#sarah kliff

[st-just]

Even though we are most conscious of the big, widely spoken languages like English and Chinese, most languages are spoken by a much smaller number of people. Because of the sheer number of languages in the world, something like Estonian is much more typical. To a first approximation, nobody in the world ever learns Estonian. If an Estonian person wants to talk to someone who’s not Estonian, they speak English. In the past, they might have spoken Russian. But nobody is learning Estonian. And Estonian is very complicated, with 14 noun cases and all kinds of other trouble. But as Trudgill points out, even Estonian — with its ~1 million speakers and solid K-12 education system and some broadcast media — is much more widely spoken than most historical languages. The vast bulk of human history consists of language communities that had no television or radio or even writing, speaking face-to-face mostly to other people they actually know. Communities like that are Petri dishes of linguistic innovation. When I used to host “The Weeds,” Dara Lind liked to jokingly say things like “Teds Cruz” to mean “people like Ted Cruz” modeled on the pluralization of attorneys-general. That became an inside joke that Sarah Kliff and Jane Coaston and I picked up. And Trudgill says this is how language change works in small oral communities — someone makes something up because he or she thinks it’s clever, and if other people like it, they copy it. There aren’t a lot of entertainment options, language play is fun, and there’s no influx of foreigners learning your language and needing to simplify it. So you end up developing a kind of anti-creole, with lots of weird flourishes.

-Matthew Yglesias, Political lessons from Jamaican Patois

#quote #sociology #Matthew Yglesias

[thistlecatfics]

This subject came up with my friend last week so here is my attempt at starting a list of the best writers/artists of my (millennial) generation.

Requirements: my subjective personal taste, staying power, being iconically millennial/speaking to my generation, big name in their field even if not big name overall, not just a social media shit-stirrer

Sally Rooney (novels)

Taylor Swift (songwriting)

Beyonce (performance/singing) (gen x cusp)

RF Kuang (fantasy) (gen z cusp)

Tamsyn Muir (scifi)

Ocean Vuong (poetry, literary fiction)

Jia Tolentino, Jamelle Bouie, Ezra Klein (commentary)

Ronan Farrow, Sarah Kliff (investigative journalism)

Ed Yong (science writing) (gen x cusp)

Lin Manuel Miranda (musicals) (gen x cusp)

Other writers/artists I considered: Casey McQuiston (new adult/romance), Leigh Bardugo (YA/fantasy), SA Chakraborty (fantasy), Kai Cheng Thom (?? instagram-y writing?), Chanel Miller (memoir/visual art), Lady Gaga (performance), Jon Favreau (speech writing), Amanda Gorman (poet) (gen z), adrienne maree brown (essays) (gen x)

Who am I missing? Who absolutely needs to be on this list? I'm particularly looking for more nonfiction writers, poets, visual artists and non-Americans since those are areas I'm less familiar with.

BONUS Gen X honorees because I kept thinking of people who turned out to be Gen X:

Emily Wilson (translation)

NK Jemisin (fantasy)

Patrick Radden Keefe (history)

Jessica Valenti, Moira Donegan, Ta-Nehisi Coates (political commentary)

Cheryl Strayed (advice columns)

Susanne Collins (YA)

Kiese Laymon (memoir, essays)

Junot Diaz (fiction, short stories)

Jhumpa Lahari (fiction, short stories)

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: N.Y. Health Dept. Is Looking Into Bellevue’s Weight-Loss Surgery Program by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Sarah Kliff

By Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Sarah Kliff The Health Dept. is looking into the public hospital’s use of unlicensed technicians during some bariatric surgeries. Published: December 21, 2023 at 12:42PM from NYT Business https://ift.tt/EATdJMZ via IFTTT

View On WordPress

#antonio velardo #IFTTT #NYT

[studieesshow]

Obamacare Mandate for Preventive Care Is Restored, for Now

By Sarah Kliff Health plans must pay for all types of preventive care, including a pill to prevent H.I.V., while an appeals court deliberates whether to strike down part of the Affordable Care Act. Published: June 12, 2023 at 09:08PM via NYT Health https://ift.tt/LFgPp8d

