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Why Democrats’ ambitions for health care are shrinking rapidly

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As <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/7/16/20694598/joe-biden-health-care-plan-public-option">Joe Biden</a> closed in on the Democratic Party’s nomination, with only <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/4/10/18304448/bernie-sanders-medicare-for-all">Bernie Sanders</a> still running against him, part of his pitch was that he knew how he’d pay for his proposals.
Bernie’s $32 trillion <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/4/10/18304448/bernie-sanders-medicare-for-all">single-payer Medicare-for-all plan</a>? Unrealistic and unaffordable. Biden’s $800 billion plan to create a <a href="https://www.vox.com/21540041/election-2020-joe-biden-health-care">new public insurance option</a> and build on Obamacare? Joe has it covered.
“The fact of the matter is, everything I call for I pay for,” Biden <a href="https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/march-democratic-debate-transcript-joe-biden-bernie-sanders">said</a> in his final debate with Sanders on March 15, 2020.
But in practice, an $800 billion plan may be almost as politically daunting as a $32 trillion one.
“It’s still a monumental lift,” Kim Monk, who follows Congress for investment clients at Capital Alpha Partners, told me.
And that is forcing Biden to aim lower still.
Right now, in his proposed <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/28/22404411/biden-american-families-plan-inequality">American Families Plan</a>, Biden is asking Congress for $200 billion to expand the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies for health insurance premiums. The expansion already passed in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22360870/american-rescue-plan-act-premium-tax-credit-health-insurance">American Rescue Plan</a> but expires after two years; the new proposal would make them permanent. The public option is nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile, the payment plan Biden proposed during his campaign and in his debate with Sanders — an increased tax on capital gains — <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-22/biden-to-propose-capital-gains-tax-as-high-as-43-4-for-wealthy">will probably be used</a> to pay for other parts of the Biden agenda, while a $450 billion savings proposal, favored by most Democrats in Congress, that would allow Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies was also left out of the Families Plan. Congressional Democrats were <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-urge-biden-to-keep-drug-pricing-proposal-in-antipoverty-plan-11619126518">urging</a> Biden to include the drug price idea and use the savings to pay for coverage expansions, such as lowering Medicare’s eligibility age.
It’s hard not to see one as related to the other. Biden’s plans for expanding health coverage — earlier Medicare eligibility, a public option — were modest compared to Sanders’s. But their fate, even as Biden proposes trillions in other new spending, shows that health care programs still have to pass a difficult test: They need to at least partially pay for themselves.
For decades, the norm has been that when Congress wants to pass a new expansion of health coverage, it will find the money to pay for at least some of that expansion from the health care industry, whether in the form of new taxes or spending cuts. Health care funds health care.
But that creates a huge political problem: The health care industry can block new reforms not by opposing the reforms themselves but by campaigning against the cuts or taxes used to pay for them. Doctors, hospitals, and health care companies retain a lot of influence in Congress; every congressional district has a hospital, as lobbyists happily point out.
So even as their ambitions for health care grow, as demonstrated by Biden’s embrace of the public option, Democrats find themselves caught in this trap.
Nobody knows for sure why Biden dropped the Medicare negotiations proposal from the American Families Plan, even as he called for lawmakers to pass it this year on a bipartisan basis — an unlikely prospect — in his <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/28/22408111/winners-and-losers-biden-joint-session-speech">first address to Congress</a>. The reporting has been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/04/24/biden-families-plan-tax/">circumspect</a>.
But we do know the pharma industry has a <a href="https://www.axios.com/phrma-lobbying-trump-drug-prices-2018-3651a0c7-0f33-4d02-94b5-3778427cc559.html">massive war chest</a>, refilled every year by member fees, and has promised to deploy it if any major drug pricing reform started moving through Congress. Drug manufacturers also enjoy <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/4/2/22362078/covid-19-vaccines-pfizer-pharma-companies-popularity">their best public approval</a> in years after delivering Covid-19 vaccines in record time.
