
'And a little biology'
Work by Mark Adams in his show at the Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, Mass., through Aug. 28.
The gallery notes that Mr. Adams is a painter, printmaker and a cartographer with the National Park Service who “creates images of animals using simple curiosity, wonderment and a little biology as a base.’’
Susan Jaffe: Medicare's frustrating post-hospitalization gap
Incision from knee-replacement surgery
Medicare paid for Betty Gordon’s knee-replacement surgery in March, but the 72-year-old former high school teacher, a Rhode Islander, needed a nursing home stay and care at home to recover.
Yet Medicare wouldn’t pay for that. So Gordon is stuck with a $7,000 bill she can’t afford — and, as if that were not bad enough, she can’t appeal.
The reasons Medicare won’t pay have frustrated her and many others trapped in the maze of regulations surrounding something called “observation care.”
Patients, like Gordon, receive observation care in the hospital when their doctors think they are too sick to go home but not sick enough to be admitted. They stay overnight or longer, usually in regular hospital rooms, getting some of the same services and treatment (often for the same problems) as an admitted patient — intravenous fluids, medications and other treatment, diagnostic tests and round-the-clock care they can get only in a hospital.
After knee-replacement surgery, Betty Gordon needed to go to a nursing home but because she had been in outpatient care and not hospitalized as an admitted patient for three days, Medicare would not cover her care there.
But observation care is considered an outpatient service under Medicare rules, like a doctor’s appointment or a lab test. Observation patients may have to pay a larger share of the hospital bill than if they were officially admitted to the hospital. Plus, they have to pick up the tab for any nursing home care
Medicare’s nursing home benefit is available only to those admitted to the hospital for three consecutive days. Gordon spent three days in the hospital after her surgery, but because she was getting observation care, that time didn’t count.
There’s another twist: Patients might want to file an appeal, as they can with many other Medicare decisions. But that is not allowed if the dispute involves observation care.
Monday, a trial begins in federal court in Hartford, Conn., where patients who were denied Medicare’s nursing home benefit are hoping to force the government to eliminate that exception. A victory would clear the way for appeals from hundreds of thousands of people.
The class-action lawsuit was filed in 2011 by seven Medicare observation patients and their families against the Department of Health and Human Services. Seven more plaintiffs later joined the case.
.“This is about whether the government can take away health care coverage you may be entitled to and leave you no opportunity to fight for it,” said Alice Bers, litigation director at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs.=
If they win, people with traditional Medicare who received observation care services for three days or longer since Jan. 1, 2009, could file appeals seeking reimbursement for bills Medicare would have paid had they been admitted to the hospital. More than 1.3 million observation claims meet these criteria for the 10-year period through 2017, according to the most recently available government data.
Gordon is not a plaintiff in the case, but she said the rules forced her to borrow money to pay for the care. “It doesn’t seem fair that after paying for Medicare all these years, you’re told you’re not going to be covered now for nursing home care,” Gordon said.
No one has explained to Gordon, who has hypoglycemia and an immune disease, why she wasn’t admitted. The federal notice hospitals are required to give Medicare observation patients didn’t provide answers.
Even Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, is puzzled by the policy. “Better be admitted for at least 3 days in the hospital first if you want the nursing home paid for,” she said in a tweet Aug. 4. “Govt doesn’t always make sense. We’re listening to feedback.” Her office declined to provide further explanation.
Patients and their families can try to persuade the physician or hospital administrators to change their status, and sometimes that strategy works. If not, they can leave the hospital to avoid the extra expenses, even if doing so is against medical advice
The requirement of three consecutive days as a hospital inpatient to qualify for nursing home coverage is written into the Medicare law. But there are exemptions. Medicare officials don’t apply it to beneficiaries in some pilot programs and allow private Medicare Advantage insurers to waive it for their patients.
Concerned about the growing number of people affected by observation care, Medicare officials created a “two-midnight” rule in 2013. If a doctor expects a patient will be sick enough to stay in the hospital through two midnights, then it says the patient should generally be admitted as an inpatient
Yet observation claims have increased by about 70 percent since 2008, to more than 2 million in 2017. Claims for observation care patients who stay in the hospital for longer than 48 hours — who likely would qualify for nursing home coverage had they been admitted —rose by nearly 159%, according to data Kaiser Health News obtained from CMS. Yet the overall growth in traditional Medicare enrollment was just under 9 percent.
