to the White House withdrawing from consideration to lead the Civil Division of the Department of Justice. Conway, also a finalist for the post of U.S. Solicitor General, emerged as the presumptive pick for assistant attorney general of the Civil Division back in March.

Conway shared news of his withdrawal with friends and colleagues earlier this week.

He’s allegedly not taking the job to spend more time with his family, which is always bullshit, and especially the case considering he is married to Kellyanne Conway (apparently because Laura Ingraham wouldn’t marry him).

At any rate, Conway is one of the miserable fucking impeachment elves who basically played a major role in sending this country down the shitter. Read the whole thing, as they say.

This is a good thing.





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O Mighty Ibis!

by 6:22 pm. It has 82 Comments.

These birds are as common as pigeons where I live. They work the neighborhood yards in small flocks, methodically crossing roads and getting the points of their beaks dirty stabbing at the lawns to flush out bugs.

They look goofy as hell when perched on lines. It’s like they’re always struggling to maintain their balance. I like that about them.

What are you up to this weekend?





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Keep it 100

by 2:33 pm. It has 184 Comments.

Although I’ve been teaching for 20 years, I never feel like I have that much philosophical wisdom to impart to students about learning. There is one thing though. Sometimes students ask “what do I need to get on the final to get X grade”. I now tell them that they should try to get 100 on the exam, that they should try to get 100 on all exams. If you tell them they just need an 80 to get a B+, then they might do something dumb like only try eight out of the ten problems, figuring if they get those then should be about 80. No, try to master all the material, try all the problems! Students aren’t good at deciding which problems they will be able to do and only trying some is self-defeating.

I feel the same way about Congressional races. The DCCC and DNC aren’t that good at figuring out how to expend resources. Sure, you can look at Cook PVIs and so on, but blowing 10 million to give yourself a tiny edge in one race is dumb given that you could take a flyer on 20 other races with that 10 million and that you never know when a Republican Congressman is going go attack someone or get prosecuted for pedophilia.

So I’d like to see someone from the Democratic party say that their goal in 2018 is to win all 435 seats. All of them, Katie.

Anyhoo, glad to see the DNC is contesting the race in SC-5.

As I said, I think Archie Parnell is a good candidate. Let’s reach our fundraising goal for him.

Goal Thermometer





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Three Hundred Blind Mice

by 11:01 am. It has 272 Comments.

It’s hard to put into words just how brazen this is:

The White House is telling federal agencies to blow off Democratic lawmakers’ oversight requests, as Republicans fear the information could be weaponized against President Donald Trump.

At meetings with top officials for various government departments this spring, Uttam Dhillon, a White House lawyer, told agencies not to cooperate with such requests from Democrats, according to Republican sources inside and outside the administration.

It appears to be a formalization of a practice that had already taken hold, as Democrats have complained that their oversight letters requesting information from agencies have gone unanswered since January, and the Trump administration has not yet explained the rationale.

The declaration amounts to a new level of partisanship in Washington, where the president and his administration already feels besieged by media reports and attacks from Democrats. The idea, Republicans said, is to choke off the Democratic congressional minorities from gaining new information that could be used to attack the president.

“You have Republicans leading the House, the Senate and the White House,” a White House official said. “I don’t think you’d have the Democrats responding to every minority member request if they were in the same position.”

Apparently fascists don’t like oversight. Who knew?

I’m so old I remember when the Republican mantra was “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to hide.”


Santa Fe Meetup

by 8:13 am. It has 22 Comments.

Not too surprisingly, the responses to my earlier request are few, and some of the responders live quite a distance away. I think what I’ll do is set something up with O. Felix Culpa and let you know about it. That will probably be next week or later.





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Rich data sets and risk adjustment

by 7:26 am. It has 8 Comments.

I had a lot of fun talking about risk adjustment yesterday. Michael Kalina is an insurance plumber who worked at a co-op and he raised a very good point.

I agree completely with him. Deep data sets across multiple lines of business are extremely valuable if they are properly used in risk adjustment projections and risk adjustment revenue optimization.

When I left UPMC Health Plan, I was running the data mining for the Medicaid risk adjustment optimization team. We were active in most lines of business; Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, Medicare SNP, CHIP, Exchange, and employer sponsored insurance. Our optimization program required a diagnosis on a valid claim within a reference period. The data mining looked for highly probable persistent diagnoses that had shown up previously but had not yet shown up in the reference period.

