Angst and Hotels

Greetings Fellow Humans.  My existential angst knows no bounds.  If that man wins it will be the end of us.  The rat bastard owner of the WAPO, Jeff Bezos, has declined to endorse a candidate.  Apparently he is afraid his company, Blue Origin, will lose government contracts if the orange intestine wins the election.  Meanwhile, it has been revealed that Musk has been having frequent conversations with Putin.  Elon should lose his security clearance, all of his government contracts, and be de-naturalized and returned to South Africa. Rich people are the bane of our existence these days.

There have been many pharmacy closures as of late.  This is particularly true of independent pharmacies.  Here is part of the reason why.

 Pharmacies traditionally earn money in two ways. The first is the obvious one: filling prescriptions. But that model is increasingly under threat. A major culprit? Pharmacy benefit managers, also known as PBMs. These companies originally intended to save patients and insurers money by negotiating discounts from manufacturers on medications. But more recently, they have been snapped up by larger and larger conglomerates. As they consolidated — the three largest PBMs handled almost 80% of all prescriptions issued in the U.S. in 2023 — they steered business toward favored pharmacies (including ones they owned) and mail-order facilities.

Independents are suffering the most because they're being forced to sell drugs below the cost of what they paid for them.  It's not a sustainable business plan.  The head of the FTC is on the case, and is hoping to rein in this industry.  Article is here.

One of the ways Medicare Advantage adds to the cost of health care in this country by doing "home risk assessments" as well as "chart reviews."  They charge for these activities, and then don't follow up if they actually find anything.  Here is a link to the tweet which spells this all out.  In the tweet is a link to statnews which did an article on the subject.  Project 2025 details the pubtards' plan to force everyone to enroll in Medicare Advantage, that is if senior health care still exists, because the private companies who run these plans make millions. It's predatory, and one marvels at the goodness of the lobbyists that perpetuate this horn swoggling of the US public.

Speaking of Project 2025, one of their stated goals is this.

Deep within Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 925-page roadmap for the next Republican president, its authors say they want the service academies scrubbed of anything and anyone deemed insufficiently pure of thought — exactly what they did to Ben-Ghiat.

“Audit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination,” they wrote in the section on the U.S. military, “eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD contracting personnel.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat had been invited by the history department at the Naval Academy to talk about how the military is affected by being part of an authoritarian government.  It was a discussion of things that happened in the past.  The Heritage Foundation got wind of it and got her dis-invited from speaking. Since when does the Heritage Foundation have any say over what is taught at a tax payer supported institution?  This is not getting much attention, the article is here.  Interestingly enough, Elon suspended the Naval Academy twitter account immediately after this became known.

The Fascism is creeping in already, some might say it's already here.

I've been gathering up stuff that needs to go south for the winter.  If I don't go and get it as soon as I think about it, I forget.  So, it's piling up in the room we don't use.  Tomorrow we're making hotel reservations, one of my most hated activities.  I would really like it if we could get one route down there, with hotels we don't hate, and then one route back and just repeat the process instead of having to re-invent the wheel each time.  We had planned to go through Butte this time until we checked the weather and say the predicted lows were in the teens.  Too cold!  We've got the two long days in the middle, so day one and day four are shorted driving days.

Other than my angst, I have not too much to say about things other than I want this to be over.