You know, this just can’t be said enough: when you hear that Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg shouldn’t go after Donald Trump because of TEH SKYROCKETINGZ CRIMEZ!!!!, you have to understand that crime is not, in fact, skyrocketing. A lot of right-wingers seem to prefer to say “skyrocketing crime rate” without even backing it up, as if the mere fact of its utterance makes it true, but shootings, murders, rape, burglary, robbery, and grand larceny are all down, and while felonies overall are up, they’ve been higher. And even that is an incomplete picture of crime – our “liberal” media never means water pollution or wage theft when they discuss crime, let alone corporate crime. I hope if I say these things enough, they’ll take, but given how careless our “liberal” media are, I won’t hold my breath.
Matt Stoller describes “the monopolies behind the Adderall shortage.” . Long story short: the big pharma wholesalers that sell drugs to pharmacies are, basically, too big to run, and of course only three of them control 85% of the market! For years the wholesalers sold large amounts of controlled substances (of which Adderall is one) to obvious organized crime fronts; when they got caught, and settled with several state Attorneys General, they stopped selling controlled substances to pharmacies that raised “red flags,” but not only did the wholesalers create overly broad red flags (simply increasing demand for controlled substances is one of them!), but they also use (wait for it) algorithms to create arbitrary and hard drug-selling caps, all of which means the wholesalers don’t know their customers (the pharmacies) very well, if at all. Hence “too big to run,” and it gets worse: because of their market power, the big wholesalers force pharmacies into exclusive contracts that the pharmacies can’t even read, which keeps pharmacies from finding a non-corrupt wholesaler. I think the states did the best they could, but this sounds like a job for Big Government!
You really won’t like this one: ProPublica catches big health insurance corporation Cigna having doctors reject insurance claims without even looking at them! Cigna, of course, says that’s not true, but doctors who’ve worked there say it is, and, gosh, whom do I believe – the corporation that never admits wrongdoing, or the worker whose testimony implicates them in wrongdoing? I kid, of course – I’ll take the latter, any day. What tool does Cigna use to reject all these claims? I hesitate to tell you the answer, but it rhymes with “Blaise Pascalgorithm.” Whomever came up with this roborejection process has apparently saved Cigna over $2 million annually from folks who would rather just pay a few hundred dollars than try to navigate some labyrinthine bureaucracy over the phone. But it’s possible to save $2 million and still lose your soul.
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