Categories
Government Health Insurance Healthcare

Dear Buddy Carter: Health Care Premium subsidies help people

Buddy Carter, why do you persist in sending lies in your Congressional newsletter? Isn’t the purpose of these newsletters to inform rather than misinform?

Your recent newsletter takes aim at Democrats during the shutdown. You claim that Democrats are keeping the government shutdown in order to provide subsidies for healthcare for undocumented migrants.

You wrote:

Democrats, including Schumer and Jon Ossoff, have now voted for the fourth time to shut down the government, demanding $1.5 trillion in new partisan spending, including nearly $200 billion in taxpayer-funded health care for illegal immigrants.

That partisan spending you’re talking about, is subsidies necessary to keep Affordable Care Act insurance policies affordable for primarily middle class US Citizens and lawfully present migrants. These subsidies were passed into law during the COVID epidemic but now they’re terminating at the end of 2025. This will drive up the cost of health insurance policies for US citizens and lawfully present migrants by an average of 114%. That’s well over double, which most US Citizens and lawfully present migrants can’t afford.

I keep repeating US citizens and lawfully present migrants, because the Affordable Care Act provides health insurance for US Citizens and lawfully present immigrants, only, as this fact check carefully notes.

Now, there is a law, called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTLA), signed into law by Ronald Reagan decades ago that does allocate a small amount of Medicaid funds to reimburse hospitals for treating anyone and everyone in an emergency life-saving scenario regardless of the person’s status. So, if an undocumented migrant shows up at the hospital with his hand cut off because he’s operating machinery no US citizen wants to operate, the ER has to save his life.

Now, I realize that you may prefer that this person die. I hope, though, as a country we’ve not fallen so far as to wish death on people in this country solely because of the promise of an American dream.

Regardless of the moral ambiguity of letting people die in the street, what the Democrats are pushing for has nothing to do with the EMTLA and everything to do with helping middle class folk, like your voters, afford the premiums for healthcare.

Of course, you think of me as a screaming radical leftist and therefore beneath your interest, even though you are my elected representative, which means you’re supposed to represent people like me. Still, because of your partisan approach to leading,  you may discount what I say. Well, that’s fine. So let’s look to someone else who you might find worth your time.

Let’s look to the insurance commissioner for the state of Georgia, who has joined with other insurance commissioner of every single state, in sending to Congress several letters, including the latest, pleading with Congressional members like yourself, to please continue the ACA subsidies.

For more than a year, NAIC has voiced its strong support for continuation of the enhanced premium tax credits for Marketplace coverage. The enhanced credits expire at the end of this year, but health insurance premiums for 2026 must be finalized much sooner. Health insurers have already filed their initial rates for 2026, and state regulators are poised to give them final approval in the coming weeks. We must complete this action soon in order to make plans available for the annual Open Enrollment Period that begins on November 1. Without an extension of the enhanced credits in September, insurers and marketplaces will begin to notify over 20 million consumers in all 50 states of major premium increases in
a matter of weeks.

Contrary to what Speaker of the House Johnson implies by continuing to cancel House sessions, there is an urgency to renew these subscriptions now, before it’s too late. As North Dakota’s—note, North Dakota…not a screaming leftist liberal state—insurance commissioner notes:

Democratic lawmakers say extending enhanced premium tax credits is urgent, with open enrollment weeks away. Republican lawmakers say there’s time to negotiate over a policy later, since the subsidies expire in December.

 

Who’s right?

 

“The window is rapidly closing,” says Jon Godfread, North Dakota’s insurance commissioner. He says the enhanced subsidies need to be extended before open enrollment starts Nov. 1. “Let’s do this now.”

 

If lawmakers miss that deadline, he says, “it’s going to be really, really challenging to go back [to consumers] and say, ‘OK, now we fixed it, please come back and shop at this market that you were priced out of.’ I just don’t believe consumers are going to do that.”

