March 2023 – Page 14 – The Tarbabys Blog

More Retiree Health Plans Move Away From Traditional Medicare

The New York Times

More Retiree Health Plans Move Away From Traditional Medicare

Mark Miller – March 11, 2023

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on Social Security and healthcare costs at University of Tampa, Fla. on Feb. 9, 2023. (Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times)

Bob Bentkowski, a retired New York City firefighter, has a rare, painful disease that caused his kidneys to swell almost to the size of basketballs. He needed a transplant, and in the fall of 2021, he found a donor after waiting for years — but he was unsure whether Medicare would cover his surgery.

New York City has long provided its retired employees with comprehensive health benefits that pay for most of their Medicare costs. But with his transplant approaching, the city, and a coalition of its labor unions, had thrown Bentkowski a curveball. Aiming to save $600 million annually, they were negotiating to shift 250,000 retirees out of traditional fee-for-service Medicare into a privately operated Medicare Advantage plan.

“I was panicking about what might happen if I moved over to this new plan, since I was only a month away from the surgery,” Bentkowski said. But after hours on the phone with the insurance company, he was told that it couldn’t give him an answer until he enrolled. “They just give you the runaround. How am I going to join the plan when I don’t know what it will cover?”

Ultimately, Bentkowski’s surgery was covered under traditional Medicare. The city’s plans for Medicare Advantage became bogged down in litigation and political battles, with the opposition led by a group of New York City retirees who organized to fight not only the city but their own unions. Their battle has continued into this year, with a group representing city workers voting Thursday to approve the latest Advantage proposal.

The fight in New York City is a highly visible example of a nationwide shift in the way some retirees receive health insurance benefits from former employers, both in the public and private sector. It pits the drive to control health care costs against retired workers’ pocketbook and health concerns.

Many employers have dropped these benefits over the past several decades, and those that still offer them are shifting retirees into Medicare Advantage plans at a rapid pace.

Half of large employers offering benefits to Medicare-age retirees have contracts with Medicare Advantage plans, nearly double the share in 2017, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And roughly 44% don’t give retirees a choice to use traditional Medicare within their programs. Most cited lower cost as the key reason.

The growth is part of a bigger story about Medicare Advantage expansion. Advantage is an alternative to traditional Medicare offered by insurance companies, and it uses managed-care techniques to control costs. Nearly half of Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in Advantage plans last year, more than double the rate in 2007. And enrollment is projected to cross the 50% threshold as soon as this year, according to the foundation.

Retirees who are shifted into Medicare Advantage plans may not fully understand the major differences from traditional Medicare. These include the requirement to use physicians and hospitals in their plan’s narrower network, and reduced access to care in some instances. A federal investigation concluded last year that tens of thousands of people in Medicare Advantage plans were denied necessary care that should be covered.

The shift will also mean higher costs for taxpayers and all Medicare beneficiaries, some experts say. Payments by the federal government to Advantage plans average 102% of its spending on the fee-for-service traditional program, and that contributes to higher overall Medicare spending. This occurs in part because a bonus system awards extra dollars to plans that achieve high quality ratings from Medicare.

Advantage plans have also been found to submit to Medicare inflated bills that over-diagnose their patients. According to federal audits, the practice of “upcoding” crossed the line into fraud. Excess payments totaled $12 billion in 2020, according to the independent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which advises Congress.

The higher costs add financial pressure to Medicare’s hospital insurance (Part A) trust fund, as well as the taxpayers, beneficiaries and state-run Medicaid programs that fund the Part B program. The Part A trust fund is forecast to run dry in 2028, leaving revenue sufficient to meet 90% of the program’s obligations.

“On the one hand, Medicare Advantage allows employers to continue to offer retiree health benefits and potentially broaden benefits, and may lower their financial liability for retiree health,” said Tricia Neuman, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “It also has the possibility of increasing Medicare spending.”

Insurers argue that Medicare Advantage group plans are simply one choice available to retirees. “Medicare rules require that retirees always have the option to opt out of enrollment in a group Medicare Advantage plan in favor of other forms of coverage that may be available,” said Heather Soule, a spokesperson for UnitedHealthcare, one of the largest providers of Advantage plans.

But for many retirees, joining an Advantage plan can be a difficult decision to reverse. Traditional Medicare should be paired with supplemental coverage — often a Medigap policy — to protect against potentially high out-of-pocket costs. But the best time to buy a Medigap policy is during the six months after you sign up for Part B (outpatient services), when insurers cannot reject you, or charge a higher premium, because of preexisting conditions. After that time, you can be rejected or charged more in most states.

What’s more, when employers make this transition, retirees often face a choice: Join an Advantage plan or lose the benefit.

“It really takes away choice,” said Marilyn Moon, an economist and a former trustee of both Social Security and Medicare. “The whole idea of Medicare Advantage was supposed to be to give people more choice, not less.”

Seeking Cost Savings

Medicare Advantage offers employers an opportunity to reduce costs substantially. They and unions traditionally have provided a retiree health benefit that fills the gaps in traditional Medicare by paying for deductibles and co-pays, and by providing other benefits. When an employer contracts with a Medicare Advantage insurer, retirees get all of their benefits, including their Medicare-covered benefits, from this Medicare Advantage plan.

In New York City, labor unions representing retirees have been working with the city on its planned shift to Advantage. They promoted the projected savings and their ability to use their bargaining clout to negotiate for far more generous features than those in plans available for individual purchase.