“Why go after the very industry that basically is our lifeline out of the pandemic?” Monk said.
This is how the trap closes: When health care must pay for health care, the health care industry must take a hit in order to cover more people. That is something the industry’s immense lobbying apparatus usually wants to stop, and given its influence in the halls of Congress and in the White House, that can make anybody’s health care plan — whether it costs $800 billion or $32 trillion — a nonstarter.
Biden avoided this problem with the initial two-year expansion of the ACA subsidies in the American Rescue Plan by mostly not paying for it. But even in this age of deficit doves, the $200 billion to make that expansion, or any other major health care expansion, permanent would need to be paid for. That presents a massive political problem, even for Biden’s more modest (compared with Sanders’s) proposals.
“It was quite easy to get the health care industry on board for temporarily increasing ACA premium help without any budgetary offset to pay for it, as was the case in the American Rescue Plan,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for the Kaiser Family Foundation. Levitt framed that bill’s health care provisions as “all winners, no losers.”
“As soon as there starts being pressure to pay for health care enhancements,” he continued, “it becomes a zero-sum game with losers as well as winners.”
The health care industry can be persuaded that the trade-off is worth it. It’s happened before.
The platonic ideal of this framework is the ACA itself, the 2010 law Biden says he wants to build on with this subsidy expansion and (eventually) a public option. About 80 percent of the ACA <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/08/30/how-congress-paid-for-obamacare-in-two-charts/">was covered</a> by spending cuts (for Medicare payments to providers, for example) or new taxes (various new levies on pharma and health insurers and medical devices) targeted to the industry.
The industry bought into the law and didn’t oppose its passage. It took the deal that is at the heart of this long-held tradition: The coverage expansion would mean more paying customers. It might take a trim in payment rates or on new taxes, but it’d make up for it with more volume. And, as it turned out, more than 20 million people were covered by the law.
But the industry may not be willing to make the same kind of bargain with Biden because his proposals don’t have the same appeal. The Medicare expansion is opposed by many hospitals and doctors — Medicare pays lower rates than private health insurers; more people on Medicare means <a href="https://twitter.com/larry_levitt/status/1387034475222093828">less reimbursement for them</a>.
The industry opposes the public option, which would presumably set rates lower than private insurance so it could charge cheaper premiums, for the same reason. Considering more than half of America’s uninsured <a href="https://www.kff.org/health-reform/issue-brief/how-the-american-rescue-plan-act-affects-subsidies-for-marketplace-shoppers-and-people-who-are-uninsured/">already qualify</a> for Medicaid or the ACA, the public option is less a device for expanding coverage than a way to drive down health care costs. And that is exactly why the health care industry would fight fiercely to stop it.
The Biden administration still can, and has, taken steps to expand health coverage. An additional 4 million people <a href="https://www.urban.org/research/publication/cost-and-coverage-implications-five-options-increasing-marketplace-subsidy-generosity">qualify</a> for ACA subsidies since Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law. Nearly 1 million people have <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/06/politics/affordable-care-act-enrollment-premiums/index.html">signed up</a> for insurance during a special open enrollment period Biden started shortly after taking office.
The administration is also bound by the rules and politics of the Senate. A public option may not be permissible under the <a href="https://www.vox.com/22242476/senate-filibuster-budget-reconciliation-process">“budget reconciliation” rules</a> that allowed Democrats to move some legislation without any Republican votes. Some moderate Senate Democrats may be <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/511909-battle-looms-over-biden-health-care-plan-if-democrats-win-big">less enthused</a> about the public option or even a Medicare expansion than some of their peers who are more progressive.
But America still has the highest uninsured rate in the developed world and the highest health care costs. So long as the health care industry wields a veto pen over any plan that would cut into its profits to address those problems, little is going to change.
Democrats will have to find a way to escape this trap.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22422793/joe-biden-health-care-plan-obamacare-medicare-public-option">https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22422793/joe-biden-health-care-plan-obamacare-medicare-public-option</a>