Again, this is about renewing the healthcare subsidies that impact on the people you represent: voters in the state of Georgia. Not, as you said in your newsletter, healthcare for undocumented immigrants. It is not, as you stated in your newsletter, about healthcare for undocumented immigrants. This is a lie, and you know this is a lie. It’s not as egregious as the lie Ryan Zinke told, with his claim that Democrats are somehow trying to kill the $50 billion dollar rural healthcare fund recently passed, but it’s still a lie.

And the sad thing for you is, if you don’t do something now, if Johnson doesn’t stop shutting down the House and actually work with the Democrats, people will know November 1 that you all lied.

Categories
Government

The best outcome for this shutdown tug of war: the end of the filibuster

Have you ever played tug of war? If so, you recognize what’s happening in Congress right now. Republicans pulling, Democrats pulling, and here we are: stuck in the middle, again.

Shutdowns for the government are never a good thing. Our country should have eliminated the possibility a long time ago. However, this particular shutdown is far worse than any others primarily because of how Trump has weaponized the shutdown. If he and his administration aren’t violating the Hatch Act on a daily basis, Trump and his Project 2025 minion, Vought, are using the shutdown as an excuse to decimate even more of the government.

We would think that Congressional members would be busily negotiating an end to the shutdown, but Speaker of the House Mike Johnson won’t even convene the House for other business, much less working to resolve the shutdown. To me, this proves that Republicans are less interested in getting the government up and running, and more interested in pandering to our newest SCOTUS-appointed King, Trump.

Which leads me to what I think is the best possible outcome for this shutdown and that’s for Thune to finally blow up the filibuster and allow a party-line vote on resuming operations.

It would be nice to get healthcare for the citizens of this country, but Republicans have shown that little things like feeding the hungry and caring for the sick are not as important as building a ballroom for the President and striking a new coin in his image.

From both Johnson and Thune we’ve seen nothing but disinterest on ending the shutdown. However, at some point, critical functionality like paying for all those $50,000 bonuses for new ICE goons will shake them out of their Fox-headlight dazed stare and require them to actually Do Something.

They may realize that causing millions of taxpayer health insurance premiums to double in price could actually impact on their elections next year. It may actually also dawn on them that all the government cuts Trump is gleefully making are harming people that vote for them. And they may decide to toss Democrats a bone, and Democrats, knowing the hurts caused by the shutdown, may grab the bone. But I hope they don’t.

The best of all outcomes from this shutdown is to force Thune to blow away the 60-vote threshold to advance legislation.

While this seems like a win for Republicans, why do I consider this a win for Democrats? After all, this removes the last bit of power Democrats have in Congress.

The 60-vote threshold requires that at least eight Democrats cross over to help Republicans pass legislation. The Republicans then can claim at some future time—when their bad legislation hits Americans—that the bills passed with ‘bipartisan’ support. And the media will find someway, somehow, to twist the pretzel that now passes for ‘journalism’ and decide not only are Democrats partially to blame, they’re solely to blame.

After all: how many times have we read in the past that this or that is really the fault of Democrats, no matter who instigates the action and no matter how little Democrats have a say? Even now, when Democrats don’t control any part of the government, the White House and Congressional Republicans are saying the fault lies solely with the Democrats.

If the filibuster is gone, everything from this point on is solely and wholly owned by Republicans. And while there might be some positive legislation passed under complete Republican constrol, with this President and this Congress a lot of ugly will pass through the hallowed (or is that hollowed?) Congressional halls.

For once, Democrats won’t be around to clean up the mess Republicans make, and maybe this time, voters will actually wake up long enough to see it.

Best of all, we would no longer have to depend on Chuck “Everything’s fine” Schumer to eliminate the filibuster when the Democrats do finally get the Senate. And we’ll need to destroy the filibuster at that point if we have any hope of repairing even half the damage Trump, SCOTUS, and Congressional Republicans have done and will continue to do to this country in the next few years.

Sometimes the only way to ‘win’ at tug of war, is to just let go of the rope and let your opponent fall on their asses.

cover image, courtesy of Wannapik Studio

Categories
Burningbird Technology Weblogging

TypePad will be no more…what you can do to save your site

In the early days of weblogging, TypePad was one of the biggies. It’s built on the Movable Type weblogging system that I was surprised to read is still in existence…proving that some old dragons never die.

