Kevin Drum

Both the New York Times and Washington Post reported today on a $2 billion Medicare scam. The way it worked was simple:

• Scammers buy a few small medical supply companies (seven, to be exact).
• The companies send Medicare bills for millions of phony catheters.

That's it! But how did they get away with it? The Post explains:

Urinary catheters made an appealing target for potential scammers because orders for the low-cost products — small tubes often made with latex or silicone — could escape some of the scrutiny that accompanies billing for expensive equipment, surgeries and other high-cost claims, fraud experts said.

Huh. The Times provides this chart of catheter billing:

I'm a big proponent of being patient until all the facts are in, but this truly looks insane. Catheters were billed at a steady $50 million per quarter, and then, in one quarter, it jumped to $600 million. And Medicare has no systems in place to flag that? My credit card company flags my account if I spend a thousand dollars in a different time zone.

But apparently nothing like this was in place. The scam wasn't even uncovered by Medicare, despite skyrocketing billing and lots of complaints (the scammers submitted bills using real customer and doctor names). It was uncovered by a private organization.

You've probably all seen those pictures of a gang of migrants beating up a pair of cops in Times Square. It's pretty disturbing, and there's no excuse for it.

Nonetheless it's instructive to see what really happened. The cops say the migrants were told to move because they were blocking the sidewalk. But bodycam footage clearly shows they weren't:

They're clustered over to one side, just hanging out. One of the cops tells them to "Vamos," and they all start walking away. A few seconds later one of the migrants stops to rearrange the stuff in his cart and the cop comes up behind him and tells him to keep moving. He does, but first turns around to tell the cop he looks like Ugly Betty. This pisses off the cops, who grab him and push him against the wall:

A few seconds later the cops are momentarily distracted and the guy tries to run away. The cops tackle him and that attracts his friends. This is when the melee starts.

Attacking cops is stupid and wrong, and you'd think a bunch of migrants would be especially aware of this. That said, nothing would have happened if (a) the cops had just left them alone, or (b) ignored the insult. Why didn't they?

You can see all the bodycam and surveillance footage here, along with a more detailed explanation of what happened.

Special counsel Robert Hur's obviously partisan report on President Biden has raised a question: why are special counsels always Republicans?

And they really are all Republicans. In the past 30 years not a single Democrat—or even someone with "Democratic ties"—has been a special counsel or independent prosecutor.

It's no mystery why this is. Democrats appoint Republicans to show they're bending over backward to be fair. Republicans don't care about that, so they appoint Republicans too. Result: it's always Republicans.

See also FBI directors. No Democrat has headed the FBI since the day it was created.

According to Politico, the big Republican pushback against Bidenomics is that, sure, inflation is lower, but the price of food hasn't gone down. For the record, this hasn't happened a single time in the past 50 years:

Food prices never go down. Sometimes they only go up a little bit—as in 2010 and 2016—but never down.

Now, I get it. GDP growth is strong. Unemployment is low. Wages are rising. Inflation is under control. The prime-age labor participation rate has been above the Trump peak for four consecutive quarters. Investment has been at record highs for ten consecutive quarters. The stock market is up. Construction is booming.

So what's left to complain about? Poverty was up in 2022, but obviously Republicans don't want to talk about that. There's just nothing.

So all that's left is to invent something. And they have.

Here's a skycam view of Charlie and Hilbert snuggling up together on the living room sofa. This is a fairly rare occurrence these days.

Here's a comparison of GDP growth under Presidents Trump and Biden. I have deleted the last three quarters of 2020 since Trump can't be held responsible for the pandemic.

Nobody ever shows this comparison. Is that fair? Why or why not?

Josh Marshall annotates the New York Times for us:

Now compare this to the print edition:

In the print edition, there's only one front page piece about the special counsel's report. It occupies less than 10% of the A1 real estate. It's not the top story. There's no accompanying art. And the headline is pretty low key.

This is typical. The print edition reflects the honest judgment of the editorial staff. The web edition—which is relatively independent—is clickbait designed to compete with cable shouters. Nor is this unique to the Times. If all you read is the print edition of a metro daily, your sense of the news will be completely different from someone who's a digital native or TV junkie.

The latest from Gaza:

The Israeli military is drawing up plans for both the evacuation of civilians from Rafah and a “massive” military operation.... More than a million displaced people are crowded into Rafah, and aid groups have warned against military action there. The United States “would not support” a major Israeli military operation in Rafah under current conditions, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Thursday.

Unmentioned in this story is that humanitarian aid all goes through Rafah, and a "massive" military operation there would almost certainly cut off what little aid is getting through to Gaza now. This is unconscionable.

Joe Biden continues to have problems enunciating certain sounds, and I also think that "angry" Joe Biden doesn't work for him. That said, here's his entire press conference this afternoon. It's only 13 minutes long. Watch for yourself and decide if, speech issues aside, he seems in any way cognitively limited. As usual, it strikes me that if you watch the whole thing instead of just reading about it or looking at snippets, he seems fine.

A couple of years ago Microsoft stunned the AI world with a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. That's a lot of money!

Or, maybe it's chickenfeed. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has apparently decided the world needs a lot more chipmaking capacity and he's just the guy to get it off the ground:

The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost the world’s chip-building capacity, expand its ability to power AI, among other things, and cost several trillion dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, one of the people said.

....Altman has also met with Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, and with representatives from chip-fabrication companies including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., also known as TSMC, to discuss the venture. In talks with TSMC, Altman has said he wants to build dozens of chip-fabrication plants in the next few years, the people said. His vision would be to raise the money from Middle East investors and have TSMC build and run them.

Even mega investments are typically on the order of tens of billions of dollars. A trillion dollars is ridiculous. $7 trillion doesn't even have a word to describe it. Stay tuned.