vox Why Democrats’ ambitions for health care are shrinking rapidly

As Joe Biden closed in on the Democratic Party’s nomination, with only Bernie Sanders still running against him, part of his pitch was th...

How to stop the next falling space rocket

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There’s a scene in <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/5/9/18535738/primetime-podcast-todd-vanderwerff-the-west-wing">The West Wing</a>’s second season in which one of the protagonists is told a <a href="https://communicationsoffice.tripod.com/2-20.txt">Chinese satellite is falling to Earth</a>, but no one knew exactly when or where.
“A satellite is crashing to Earth, and NASA sent us a fax?” Donna Moss says, clearly concerned. But few in the show shared her fear, because debris in space often falls out of orbit and is either burned up upon reentry or lands harmlessly somewhere on the planet.
The US government estimates around <a href="https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/does-space-junk-fall-sky">200 to 400 tracked objects enter Earth’s atmosphere every year</a> — roughly one a day — out of the 170 million pieces of space debris floating above our heads. The fallen items rarely make news, though, since they usually crash into the ocean, which covers about 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, or sparsely populated areas.
Yet news of a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/science/china-rocket-crash-long-march-5b.html">Chinese rocket falling uncontrollably to Earth</a> has awakened the Donna Moss in many of us.
A section of the Long March 5B rocket, which launched China’s new space station into orbit last week, is expected to <a href="https://twitter.com/AerospaceCorp/status/1390666461576900610?s=20">hit somewhere on the planet either on Saturday or Sunday</a>, experts say. At <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/science/china-rocket-crash-long-march-5b.html">10 stories</a> and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57013540">18 tons</a> (36,000 pounds), it’s one of the largest items in decades to spiral in an undirected dive toward the Earth.
<div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Our latest prediction for CZ-5B rocket body reentry is:  
 09 May 2021 03:53 UTC ± 11 hours 
Reentry will be along one of the ground tracks shown here. It is still too early to determine a meaningful debris footprint. Follow this page for updates:  <a href="https://t.co/p2AU9zE3y2">https://t.co/p2AU9zE3y2</a> <a href="https://t.co/1depRKMk6f">pic.twitter.com/1depRKMk6f</a>
— The Aerospace Corporation (@AerospaceCorp) <a href="https://twitter.com/AerospaceCorp/status/1390666461576900610?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 7, 2021</a></blockquote>
</div>
It could cause serious damage if it hits a major population zone, but so far few governments — especially the one in Beijing — seem overly concerned.
“The probability of this process causing harm on the ground is extremely low,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson <a href="https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/china-says-its-rocket-debris-unlikely-cause-any-harm-2021-05-07/">Wang Wenbin</a> said on Friday. The <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/no-plan-shoot-down-chinese-rocket-pentagon-chief-2021-05-06/">White House and Pentagon</a>, meanwhile, say they’re tracking the rocket and have no plans to shoot it out of the sky.
After speaking with experts, two things have become clear about this episode.
The first is that the idea of a large rocket hurtling toward Earth is understandably scary. It conjures up images of a city devastated by the impact, potentially injuring thousands.
Importantly, the chance of anything like that happening is infinitesimally small — like <a href="https://twitter.com/SpaceTrackOrg/status/1390527414162264065?s=20">1 in a 196.9 million chance</a> small. While there have been a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-31/nasa-skylab-fell-to-earth-esperance-retrofocus/12282468">few bad incidents</a> in the past, nothing on that scale has ever happened, and very likely won’t now.
The second is that it’s troubling this scenario could happen in the first place. Why is it possible for China, or any other space-faring nation, to launch massive rockets and let them fall to earth willy-nilly?
The answer to that is policy failure: Despite regulations on space flight and conduct, the issue of rocket reentry is loosely and poorly regulated, so countries cut corners and take their chances that a falling rocket won’t hit anything major.
“We’re in the realm of risk management, and states are willing to swallow the risk,” said Christopher Newman, a professor of space law and policy at Northumbria University in Britain.
But there’s always the more-than-zero chance that their luck runs out and a falling rocket sparks a catastrophe. Experts are unanimous that the falling Chinese rocket is a symptom of a much larger problem that needs solving sooner rather than later.
“If you don’t want any more of this kind of thing to happen, we need the big powers to step up,” said Bleddyn Bowen, a professor of space warfare and policy at the University of Leicester in the UK.