The best use example is a lower leg amputation. Once a leg is gone, it is gone. My data mining looked at Medicaid claims, it looked at Medicare claims, it looked at Exchange claims, it looked at group claims. And if there was strong evidence from a 2005 group claim for a brand new to Medicaid member, a gap would be identified for the 2017 risk adjustment cycle. Similar logic played out for the Exchange and the Medicare Advantage risk adjustment teams.

New insurers would miss that risk adjustment gain. Insurers that only offered coverage in a single line of business like the individual market would miss that potential gain. Insurers with multiple lines of business but small market share in a region would miss a significant proportion of the gains from data mining.

Rich data sets are an extremely valuable asset and competitive advantage for locally significant legacy carriers.

Now what are the policy implications of this fact of life?

Good, widespread information is critical. States that have all payer claims databases should be sending identifiable diagnosis and procedure code data to all risk adjusted product lines for all carriers. This would allow new carriers and tightly focused carriers to get a significant data flow that they would otherwise not have. It would increase the probability that a high probability of being an actual gap is identified as a gap in the risk adjustment revenue chase.

Another approach would be for a state or a collection of states to keep a list of truly persistent conditions for individuals. Any condition on this list would be automatically attributed to the risk adjustment score of the insurer. A diagnosis or a prescription would not be required. For instance, a state could decide that an amputation is a truly persistent condition. If a person was identified as having a leg amputation in a previous year, there would no need for an insurer to see a Z-status code submitted in the current year to get credit. This list of truly persistent conditions would be small (amputations, organ transplant status codes, cystic fibrosis, HIV status codes etc) and it would be an additive list. This again minimizes the inherent big data advantage of long established multi-line carriers. They can still mine their data for the non-obvious but the obvious is common property.





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Show me the waiver

by 6:53 am. It has 25 Comments.

The California State Senate passed the single payer bill. This is hopefully the start of the process of exploring what that actually means and how it can actually be done in a state with resources and technical sophistication.

Michael Hiltzik in the LA Times identifies the key implementation challenges:

Under the Senate bill, the “Healthy California” program would take over payment for almost all medical spending in the state. It would absorb funding currently going to federal and state programs, and relieve employers, their workers and buyers in the individual market of premiums, deductibles and co-pays….

They need multiple waivers from the federal government to refashion Medicaid (known in California as Medi-Cal), Medicare and other federally funded health programs and redirect federal dollars into their own systems….(emphasis mine)

Show me the waivers.

If there aren’t waivers, this plan is vaporware.
Read more →


Friday Morning Open Thread: “Good Riddance”

by 6:02 am. It has 190 Comments.

For your morning enjoyment, a most excellent rant from Tom Scocca:

The public editorship of the New York Times was always a fictitious job. That essential truth was made clear on Wednesday morning, when the paper’s publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., announced that he would be terminating the position, less than a year into the term of its sixth and final occupant, Liz Spayd.

Spayd’s columns were widely mocked and despised, especially by other people in the media. Still, she was probably not the worst public editor the Times ever had. She produced only one valuable column, in an otherwise unbroken string of dumb and wrong ones, but that was one more than readers ever got from Byron Calame or Arthur Brisbane or that other guy, whoever he was. Clark Hoyt?

The majority of the public editors were bad because the public editor’s job was designed to be badly done. It was created after the Jayson Blair scandal and the collapse of Howell Raines’ executive editorship, as a means of showing that the Times was serious about managing the institutional damage. The first public editor, Daniel Okrent, was sharp and rigorous, befitting a newspaper that saw its mission as a sacred trust and had obvious lessons to learn from its failures. Once the crisis had passed, though, Sulzberger seemed to approach the routine duty of holding his paper accountable the same way a surly 12-year-old approaches the task of mowing the lawn—if he could do it badly enough, maybe people would decide he shouldn’t have been made to do it at all.

So the work of minding the Times fell to a series of timid people, dull-witted ones and bores. Only the fifth public editor, Margaret Sullivan, broke with that pattern and did her job energetically enough that she ended up being hired as a real media columnist, at the Washington Post…

And I suspect Ms. Sullivan is now celebrating her escape!