However, while Movable Type still exists, TypePad is shutting down. Its early moments in the sun didn’t survive the test of time.

Unfortunately, TypePad made the shutting down immensely painful for many folk by only giving people a one month’s heads up. This means people are now scrambling to preserve their web sites.

There is no magic formula that can take what you have on TypePad and magically re-created it somewhere else. But you do have options and I’m cover a few one approach here: porting your site to a stand alone WordPress site.

First and most importantly, Export your Site

Right now, every person or organization with a TypePad web site needs to export their site to ensure they don’t lose their writing. Everything else is expendable but not the writing.

TypePad has an export feature which exports metadata, writing, and comments to a huge plain text file. If you do nothing else before September 30, do this. I would also suggest one final posting in your old TypePad space, letting folks know what’s happening and where you’ll be in the future. And then hit export.

You’ll end up with a huge text file, and that’s OK. What you can export from TypePad you can import into another system, such as the one I use: WordPress. Point of fact, I’m going to recommend a stand alone WordPress weblog because it’s probably the simplest approach for now. Getting a WordPress weblog up and running is automated in many hosts.

Setup WordPress Stand Alone

I’m focusing on a WordPress stand alone site because WordPress is one the most supported weblogging systems in use. And the software is free.

When you do create your WordPress weblog, don’t worry about looks. Don’t worry about themes. This is preservation time, you can tweak later. Just grab a theme that seems to be close to yours and worry about customizing it later.

Happily, I don’t have to write out all the bits and pieces of the migration, because Ogi Djuraskovic did a really good job of this in January. He goes into great detail about setting up a WordPress weblog in a hosted environment (Bluesky, who I can also recommend), and then importing your exported file. Best of all, he provides instructions in ensuring your images are autoloaded into your new space.

So, following his instructions, you’ll have a new WordPress weblog with writing, comments, and hopefully images. What next?

Managing Links and Domains

If you used your own domain for your site, you’ll need to access your domain registrar after you’ve created your WordPress weblog in your new space, and transfer the domain to the new IP location. Propagation is very quick nowadays and the site should show up in browsers within a day, most likely.

Now, if you used your own domain, this move may be much simpler than if you used a TypePad subdomain. If you used your own domain, you can set up your WordPress weblog to use the same URL format as you used in TypePad and any missing pages should be kept to a minimum. The same holds true if you used relative URLs rather than absolute.

Absolute URL

https://burningbird.net/about/

Relative URL

/about/

The relative URL should work in the new space as well as the old. If you used absolute URLs, and a TypePad subdomain, then you’ll need to do redirects. Ogi covered this in his excellent TypePad to WordPress how-to.

At this point, you’ve saved your writing, images, and comments. You’ve also ensured that pages won’t go missing when accessed from other pages or search engines. And your readers should be able to find you. But there is still one piece left if you want to truly preserve what you once had.

Capturing Context

No matter how much material we port, your new space won’t completely capture your old space. You can get it close, but it’s unlikely you’ll get an exact matchup between old and new.

If you have the time, and it’s worth it to you to capture the context of your old space, then you can go do what I did when I was merging all my many different weblogs over the years into Burningbird:

Include links to the Wayback Machine archives for the page.

If you look at one old time page that achieved some fame back in the glory days of weblogging, you’ll see that I have copied over both the text of the post, but not comments because I no longer have comments at Burningbird. In addition, the look and feel of the page when it was first written is different than the look and feel of my website now.

So once I merged all of my old weblog posts into Burningbird, I also included a link to the Wayback Machine entry for the post. The Wayback Machine captured an instance of time on the web, allowing us to preserve everything associated with the page at the time it was written—something no export/import tool can re-create.

This is a bit of a tedious process, but it’s also something you can do over time, when you have a spare hour or so. Start with the oldest material and work your way forward. If you don’t have older URLS, as I didn’t have, you can access the top page, such as http://weblog.burningbird.net, and then just slog through the pages.

You’re not losing anything

It’s stressful when a hosting company goes out of business and we have to scramble to find a new home. I have been through this a time or two in the past.