There’s a trope about space that it’s the “Wild West,” a phrase I often catch myself using. But the truth is that there have been rules governing operations in space for decades.
In the <a href="https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/introouterspacetreaty.html">Outer Space Treaty of 1967</a> and <a href="https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/introliability-convention.html">Liability Convention of 1972</a> are guidelines for how to punish a country that lets one of its rockets cause damage on Earth. Basically, those rules say that the offending state can be held liable by the victim nation. So, in this case, if the Chinese rocket were to land in the middle of New York City (which, again, is extremely unlikely to happen), the Biden administration could ask China to pay for damages and demand other recourse.
In other words, this is a state-to-state issue. “If the rocket lands on my house, I can’t go and sue China,” Northumbria’s Newman told me. That’d be UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s job to call up Chinese President Xi Jinping.
But that’s really it. There’s nothing in international law to stop any nation from letting any of the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57013540">900 rockets</a> currently in orbit from falling in an unplanned way. “This isn’t illegal,” Newman said about the current saga of the Chinese rocket. “There is no sort of regulation on an international level on reentry.”
Individual countries essentially govern themselves when they make plans to launch a rocket into space. If the Chinese government is fine with the plan of an unplanned reentry, then that’s what’ll happen at the end of the mission.
Naturally, such plans cause frustration among space experts. “I think it’s negligent of them,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in the US, told the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/science/china-rocket-crash-long-march-5b.html">New York Times</a> on Thursday. “I think it’s irresponsible.” Last year, in fact, another Chinese Long March 5B rocket burned up and pieces of metal fell onto a few buildings in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/may/04/out-of-control-chinese-rocket-tumbling-to-earth">Ivory Coast</a>.
But it’s important to remember two things.
First, China — and other leading space-faring nations like the US, Russia, Japan, and the European Union — know that the chance of hitting people or infrastructure is so small that they don’t feel the need to spend extra money and time to plan for a controlled reentry.
Ensuring a rocket splashes into, say, the Pacific Ocean, requires more fuel and staff work, which increases the cost of missions. For most space agencies grappling with <a href="https://spacenews.com/op-ed-global-government-space-budgets-continues-multiyear-rebound/">small budgets</a>, cutting costs on that part of the operation is worth the risk.
Second, and relatedly, China isn’t the only country taking their chances here; others, including the US, have as well, leading to some scary scenes.
In 1978, a <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/1978-soviet-nuclear-satellite-crashes-in-canadian-north">Soviet satellite</a> carrying a nuclear reactor crash-landed in northern Canada and spewed radioactive waste. The next year, the NASA-launched <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-31/nasa-skylab-fell-to-earth-esperance-retrofocus/12282468">Skylab</a> space station — America’s first one — fell out of orbit, with parts landing in the Indian Ocean and in Western Australia, though luckily hurting no one.
“Bad behavior was quite typical by the Americans and Soviets during the space race,” said Leicester’s Bowen. “Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones,” he said of current complaints about the Chinese rocket.
While there are more safety measures now and technology has improved, experts say the main problem is still that space law is too lax on this issue. They point to the Ivory Coast incident last year, where the country decided not to seek recourse from China, potentially out of the desire not to anger a <a href="https://m.scirp.org/papers/87841">key economic partner</a>.
So what has to change?
Experts say countries like China, the US, and others should leverage this moment and work through the United Nations to regulate rocket reentry. They should compel space programs to spend more to ensure their rockets land far away from people, and even wildlife, when possible. Even if the risk of a calamity is extremely low today, the fact that it’s more than zero is already too high.
“If this is good for anything, it’s an opportunity for everyone to take ownership of space as a domain of human activity and to want a say in how it’s governed,” said Northumbria’s Newman. “We’re now at the stage where this is generating concern.”
But until there’s political will for such action — and governments take the rocket reentry problem seriously — we’ll have more Chinese-rocket-type scares.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22424594/china-rocket-falling-space-law">https://www.vox.com/22424594/china-rocket-falling-space-law</a>

vox How to stop the next falling space rocket

There’s a scene in The West Wing ’s second season in which one of the protagonists is told a Chinese satellite is falling to Earth , but no...

