Old clothes
”…they {beech trees} still wear last summer’s leaves
the lightest brown almost translucent
how their stubbornness has decorated
the winter woods."
”A Walk in March,’’ by Grace Paley (1922-2007), of New York and Vermont
Tim Faulkner: Two-way electricity trading between N.Y., New England and Quebec
A 2008 map of Hydro Quebec facilities
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
An MIT study claims that hydropower from Quebec can provide stored energy and solve the intermittency issues afflicting wind and solar power. Researchers at the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research illustrate how “two-way” electricity trading between New England, New York and Quebec can reduce energy-system costs, decrease natural-gas use, and limit the need for emerging technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration.
To get there, 4 gigawatts of new transmission lines must built between New England and Quebec so that existing hydropower reservoirs can send power on demand.
Meanwhile, attorneys general from Rhode Island and Massachusetts signed on to a letter in support of a 2018 rule by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that requires utilities to include energy storage in wholesale electricity markets. The rule is being appealed by utilities through groups such as the American Public Power Association over anticipated cost increases. The states say the rule would create billions in economic and environmental benefits.
Mayflower Wind record price
The 804-megawatt Mayflower Wind project being developed by Royal Dutch Shell and EDP Renováveis in the wind-energy zone south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket was recently awarded a power-purchase contract of 5.8 cents per kilowatt-hour from the Massachusetts utilities that will be buying the electricity. The price agreement offered by Eversource, National Grid, and Unitil needs to be approved by the Massachusetts Department of Pubic Utilities.
The record low price is less than the previous low of 6.5 cents for the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind project.
More than $70 billion of potential investments in offshore wind facilities are proposed between North Carolina and Maine, but all await the outcome of an overdue federal environmental review on the Vineyard Wind project by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Public comment for offshore wind
The public has until March 16 to comment on a Coast Guard proposal for the layout and navigable shipping routes for the seven leased wind areas in federal waters. The Massachusetts and Rhode Island Port Access Route Study recommends spacing of 1 nautical mile between the turbines. Developers generally favor the layout, while the commercial fishing industry prefers 4-mile transit corridors and a design that limits radar interference.
Tim Faulkner is an ecoRI News journalist.
David Warsh: The social pathologies of 'carry trades'
SOMERVILLE. Mass.
The first time I heard the term “carry trade” was in June 2007. I was standing by an elevator bank as bond trader Dan Fuss explained to a cluster of anxious money managers the essence of Bear Stearns’s bailout of a pair of its hedge funds announced earlier that day.
It had been a carry trade, Fuss told them, harder to understand than a classic currency carry because it involved mortgage market derivatives, but otherwise no different in its fundamental structure: borrow at low rates in one market in order to invest in high-yielding assets in another, and hope that nothing changes.
But things had changed. With doubts proliferating about the funds’ underlying assets, which happened to be subprime mortgages, overnight lenders were putting up rates and investors were withdrawing their money. Bear had no choice but to close the funds and absorb their losses. Seven months later, the firm itself failed and was merged out of existence.
Looking back, I see how wise was Fuss in his concise description that day, though I noted yesterday that Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera took 10 pages in All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (2010) to explain in detail how Bear’s High-grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Limited Partnership had come to grief. The episode was the first hint of events that 15 months later would culminate in the Panic of 2008.
I remembered my innocence as I spent part of last week reading The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis, by Tim Lee, Jaimie Lee, and Kevin Coldiron (McGraw-Hill, 2020). It is quite a good book, clear and strongly argued, likely to command a wide audience among financial cognoscenti, Silicon Valley guru Tim O’Reilly’s online learning club, for instance. Sufficiently confident are the authors of the freight-train qualities of their argument, with its 39 figures and tables, that they reserve their punchline for the very last paragraph.
That argument is this: Carry trades, when they can be arranged, are especially attractive to well-to-do investors because they resemble selling insurance. They deliver a flow of income or accounting profits eventually punctuated by large losses when unforeseen events occur. These surprises may not threaten a strong and well-managed balance sheet when they occur, but they will certainly be dangerous to those who have underestimated the risks. Carry trades flourish when “nothing happens,” the authors say. Let underlying asset prices, currencies, or commodities begin to fluctuate and things get interesting. Volatility is the enemy of carry.