The important thing is to set your expectations: you’re not going to be able to completely re-create what you have now, and that’s OK: trying something new is good for the soul. And the other important thing is that you won’t be losing your writing.

The writing is what’s important. Everything else is just candy sprinkles.

 

 

Categories
Healthcare Legal, Laws, and Regs

RFK Jr COVID vaccination mess is only the beginning…your food is next

The country is trying to deal with the CDC breakdown this last week, with limited COVID vaccination access and important CDC personnel quitting because they refuse to lie or to issue recommendations they know are bogus and harmful.

This follows the tragic shooting at the CDC by a man who bought into the lies about the COVID vaccination. A police officer was killed in the shooting…an event the President still has not acknowledged.

Now, thanks to Secretary Kennedy (RFK Jr) many people who could get the new COVID  vaccinations can’t, because they’re only allowing the vaccinations for those over 65 or those who are at higher risk. Kids under 5 can get a vaccination if their pediatrician approves. In my own state of Georgia, which has a requirement that vaccines be recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunizations (ACIP) and the CDC, you can’t get  the new COVID vaccination without a prescription at any pharmacy regardless of your age and health.

Normally ACIP would have met by now, but RFK Jr has fired all previous members, and now Senator Cassidy doesn’t want the meeting to happen at all because he’s concerned about what happens to vaccines once a group of quacks get their hands on them. Perhaps he should have considered this before voting to confirm RFK Jr to head the HHS.

The situation with COVID vaccinations, and vaccinations in general, is chaotic. But wait…there’s more.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans

Every five years, the USDA and the HHS release a document, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The document is updated and revised from previous releases based on recommendations from a federal advisory committee made up of nutritional and medical experts.

The committee’s recommendations for the new guidelines, due to be published this year, were delivered to RFK Jr and then just…disappeared.

The Guideline recommendations are in limbo, and one member of the recommending committee, Christopher Gardner, believes it’s because the recommendations didn’t tackle ultra-processed foods. But there’s reasons for this and one reason is that not all ultra-processed foods have an affordable replacement. Telling schools they have to use tomato sauce that contains no HFCS and costs twice as much, as compared to tomato sauce that has a small amount of HFCS is a tough sell with schools with tight budgets. Especially when those budgets have been cut by the current administration.

And try telling people on a fixed income who live in neighborhoods that are food deserts that they should be eating only whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, and lean meats or fish. A goal for a lot of people is they just don’t want to go to bed hungry—a situation neither of the wealthy-born RFK Jr and Trump has ever had to face.

Another reason the guidelines don’t focus on ultra-processed foods is not all ultra-processed foods are bad. It really depends on what you mean by ‘ultra-processed’.

There is a classification of foods based on their processing: The NOVA Food Classification System. It lists foods as minimally processed (Group 1), processed culinary (Group 2), processed (Group 3), and ultra-processed (Group 4). The latter is differentiated by the others by combining multiple ingredients, including those from Group 2, and incorporating additives to enhance flavor or shelf life. It also typically uses enhanced food production techniques.

Think corn, corn oil, canned corn, and corn chips. It’s the chips that are the bad guys.

But, wait a sec…if corn oil is ‘OK’ what about corn syrup? Or the baddy of all, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)?

Then this is where things start to get a bit trickier. It’s not just the ingredients, but how those ingredients are manufactured that can make the difference between  Group 2 processed (corn syrup) and Group 4 ultra-processed (HFCS)). The latter is considered ultra-processed because some of the glucose from corn starch used to create corn syrup is enzymatically converted to fructose.

So, it’s not just the ingredients but also the processing that’s being targeted.

Well, not quite.

The Kessler Petition

Early in August, a former FDA chief, David Kessler, petitioned the FDA to revote GRAS, or “generally recognized as safe” designation from certain refined, processed food products to force the makers to either successfully petition to continue using the product or remove it, entirely. Specifically, he targeted refined carbohydrates.

One of the ingredients Kessler wants to dump is corn syrup, yet corn syrup is considered a Group 2 processed food in the NOVA classification, not Group 4 ultra-processed. It’s corn from the minimally processed food group (Group 1) that is further refined using milling. It’s definitely something you can buy, and use, from the grocery store.