Justice Department lawyers handling the case declined to be interviewed, but in court filings they argue that the lawsuit accuses the wrong culprit.
The government can’t be blamed, the lawyers said, because the “two-midnight” rule gives hospitals and doctors — not the government — the final word on whether a patient should be admitted.
The government’s lawyers argue that since Medicare “has not established any fixed or objective criteria for inpatient admission,” any decision to admit a patient is not “fairly traceable” to the government.
Like Gordon, some doctors also complain about observation care rules. An American Medical Association spokesman, who spoke on condition of not being named, said the “two-midnight” policy “is challenging and illogical” and should be rescinded. “CMS should instead rely on physicians’ clinical judgment to determine a patient’s inpatient or outpatient status,” he added.
HHS’s Office of Inspector General urged CMS to count observation care days toward the three-day minimum needed for nursing home coverage. It’s No. 1 on a list issued last month of the 25 most important inspector general’s recommendations the agency has failed to implement.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which counsels Congress, has made a similar suggestion.
However, Colin Milligan, a spokesman for the American Hospital Association, is more positive about the “two-midnight” rule. It “recognizes the important role of physician judgment,” he said.
Medicare isn’t dictating what physicians must do, said a physician who has researched the effects of observation care. “It’s a benchmark upon which to base your decisions, not a standard or a mandate,” said Dr. Michael Ross, a professor of emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. He supervises observation care units at Emory’s five hospitals and was chairman of a CMS advisory subcommittee on observation care.
Other physicians claim that since HHS pays hospitals and doctors to treat Medicare patients, the agency’s policies weigh on their decisions.
“One of the hardest things to do is to get physicians to predict what will happen with patients — we like to hedge our bets and account for all possibilities,” said Dr. Tipu Puri, a physician adviser and medical director at the University of Chicago’s medical center. “But we’re being forced to interpret the rules and read between the lines.”
In the meantime, observation care patients who get follow-up care at a nursing home may soon receive a puzzling notice. A Medicare fact sheet issued last month “strongly encourages” nursing home operators to give an “advance beneficiary notice of non-coverage” to patients who arrive without the required prior three-day hospital admission.
But that notice says they can choose to seek reimbursement by submitting an appeal to Medicare — an option government lawyers will argue in court is impossible.
Susan Jaffe is a Kaiser Health News reporter. Jaffe.KHN@gmail.com, @SusanJaffe
Water chestnut plants have been invading New England
Water chestnuts are the smaller floating leaves, with water lilies in back.
— Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management photo
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) is surveying lakes, ponds, and rivers across the state this summer as part of an annual monitoring program to identify aquatic invasive species.
During a June 12 survey of Barney Pond, in Lincoln, DEM staff observed and removed several small water chestnut plants that were scattered throughout the pond. As water chestnut hadn’t been previously documented in Barney Pond or its watershed, DEM notified the town of Lincoln and searched for the source of the invasive plants.
Staff surveyed Olney Pond ,in Lincoln Woods State Park, which is upstream from Barney Pond, and found a large patch of water chestnut plants. The plants, which have likely been in the pond for at least a year, dropped seeds that floated down to Barney Pond and started new plants. In July, DEM staff removed the invasive plants as part of conservation efforts to manage and protect Olney Pond’s habitat from this non-native species.
Water chestnut is a rooted aquatic plant that forms dense, floating mats that cover the surface of the water, limiting light to other aquatic plants and quickly displacing native species and decreasing biodiversity. These dense mats may also impede recreation such as boating, fishing and swimming, and lower the dissolved oxygen in the water, creating the potential for fish kills.
Large and woody fruits containing four sharp barbs appear on the plants by late summer and are released as the water chestnut plants die off with the onset of frost. As the barbed fruits wash up along the shoreline, they pose a hazard for humans and pets, according to DEM.
Water chestnut’s barbed fruit.
Water chestnut was introduced to New England from Asia as an ornamental plant that spread into local waters. It was first observed in Rhode Island in 2007 in Belleville Pond, in North Kingstown. Once introduced, water chestnut establishes and spreads rapidly.
As of November 2017, the invasive plant has been documented in eight Rhode Island lakes and ponds: Valley Falls Pond in Central Falls; Central Pond and Turner Reservoir in East Providence; Porters Pond in Foster; Solitude Springs Farm Ponds in Hopkinton; Belleville Pond in North Kingstown; Chapman Pond in Westerly; and Sylvestre Pond in Woonsocket.