Central banks were invented to manage the risks of carry trading – after all, the whole idea of banks is to borrow short in order to lend long. But as the global economy has grown, so has the “moneyness” of all the other financial instruments with which central banks are today concerned. Central banks have become the foe of pooled risk. When credit arrangements are threatened by volatility, central banks are expected to “supply liquidity” – that is, to serve as lenders of last resort.
The more carry, the more vulnerable is the economy to unanticipated shocks of one sort or another, the authors say, and therefore more prone to requiring periodic bailouts. They note that carry trades today can be arranged “by writing insurance or credit default swaps, buying higher-yielding equities or junk debt on margin, taking out buy-to-rent mortgages to finance property investments, writing put options on equities or equity indexes, or buying exchange-traded funds” that do the same. But that’s not all, the authors say:
Carry trade can also include dealings such as companies issuing debt to buy back their own equity, or private equity leveraged buyouts, plus a whole gamut of more complex financial strategies and financial engineering. In all cases the carry trader is thus explicitly or implicitly betting that underlying capital values will not wipe out his or her income return; the carry-trader is betting that asset price volatility will be low or will decline.
In other words, carry trades have found their way into every nook and cranny of present-day finance, and central banks are committed to keeping volatility low, lest these arrangements fail en masse. Whatever the business cycle was, it has come to be dominated, since 1987, by long and tame business expansions, threatened at intervals by potentially catastrophic crises. And with each such subsequent government intervention, insiders are rescued, outsiders (like the widely resented Bear Stearns) are permitted to fail, the rich grow richer and inequality increases, according to the authors. Carry, they say, is about power.
The opportunity to decisively lean against carry was lost in 2008, the authors conclude, when governments chose not to allow banks to suffer catastrophic losses. What lies ahead, they say, is more of the same: carry bubbles and carry crashes, financial concentration, growing inequality, fewer opportunities for workers, more nationalism and populism. Properly examining the fire-or-ice possibilities discussed in the last chapter of the book, “Beyond the Vanishing Point” (at which carry trades eclipse all other possibilities), would take a month of Sundays. It is for sustained discussion of this sort that book clubs and online learning venues exist. And then there is that last paragraph.
Ultimately the verdict of history will likely be that the post-Bretton Woods experiment with fiat money failed. But technologies that have emerged could possibly provide the basis for future, workable monetary systems. Whatever it is that eventually arises from the ashes of the present monetary system, we have to hope it will be more effective in restraining the rise of carry.
It may turn out to be so. But for all its learnedness about the logic of cumulative advantage, The Rise of Carry leaves out a great deal in the realm of democratic politics and taste-making that is important, especially the effects of continuing technological and climate change on attitudes toward taxation and income distribution. Independent central banking, financial regulation, and antirust policy will continue to be tested, along with all other democratic institutions. But surely it is too soon to judge the modern experiment in self-government a failure.
The Panic of 2008 was only the first modern encounter – or perhaps the second or third – with the consequences of rapid economic growth. Experience – as in Surviving Large Losses: Financial Crises, the Middle Class, and the Development of Capital Markets, by Philip Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal – remains a great teacher.
David Warsh is a Somerville-based economic historian and veteran columnist. He is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
A way to enjoy driving on Memorial Drive
View of Boston's Back Bay skyline, at night across the Charles River from Memorial Drive in Cambridge, just south of the Longfellow Bridge.
— Photo by Eric Hill
I love driving through Western Massachusetts, out through the Berkshires, when the road is empty and it's a nice day. I don't like driving home on Memorial Drive at 5:45 or 6:45 at night when it's crowded and stressful. I think that's true of most people, and the goal of automated driving is to take the stressful part of driving out of the task.
— Karl Iagnemma, a Massachusetts-based American writer and research scientist and CEO of Cambridge-based self-driving technology company NuTonomy.
Mt. Greylock, in The Berkshires
'Ambrosial odor'
A sugar shack in late winter or early spring, when maple syrup is made
“{An} ancient wooden shack {stands} among magnificent old maple trees. When we first came in sight of it, it looked as though it were on fire, for the steam from the boiling sap was pouring out through every crack. It was indeed a stirring place — men and boys hallooing in the woods as they chopped fuel for the fire, and drove the sledges down the mountainside with barrels of sap, or ran in and out of the sugarhouse. As we came nearer we caught the ambrosial odor of the steaming syrup.’’