#IFTTT #NYT #studies show #news machine

[fuojbe-beowgi]

"Nonprofit Health System Pauses Policy of Cutting Off Care for Patients in Debt" by Sarah Kliff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg via NYT Health https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/health/allina-health-nonprofit-medical-debt.html?partner=IFTTT

#IFTTT #NYT

[arthropooda]

X

#twitter #krystal ball #sarah kliff #america #coronavirus #ny times #workers #vulnerability

[midnightfunk]

#aca #affordable care act #health insurance #hospital bills #zuckerberg san francisco general hospital #san francisco #california #mark zuckerberg #out-of-network billing #class action lawsuit #vox #sarah kliff

[nprfreshair]

One of the things I think you’ll see a lot of conservative Senators and thinkers grapple with is, this bill actually keeps a lot of the structure of the Affordable Care Act in place. As much as it is kind of derided and detested by Republicans, it is proved awfully difficult to write a bill that would get rid of it entirely.

Sarah Kliff of Vox.com on the battle over health care

#Health Care #ACA #Trumpcare #Senate #Republicans #GOP #politics #Obamacare #Vox #Sarah Kliff #Interview

[vox]

A platinum get out of jail free card

This week on The Weeds, Sarah, Ezra, and Matt talk about the real causes of mass incarceration, Trump's move to roll back contraceptive coverage, and the mysterious world of high-end credit cards.

Listen here. 

#The Weeds #podcast #Ezra Klein #Sarah Kliff #Matt Yglesias #audio #quotables #graphics #viz #policy #politics

[porterdavis]

She is *the* policy wonk

Sarah Kliff‏Verified account @sarahkliff

The Senate tax bill: —Cuts $25B annually from Medicare —Cuts Medicaid enrollment by 5 million —Raises ACA premiums This is a health care bill.

#sarah kliff #vox #trumps tax scam

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: What Parents Should Know About Tongue-Tie Releases by Sarah Kliff, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas

By Sarah Kliff, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas Tongue, lip and cheek-tie releases are often recommended to help with breastfeeding or to prevent health problems. Few studies have shown benefits. Published: December 18, 2023 at 05:01AM from NYT Health https://ift.tt/629q51p via IFTTT

View On WordPress

#antonio velardo #IFTTT #NYT

[studieesshow]

Unwanted Epidurals, Untreated Pain: Black Women Tell Their Birth Stories

By Claire Cain Miller and Sarah Kliff Regardless of income or education, Black mothers have worse birth outcomes. Published: May 6, 2023 at 05:00AM via NYT The Upshot https://ift.tt/xAzKDqM

#IFTTT #NYT #studies show #news machine

[fuojbe-beowgi]

"This Nonprofit Health System Cuts Off Patients With Medical Debt" by Sarah Kliff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg via NYT Business https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/business/allina-health-hospital-debt.html?partner=IFTTT

#IFTTT #NYT

[wazafam]

By BY SARAH KLIFF from World in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/01/world/covid-19-vaccine-coronavirus-updates/the-biden-administration-is-expected-to-advance-a-law-to-protect-patients-from-surprise-medical-bills?partner=IFTTT The Biden administration is expected to advance a law to protect patients from surprise medical bills. New York Times

#BY SARAH KLIFF #World #NYT

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The secrets of hospital bills

Today, the New York Times published an analysis of hospital pricing in the US, comparing prices charged to uninsured people, to Medicare, and to different insurers, revealing that these prices can vary up to 900%, often to the detriment of large insurers.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/22/upshot/hospital-prices.html

This represents a marked contrast to the story we are often told about health-care pricing in America — that large insurers use their might to negotiate lower rates from price-gouging hospitals. That might be true sometimes, but often, it’s not.

And as the Times points out, it’s not necessarily the insurers who pay those inflated prices — many insurance plans are actually run by large employers, and only administered by the insurance company. So when Cigna turns down a treatment, it’s actually your boss doing it.