If you think you have spotted the plant or seed in a new location, take a picture and report it to DEM.WaterResources@dem.ri.gov.
“It is much easier and cost effective to remove a small patch of water chestnut than manage an entire lake covered with plants, so early detection is key,” said Katie DeGoosh-DiMarzio, environmental analyst with DEM’s Office of Water Resources. “Public awareness of invasive plants is the most effective way to combat the spread of aquatic invasive species from one lake to another by preventing the inadvertent transport of a hitch-hiking plant fragment. Many of the aquatic invasive plants in Rhode Island can reproduce from just one small plant fragment and do not need entire root systems to successfully establish in a new spot. Cleaning off every bit of plant from recreational gear used at one pond is essential before visiting another.”
Water-chestnut management costs in Lake Champlain and other Vermont waters exceeded $400,000 in 2009 and have totaled over $10 million since 1982, according to DEM. The agency noted that in 2017 the cost to treat a 1.3-mile stretch of the Sudbury River in Massachusetts was $60,000, but the river needs continual treatment and surveillance as water chestnut seeds can lie dormant for up to 12 years.
Water chestnut is just one of the aggressive, invasive species found in local waters, according to DEM.
DEM volunteers recently removed lotus leaves from a large, non-native lotus patch that was found in Meshanticut Pond, in Cranston.
Our fellow animals
“Owl” (collage), by Violet Davenport, in the group show “Animalia,’’ at Art Center East, Vernon, Conn., through Aug. 18.
The show has dozens of works across various media, many of which are for sale, and focuses on the complex relationships that humans have with other members of the Animal Kingdom, which includes over 7 million species. Some we use for labor, some to milk or eat, some for companionship, and others we consider pests.
What an entrance!
The wonderfully ornate main entrance to the glorious United Shoe Machinery Building, at 160 Federal St., in the Financial District of Boston. The steel-frame skyscraper has 24 stories and a penthouse, and was built in 1929–1930 and designed by George W. Fuller and Parker, Thomas & Rice to serve as United Shoe Machinery Corp.’s headquarters.
It is one of Boston's finest Art Deco buildings, including an elaborately decorated lobby. The long-dead United United Shoe Machinery (in Boston often just called “Shoe’’) was a huge manufacturer of a wide range of industrial goods, including many things for the defense industry. At one time it controlled 98 percent of the nation's shoe-machinery business and much of that business abroad, too. Of course the American shoe business was based in New England for many years.
Below see the tower with its famous gold top.
Don Pesci: The rhetorical career of Bernie Sanders, socialist
Sen. Bernie Sanders
It is no longer true, as your mother may once have told you, that you are judged by the company you keep. Former President Barack Obama had a few diamonds in the rough on his friends list. There were the Chicago terrorist bombers Bill Ayers, a former leader of the Weather Underground, now an American elementary education theorist, and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, responsible for bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and several police stations in New York, as well as the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed three of its members. Dohrn left a position in 2013 as “Clinical Associate Professor of Law" at the Northwestern University School of Law.
Far from being a repentant sinner, Ayres told The New York Times in 2001 "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Ayers and Obama served together on the board of directors for the Woods Fund of Chicago, their terms overlapping for three years, and Ayres is credited with helping to jump-start Obama’s political career. In 1995, Alice Palmer introduced Obama as her chosen successor in the Illinois State Senate at a gathering held in the Ayers home.
Obama also attended for 20 years the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago church where, apparently, he snoozed through sermons such as "Confusing God and Government" in which Wright dammed America. Wright officiated at the wedding ceremony of Barack and Michelle Obama and baptized their children. The title of Obama's 2006 memoir, The Audacity of Hope, was inspired by a Wright sermon.
Wright claimed his offending message had been taken out of context, to which Salon editor-in-chief Joan Walsh responded: "the whole idea that Wright has been attacked over 'sound bites,' and if Americans saw his entire sermons, in context, they'd feel differently, now seems ludicrous. The long clips [Bill] Moyers played only confirm what was broadcast in the snippets… My conclusion Friday night was bolstered by new tapes of Wright that came out this weekend, including one that captures him saying the Iraq war is 'the same thing al-Qaida is doing under a different color flag,' and a much longer excerpt from the 'God damn America' sermon that denounces 'Condoskeezer Rice ...”
Obama’s past associations certainly presented no bar to his accession to the presidency.