— From The Countryman’s Year (1936), by Ray Standard Baker (1870-1946), writing as David Grayson. A journalist , historian and book author, he moved to Amherst., Mass, in 1910. He lived there for the rest of his life. Among his many jobs was serving as President Wilson’s press secretary during the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919.
He wrote in the book:
“It is not limitation of life that plagues us. Life is not limited: it is the limitation of our awareness of life.”
'Silent, and soft, and slow'
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
— “Snow-Flakes,’’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82)
Birthplace of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Portland, Maine, c. 1910; the house was demolished in 1955.
Llewellyn King: A prize is needed for ideas on dealing with nuclear waste
Places in Continental United States where nuclear waste is stored
A “scram” is the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant. Control rods, usually boron, are dropped into the reactor and these absorb the neutron flux and shut it down.
President Trump, a supporter of nuclear power, has in a few words scrammed the whole nuclear industry, or at least dealt its orderly operation a severe blow.
Scientists see nuclear waste as a de minimus problem. Nuclear-power opponents — who really can’t be called environmentalists anymore — see it as a club with which to beat nuclear and stop its development
The feeling that nuclear waste is an insoluble problem has seeped into the public consciousness. People, who otherwise would be nuclear supporters, ask, “Ah, but what about the waste?”
For its part, the nuclear industry has looked to the government to honor its promise to take care of the waste, which it made at the beginning of the nuclear age.
In the early days of civilian nuclear power — with the startup of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, in Pennsylvania, in 1957 — the presiding theory was that waste wasn’t a problem: It would be put somewhere safe, and that would be that.
Civilian waste would be reprocessed, recovering useful material like uranium and isolating waste products, which would need special storage. The most worrisome nuclear byproducts are gamma, beta and X-ray emitters, which decay in about 300 years.
The long-lived alpha emitters, principally plutonium, must be put somewhere safe for all time. Plutonium has a half-life of 240,000 years. It’s pretty benign except that it’s an important component of nuclear weapons.
If you get it in your lungs, you’ll almost certainly get lung cancer. Otherwise, people have swallowed it and injected it without harm. It can be shielded with a piece of paper. I have handled it in a glovebox with gloves that weren’t so different from household rubber ones.
But it’s plutonium that gives the “eternal” label to nuclear waste.
Enter President Jimmy Carter in 1977. He believed that reprocessing nuclear waste — as they do in France, Russia, Japan and other countries — would lead to nuclear proliferation. Just months in office, Carter banned reprocessing: the logical step to separating the cream from the milk in nuclear waste handling.
Since then, it’s been the policy of succeeding administrations that the whole, massive nuclear core should be buried. The chosen site for that burial was Yucca Mountain, in Nevada. Some $15 billion to $18 billion has been spent readying the site with its tunnels, rail lines, monitors and passive ventilation.
In 2010 Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — then the majority leader in the Senate — said no to Yucca Mountain. It’s generally believed that Reid was bowing to casino interests in Las Vegas, which thought this was the wrong kind of gamble.
The industry had pinned all its hopes on Yucca Mountain being revived under Trump: He had promised it would be. Then on Feb. 6, and with an eye to the election (he failed to carry Nevada in 2016), Trump tweeted, “Nevada, I hear you and my administration will RESPECT you!
In the Department of Energy, which was promoting Yucca Mountain, gears are crashing, rationales are being torn up and new ones thought up, even as the nuclear waste continues to pile up at operating reactors. No one has any idea what comes next.
Time, I think — after watching nuclear-waste shenanigans since 1969 — to take a very fresh look at nuclear- waste disposal. Most likely, a first step would be to restart reprocessing to reduce the volume.
I’ve been advocating that to leave the past behind, a prize, like the XPRIZE — maybe one awarded by the XPRIZE Foundation — should be established for new ideas on managing nuclear waste. The prize must be substantial: not less than $20 million. It could be financed by companies like Google or Microsoft, which have lots of money, and a declared interest in clean air and decarbonization.