Apart from schadenfreude, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up another busy week?


On The Road

by 5:00 am. It has 15 Comments.

Good Morning All,

This weekday feature is for Balloon Juicers who are on the road, travelling, etc. and wish to share notes, links, pictures, stories, etc. from their escapades. As the US mainland begins the end of the Earth day as we measure it, many of us rise to read about our friends and their transient locales.

So, please, speak up and share some of your adventures, observations, and sights as you explore, no matter where you are. By concentrating travel updates here, it’s easier for all to keep up-to-date on the adventures of our fellow Commentariat. And it makes finding some travel tips or ideas from 6 months ago so much easier to find…

Have at ’em, and have a safe day of travels!

Should you have any pictures (tasteful, relevant, etc….) you can email them to picstopost@balloon-juice.com or just use this nifty link to start an email: Start an Email to send a Picture to Post on Balloon Juice

Another week, one less to suffer under mein hair!

I miss Colorado.

Read more →


Late Night Open Thread: Speaking of Russian Assets…

by 11:11 pm. It has 97 Comments.

NBC News:

The FBI and Congress are examining a campaign event last spring during which Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions and Jared Kushner were in a small gathering with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak and other diplomats at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, multiple U.S. officials told NBC News.

Five current and former U.S. officials said they are aware of classified intelligence suggesting there was some sort of private encounter between Trump and his aides and the Russian envoy, despite a heated denial from Sessions, who has already come under fire for failing to disclose two separate contacts with Kislyak. Kushner also denied through a spokesman that he met privately with Kislyak that day.

The officials acknowledged to NBC News that the evidence does not amount to proof, and they have declined to provide details about it…

Any confirmation of a private meeting with Kislyak in April would raise a host of questions, most particularly for Sessions.

April 2016 is when officials at the Democratic National Committee first noticed suspicious activity on their network — activity they would later learn was part of a Russian hack.

At Sessions’ confirmation hearing in January, Sen. Franken asked him, “If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?”

Sessions replied: “Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.” …

At least the OG Trump Crime Cartel had the excuse that (a) they were desperate for money; and (b) they’re morons, as well as political naifs, who had no way of understanding what they were doing — or, rather, letting Putin do. But the Malevolent Leprechaun? He knew.

He knew exactly how dangerous these people were, and how close to treason he himself was skirting. He just didn’t care, because he wanted a win (however temporary) for his clan, the Republican Party. The chance for a bigger stick that he could use to punish uppity people of color and women like Hillary Clinton meant more to him than selling his country out.


Open Thread: Sad Little Man, Posturing

by 9:26 pm. It has 148 Comments.


Back Home in West by God Virginia

by 7:18 pm. It has 185 Comments.

Long drive home from a pleasant visit at ABC’s up north, although the traffic was damned hellish and the entire state of Pennsylvania is under construction. Also, Massholes are the Ohio drivers of the Northeast, the difference being Ohio drivers are in the passing lane doing ten miles under the speed limit in an uninspected chrysler whose turns signals don’t work, while Massholes are in a brand new BMW X5 in whatever fucking lane they want doing whatever fucking speed they want and not using their turn signals because they don’t have to because TOM BRADY or some fucking bullshit. Fuck the Wahlbergs.

At any rate, here was the playlist on the ride home (DougJ ignored the last one, maybe he will come in and grief me on this one):

Allman Brothers: Eat a Peach
Beatles: Rubber Soul
CCR: 20 Greatest Hits (again)
Grateful Dead: disc 1 of Hundred Year Hall
Michael Jackson: Thriller
Led Zeppelin: III
Led Zeppelin: II
Yonder Mountain String Band
Frampton Comes Alive (disc 1)
The Police: Zenyetta Mondatta
Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream
Litle Feat: Waiting for Columbus

I am going to take a nap. Also, fuck you people for not recognizing my genius.

This shit ain’t easy, people.

This picture of me has been making the rounds with my friends on FB, so I thought I would share. Me in 1991 in Germany.

Sums up my mood about now.





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Thursday Evening Open Thread: Meanwhile, at the Embassy…

by 5:36 pm. It has 131 Comments.

Murphy the Trickster God is testing the limits of verisimilitude…

(#TBT = ThrowBack Thursday)


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THANKS AGAIN, REPUBLICANS!