Month: March 2021

Covid-19 Rewrote the Rules of Shopping. What Is Next?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-rewrote-the-rules-of-shopping-what-is-next-11615561232

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Excerpt:

Covid-19 changed the way we shop. The big question now is which of the new habits will stick once the pandemic recedes.

Instead of lining up on Black Friday for a bargain-priced TV, shoppers ordered from home and picked up curbside. Even those who rarely bought online before the pandemic relied on the internet to bring them everything from groceries to pajamas to fake eyelashes.

“Consumers found some of the experiences forced by Covid to be convenient,” said Stefan Larsson, the chief executive officer of PVH Corp., which owns Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and other brands. “Anything that they perceive as making their life easier will be here to stay.”

Author(s): Suzanne Kapner

Publication Date: 12 March 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Survival Curves

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://labs.minutelabs.io/survival-curves/#/

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Excerpt:

Every green block shows the fraction of individuals that are still alive when they reach that age. The red blocks show the fraction that died since the previous age group.

LIFE EXPECTANCY AT BIRTH

If we add up all the areas of the red blocks (deaths) and divide by 100%, we get the expected age an individual would die at (aka: life expectancy at birth). Humans mostly live around 75 years after birth.

Author(s): Jasper Palfree

Date Accessed: 15 March 2021

Publication Site: Minutelabs.io

Why It’s Time for States to Raise Their Tobacco Taxes

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.governing.com/now/Why-Its-Time-for-States-to-Raise-Their-Tobacco-Taxes.html

Excerpt:

In the face of the pandemic, states across the geographic and political spectrum — including Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, New Mexico and New York — are actively considering tobacco tax increases during their legislative sessions. Last month, a bipartisan supermajority in the Maryland Legislature moved to increase the state’s cigarette tax by $1.75 per pack, the first increase in nearly a decade, and to establish a tax on e-cigarettes to fund tobacco cessation and health programs.

The growing legislative momentum comes after voters in Colorado and Oregon approved tobacco tax increases in ballot measures last November. Colorado, which had not raised tobacco taxes in 16 years, will collect an estimated $175 million in revenue during the 2021-22 budget year for tobacco cessation and health programs. In Oregon, higher tobacco taxes will generate an estimated $160 million per year and help to fund the care of people with mental illnesses and other conditions.

Author(s): NANCY BROWN, AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION

Publication Date: 15 March 2021

Publication Site: Governing

Encountering Thomas Sowell

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://lawliberty.org/encountering-thomas-sowell/

Excerpt:

Riley, a longtime columnist at the Wall Street Journal and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has made it something of a personal mission to alter the dynamic of prejudgment and casual dismissal I have outlined, or at least to bring the ideas of Sowell to as wide an audience as possible. In May he will publish Maverick, a biography of the thinker, now 91 years old and in semi-retirement since 2016. The documentary relies on archival footage as well as hours of interviews that Riley has recorded with Sowell who, since attaining his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago at the seasoned age of 38, has conducted one of the most prolific and long-running careers in public thinking in recent memory, publishing over 30 books on a variety of subjects from Marxist political economy to late-speaking children, and thousands of syndicated columns, despite his near total absence from the mainstream American imagination.

Sowell’s rise was not predestined. His father died shortly before he was born to a single mother in North Carolina in 1930. By the time that he was eight, his mother had also passed away, and he was raised in Harlem by his aunt and uncle—a devastating twist of fate that Sowell insists on describing as a stroke of fortune. “We were much poorer than most people in Harlem or most anywhere else today; it was my last year or two at home that we finally had a telephone; we had a radio, but we never had a television,” we hear him explain in voiceover. “But in another sense, I was enormously more fortunate than most black kids today.” He describes his family as being “interested” in him, and it is that interest and their dedication to developing his obvious talents that was crucial to his future. A family friend exposed him to the public library and lit a fire in his imagination. He won admission to the ultra-competitive Stuyvesant High School, but dropped out to serve in the Marines before eventually graduating magna cum laude from Harvard in the late 1950s.