The old concepts have been so tinkered with and politicized that nuclear waste is now a political horror story. Make what you will of Trump being on the same side of nuclear-waste management as presidents Carter and Barack Obama.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Containers or low-level nuclear waste
Campus expansionism
On the Brown campus
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Brown University wants to build two dorms, housing a total of 375 undergraduate students, at the southern end of its main campus, on Providence’s College Hill. This would require tearing down three undistinguished houses, a small commercial strip and a police substation, all properties owned by Brown.
Presumably there would be some pushback from neighbors concerned about, for example, even tighter parking on neighborhood streets, which are increasingly monopolized by Brown-connected people, but I’d be very surprised if the project didn’t happen. Colleges and universities, especially rich “elite’’ ones such as Brown, are constantly trying to expand and they usually get their way.
Despite the complaints that Brown doesn’t pay property taxes (it does fork over some payments in lieu of taxes to the city -- $6.7 million a year at last count) and more generalized complaints about its power and huge footprint, the fact is that its presence, along with that of the Rhode Island School of Design, are key factors in making the College Hill/East Side of Providence so attractive. Brown has some facilities and activities that local residents can enjoy; it ensures that there are many physicians and other health-care professionals (and the Brown teaching hospitals they help staff) and other useful experts close by, and includes a large, generally beautiful, almost parklike campus – a lovely amenity to have near the middle of a city. Indeed, some of those complaining all the time about Brown live on the East Side/College Hill because Brown is there, whether or not they work there
An old joke is that “Providence is Fall River with Brown.’’ Well, as a state capital and former industrial and foreign-trade center, it was always much more than that, but certainly Brown has had something to do with keeping Providence viable as a mid-size city as its old industrial base shrank. Brown’s expansion is, all in all, good for the city, though taxpayers would like it to chip in more money in lieu of taxes. And no, I didn’t go to Brown.
In general, having a college or university brings wealth and energy to their hosting communities, albeit with some irritations and costs.
To read more about Brown’s latest expansion plans, please hit this link.
A Nantucket origin story
Nantucket from a satellite. Martha’s Vineyard’s Chappaquiddick Island is on the left.
“Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island {Nantucket} was settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket --the poor little Indian's skeleton.’’
-- From Moby-Dick (1851), by Herman Melville (1819-91)
Chris Powell: Conn. Democrats' hypocrisy on military spending
Connecticut's members of Congress, all Democrats, are upset -- some almost apoplectic -- about President Trump's using his emergency power to divert military appropriations away from nuclear submarine and jet-fighter procurement to help finance the wall he is having built along the border with Mexico.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal says, "This is about appealing to President Trump's political base" -- as if in opposing the diversion the senator and his colleagues in Connecticut's delegation aren't appealing to their political base, the military contractors and subcontractors in the state that make submarines and jet fighters.
Sen. Chris Murphy says, "The president is stealing money from programs that keep us safe during real national emergencies to fund his stupid border wall." But how persuasive is any member of Congress from a military contracting state like Connecticut when he is just defending appropriations for his own constituents? Has any member of Congress from Connecticut ever opposed an appropriation for military contracting that was to have been spent in the state?
As for keeping the country safe during "real national emergencies," how about that "emergency" with Afghanistan, now in its 20th year? How many more years of that "emergency" will be required before Connecticut's congressmen acknowledge that it is not an "emergency" at all but just another discretionary war of nation building, less of an emergency than the illegal immigration Trump's border wall addresses?
To his credit Murphy lately has led the effort to stop the president from waging war on Iran without the approval of Congress. But the long war in Afghanistan, having achieved nothing but death, seems to have escaped the senator's notice. Where is the legislation to terminate appropriations for that war? Why does that war keep getting a pass from Connecticut's delegation, if not because of the delegation's reluctance to jeopardize the state's military contracting?
Besides, the delegation shares the blame for diversion of the sub and jet-fighter money. For politics is compromise, the president's discretion to move military money around in emergencies he declares and defines has been the law for many years, and Democrats have yet to want much compromise with Trump over illegal immigration.
Indeed, most leading Democrats in Connecticut want as much illegal immigration as they can get, since it proletarianizes the country, increasing the population's dependence on government welfare programs, and increases the number of Democratic-leaning legislative districts, since illegal immigrants cluster overwhelmingly in Democratic urban areas, where, though they aren't supposed to vote, they still are counted toward formation of new congressional and state legislative districts.