RSVP now to talk Gold Diggers with Sanjena Sathian and the Vox Book Club

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The Vox Book Club is linking to <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://bookshop.org/shop/voxbookclub&referrer=vox.com&sref=https://www.vox.com/culture/21423100/idiot-elif-batuman-semiotics-language-word-games&xcust=___vx__p_22049617__t_w__r_vox.com/vox-book-club__d" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588\u0026xs=1\u0026url=https://bookshop.org/shop/voxbookclub\u0026referrer=vox.com\u0026sref=https://www.vox.com/culture/21423100/idiot-elif-batuman-semiotics-language-word-games\u0026xcust=___vx__p_22187457__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_vox.com/vox-book-club__d_d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/shop/voxbookclub","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/21423100/idiot-elif-batuman-semiotics-language-word-games","xcust":"___vx__p_22187457__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_vox.com/vox-book-club__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Bookshop.org</a> to support local and independent booksellers.
This May, the Vox Book Club is reading Sanjena Sathian’s assured and immersive debut novel, <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fgold-diggers-9780593401088%2F9781984882035%3Fsscid%3D51k5_6boyq%26utm_source%3DShareASale%26utm_medium%3DAffiliate%26utm_campaign%3D314743%26utm_term%3D1535322&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22423416%2Frsvp-sanjena-sathian-live-event-vox-book-club-zoom" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516588\u0026xs=1\u0026url=https://bookshop.org/books/gold-diggers-9780593401088/9781984882035?sscid=51k5_6boyq\u0026utm_source=ShareASale\u0026utm_medium=Affiliate\u0026utm_campaign=314743\u0026utm_term=1535322\u0026referrer=vox.com\u0026sref=https://www.vox.com/culture/22423416/rsvp-sanjena-sathian-live-event-vox-book-club-zoom\u0026xcust=___vx__p_22187457__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/gold-diggers-9780593401088/9781984882035?sscid=51k5_6boyq\u0026utm_source=ShareASale\u0026utm_medium=Affiliate\u0026utm_campaign=314743\u0026utm_term=1535322","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22423416/rsvp-sanjena-sathian-live-event-vox-book-club-zoom","xcust":"___vx__p_22187457__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Gold Diggers</a>. It’s got <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22379926/gold-diggers-book-review-sanjena-sathian">alchemy, heists, and diaspora politics</a>, and it’s the kind of book that makes me have a lot of thoughts about Jonathan Lethem’s 2003 novel Fortress of Solitude.
We’ll be talking about the whole thing with Sathian live on Zoom on Wednesday, May 19, at 5 pm Eastern, with audience questions encouraged. We’d love to see you there, so go ahead and <a href="https://voxmediaevents.com/vox-book-club-gold-diggers">RSVP right here</a>. In the meantime, <a href="http://vox.com/book-club-newsletter">subscribe to the Vox Book Club newsletter</a> to make sure you don’t miss anything, and come back on Friday, May 14 for our on-site discussion.
Friday, May 14: Discussion post on Gold Diggers published to Vox.com
Wednesday, May 19: Virtual live event with author Sanjena Sathian at 5 pm Eastern. You can <a href="https://voxmediaevents.com/vox-book-club-gold-diggers">RSVP here</a>. Reader questions are encouraged!
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22423416/rsvp-sanjena-sathian-live-event-vox-book-club-zoom">https://www.vox.com/culture/22423416/rsvp-sanjena-sathian-live-event-vox-book-club-zoom</a>

vox RSVP now to talk Gold Diggers with Sanjena Sathian and the Vox Book Club

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Don’t freak out about the jobs report yet

