1) Denial
2) Hubris
3) Normalization of our gerontocracy.
I hope the Dem leadership has learned from this. Voters themselves are partly to blame, because they keep reelecting these doddering politicians, presumably for sentimental reasons.
One egregious example: Senator Strom Thurmond (R), who finally retired at age 100, six short months before he moved on to his great reward.
I remember a photo of him asleep in a wheelchair sitting near the Senate floor with a headline of something like…Thurmond resides in the best nursing home in DC…the Senate.
rw saunders
hey, how lucky can one man get.
For his last few years he actually (while still in office) lived at Walter Reed Hospital.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/strom-t...into-hospital/
AP News tells me that the current president, with his unflattering history as a businessman, considers himself qualified to tell Walmart that they should not raise prices due to the impact of tariffs. I particularly enjoy the part where he says they made “unexpected” billions in profit during the prior administration and should therefore eat the higher costs.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/05/yo...th-fake-books/
The story of the Chicago Sun Times and Philadelphia Enquirer (so far) publishing a Summer Books feature that is 40+ pages of worthless AI-generated slop. Books that don’t exist, incorrect attributions of books to authors … of course the person who is taking responsibility for the error (at a third-party content provider) says this is the “one time” he didn’t check the work. He made sure to cash the check, I’d wager!
A fine metaphor for the current anti-expert, pro-grift environment. I do have hope that the pendulum will swing back toward actual people who actually care at some point.
Dan Fuller, local bicycle enthusiast
Back to the OP, United Health just looks sicker and sicker.
A former exec admits, “You gain profitability by denying care,” which is pretty much our health care system in a nutshell.
Some really disturbing stuff exposed here:
Revealed: UnitedHealth secretly paid nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers
A Guardian investigation finds insurer quietly paid facilities that helped it gain Medicare enrollees and reduce hospitalizations. Whistleblowers allege harm to residents
And there’s more.
It’s gonna get really interesting when this corporate perversion of the Medicare Advantage program collides with $500 billion in Medicare cuts that are in the present Republican tax cut bill. Talk about 3D chess…
Trod Harland, Pickle Expediter
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. — James Baldwin
In business, velocity is how you make money. The faster you do more things, the longer it takes regulators to unpack what you are doing. And by the time they do, the settlement costs are just a percentage of revenue gained. Meanwhile you've got 12 other things going on no one has figured out yet. Compliance is for losers.
So, Grandpa gets a plane, accuses Sth Africa of genocide against white people and uses footage from a country thousands of kilometres away as proof of the genocide, while conducting a witch hunt against an Ivy League university. I would have thought Grandpa and his acolytes should drop the witch hunt and perhaps consider going back to school themselves. Unless being dumb is a pre-requisite for working for Grandpa. The DRC is not Sth Africa people.
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