It is doubtful that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ unsavory past and present associations will figure negatively in his own presidential bid. Assuming that Sanders wins the Democrat primary campaign and goes toe to toe with President Trump in a general election, he may find it difficult to grouse, after losing, that Russian spooks spiked his campaign because they preferred Trump to Sanders, the Hillary Clinton gambit.
Sanders, after all, spent his honeymoon in Russia in 1988 during the bad old days of Soviet Imperialism where, under the influence of vodka, he belted out Woody Guthrie’s ancient anthem “This Land Is Your Land.” Then too, Sanders is a socialist anti-capitalist dragon, belching fire out of his snout every half hour. One year after his Moscow honeymoon, Sanders visited Cuba, and his praise of Castro – a puff adder who was smoking gays and persecuting black Cubans at the time, not to mention the petite bourgeois small “d” democrats littering Castro’s jails -- was effusive.
Sanders, who was a congressman and the mayor of Burlington, Vt., before being elected to the Senate, did pause in his praise to note Cuba’s “enormous deficiencies” in human rights. How could he help but notice? In the United States, freedom-loving radicals like Sanders, longing to bow before the socialist shrine, bit their smothering tongues, but most of them were not shameless enough to throw bouquets at the feet of men like gods. Sanders declared he never saw a hungry child or a homeless person while in Cuba, but he did see a revolution “that is far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be.” One can hardly expect Russian President Vladimir Putin to disagree with Sanders’ pro-socialist leanings.
Senior adviser to Sanders presidential campaign Heather Gautney is convinced that “Today’s neoliberal capitalist system has become utterly incompatible with the requisites of democratic freedom.” High unemployment, Gautny said on an Iranian TV show, is a blessing because it gives people more down time to engage in protest movements. And Sanders speech writer David Sirota wrote glowingly about “Hugo Chavez’s Economic Miracle” in 2013, just as food shortages were “beginning to surface in Caracas and the countryside,” according to a piece in the Washington Times.
As a young man, Sanders should have been studying Churchill – “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy,” a near perfect description of the last ten stump-speeches of Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. But Sanders’ ideological antennae were tuned to the Soviet Union, where he spent his honeymoon. The embrace of the indefensible is fatal in the long run, but in the short run, it is an indispensable element in the rise of autocrats. And in the long run, people who have lost an animating, democratic virtue long only to sleep under the warm, benevolent smile of a dictator.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
Paper path
“Newspaper Row,’’ on Washington Street in Boston, in September 1929, right before the stock market crash in the next month. The Boston Globe was at 244 Washington St., the Boston Evening Transcript at 324 Washington (at Milk Street), the Boston Post at 261 Washington, the Boston Journal at 264 Washington and the Associated Press at 293 Washington. Other Boston news services, including the Boston Herald and Boston Traveler, were not far from Newspaper Row. It was a noisy and crowded part of downtown.
Enough of summer!
Victorian-style sitting room with a fireplace in the Sherlock Holmes Museum, London
“Caught in the doldrums of August we may have regretted the departing summer, having sighed over the vanished strawberries and all that they signified. Now, however, we look forward almost eagerly to winter's approach. We forget the fogs, the slush, the sore throats and the price of coal, we think only of long evenings by lamplight, of the books which we are really going to read this time, of the bright shop windows and the keen edge of the early frosts.”
― Denis Mackail, from Greenery Street
On an ominous note...
Lake Winnipesaukee and the Ossipee Mountains, in central New Hampshire
— Photo by Don Kasak
“It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.’’
— From “The Common Day,’’ a short story by John Cheever set in New Hampshire
Baker tries to streamline transit improvements
— Photo by LuK3
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
‘It takes much longer in the U.S. than in other developed nations to build and repair public infrastructure, as my old friend Philip K. Howard, who chairs Common Good, has researched, and written about so well, in such books as Try Common Sense.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is in need of massive repairs and major subway and commuter train service expansion. So it was heartening to read that the public-private partnership aspect of Gov. Charlie Baker’s 10-year, $18 billion transportation plan includes provisions to streamline the procurement process.
The Boston Globe had an example of how stuff gets held up and things can be moved along at a faster clip.
“Most notably, the bill contains language aimed at avoiding what went down in Quincy last year: A development at the MBTA’s North Quincy Station ground to a halt after Attorney General Maura Healey ruled the T broke the law by not bidding out work for a parking garage that would be built there. A private developer was going to build the garage, but it would have ultimately been owned by the T.