That is, the more illegal immigrants, the more Democrats in Congress and the General Assembly.
Silly as the Democrats consider the border wall, by appropriating directly for it and giving Trump what he wanted they might have guaranteed their wildest dreams of military contracting and even have achieved at last the naturalization of the innocent young people, the "Dreamers," brought into the country illegally by their parents and now living in limbo. But blocking immigration law enforcement comes first for Connecticut Democrats, even ahead of more weapons.
Somehow the country will manage with fewer jet fighters and subs, especially if Congress goes beyond posturing against a hypothetical war and terminates one that is only too real.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Staring at 'nonspectacular' flora
“Inside/Outside’’ (oil on canvas) , by Maria Napolitano, in her March 2-May 3 show “Garden Fragments,’’ at Periphery Space at Paper Nautilus, Providence. She explains:
“The work in this show invites you to stop and take a closer look at the ordinary and non-spectacular flora that surround most of our lives. To do this, I mix up painterly, cartoony and diagrammatic approaches which I use to draw attention to the fragile relationship we have with our ecosystem. Whether it be based on the dried remnants of last year’s garden or visual memories I collect from a winter walk in the park, I combine observation and imagination to provide an insight into my everyday interaction with nature. “
Try trains again
Providence’s infamous stuck-up bridge over the Seekonk River
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary’’ in GoLocal245.com
Architectural historian and critic William Morgan’s recent entertaining GoLocal column with zany ideas (ski jump!) on what to do with the abandoned railroad bridge over the Seekonk River at the head of Narragansett Bay served to remind many of us that a light-rail line from Providence down through East Providence, Barrington, Warren and Bristol would make a lot of sense. And maybe it could eventually be extended across to Aquidneck Island via a railroad bridge next to the Mount Hope Bridge.
After all, it’s a densely populated strip with distinct town centers (for stations). It would make a lot of environmental and economic sense to lay down the line even if that meant putting it where the East Bay Bike Path (formerly a rail route!) is now. You can move a lot more people by train than by bike, and do it in all weather.
In any event, we need to better knit together the improving post-industrial waterfront of East Providence with Providence’s eastern shore.
To read Mr. Morgan’s column, please hit this link.
Maybe Mr. Morgan could do another essay on Providence’s “Superman Building,’’ this one with some fantastical suggestions – e.g., hanging gardens, a recirculating waterfall, an aviary at the top….
Hit this link to read his last column on that Art Deco skyscraper.
Racism left out of history books
“Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta, ‘‘ from "Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)" (offset lithography and silkscreen on Somerset Textured paper), a show by Kara Walker, at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art, through April 19.
The museum says: “Kara Walker is New York-based artist whose work has appeared worldwide, tackling complex social issues such as race, gender, sexuality and violence. She's known for her use of silhouetted figures in her prints. In “Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated),’’ she combines her signature prints with enlarged woodcut plates from the book Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War to illustrate a different side of the Civil War: the perspective of African Americans of the era and the racism they experienced that were left out of history books.
Don Pesci: Using Conn. tolls as an escape hatch
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender and took a pause in his ceaseless efforts to rig Connecticut with a new revenue source – tolls – so that his comrades in the General Assembly would not have to apply themselves diligently during the next decade to balancing chronic deficits through spending cuts. A new revenue source would buy progressives in the legislature about ten years of business-as-usual slothfulness. It is their real hedge against spending reductions.
“I think it’s time,” Lamont said at a hastily called news conference, “to take a pause” and -- he did not say -- to resume our tireless efforts next year, after the November 2020 elections have been put to bed. The specter always hanging over the struggle for and against tolls always has been the upcoming elections, when all the members of Connecticut’s General Assembly will come face to face with the voter’s wrath. The prime directive in state politics is to get elected and stay elected, without which all ideas, hopes, dreams, and the vain strutting of one’s hour upon the political stage, are evanescent puffs of smoke.
“Gov. drops tolls plan” ran the front page, above the fold headline in a Hartford paper, underscored with a sub-headline, “Democratic Senate leaders are still open to a vote on controversial legislation.” The word “controversial” in that headline is a massive understatement. The best laid toll plans of Lamont and leading Democrats in the General Assembly were torn asunder by a volcanic eruption of disgust and dismay that Speaker of the House Joe Arsimowicz and President of the Senate Martin Looney seem convinced will disappear within the following year. Their experts no doubt have counseled them that the lifespan of political memories in Connecticut is exceedingly short; by November, all the Sturm und Drang over tolls will have been dumped onto the ash heap of ancient history.