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America may be coming out of a pandemic, but its jobs recovery may not be as rosy as some economists believed. That doesn’t mean that everyone should be freaking out — at least not yet. Almost everything about the economy over the past year has been unprecedented, and much of it surprising.
The US economy <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf">added 266,000 jobs in April</a>, a huge miss compared to the 1 million jobs economists expected. The unemployment rate in April ticked up a bit to 6.1 percent, as the number of jobs added didn’t outpace the size of the workforce. The Black unemployment rate increased to 9.7 percent, while the white unemployment rate fell to 5.3 percent.
The news left many people, well, shook. “This is a big miss that changes how we think about the recovery,” University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers <a href="https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers/status/1390648224164188164?s=20">tweeted</a>. Economist Nick Bunker <a href="https://www.hiringlab.org/2021/05/07/april-2021-jobs-report/">wrote</a> that it “might be one of the most disappointing jobs numbers of all time.”
“Obviously, this is an incredibly disappointing report,” Bunker told Vox in an interview. “All the signs from all the other data that we have is that demand for workers is quite strong, and the report today, while it doesn’t point in the direction of, say, massive labor shortages, it suggests that there is some hesitancy out there on behalf of workers to take out some jobs, be it because of fear of the virus, child care constraints, or concerns about the instability of jobs.”
It’s hard to argue that the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ April jobs report was good — not to mention that the jobs numbers from March were revised down as well, meaning the economy actually added fewer jobs that month than initially reported. But it also reinforces something that’s been true throughout the pandemic: A lot of what’s going on in the economy is just going to be completely unpredictable. Plenty of people would not have expected a <a href="https://www.vox.com/22264268/covid-19-housing-insecurity-housing-prices-mortgage-rates-pandemic-zoning-supply-demand">housing boom</a>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/22421095/chicken-wings-shortage-delivery-bar">a chicken wing shortage</a>, or <a href="https://www.vox.com/22410713/lumber-prices-shortage">a run on lumber</a>, either.
“Sometimes we overcomplicate situations by thinking that we should have thorough understandings of them when actually a great deal of humility is called for when we’re talking about unprecedented situations,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate. “We want, for the most part, to cheer for the end of the pandemic and the end of the economic downturn, and so it’s easy to get caught up in a tsunami of hope and optimism, but the economy has to do its own work to heal.”
The American economy <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/restaurants-and-retailers-have-regained-the-most-jobs-since-the-coronavirus-crisis-but-theres-a-catch-2020-08-07#:~:text=The%20economy%20shed%20a%20record,accurate%20measure%20of%20U.S.%20employment.">lost 22 million jobs</a> in March and April 2020, and <a href="https://twitter.com/byHeatherLong/status/1390645902096883716?s=20">it’s still 8 million jobs short</a> of where it was pre-pandemic. While the Covid-19 vaccine is now widely available, and <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations">more than half of American adults</a> have had at least one shot, the virus is still a dangerous threat, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/5/5/22419281/covid-19-vaccines-herd-immunity-hesitancy-anti-vaxxers">millions more people need to be vaccinated</a>. It feels almost inevitable that putting the country back together is going to take place in fits and starts — and some pieces of the puzzle might never fit back together.
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<aside><q>“It’s easy to get caught up in a tsunami of hope and optimism, but the economy has to do its own work to heal”</q></aside>
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“We don’t actually know what the economy is going to be like a month from now, much less 12 months from now. We know it’s going to be different because it already is different,” Hamrick said.
“We knew this would not be a 100-day battle, and today’s jobs report underscores the long-haul climb back to recovery,” said Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at a White House press conference on Friday.