“Baker’s bill would avoid another such situation by relaxing procurement rules to allow developers to move forward on a wide array of public transportation infrastructure — from staircases to stations — that would be part of their projects but deeded to the state or the MBTA. ‘’
One of the more interesting Baker administration proposals is to set up a new, $50 million program for a $2,000-per-employee tax credit for employers who let workers telecommute, thus reducing the pressure on Greater Boston’s often clogged roads during weekday rush hours. Of course, few managers would be affected.
To read more about the Baker plan, which of course would very much affect neighboring states, too, hit these links:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2019/07/25/baker-transportation-bill-aims-encourage-public-private-partnerships/gC5V38s7pOzcv2uzoVshCJ/story.html
https://www.wbjournal.com/article/baker-seeks-arsenal-of-tools-in-18b-transportation-bond-bill
William Hall's maritime watercolors on the Block
“The A to Z, Lost in the 1938 Hurricane’ ‘ (watercolor on paper), by William Talmadge Hall. There will be a show of his new watercolors at the Jessie Edwards Studio, Block Island, R.I., Aug. 23-Sept. 4, wlth a reception Aug. 24, 5 to 7 p.m. The gallery is on Water Street, right across from the ferry landing.
Then they're tough birds
“New Yorkers’’ (oil on canvas on panel), by Purdy Eaton, in her show of paintings and photos called “Mad to Live,’’ at Standard Space, Weston, Conn., through Aug. 25.
The gallery says that Ms. Purdy, with a background in biology and epidemiology, is inspired by the natural world, particularly animals. “Her paintings feature detailed animals against abstract backgrounds, creating a surreal atmosphere in each piece. Contributing to this are the expressions of each animal: unreadable yet evocative, at turns indifferent and ominous. Each work of art invites the viewer to look ever closer, urging them to examine both the canvas before them and their own impressions of nature. ‘‘
Frank Carini: Time for municipal renewable-energy-based utilities?
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
More than a decade ago, Rock Port, a small farming community in northwest Missouri, reportedly became the first U.S. municipality to be powered almost exclusively by renewable energy. Four large wind turbines are connected to the power grid and provide the town’s nearly 1,400 residents with most of the power they need. The turbines produce about 16 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually.
When the wind isn’t blowing, residents buy power from the grid. But on most days, the turbines generate enough wind power for the town to get paid to export energy.
Members of the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats of America are hoping to create a similar energy situation in Cranston. The group is raising money to have a study done to determine if a municipal renewable-energy utility would work in Rhode Island’s second-largest city.
The group’s broader idea is to create an energy plan that would transform the Ocean State into a sizable producer of solar, tidal, and onshore wind power. The group’s aim is to generate 200 percent of the power that the state needs and to return energy profits to Rhode Island as citizen dividends and municipal funding.
ecoRI News recently spoke with Nate Carpenter, the group’s state coordinator, and Wil Gregersen, its environmental co-coordinator, about Rhode Island’s renewable-energy potential and its ability to address climate change. While they admitted that the project, which is in its infancy stage, is ambitious, they also noted that it’s an excellent way to fight climate change.
Gregersen said the idea is to “build a pressure from underneath” to move legislators to address the issue.
“We really want to sell this to every person who lives here,” he said. “We know that all the pieces for doing this kind of thing exist … renewable-energy technology, models for setting up a municipal utility, all these pieces are out there they just need to be assembled.”
“We want to make switching to renewable energy an attractive offer,” Carpenter added. “We want to incentivize people to make this change.”
Rhode Island currently spends about $3 billion annually on energy, most of it from outside sources and most of it from fossil fuels. As an energy producer, Gregersen said, Rhode Island could keep that money in the local economy.
The Rhode Island chapter of the Progressive Democrats of America are partnering with Ocean State Community Energy, a collaborative of Massachusetts-based ReVenture Investments and 4E Energy, to develop a plan to build municipal utilities across Rhode Island, starting with a scalable design for a utility in Cranston. The design will use existing city infrastructure, will avoid green space, and will employ the latest innovations in renewable technology, they said.
With a well-researched plan that shows what such a utility would look like and how it would work, Gregersen and Carpenter say they will be able to start large-scale fundraising for a statewide plan and to advocate for similar projects across Rhode Island. The idea is strong, but they noted proof of concept is needed before any additional steps can be taken. The study will cost $26,000.
