A rebound in the financial markets after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic fueled record growth in the state’s pension fund for government workers.
The pension fund for 1.1 million employees and retirees grew a whopping 33.6% for the fiscal year that ended March 31, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced Wednesday.
The return on investments increased the fund’s value to nearly $255 billion, making it one of the largest public pension funds in the nation.
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The fund’s long-term expected rate of return is 6.8%.
The health of the fund is critical to its 673,000 active workers and 447,000 retirees, and it comes as more public sector employees are retiring, a review of state records showed.
In the midst of the uncertainty, Epic, a private electronic health record giant and a key purveyor of American health data, accelerated the deployment of a clinical prediction tool called the Deterioration Index. Built with a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning and in use at some hospitals prior to the pandemic, the index is designed to help physicians decide when to move a patient into or out of intensive care, and is influenced by factors like breathing rate and blood potassium level. Epic had been tinkering with the index for years but expanded its use during the pandemic. At hundreds of hospitals, including those in which we both work, a Deterioration Index score is prominently displayed on the chart of every patient admitted to the hospital.
The Deterioration Index is poised to upend a key cultural practice in medicine: triage. Loosely speaking, triage is an act of determining how sick a patient is at any given moment to prioritize treatment and limited resources. In the past, physicians have performed this task by rapidly interpreting a patient’s vital signs, physical exam findings, test results, and other data points, using heuristics learned through years of on-the-job medical training.
Ostensibly, the core assumption of the Deterioration Index is that traditional triage can be augmented, or perhaps replaced entirely, by machine learning and big data. Indeed, a study of 392 Covid-19 patients admitted to Michigan Medicine that the index was moderately successful at discriminating between low-risk patients and those who were at high-risk of being transferred to an ICU, getting placed on a ventilator, or dying while admitted to the hospital. But last year’s hurried rollout of the Deterioration Index also sets a worrisome precedent, and it illustrates the potential for such decision-support tools to propagate biases in medicine and change the ways in which doctors think about their patients.
Germany’s Federal Fiscal Court, the Bundesfinanzhof, demanded changes Monday to pension taxation to avoid future double taxation of retirement savings.
Prior to 2005, pensions had been basically tax-exempt because contributions came from taxed salaries. Under a 2005 law change, pension contribution payments gradually become tax-free. However, the taxable share of the pension increased. Because of the change, there is the potential of double taxation during the transition period if the tax-exempt portion of the pension is less than the contributions made earlier from taxed salaries.
A married couple who were assessed together for income tax purposes in 2009 filed a complaint against the rules, alleging that their 2009 tax assessment was unlawful. The court rejected the complaint as unfounded, stating that the plaintiffs had not been violated of their rights.
Providence’s pension crisis has its roots in the late 1980s. That’s when the city’s Retirement Board approved unusually generous compounded cost of living adjustments for more than 2,500 city workers and retirees. Decades later, that move helps explain why there’s a $1.2 billion gap between the pension balance and the amount owed to current and future retirees.
The pension crisis has defied attempted solutions for years. Providence officials say the city has just 22% of the money needed to meet its long-term pension obligations. And the amount of the city budget consumed by the pension is growing 5 percent a year, to about $93 million currently. Without a change, that annual payment will rise to $227 million by 2040.
Mayor Jorge Elorza said these pension costs are unsustainable.
“It’s only a matter of time before they continue to squeeze everything else out of our budget, so that we’re cutting deeper and deeper into the bone,” he said during a recent news conference.
Elorza’s plan involves selling $704 million in pension obligation bonds. The idea is that these bonds could generate enough of a return to boost the pension system’s funding to more than 60 percent.
The calculation error that upended the state’s largest pension fund has been traced back to a single month in 2015, according to an investigation from Spotlight PA.
The discovery came to light in a trove of documents obtained by reporters that found a tiny discrepancy that boosted the $64 billion Public School Employees Retirement System (PSERS) by a third of a percentage point in April of that year.
The consultant firm hired to review PSERS’ investment returns between 2011 and 2020, ACA Compliance Group, performed limited checks that skipped over the month in question, according to the report. The company that crunched the actual numbers, Aon, blamed the discrepancy on a data entry error.
No matter the fault, the miscalculation unraveled PSERS’ rate of return, dropping it from just above the mandated 6.36% threshold to prevent a contribution increase down to 6.34%. Now, about 100,000 workers who joined the system in 2011 or later will pay more beginning on July 1.
But most people with COVID-19 are never ill enough to be hospitalized. The best way to assess the prevalence of long COVID is to follow a representative group of people who have tested positive for the virus. The UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) has done just that, by following more than 20,000 people who have tested positive since April 2020 (see ‘Uncertain endpoint’). In its most recent analyses, published on 1 April, the ONS found that 13.7% still reported symptoms after at least 12 weeks (there is no widely agreed definition of long COVID, but the ONS considers it to be COVID-19 symptoms that last more than 4 weeks).
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In other words, more than one in 10 people who became infected with SARS-CoV-2 have gone on to get long COVID. If the UK prevalence is applicable elsewhere, that’s more than 16 million people worldwide.