Many economists, policy experts, and politicians pointed to a variety of explanations for April’s jobs numbers. Some people noted that with child care challenges and school closures, some parents may not be able to get back into the workforce very fast. Others have suggested that generous unemployment insurance benefits are keeping people out of the workforce, though there’s not much hard data evidence for that.
There is also the simple fact that with Covid-19 still spreading, many people are nervous about going back to work in person. Anecdotally, many businesses have said they’re struggling to hire, but <a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/news/2021/05/04/how-local-companies-are-filling-open-roles.html?ana=TRUEANTHEMTWT_PI&csrc=6398&taid=609171b6cd14980001d76c50&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter">some businesses have reported success with increasing wages</a>.
“Employers who truly face shortages of workers will respond by bidding up wages to attract those workers, and employers whose workers are being poached will raise wages to retain their workers, and so on,” Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist at the Labor Department, <a href="https://twitter.com/hshierholz/status/1390660399356252169?s=20">tweeted</a>. She <a href="https://twitter.com/hshierholz/status/1390660944796086277?s=20">also pointed out</a> that if employers are struggling to hire workers, you would expect them to increase the hours of the workers they already have, but that hasn’t happened to an extreme.
“There’s a lot of churn in here,” said Gregory Daco, chief US economist at Oxford Economics. Daco isn’t as alarmed as some other economists about the April numbers — he anticipated the possibility of what he calls an “April breather.”
“I think we have to be very careful not to fall into a trap of a one-way trend where every jobs number is going to be 1 million plus forever,” he said. “Let’s not feel depressed by just one jobs report.” He expects big gains coming into the summer.
The biggest gains in April were in the leisure and hospitality industries, which makes sense, given how hard the sector was hit when economies closed down and the fact that vaccinated people are starting to feel more comfortable going on vacation and out to eat. But there were other developments that were more puzzling or, at the very least, don’t have a sure explanation.
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<aside><q>“Maybe we should be a little concerned on the margins here, but I don’t think we have to radically change our view of the world because of this report”</q></aside>
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For instance, employment in construction didn’t change, even though construction season is sort of upon us. Employment in temporary help services (temp jobs) and couriers and messengers fell. On temp job declines, you could take it as a good sign that companies were perhaps hiring workers full time, but it’s not guaranteed that’s what happened. With courier and messenger jobs, a possible explanation could be that people are ordering less delivery as they go back to restaurants, for example. But again, that’s just a possibility.
There’s often not a linear story when it comes to what’s going on in the economy, and there likely isn’t one in this case. A variety of explanations for what happened in April could all be true. But because we live in such a politically charged environment, people tend to be selective in the narratives they embrace that align with their own interests and beliefs.
Case in point: The US Chamber of Commerce <a href="https://twitter.com/USChamber/status/1390670704736149507">seized on the jobs report</a> to call for an end to expanded unemployment insurance, which is set to end in September.
But it’s worth remembering that the economy was really brought to its knees last year, and it’s going to take a while for things to get better. Epidemiologists have been saying that “return to normal” will be gradual for a while now; that could be true for the economy as well.
“We don’t want to have a huge freakout about this one month of data. Maybe we should be a little concerned on the margins here, but I don’t think we have to radically change our view of the world because of this report,” Bunker said.
In other words, keep calm and carry on.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/5/7/22424859/april-jobs-report-economy">https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/5/7/22424859/april-jobs-report-economy</a>