And this is where things get confusing, because Kessler is fine with people buying corn syrup in the store. So, on the one hand, I can use corn syrup when making bread at home; on the other, I can’t buy commercially made bread that uses corn syrup as an ingredient.

Kessler also targeted refined flours and starches using extrusion technology. The problem with removing GRAS on this food technique is it’s also used to incorporate vitamins and minerals into flour and starch products, such as vitamin enriched breads. One use of extrusion is being explored as a way of making rice more nutritional, since rice is such a main staple throughout the world. It’s also the primary technology behind plant-based milks, which have become a popular nutritional replacement for dairy milk. In fact, extrusion can make dairy milk healthier.

This demonstrates that the problem with going after ‘ultra-processed’ foods is we don’t really understand what this term encompasses, and by its very nature, it’s too vague to be useful. Because of this vagueness, we might get rid of ‘bad’ food, but we also could eliminate good food, too.

Though it’s been crippled by budget cuts and firings, the National Institutes of Health still maintains a medical library that carries a paper by Allen Levine and Job Ubbink. Published in the Obesity Science and Practice journal it touches on the complicated problems with defining ultra-processed foods based solely on the processes used.

Group 4 products are not necessarily unhealthy. Infant formula, an often‐quoted example… can sustain newborn babies in the first half year of their lives, when breast milk is unavailable and is considered safe and nutritious. The verdict on the health impact of meat analogs based on plant proteins is still out, as many are formulated with high salt and saturated fat contents but there is no reason they cannot be formulated with acceptable amounts of salt and saturated fats next to a high protein and fiber content and thus fit in a healthy diet in addition to being animal friendly and more sustainable than meat.

This confusion about ultra-processed and what it means and when is it good versus bad is why the Dietary Guidelines for Americans don’t incorporate restrictions against ultra-processing; preferring to focus more on clear food choices organizations and people can easily understand.

Kessler’s recommendations are a mashup of NOVA categorized processed and ultra-processed foods, some based on their use, others based on how they’re created, and even others based on whether the use is personal or commercial. Except that he’s incorporating a procedure (a petition to revoke GRAS designation) that would result in a catastrophic and sudden undermining of our food system with seeming little concern for the short or even long-term consequences.

And all indicators show he has a receptive audience in RFK Jr.

Ominous nutritional clouds on the horizon

I mention the Kessler petition because I believe that RFK Jr is going to use this petition to give credibility to his own ideological biases to redefine The Dietary Guidelines for Americans. And this will not be a good thing.

RFK Jr ignored the advisory committee’s recommendations and has claimed the new Guidelines will only be a few pages, four at most. The problem is, the Guidelines themselves are not intended for a general audience, they’re intended to provide the scientific basis for all of the recommendations. In other words: they’re not used by parents to determine what milk to buy for their kids, but for schools as justification for the type of milk they serve. It is the summaries contained within the guidelines that are released to the public. To remove all of this in order to just provide a simplified push for a few foods removes all transparency to any decision made in the guidelines.

Why is this harmful? After all, we’ve had years of ignoring the Guidelines and can continue doing so.

It’s harmful in how the Guidelines can impact on what foods are accessible. For instance, the Guidelines can be used to define what food can be purchased with SNAP funds, or that schools have to serve for meals. Eliminating ‘ultra-processed’ foods, especially when we don’t have a clear understanding of what this term even means will eliminate a whole lot of affordable food options for most folk. That school tomato sauce purchase is a good example.

And what about ‘good’ ultra-processed foods, like some forms of yogurts, enriched flour, or plant-based meats and milks? These can be nutritionally superior to minimally processed alternatives but the processes used for them would become taboo.

I suspect even something as essential as the peanut-based paste used to feed kids in starving countries would fail any ultra-processed test RFK Jr would provide.  And the sensible recommendations for listing beans, peas, and legumes as a protein source will die a quick death in favor of raw milk and beef fat.