The condition seems to be more common in women than in men. In another ONS analysis, 23% of women and 19% of men still had symptoms 5 weeks after infection. That is “striking”, says Rachael Evans, a clinician scientist at the University of Leicester, UK, and a member of the Post-Hospitalisation COVID-19 study (PHOSP-COVID). “If you’re male and get COVID, you’re more likely to go to hospital and you’re more likely to die. Yet if you survive, actually it’s females that are much more likely to get the ongoing symptoms.”
Seemingly overnight, the COVID-19 pandemic launched millions of Americans into a massive work-from-home experiment, with roughly 7 in 10 workers who could work remotely doing so in May 2020.
But from a bird’s eye view, the way Americans moved in 2020 looks pretty much the same as it has for years. More people moved out of the biggest cities than moved in, while smaller cities and suburbs grew — especially in Arizona, Florida and Texas.
In addition to benefiting reproducibility and transparency, one of the advantages of using R is that researchers have a much larger range of fully customisable data visualisations options than are typically available in point and-click software, due to the open-source nature of R. These visualisation options not only look attractive, but can increase transparency about the distribution of the underlying data rather than relying on commonly used visualisations of aggregations such as bar charts of means. In this tutorial, we provide a practical introduction to data visualisation using R, specifically aimed at researchers who have little to no prior experience of using R. First we detail the rationale for using R for data visualisation and introduce the “grammar of graphics” that underlies data visualisation using the ggplot package. The tutorial then walks the reader through how to replicate plots that are commonly available in point-and-click software such as histograms and boxplots, as well as showing how the code for these “basic” plots can be easily extended to less commonly available options such as violin-boxplots. The dataset and code used in this tutorial as well as an interactive version with activity solutions, additional resources and advanced plotting options is available at https://osf.io/bj83f/. This is a pre-submission manuscript and tutorial and has not yet undergone peer review. We welcome user feedback which you can provide using this form: https://forms.office.com/r/ba1UvyykYR. Please note that this tutorial is likely to undergo changes before it is accepted for publication and we would encourage you to check for updates before citing.
Nordmann, Emily, Phil McAleer, Wilhelmiina Toivo, Helena Paterson, and Lisa M. DeBruine. 2021. “Data Visualisation Using R, for Researchers Who Don’t Use R.” PsyArXiv. June 21. doi:10.31234/osf.io/4huvw.
The Utah Department of Health reported 462 new cases of COVID-19, one new death and 7,412 new vaccinations administered in Utah Thursday.
It also released a new dataset for the first time that shows the number of “breakthrough” cases, hospitalizations and deaths for those who aren’t vaccinated account for a vast majority of recent trends. It also shows rate of new COVID-19 vaccinations is very slowly rising.
Utah’s rolling seven-day average for new positive cases in the state is now at 324, which is a slight increase from 312 Wednesday. The number of new cases is still well below any of the previous increases experienced since March 2020.
Leading causes of death among Blacks differ by sex. Among Black males, homicide and accidents (such as drug overdoses and motor vehicle accidents) combined make up almost as many deaths as deaths due to cancer. Stroke and kidney disease cause higher proportion of deaths among Black females compared to males and non-Blacks.
Black Chicagoans are expected to live more than nine years less than non-Black residents — and that gap in life expectancy is only growing, according to a report released Tuesday.
The report by the Chicago Department of Public Health presents a grim but unsurprising outlook on how inequities in housing, income, access to healthy food and trauma have contributed to the disparity in the city.
From 2012 to 2017, the life expectancy gap between Black residents and non-Black residents grew from 8.3 years to 9.2 years, the report found.
Black Chicagoans on average live 71.4 years while non-Black residents live 80.6 years. While non-Blacks saw their life expectancy drop by more than three months in those five years, life expectancy dropped for Blacks by more than 14 months. The report cites five main factors: chronic diseases, homicide, infant mortality, opioid overdoses and HIV, flu or other infections.
Jobs as judges, prosecutors, and municipal business administrators are the crock of gold at the end of a politician’s rainbow here and with bailouts, unlimited debt, and an apathetic tax base ripe for plucking politicians have an opportunity to sweeten the pots. According to politicoNJ that is exactly what they are planning on doing with five bills (one already enacted).
A4313: transfers Administrative Law Judges from the Defined Contribution Retirement Program to the Public Employees’ Retirement System. The Office of Legislative Services (OLS) estimates that this bill will lead to annual State cost increases resulting from the transfer of Administrative Law Judges from the Defined Contribution Retirement Program to the Public Employees’ Retirement System. The first-year cost could approximate $2million.In subsequent fiscal years, the annual State cost will grow as a function of increases in judges’ salaries and other economic factors. The bill may also make Administrative Law Judges eligible for healthcare benefit sat retirement that are not available in the Defined Contribution Retirement Program.
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S3197: Clarifies eligibility for deferred retirement for certain judges in JRS. PoliticoNJ guessed at who could benefit:
The bill appears to have been written with Middlesex County Prosecutor Yolanda Ciccone in mind, as she otherwise would have to leave the prosecutor’s position when she reaches the mandatory judicial retirement age of 70 in 2024 in order to collect her judicial pension. It also could potentially apply to Judge William Daniel, whom Murphy nominated last week as the next Union County prosecutor.
