Ugliness at the University (Another Institution Tarnished)

Then Potts-Kant's troubles got worse. Duke officials took a closer look at her work and didn't like what they saw. Fifteen of her papers, mostly dealing with pulmonary biology, have now been retracted, with many notices citing "unreliable" data. Several others have been modified with either partial retractions, expressions of concern, or corrections. And last month, a U.S. district court unsealed a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former colleague of Potts-Kant. It accuses the researcher, her former supervisor, and the university of including fraudulent data in applications and reports involving more than 60 grants worth some $200 million. If successful, the suit—brought under the federal False Claims Act (FCA)—could force Duke to return to the government up to three times the amount of any ill-gotten funds, and produce a multimillion-dollar payout to the whistleblower.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/whistleblower-sues-duke-claims-doctored-data-helped-win-200-million-grants

If it weren't real you'd think it was a novel

For nearly two years, she maintained the servers through which her unauthorized, non-secure homebrew communication system had operated. As we now know, about 62,000 emails were stored on those servers, over 2,000 of which contained classified information, including some of the most sensitive national defense secrets — and the highly classified sources and methods for acquiring those secrets — maintained by our government.

The latest classified email disclosure is a joke. The document is so chockablock with classified information — meaning it is so thoroughly redacted — that the State Department might just as well have issued a blank page. This reminds us of how cynically the Democrats’ presidential nominee looked the American people in the eye and assured us, for over a year, that she never sent or received classified information.

http://nypost.com/2016/08/31/latest-email-disclosure-is-just-more-proof-that-clinton-lied/

We are also reminded that Clinton repeatedly vowed she’d surrendered every single government business-related email upon the State Department’s request.

This was an extraordinary lie: She hoarded and attempted to destroy thousands of emails which, like the one The Post describes, involved government business — some of it highly sensitive and significant (such as the 30 emails related to the Benghazi massacre that the FBI recovered but the State Department has yet to disclose). Converting government records to one’s own use and destroying them are serious crimes, even if no classified information is involved.

Swinging for the Fences, Using a Balsa Bat

But to explain why they should have done something else, I should first explain why I think that what we’re seeing now was predictable. The answer is that long before the exchanges opened, many critics warned that its weak mandate – the fines for failing to participate are modest -- would result in rampant gaming of the system by people who signed up only when they got sick.

The weakness of the mandate, like other flaws in the law, was politically necessary because the law was already quite unpopular, and its supporters couldn’t afford to alienate a single other voter. So they passed what they could and hoped to fix it later. However, the unpopularity of the law meant that there was a strong risk that they wouldn’t be able to fix it later, and indeed that is where we now find ourselves.

I don’t mean to suggest that the law has been an utter failure by the standards of its architects. They have not achieved anything close to universal coverage, but they did manage to reduce the number of uninsured people by somewhere between a quarter and a third. However, I think that if they had been a little less stuck on the idea of attacking every problem at once, they might have passed a less ambitious plan that would nonetheless have expanded coverage substantially, with far fewer risks to either the system or the Democratic Party.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-29/modesty-could-have-averted-the-anguish-of-obamacare

Anyone who saves me from the boogey man is good enough ... even if they are awash in corruption

Breathtaking how acceptable this is to so many. "Anything's better than a republican", I guess, that's how I feel about a clinton.

But it was always something of a sideshow. The real question wasn't classification but: Why did she have a private server in the first place? She obviously lied about the purpose. It wasn't convenience. It was concealment. What exactly was she hiding?

Was this merely the prudent paranoia of someone who habitually walks the line of legality? After all, if she controls the server, she controls the evidence, and can destroy it -- as she did 30,000 emails -- at will.

But destroy what? Remember: She set up the system before even taking office. It's clear what she wanted to protect from scrutiny: Clinton Foundation business.

http://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/charles-krauthammer-the-clinton-bribery-standard/

Really? No, not really, I was just kidding about that Obamacare lowering prices thing.

Last week, Brian Blase highlighted a more serious Brookings analysis that contradicts Adler and Ginsburg's claims. That analysis, a genuine study by Amanda Kowalski for Brookings's Economic Studies program, found the following: "Across all states, from before [Obamacare's implementation] to the first half of 2014, enrollment-weighted premiums in the individual health insurance market increased by 24.4 percent beyond what they would have had they simply followed state-level seasonally adjusted trends." In other words, Obamacare apparently increased premiums by about 24 percent versus what they otherwise would have been.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/no-obamacare-has-not-lowered-premiums/article/2003615

"I'm not dead yet. I think I'll go for a walk."

And even with the mandate in place, some people appear to be gaming the system. A top actuary for insurer Highmark told the Times that in Pennsylvania, roughly 250 of its beneficiaries on had already incurred more than $100,000 in expenses this year. "People use insurance benefits and then discontinue paying for coverage once their individual health care needs have been temporarily met," he said, driving up the cost of coverage for everyone. Last year, UnitedHealth also indicated that individuals buying coverage and dropping it was driving losses.

As all this is happening, of course, insurers are bailing on the system, unable to make the numbers add up.

It's not an exact replica of the Washington state experience, but there are certainly similarities. The underlying point of all of this is that if the law's exchanges remain on their current wobbly trajectory, its dysfunction is nearly certain to grow. And the rough negotiations between Aetna and the administration may make insurers who are already losing money even more wary of further participation in the system.

That means that the prospect of significant further reforms may soon be on the table—which will likely include everything from poorly conceived state-based single-payer plans to poorly conceived federal health insurance systemsto, ah, poorly conceived conservative reforms. If anything, reforming health reform will be even more difficult than the initial project.

https://reason.com/blog/2016/08/17/the-return-of-the-obamacare-death-spiral

Damned if you do/don't ...

This week the Administration also released a July 5 letter from Aetna in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Democrats claim the document shows CEO Mark Bertolini conditioning Aetna’s ObamaCare cooperation on merger approval.

This is some gall. Aetna was answering a June 28 “civil investigative demand,” in which Justice’s antitrust division specifically asked how blocking the merger would “affect Aetna’s business strategy and operations, including Aetna’s participation of the public exchanges related to the Affordable Care Act.”

Soliciting sensitive internal information that Aetna is legally compelled to provide—and then making it public to sandbag the company—is the behavior of political plumbers, not allegedly impartial technocrats. If police tried this, it’d be entrapment.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aetna-mugging-1471475229