No one will recall these bitter fighting words from Lamont, “If these guys [Lamont’s Democrat co-conspirators who had been giving him assurances that there were enough votes in the General Assembly to pass his re-worked toll plan] aren’t willing to vote and step up, I’m going to solve this problem. Right now, we’re going to go back to the way we’ve done it for years in this state when we kept kicking the can down the road."
By the expression “kicking the can down the road” Lamont meant to indicate that the Democratic-dominated legislature and preceding governors had not, unlike him, attacked transportation issues, not to mention massively dislocative state workers’ pension obligations, with energy and dispatch. We are back to borrowing money to pay for transportation and road repair because – Lamont did not say – his Democrat comrades in the General Assembly had in the past raided dedicated funds, transportation funds among them, in order to move from laughably insecure “lockboxes” to the General Slush Fund monies necessary to patch massive holes in budget appropriations and expenditures caused by inordinate spending.
The real political division in Connecticut is not, and perhaps never has been, between Democrats and Republicans. The dissevering line runs between progressive politicians who, victims of their own past successes, are not discomforted by ever-increasing taxes and spending – which go together, like the proverbial horse and carriage – and those who are beginning to suspect that the usual political bromides only sink the state further in a mire of political corruption and anti-democratic but successful political verbiage that makes no sense when examined closely. In the post income tax period, Connecticut entered into a perilous and fatally repetitious Groundhog Day, and those who might have opened the eyes of the public, reporters and commentators, were fast asleep.
Tolls are, in fact, an escape hatch for politicians who want to deceive their real employers, voters, into swallowing the fiction that less money for the masses and more for the politicians will usher in a progressive Eden, whereas inordinate revenue infusions only relieve politicians of the brutal necessity for spending cuts.
The general perception among all groups opposed to tolls and other revenue boosters appears to be: not one cent more in net revenue. For the benefit of the real state, not Connecticut’s administrative apparatus, the General Assembly must show in an indisputable and public manner that it intends to inaugurate real, lasting, spending reforms. The General Assembly is making a serious political mistake if it assumes that all the ruckus of the past year surrounding tolls is only about tolls. It is about the General Assembly and present and past governors who have closed their eyes and ears to the havoc they have caused and the wounds and injuries they have visited upon our beloved state.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
'Left with yourself'
Inman Square in Boston
— Photo by Tim Pierce
“Just to be in Boston, in Cambridge, on a Monday night was very horrifying to me. It frightens me . . . All the stores closing up by 5 or 6, coffeehouses being open maybe until 11, just the sense that the world shuts down and you're left with yourself.”
― Ann Douglas, English professor emerita at Columbia who got her PhD at Harvard
An objective approach
“Who’s on First” (oil on canvas), by Madolin Maxey, in her March 8-27 show, “Objects as Narrative,’’ at the Providence Art Club. In it, she uses objects from her studio “in settings that lead to visual conversations with the viewer.’’
Trashy art in Maynard
Work by Mary Mooney, in the show “Out of the Box,’’ at ArtSpace Maynard (Mass.) through April 18.
The gallery says:
“ArtSpace Maynard artists challenged each other to create art from collections of trash and treasure that were boxed and re-distributed to participating artists at random. This challenge has brought artists in this community together to commiserate and encouraged them to step into entirely new territory with their work.’’
![Maynard is located on the Assabet River, a tributary of the Concord River. A large part of the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge is within the town.[2]Historic downtown Maynard, above, hosts many shops, restaurants, galleries, a movie theater, …](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/561446cce4b094b629347f8d/1582495301748-51FIXPMKGG9YL860ZQ9Y/500px-Nason_Street_in_downtown_Maynard_Massachusetts_MA_USA_with_the_Maynard_Outdoor_Store.jpg)
Maynard is located on the Assabet River, a tributary of the Concord River. A large part of the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge is within the town.[2]
Historic downtown Maynard, above, hosts many shops, restaurants, galleries, a movie theater, and the former Assabet Woolen Mill, which produced wool fabrics from 1846 to 1950, including cloth for Union Army uniforms during the Civil War. Maynard was the headquarters for Digital Equipment Corporation, one of the first big computer companies, from 1957 to 1998.