Gregersen said the study will determine how much renewable energy Cranston could produce and the amount of profit that could be generated. He said Cranston is a good model, because it has both urban and suburban areas.
“Rhode Island, the Blackstone valley, was the site of the Industrial Revolution and this was an incredibly powerful and wealthy place,” Gregersen said. “We’d like to do that again for our state by creating an energy revolution.”
Both Gregersen and Carpenter noted that they are disheartened by the time and effort that has been wasted dealing ineffectively with climate change. They said the issue needs to be addressed immediately. To address the ongoing lack of urgency, Carpenter said the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats of America has elevated addressing climate change/reducing fossil-fuel emissions as its core issue. He noted that worsening climate events will overstretch vulnerable communities and tear societies apart.
“We see with absolute clarity that if we don’t solve climate change we won’t solve anything we care about,” he said. “Everything that progressives are fighting for will come to nothing if climate change is allowed to continue. We’re not here to scare people. These things are real but we do have the ability to fix this, or at least mitigate the effects of climate change.”
Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News.
JUMP Bikes, e-scooters worth the start-up problems
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
In other environmental news, GoLocal reports that Providence City Council President Pro Tempore Michael Corriea wants to ban JUMP Bikes and e-scooters from the city’s Ward Six until a community meeting can be held with transportation companies’ representatives.
Yes, we’re in the early, Wild West period of these new personal-transportation options.
New local ordinances and state laws are needed to control where they can be parked and retrieved, helmets should be mandated, and actions taken to discourage their vandalization. And there has to be a crackdown to make users of these things follow the rules of the road, such as obeying stop signs and traffic lights and barring people from riding them on sidewalks. A few of the users (especially boys and young men) use them like characters in a manic video game.
Still, we should put up with their inconveniences while appropriate rules are being crafted. They let people who cannot afford a car or truck get around easily; they take up far less space than other vehicles, and they don’t add to air pollution.
To read the GoLocal story, please hit this link.
Josh Hoxie: The U.S. economy is stacked against young people
Via OtherWords.org
BOSTON
The mechanics of wealth building are fairly simple. Save more than you spend, invest those savings to generate more money. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There’s one big problem for younger people trying to do this: The rules are rigged against them. Here are five facts showing the unfair burden millennials carry.
1. Wages are stagnant.
Today’s rising generation earns 20 percent less, on an inflation-adjusted basis, than their parents did at their age, despite being better educated and more productive. In fact, Millennials are on track to become the first generation in modern American history to make less money than their parents did.
The federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, is lower than the cost of living in every city in the country — and hasn’t gone up in 10 years. It’s hard to save when the money coming in doesn’t come close to covering the basics.
2. Student debt is out of control.
The cost of attaining a college degree leaps annually, with aggregate student debt now topping $1.5 trillion. Savings that could’ve gone to a down payment on a house, starting a business, or saving for retirement are eaten up by monthly student debt obligations.
This is largely the result of state governments disinvesting in public colleges and universities, shifting the costs onto families. Since student debt is the only form of debt not discharged in bankruptcy, you either pay it off or die trying.
3. Everything else costs more too.
Millennial wealth problems aren’t due to avocado toast, lattes, or any other consumer spending habits. Millennials spend less than previous generations on food, alcohol, shelter, utilities, transportation and entertainment.
A few of these things are cheaper today than a few decades ago. But these are far outpaced by the skyrocketing cost of buying a house, rent, health care, college, child care, cars and insurance — and wages aren’t keeping up at all.
4. Buying a house is out of reach.
Starter home prices have increased by nearly 60 percent over the last five years, while inventory has dropped by over 20 percent, according to Zillow. Buying a house has become a punchline for many millennials who don’t have the privilege of family members who can help with a down payment.
Homeownership has historically been the greatest generator of middle class wealth, but millennials are buying houses at a lower rate than previous generations. The top reason they cite isn’t lack of interest or lust for living in a converted van. It’s inability to save for a down payment.
5. Traditional money advice is laughably out of touch.
The standard personal finance advice doled out these days is to save at least three months of expenses, save for retirement, and spend less than a third of your income on housing.
But when you don’t have enough to cover rent, student loans, and insurance, not to mention groceries, where’s all this saving going to come from? What’s the advice for the 40 million of us earning under $15 an hour, whose jobs don’t cover the cost of living?