vox Don’t freak out about the jobs report yet

America may be coming out of a pandemic, but its jobs recovery may not be as rosy as some economists believed. That doesn’t mean that every...

Anti-Inflammatory Drug Ibuprofen Does Not Worsen Covid Symptoms: Study

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Anti-Inflammatory Drug Ibuprofen Does Not Worsen Covid Symptoms: Study" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2020-12/9t7ugcnc_coronavirus-generic_625x300_20_December_20.jpg" title="Anti-Inflammatory Drug Ibuprofen Does Not Worsen Covid Symptoms: Study" /></div>
Concerns over the drugs emerged at the start of the Covid pandemic. (FILE)
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Paris:
Taking anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen does not increase the risk of developing a severe form of Covid-19 or of dying from it, according to a new study, the largest so far on this class of medicines.
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic there was concern over the potential effects of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which are used to treat everything from minor pain to chronic arthritis and cardiovascular disease.
But observational research published Saturday in the medical journal Lancet Rheumatology, based on 72,000 hospitalised patients, found that the drugs "do not increase the mortality or severity" of Covid-19.
The authors recommended that doctors should continue to prescribe NSAIDs as they have in the past.
"When the pandemic began over a year ago, we needed to be sure that these common medications would not lead to worse outcomes in people with Covid-19," lead author Ewen Harrison, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, said in a press release.
"We now have clear evidence that NSAIDs are safe to use in patients with Covid-19, which should provide reassurance to both clinicians and patients that they can continue to be used in the same way as before the pandemic began."
The NSAID family of anti-inflammatory drugs includes those widely used by the general public like ibuprofen -- an active substance in common drugs, such as Nurofen or Advil -- or ketoprofen.
Death rates the same
Concerns over the drugs emerged at the start of the Covid pandemic and centred on suspicions that they can worsen infections, especially bacterial.
In March 2020, for example, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended that people suffering Covid-19 symptoms avoid self-medicating with ibuprofen, after French officials warned that anti-inflammatory drugs could worsen effects of the virus.
The new research examined data on 72,000 Covid patients admitted to 255 health centres in England, Scotland and Wales between January and August 2020.
Of these, 4,211 had taken NSAIDs before hospitalisation.
The study found that the proportion of death was similar regardless of whether patients had taken the drugs or not -- 30.4 percent for those who had and 31.3 percent for those who had not.
It also found that those who took NSAIDs were "no more likely to be admitted to critical care, need invasive or non-invasive ventilation, or require oxygen".
There were some limitations to the research, however, including that in the UK ibuprofen is the most commonly used NSAID, so it is unclear whether the results could be as applicable to other countries where different NSAIDs are used.
They also did not know how long patients had taken the drugs and whether they were taking them for a serious chronic condition or temporary symptoms.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/anti-inflammatory-drug-ibuprofen-does-not-worsen-covid-symptoms-study-2437477">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/anti-inflammatory-drug-ibuprofen-does-not-worsen-covid-symptoms-study-2437477</a>

news world Anti-Inflammatory Drug Ibuprofen Does Not Worsen Covid Symptoms: Study

Concerns over the drugs emerged at the start of the Covid pandemic. (FILE) Paris: Taking anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen does no...

Britain Free Of Covid By August, Says UK Vaccine Task Force Chief: Report

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Britain Free Of Covid By August, Says UK Vaccine Task Force Chief: Report" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-01/np1m3iuo_uk-coronavirus-vaccination-650_625x300_27_January_21.jpg" title="Britain Free Of Covid By August, Says UK Vaccine Task Force Chief: Report" /></div>
The UK has administered over 51 million vaccines. (FILE)
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The new coronavirus will no longer be circulating in Britain by August, the government's departing vaccine taskforce chief Clive Dix told the Daily Telegraph on Friday.
"Sometime in August, we will have no circulating virus in the UK", Dix said, adding that he believed the vaccine booster programme could be pushed back to early 2022.
The government is looking at which COVID-19 vaccines would offer the best booster shot for vulnerable people later this year.
Dix told the Telegraph that he expects everybody in the UK to have been vaccinated at least once by the end of July, by which time "we'll have probably protected the population from all the variants that are known."
The UK has administered over 51 million vaccines and has been the second quickest country to give a first dose to at least half its adult population.
British officials said people under 40 should be offered an alternative to Oxford/AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine where possible due to a small risk of blood clots.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI)said the advice reflected low levels of coronavirus infection in Britain and the availability of other vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna.
Dix, who was appointed as interim leader of the task force in December, stepped down from his role last week.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/britain-free-of-covid-by-august-says-uk-vaccine-task-force-chief-report-2437470">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/britain-free-of-covid-by-august-says-uk-vaccine-task-force-chief-report-2437470</a>

news world Britain Free Of Covid By August, Says UK Vaccine Task Force Chief: Report

The UK has administered over 51 million vaccines. (FILE) The new coronavirus will no longer be circulating in Britain by August, the gov...