Kayak and canoe launch dock at Ice House Landing, on the Assabet River, Maynard.
Trump's planned 'classical' command
Two “Modernist’’ landmarks: the “Brutalist” Boston City Hall, ugly (to many people). Below, the Hancock Tower in Boston, which most people (I think) find beautiful.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The White House is considering putting out an order called “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’’ that would mandate “classical’’ styles as the default design for all new federal buildings in Greater Washington, D.C., and for all new federal buildings everywhere, including courthouses, projected to cost more than $50 million each.
Now, a lot of “classical’’ architecture is attractive in its dignified, symmetrical, solid way, and some modern architecture, especially the Brutalist (think Boston City Hall) and Deconstructivist (think the Seattle Central Library and the Stata Center at MIT), hideous to many, but not all, people. (The order would ban both styles.) Some “classical’’ architecture can look silly, with columns looking pasted on in an effort to make a building appear Graeco-Roman (and instant old); or they can recall sterile, heavy Stalinist or even Nazi-era creations.
But many people (including me) find some modern architecture gorgeous. Consider the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington or the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.
The selection of architects, and of the many other people involved in getting public buildings up, should depend on their appreciation of beauty (modified by functional needs and budgetary constraints) of design and quality of materials, whatever the style. And public buildings should look as if they’re going to stand for a long, long time, as we hope (more nervously these days) the country will. Why circumscribe creativity as much as Trump wants to do? There’s a lot of it out there.
Classic “classical’’ — The National Archives, in Washington, D.C.
Phil Galewitz: Trump's Medicaid chief mostly wrong on its outcomes, access
“This wouldn’t pass muster in a first-year statistics class.’’
— Benjamin Sommers, health-care economist at Harvard, of Medicare-Medicaid chief’s remarks
The Trump administration’s top Medicaid official has been increasingly critical of the entitlement program she has overseen for three years.
Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has warned that the federal government and states need to better control spending and improve care to the 70 million people on Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the low-income population. She supports changes to Medicaid that would give states the option to receive capped annual federal funding for some enrollees instead of open-ended payouts based on enrollment and health costs. This would be a departure from how the program has operated since it began in 1965.
In an early February speech to the American Medical Association, Verma noted how changes are needed because Medicaid is one of the top two biggest expenses for states, and its costs are expected to increase 500% by 2050.
“Yet, for all that spending, health outcomes today on Medicaid are mediocre and many patients have difficulty accessing care,” she said.
Verma’s sharp comments got us wondering if Medicaid recipients were as bad off as she said. So we asked CMS what evidence it has to back up her views.
A CMS spokesperson responded by pointing us to a CMS fact sheet comparing the health status of people on Medicaid to people with private insurance and Medicare. The fact sheet, among other things, showed 43% of Medicaid enrollees report their health as excellent or very good compared with 71% of people with private insurance, 14% on Medicare and 58% who were uninsured.
The spokesperson also pointed to a 2017 report by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), a congressional advisory board, that noted: “Medicaid enrollees have more difficulty than low-income privately insured individuals in finding a doctor who accepts their insurance and making an appointment; Medicaid enrollees also have more difficulty finding a specialist physician who will treat them.”
We opted to look at those issues separately.
What About Health Status?
Several national Medicaid experts said Verma is wrong to use health status as a proxy for whether Medicaid helps improve health for people. That’s because to be eligible for Medicaid, people must fall into a low income bracket, which can impact their health in many ways. For example, they may live in substandard housing or not get proper nutrition and exercise. In addition, lack of transportation or child care responsibilities can hamper their ability to visit doctors.
Benjamin Sommers, a health economist at Harvard University, said Verma’s comparison of the health status of Medicaid recipients against people with Medicare or private insurance is invalid because the populations are so different and face varied health risks. “This wouldn’t pass muster in a first-year statistics class,” he said.
Death rates, for example, are higher among people in the Medicare program than those in private insurance or Medicaid, he said, but that’s not a knock on Medicare. It’s because Medicare primarily covers people 65 and older.