The good news? Last year, for the first time ever, young voters outpaced Boomers at the ballot box, with millennial turnout nearly doubling from 2014. This year, they overcame baby boomers as the biggest voting bloc.
Bold solutions to un-rig the economy are on the table, like Medicare for All, college for all, student debt forgiveness, first time home buyer programs, and a Green New Deal. Millennials are in a position to benefit the most from these programs — and to contribute the most to ensuring they become law.
Josh Hoxie is a Boston-based associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
All somehow useful in an old Yankee way
“Cabinet of Curiosities,’’ by Corey Daniels, in the group show “Flux III,’’ at the Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, Maine, Aug. 24-Sept. 28
Fancy dorms
High-rise and upscale LightView apartment complex, for college students in Boston
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
In New England and elsewhere an increasing number of colleges and universities are collaborating with private developers to build fancy apartment buildings (or call them “dorms’’) with heftier rents than students would pay to live in the usual barebones (often cinderblock) dorms.
In one way you could see this as a good thing because companies, not the colleges, pay to build the somewhat luxurious “dorms,’’ saving the institutions a lot of money (especially those in expansionary mode), which they can spend on other things, such as financial aid.
But a negative is that this housing separation between students from rich families and everyone else helps further widen class divisions in a time of yawning income inequality, which you can see all around you. Love those “gated communities’’! It does this in part by depriving middle- and lower-income students of much of the opportunity to mix with privileged students and gain access to their social and business connections. Residential segregation at colleges further consolidates the power of the permanent, hereditary upper class and reduces the sense of collective citizenship.
Chris Powell: Social Security benefits can and should be expanded
How disappointing that the leadership of the Republican minority in the U.S. House has dismissed peremptorily Connecticut Rep. John B. Larson's legislation to keep Social Security solvent for a century while improving benefits. Though the bill seems likely to pass the House, given the Democratic majority there, it won't go anywhere in the Senate, where the majority is Republican, unless Republicans in the House support it.
Republicans complain that Larson's bill costs too much. But the increases that the bill would make in Social Security taxes are small and gradual, and much of the new revenue would come from higher incomes that now escape Social Security taxation. Besides, if taxing too much for Social Security is a problem, why do the Republicans seem to think that the forever war in Afghanistan is a necessity and a bargain?
Yes, as the Republicans complain, under Larson's bill poorer people would receive more in benefits than they contributed in Social Security taxes. But so what? Social Security is already largely a matter of income redistribution, just as all government itself in a progressive tax framework is redistribution. All private forms of insurance are redistribution, too. But few things government does are as compelling as Social Security.
Only military contractors benefit from Afghanistan. That is income redistribution too but Republicans don't complain about it.
Call Social Security welfare if you want, but it profoundly incentivizes and rewards work, for people earn benefits only through working or their relationship to someone who worked. It is a retirement savings plan and disability insurance policy that cannot fail as long as the United States endures. Larson pointedly asks: "Where in the private sector can you buy this package of benefits that is there for all Americans? You can't. It doesn't exist."
Further, if, as the Larson bill envisions, improved Social Security benefits prevent people from retiring into poverty, money circulating in the economy will increase, because poorer people will spend most of their benefit on necessities. Meanwhile, with fewer people retiring into poverty, fewer people will rely on other welfare benefits.
Of course, details of the Larson bill are arguable, particularly the levels of taxation and benefits. But the aging of the population is expected to make the Social Security Trust Fund insolvent by 2035 if its revenue isn't increased or benefits reduced, and then Social Security will be competing for ordinary appropriations every year with other government functions -- including the usual stupid imperial wars -- even as maintaining the social insurance system should have priority.
There is no disputing the demographics. They will make Social Security insolvent in less than 20 years unless something is done, and doing nothing means cutting benefits even as income inequality worsens. Will that really be the Republican plan?
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WHERE ARE THE LIBERALS?: The office of Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong says it is working with the U.S. Justice Department's Antitrust Division to review the planned acquisition of United Bank by People's United Bank, which would sharply reduce competition in banking in central Connecticut and western Massachusetts. At least someone is paying attention.
But Governor Lamont and state legislators, even those who portray themselves as liberals, have nothing to say about this consolidation in the banking industry and the loss of many bank branches and hundreds of jobs. The trivialities liberal legislators applaud have little bearing on Connecticut, but preserving economic competition is vital.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Connecticut.