Author(s): Thomas Chatterton Williams

Publication Date: 15 March 2021

Publication Site: Law & Liberty

First COVID-19 Wave Hit Preferred Insureds Hard: Work Group

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2021/03/12/first-covid-19-wave-hit-preferred-insureds-hard-work-group/

Excerpt:

The team found that deaths attributed to COVID-19 accounted for 5.1% of the individual life insurance death claims participating insurers received in the first half of 2020.

About 2% of all of claims for all causes were for people younger than 45. That was about the same percentage as in 2019.

About 1% of the COVID-19-related claims submitted in the first half of 2020 were for people under 45.

The overall increase in the odds of dying from any cause was highest for insureds in their 70s.

Author(s): Allison Bell

Publication Date: 12 March 2021

Publication Site: Think Advisor

COVID vaccine czar to face complaint after ‘inappropriate’ calls about Cuomo

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nypost.com/2021/03/14/covid-19-vaccine-czar-to-be-subject-of-complaint-calling-about-cuomo/

Excerpt:

A longtime lieutenant to Gov. Cuomo — who is now overseeing New York’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout — called around county officials to gauge their loyalty to the governor amid sexual harassment and misconduct allegations, it emerged Sunday.

Larry Schwartz, who formerly held the highly influential position of secretary to the governor, undertook the phone campaign in the past two weeks as more than a half-dozen women have come forward to accuse Cuomo of inappropriate remarks or behavior.

“Last Friday, I had a conversation with Larry Schwartz who reached out to discuss whether I was supportive of the governor,” Democratic Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone told The Post.

Author(s): Carl Campanile, Aaron Feis

Publication Date: 14 March 2021

Publication Site: NY Post

COVID-19 Nursing Home Data

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://data.cms.gov/stories/s/COVID-19-Nursing-Home-Data/bkwz-xpvg/

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Excerpt:

The Nursing Home COVID-19 Public File includes data reported by nursing homes to the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) system COVID-19 Long Term Care Facility Module, including Resident Impact, Facility Capacity, Staff & Personnel, and Supplies & Personal Protective Equipment, and Ventilator Capacity and Supplies Data Elements.
For a list of Frequently Asked Questions, please click here.
For a full list of variables included in this Public Use File (PUF) and their descriptions, please see the data dictionary. The file contains an individual record for each certified Medicare skilled nursing facility/Medicaid nursing facility and the ending date for each collection week, and is updated weekly. More information on CMS requirements for reporting COVID-19 information can be found here. We note that the presence of cases of COVID-19 in a nursing home does not automatically indicate noncompliance with federal requirements. This information is used to assist with national surveillance of COVID-19 in nursing homes, and support actions to protect the health and safety of nursing home residents.

Date Accessed: 15 March 2021

Publication Site: CMS

Nursing Home Residents Die From COVID at Record Rate Over New Year’s Period

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/health/info-2021/nursing-homes-new-years-covid-deaths.html

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Excerpt:

The COVID-19 death rate in U.S. nursing homes hit a new high in the weeks surrounding New Year’s Day, a new AARP analysis of federal data shows. It found that roughly 1 in every 51 residents died from COVID-19 over the four-week period from Dec. 21 to Jan. 17. A total of 19,299 deaths were reported. 

The death rate captured in the analysis topped that of previous four-week reporting periods, making it the highest COVID-19 death rate reported to the government since the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) began requiring nursing homes to do so in late May. 

While the record high death rate in the four weeks ending Jan. 17 represents only a slight increase from the previous month, when 1 in every 53 residents died from COVID-19, it is more than a quadrupling of the resident death rate at the end of the summer. 