By definition, Medicaid covers the most vulnerable people in the community, from newborns to the disabled and the poor, said Rachel Nuzum, a vice president with the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund. “The Medicaid population does not look like the privately insured population.”
Joe Antos, a health economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, also agreed, saying he is leery of any studies or statements that evaluate Medicaid without adjusting for risk.
For a better mechanism to gauge health outcomes under Medicaid, experts point to dozens of studies that track what happened in states that chose in the past six years to pursue the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. The health law gave states the option to extend Medicaid to everyone with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level, or about $17,600 annually for an individual. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia have adopted the expansion.
“Most research demonstrates that Medicaid expansion has improved access to care, utilization of services, the affordability of care, and financial security among the low-income population,” concluded the Kaiser Family Foundation in summarizing findings from more than 300 studies. “Studies show improved self-reported health following expansion and an association between expansion and certain positive health outcomes.” (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
Studies found the expansion of Medicaid led to lower mortality rates for people with heart disease and among end-stage renal disease patients initiating dialysis.
Researchers also reported that Medicaid expansion was associated with declines in the length of stay of hospitalized patients. One study found a link between expansion and declines in mechanical ventilation rates among patients hospitalized for various conditions.
Another recent study compared the health characteristics of low-income residents of Texas, which has not expanded Medicaid, and those of Arkansas and Kentucky, which did. It found that new Medicaid enrollees in the latter two states were 41 percentage points more likely to have a usual source of care and 23 percentage points more likely to say they were in excellent health than a comparable group of Texas residents.
Medicaid’s benefits, though, affect far more than the millions of nondisabled adults who gained coverage as a result of the ACA. “Medicaid coverage was associated with a range of positive health behaviors and outcomes, including increased access to care; improved self-reported health status; higher rates of preventive health screenings; lower likelihood of delaying care because of costs; decreased hospital and emergency department utilization; and decreased infant, child, and adult mortality rates,” according to a report issued this month by the nonpartisan Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Children — who make up nearly half of Medicaid enrollees — have also benefited from the coverage, studies find. Some studies report that Medicaid contributes to improved health outcomes, including reductions in avoidable hospitalizations and lower child mortality.
Research shows people on Medicaid are generally happy with the coverage.
A Commonwealth Fund survey found 90% of adults with Medicaid were satisfied or very satisfied with their coverage, a slightly higher percentage than those with employer coverage.
Accessible Care?
The evidence here is less emphatic.
A 2017 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found 84% of Medicaid recipients felt they were able to get all the medical care they needed in the previous six months. Only 3% said they could not get care because of long wait times or because doctors would not accept their insurance.
Verma cites a 2017 MACPAC report that noted some people on Medicaid have issues accessing care. But that report also noted: “The body of work to date by MACPAC and others shows that Medicaid beneficiaries have much better access to care, and much higher health care utilization, than individuals without insurance, particularly when controlling for socioeconomic characteristics and health status.” It also notes that “Medicaid beneficiaries also fare as well as or better than individuals with private insurance on some access measures.”
The report said people with Medicaid are as likely as those with private insurance to have a usual source of care, a doctor visit each year and certain services such as a Pap test to detect cervical cancer.
“Medicaid is not great coverage, but it does open the door for health access to help people deal with medical problems before they become acute,” Antos said.
On the negative side, the report said Medicaid recipients are more likely than privately insured patients to experience longer waiting times to see a doctor. They also are less likely to receive mammograms, colorectal tests and dental visits than the privately insured.
“Compared to having no insurance at all, having Medicaid improves access to care and improves health,” said Rachel Garfield, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “There is pretty strong evidence that Medicaid helps patients get the care they need.”
Our Ruling
Verma said that “health outcomes today on Medicaid are mediocre and many patients have difficulty accessing care.”
Numerous studies show people’s health improves as a result of Medicaid coverage. This includes lower mortality rates, shorter hospital stays and more people likely to get cancer screenings.
While it’s hard to specify what “many patients having difficulty accessing care” means, research does show that Medicaid enrollees generally say they have no trouble accessing care most of the time.
We rate the claim as Mostly False.
Phil Galewitz is a Kaiser Health News reporter.
Phil Galewitz: pgalewitz@kff.org, @philgalewitz