The impact on the Dietary Guidelines could be bad, but worse would be for RFK Jr to actually act on Kelling’s petition. Combined with the Trump immigration effort’s impact on the food industry and the Congressional budget cuts for SNAP, we could be heading into times when price of eggs is the least of our concerns.

Will we survive?

Will we survive RFK Jr’s interventions on vaccinations and food? The short answer is yes. The longer answer is yes, but it won’t be easy and will be a battle every day until he’s gone. And the sadder answer is yes, but not all of us.

We can be reasonably sure that any food producer impacted by an RFK Jr version of dietary guideline or GRAS reversal would tie any such decision in court for years. It’s one thing to ask ice cream companies to remove artificial dyes from ice cream; it’s another to completely toss plant-based milks, baby formula, corn syrup, or foods with shelf stabilizers.

And it’s impossible to turn an entire populace back into primitive hunter/gatherers.

And therein is our tiny path to salvation: RFK Jr’s “my way or the highway” form of decision making will undermine whatever he attempts. He’s a fruitcake with fruitcake ideas and absolutely no guardrails to stop him. Trump isn’t stopping him, Congressional Republicans aren’t stopping him, and the talking heads are just chanting “Go Bobby Go!”

But it’s the obvious badness about his arbitrary decisions we can use, both as a target to fight and a rallying cry.

In the last few days, blue states like New Mexico, Illinois,  and others are looking at what they can do to ensure citizens have access to COVID vaccinations:

Pritzker’s health department in Illinois is currently exploring the possibility of purchasing Covid-19 vaccines in bulk straight from manufacturers in response to the mess in Washington, a senior Illinois health official confirms to me. Meanwhile, a coalition of mostly-blue states led by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey is planning to coordinate on the purchase and distribution of pediatric vaccines, should the federal government restrict access to them, according to a source familiar with ongoing discussions. This will likely include big states like New York and Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately, though, the fact that only blue states are acting leaves significant numbers of people living in red states that will offered something like ivermectin, instead, and a whole lot of folk will end up dying.

Like I said RFK Jr can be survived…but not by everyone.

 

header image courtesy heaute.at via CC by 4.0 

 

 

Categories
Browsers Burningbird Technology Web

Rebooting Weblogging?

I haven’t been out to scripting.com for a long time, and was surprised to find Dave is not using https. Of course, the page I tried to access (on rebooting weblogging) triggered a warning in my browser. It triggers a warning in any browser, but some are more severe than others.

There were issues with https and having to pay fees for SSL certs, but that all changed with LetsEncrypt. And the load on the server is nothing nowadays. Is it necessary to use https? Not always. But is it worth the pain in the butt people have to go through trying to access my page without it? Nope. I want people here. I like people here.

Hi, you.

(I wrote about my transition from http to https.)

Dave sent me a link on why he doesn’t support https, but I don’t know that Google Is Evil is really justification. You scratch anything and you’ll find someone or something somewhere acting evil from one perspective or another.

I went from http to https and I didn’t break the web with 404s. What broke the web is my determination to use as many domains as I possibly could for one person before I finally wised up and stuck with burningbird.net.

There are not enough redirects in the world to ‘fix’ all the 404s my domain experimentation has wrought. I think I made the folks at the Wayback Machine cry.

The thing for me is, it’s more important to write than get caught up on the tech. Today, there is no tech hill I’m willing to die on, because I’m more focused on not getting discouraged, not giving up on the weblog, continuing to write. That’s why I duplicate my weblog posts on Substack: it’s an easy way of offering email notifications and good comment control.

Yeah, yeah, it’s evil, too.

You know what’s really evil? The fact that I can’t get a covid vaccination right now because RFK Jr has mucked everything up. That trans people are having to cower in fear. That hard working migrants are running screaming from hooded thugs and being sent to gulags in other countries. That we have a President bent on destroying the country.

Google’s push for https doesn’t reach pebble-size on this mountain.

The medium isn’t the goal, it’s just a means. I paid my tech dues in the past, and I want to do other things now.

Anyway, here’s Dave’s reasoning on not using https. Note, this is served using https.

https://this.how/googleAndHttp/