Author(s): Emily Paulin

Publication Date: 11 February 2021

Publication Site: AARP

Nursing Home ‘Patients Will Die’: Staff Warned NJ Commissioner About COVID-19 Order

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/03/15/nursing-home-patients-will-die-staff-warned-nj-commissioner-about-covid-19-order-n1432596

Excerpt:

“Patients will die,” an unidentified administrator declared, according to a recording of the March 21, 2020 meeting first reported by NJ Advance Media. “You understand that by asking us to take COVID patients, by demanding we take COVID patients, that patients will die in nursing homes that wouldn’t have otherwise died had we screened them out.”

About 8,000 COVID-19 deaths — roughly 40 percent of New Jersey’s 21,000 COVID-19 deaths — trace back to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. On March 31, Murphy’s administration directed nursing homes to re-admit residents who had been discharged from hospitals while recovering from COVID-19.

While Persichilli’s guidance also directed nursing homes to house these residents in a separate wing, in order to avoid infecting other patients, many nursing home administrators warned that such separation would be incomplete and would fail to prevent the spread of the virus.

Author(s): Tyler O’Neil

Publication Date: 15 March 2021

Publication Site: PJ Media

How to Spend Stimulus Money to Reduce State and Local Retiree Health Care Debt

Mary Pat Campbell
How to Spend Stimulus Money to Reduce State and Local Retiree Health Care Debt

Excerpt:

In some cases, state and local governments show net OPEB liabilities, which is the total amount of benefits already promised to retirees, as large or larger than their net pension liabilities. Although the total future cost of retiree health care benefits is smaller than pension benefits, which are intended to replace income, most governments have at least partially prefunded their pension benefits while setting aside little or no money to cover their future OPEB costs. This is often attributable to the strong legal protections granted to public pensions but that largely do not extend to OPEB benefit promises made to workers in most places. Nonetheless, by failing to set aside funds for retiree health benefits as employees accrue them, government employers are burdening future taxpayers with growing debt. The size of the problem is also raising doubts among prospective retirees about whether the benefits promised to them will really be there when they retire.

In this post, I consider two potential strategies for using the temporary increase in governments’ fiscal capacity to address unfunded other post-employment benefit liabilities: (1) prefunding and reforming defined retiree healthcare benefits, and (2) switching employees to defined contribution retiree health care benefits.

Author(s): Marc Joffe

Publication Date: 12 March 2021

Publication Site: Reason

U.S. Individual Life COVID-19 Mortality Claims Analysis

Mary Pat Campbell

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Excerpt:

The first quarter of 2020 all-cause individual life death counts were in the range of 93% to 99% for
the first quarter in the previous five years, similar to the CDC’s estimated actual to expected all-cause deaths for the population.

The second quarter of 2020 all-cause individual life death counts were in the range of 110% to
113% for the second quarter in the previous five years. This was lower than the CDC’s second-quarter estimate of 118% to 123% for the population.

The average attained age at death of the individual life COVID claims is 0.6 years older than the
average age of non-COVID claims. The U.S. population had a much larger difference of 3.0 years
between the average attained age of COVID and non-COVID deaths.

Author(s): Individual Life COVID-19 Project Work Group

Publication Date: March 2021

Publication Site: Society of Actuaries

Restoring Financial Regulators’ Right to Fight Climate Change

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://earther.gizmodo.com/restoring-financial-regulators-right-to-fight-climate-c-1846476253

Excerpt:

Already, over the past few weeks, Biden’s Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it will update its guidelines on how climate risks should be disclosed to investors, and launched a task force to focus on climate-related compliance and misconduct. The SEC has also refused to help ExxonMobil block a shareholder vote on a climate-change resolution. (Although the commission did just let the company reject a shareholder proposal to force the operation to disclose what it plans to do with its untapped fossil fuel assets.)

This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission sided with ExxonMobil in rejecting a shareholder proposal to require the company to report how it plans to deal with “stranded assets” — untapped fossil fuels that the company is counting as assets but may never be drilled, meaning they will turn into liabilities.

Author(s): Dharna Noor, Walker Bragman

Publication Date: 15 March 2021

Publication Site: Gizmodo