Mayor Mike Vs. The Reverend (Not That One): Who Ya Gonna Believe?:
A week after the pastor of a Wilmington church and 250 signatories sent a letter to the city and its police department accusing officials of harassing area homeless residents and social services workers, Mayor Mike Purzycki issued a scathing reply, citing “misstatements” in the minister’s Dec. 5 letter.
Purzycki’s five-page emailed reply, addressed to the Rev. Patrick Burke of the Episcopal Church of Saints Andrew and Matthew on North Shipley Street, called Burke’s letter one-sided. He also said the Dec. 5 accusations slander the city’s police officers.
“It is somewhere between disturbing and amusing to me how little it takes for members of the clergy and other neighborhood groups to so loudly signal their virtue when they have heard only one side of a story,” Purzycki wrote. “To be very clear, the city welcomes working in partnership with our faith-based and non-profit organizations to address the needs and concerns of our residents.”
To be very clear, the City blatantly gave its middle finger to a judicial order and deliberately set out to do exactly what they had agreed not to do:
Purzycki’s email was sent to an address not belonging to Burke. Nearly 40 others, including incoming mayor Gov. John Carney, were included on the email. (Hopefully, John’s designated reader alerted him to the letter when John awoke from his latest nap.)
Meet the new piece-o’-shit mayor, same as the old piece-o’-shit mayor. It really is BucciniPollinville now.
Serial Anti-Vax Attorney To Join RFK Jr. at DHHS? As in, his entire practice consists of anti-vax lawsuits, including seeking to get rid of polio vaccines:
The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.
That campaign is just one front in the war that the lawyer, Aaron Siri, is waging against vaccines of all kinds.
Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.
Mr. Kennedy has privately expressed interest in having Mr. Siri serve in the Health and Human Services Department’s top legal job, general counsel. However, Mr. Siri has suggested he may have more influence outside the administration. At his law firm, Siri & Glimstad, he oversees about 40 professionals working on vaccine cases and policy.
UnitedHealthcare Declares War On Autistic Kids. You know why:
The insurer that has been paying for her son’s therapy, UnitedHealthcare, has begun — to the befuddlement of his clinical team — denying him the hours they say he requires to maintain his progress. Inside the insurance conglomerate, the nation’s largest and most profitable, the slashing of care to children like Benji does have a reason, though it has little to do with their needs. It is part of a secret internal cost-cutting campaign that targets a growing financial burden for the company: the treatment of thousands of children with autism across the country.
ProPublica has obtained what is effectively the company’s strategic playbook, developed by Optum, the division that manages mental health benefits for United. In internal reports, the company acknowledges that the therapy, called applied behavior analysis, is the “evidence-based gold standard treatment for those with medically necessary needs.” But the company’s costs have climbed as the number of children diagnosed with autism has ballooned; experts say greater awareness and improved screening have contributed to a fourfold increase in the past two decades — from 1 in 150 to 1 in 36.
So Optum is “pursuing market-specific action plans” to limit children’s access to the treatment, the reports said.
“Key opportunities” are outlined in bullets in the documents. While acknowledging some areas have “very long waitlists” for the therapy, the company said it aims to “prevent new providers from joining the network” and “terminate” existing ones, including “cost outliers.” If an insurer drops a provider from its network, patients may have to find a new clinician that accepts their insurance or pay up to tens of thousands of dollars a year out of pocket for the therapy. The company has calculated that, in some states, this reduction could impact more than two-fifths of its ABA therapy provider groups in network and up to 19% of its patients in therapy.
They are unindicted criminals without consciences. United Healthcare and companies like it should be in no position to determine who can access and afford healthcare in the United States.
Take A Bow, Lina Khan. She basically stopped the merger of two giant grocery chains from going through. If you read the piece, you’ll see that she was right:
On Tuesday, the federal government succeeded in doing something that it hasn’t done, or even seriously tried to do, in decades: It persuaded a court to block one large supermarket chain from acquiring another. In a major victory for the Federal Trade Commission, Judge Adrienne Nelson of the U.S. District Court in Oregon temporarily halted the merger of Kroger and Albertsons—the nation’s second- and fourth-biggest grocery retailers, respectively—ruling that the deal would harm competition in hundreds of communities. Hours later, a state court delivered another blow, blocking the merger in a separate suit brought by Washington’s attorney general. By the next day, Albertsons had announced that it was abandoning the deal and suing Kroger for allowing it to fall apart.
But the timing is awkward. The incoming Trump administration is all but guaranteed to go easier on merger enforcement. Shortly after Nelson’s ruling came out, Donald Trump announced what had long been expected: He will replace the current FTC chair, Lina Khan, with an appointee more friendly to corporate dealmaking. For at least the next four years, major federal merger challenges might be scarce. Still, states will almost certainly continue advancing the ball on their own. In the long term, the door to revived competition enforcement has been decisively cracked open—and it won’t be so easy to shut.
Here’s why blocking the merger is important:
Kroger and Albertsons are products of this history. Each has grown by buying dozens of other chains. Kroger is not just Kroger; it’s also Harris Teeter, King Soopers, Fry’s, Ralphs, Smith’s, and more. Albertsons is Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Vons, Shaw’s, Acme, and others. As the two retailers rolled up one rival after another, antitrust enforcers imposed barely a speed bump along the way, typically requiring the chains to spin off a fraction of stores to preserve a semblance of competition. When Kroger acquired Fred Meyer in 1999, the largest supermarket merger ever at the time, the FTC’s only stipulation was that the companies divest eight of their combined 2,200 stores. Similarly, in 2015, the FTC allowed Albertsons to acquire Safeway on the condition that it sell 146 stores to Haggen, a small retailer. (These so-called merger remedies rarely work, because the cast-off stores have to go up against the more powerful chain formed by the merger. Haggen, for example, soon filed for bankruptcy, closing many of the stores and selling others back to Albertsons.)
The Complete And Total Wonderfulness That Is Madinah Wilson-Anton! A simply great profile by Cris Barrish. I will not excerpt because (a) the article is free; and (b) you should savor every word. Just read it!
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