That may be a nice fiction for your boss to maintain in order to deflect your ire the coverage you’re denied — but it also means that when Cigna allows a hospital to gouge it for your care, it’s your boss that pays for it — not Cigna’s shareholders.

Meanwhile, the variations in prices are simply wild. If you get a colonoscopy at University of Mississippi Medical Center, it costs $1463 if you’re with Cigna, $2144 if you’re with Aetna, and $782 if you’re uninsured.

$782!

The percentage differences are even more pronounced with small-dollar items, like a pregnancy test at Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania:

$18 if you’re with Blue Cross PA.

$58 if you’re a Blue Cross NJ HMO customer.

$93 if you’re a Blue Cross NJ PPO customer.

$10 if you’re uninsured.

There’s so much more of this. Hospital and insurance spokespeople told Sarah Kliff, Josh Katz and Rumsey Taylor that all of this was not nearly so bad as it looks, that it was taken out of context, that there’s an innocent explanation — but were unable to provide that explanation.

The reality is that it’s much worse than it looks. The data-set they were reporting on is fragmentary, drawn from the minority of hospitals that deign to comply with a bipartisan order (started under Trump, affirmed by Biden) requiring hospitals to provide this pricing data.

These are the hospitals with the least to hide, the best of the bunch, and they’re so bad. There’s repeated stories of parents being horribly gouged on rabies shots for their children, for example.

All of this puts the lie to the story of health-care as a market. A parent whose child is in need of urgent care following a wild animal attack doesn’t shop around for a deal. There’s no “demand elasticity” in rabies shots for children.

But even if a heart-attack patient in an ambulance was interested in shopping for a bargain on their care, they would be stopped cold. Hospitals and insurers treat their pricing information as trade secrets, and refuse to disclose it, even when legally obliged to do so.

That secrecy extends to your employer, who is unable to see prices even when shopping for an insurer for thousands of your co-workers. In 2018, Larimer County, CO tried to get the insurer who covered its 3,500 employees to disclose its negotiated hospital prices.

They raised the issue up to the insurance company’s CEO, who personally told them to fuck off, pay him, and forget about ever finding out how that money was being spent. They put the contract out for rebid. Of the six insurers who bid, five refused to disclose prices.

A former Blue Cross exec told the Times that they put “gag orders in all our contracts,” ensuring that no one would ever know whether they were getting ripped off.

Six months after the order that legally required hospitals to post prices, the Times contracted the ten highest-grossing noncompliant hospitals. NYU Langone told them to fuck off (“We will not be providing a statement or comment”).

They got bafflegab from Cedars Sinai: “We do not post standard cash rates, which typically will not reflect the price of care for uninsured patients.”

Penn Medicine made a funny: “Penn Medicine is committed to transparency about potential costs.”

This is not a market. Markets have prices and shoppers (not hostages). This is a racket. If you doubt it for an instant, tune into Arm and a Leg, a podcast that reveals health care’s crooked billing practices and explains how to resist them.

https://armandalegshow.com/

When I moved to America, a number of friends counselled me to take out catastrophic injury insurance and skip regular health insurance, and show up at doctors’ offices and hospitals with cash in hand, ready to bargain.

They swore up and down that they were paying less in cash money for treatment than I would pay in deductibles and co-pays for my insured coverage. It looks like they were right in many cases. But this is no way to run a healthcare system.

For one thing, it leaves people with chronic conditions out in the cold. For another, it allows the system to continue to rot, transforming into a financial institution first and a way to treat patients as a distant second.

America doesn’t have market healthcare. It has racket healthcare. The fact that Americans defend this system is frankly bizarre. Unless you’re a shareholder in this rotten system, it has absolutely nothing to redeem it.

It is a crooked enterprise that wastes trillions and delivers precious little care.

Image: Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic

[autisticadvocacy]

In response to an article discussing prenatal screenings and the lack of information around understanding results, this article highlights the bias against disability in the original article and the marketing around prenatal screenings.