“When we looked at this, we saw that we could design our own plan that would get the same benefits and even more for our retirees,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city teachers union. “One of our greatest assets is the ability to use our buying power to get that done and, more importantly, to set up an accountability system and a contract where we’re holding the provider to every single word in our contract.”

As the plan was originally envisioned in 2018, retirees who wanted to stay on traditional Medicare could do so if they paid an estimated $191 per month to cover its higher cost to the city. But a grassroots group founded in 2021, the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees, sued over the plan, taking its battle to the City Council and organizing through Facebook, YouTube and email.

On Thursday, the Municipal Labor Committee, which represents the city’s 102 unions, approved the latest plan to offer only Medicare Advantage starting in September.

In a statement Thursday, Mayor Eric Adams said the new arrangement “improves upon retirees’ current plans,” and includes a lower deductible, a cap on out-of-pocket expenses, and new benefits. “We also heard the concerns of retirees and worked to significantly limit the number of procedures subject to prior authorization under this plan,” Adams said. “This Medicare Advantage Plan is in the best interests of retirees and taxpayers.”

The retiree group says it is considering its next steps, possibly including new litigation. “Labor should never support privatizing public health care or stripping retirees of vested earned benefits,” the group’s founder, Marianne Pizzitola, a retired city Fire Department emergency medical services employee, said in a statement.

“This is a daily anxiety the city and the Municipal Labor Committee are putting us through,” she added in an interview.

Bentkowski felt that anxiety in 2021 as he tried to learn whether an Advantage plan would cover his kidney transplant. He was among the first firefighters to respond at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, and a lung-related disability that developed afterward forced him to retire at age 45. He qualifies for Medicare now, at 53, because he receives Social Security Disability Insurance.

“The Medicare Advantage plan might be good for some people,” Bentkowski said. “But you just can’t squeeze everyone into one plan and say it’s going to work.”

The protection of labor agreements and the municipal code has given opponents of the New York City plan leverage to fight the Medicare Advantage transition. In the corporate sector, retiree benefits are offered at employers’ discretion — but that hasn’t stopped some retirees from trying to fight these transitions.

IBM introduced two new Medicare Advantage plans this year for its large retired workforce, replacing a plan that paid for supplemental Medigap coverage along with prescription drugs, dental and vision.

IBM retirees were given the option to stick with the old benefit — but they would lose access to balances in their health reimbursement arrangements, an employer-funded plan that reimburses certain medical expenses and insurance premiums. In most cases, employers retain the right to change this type of benefit, says Trevis Parson, chief actuary for individual marketplace business at the benefits consulting firm Willis Towers Watson.

“Most plan sponsors include language in their plan documents explicitly reserving rights to amend the plan,” he said. Some retirees were outraged by that tactic, and by the announcement of the planned transition with relatively short notice in September.

“They sprung it on us — either take Medicare Advantage or forfeit your balance,” said Steve Bergeron, who retired from IBM in 2009 after 29 years.

In a statement, IBM said that for 2023, two Medicare Advantage PPO options have “enhanced design elements above and beyond what participants were previously able to obtain with individual policies.”

Like many group plans, the new IBM offering features copays and annual deductibles much lower than those found in individual plans, and wider networks of providers. But it’s not clear how long those features will remain.

“There’s no guarantee of anything from IBM,” Bergeron said. “What if these terms were just to get people to sign up?”

Neuman of Kaiser Family Foundation shares that concern. “The question is, what happens over the longer term for retirees, perhaps five or 10 years from now, when the circumstances may change and it may be more difficult to maintain the favorable terms of a negotiated contract?” she asked.

Bergeron has been organizing retirees on social media to fight the change and with an online petition calling on IBM to drop the plan. He has also tried to recruit lawyers to sue the company, but most have advised that the case is not strong, since the retiree benefit is discretionary.

After holding out against the change, Bergeron reluctantly joined one of the Advantage plans, not wanting to forfeit the $27,000 balance in his health reimbursement arrangement.

“I never dreamed I would join, but I did,” he said. “I waited until the last minute, and signed up on the last day that I could. I really was fighting it in my brain.”

US turns to new ways to punish Russian oligarchs for the war

Associated Press

US turns to new ways to punish Russian oligarchs for the war

Fatima Hussein – March 12, 2023

Andrew Adams, director of the Justice Department's KleptoCapture task force, designed to enforce the economic restrictions imposed on Russia and its billionaires, speaks to the Associated Press in an interview at the AP bureau in Washington, Wednesday, March 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) — Andrew Adams, director of the Justice Department’s KleptoCapture task force, designed to enforce the economic restrictions imposed on Russia and its billionaires, speaks to the Associated Press in an interview at the AP bureau in Washington, Wednesday, March 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. has begun an aggressive new push to inflict pain on Russia’s economy and specifically its oligarchs with the intent of thwarting the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

From the Treasury Department to the Justice Department, U.S. officials will focus on efforts to legally liquidate the property of Russian oligarchs, expand financial penalties on those who facilitate the evasion of sanctions, and close loopholes in the law that allow oligarchs to use shell companies to move through the U.S. financial system.

Andrew Adams, who heads the U.S. government’s KleptoCapture task force, designed to enforce the economic restrictions within the U.S. imposed on Russia and its billionaires, told The Associated Press that the group is prioritizing its efforts to identify those who help Russians evade sanctions and violate export controls.

“These illicit procurement networks will continue to take up an ever-increasing amount of our bandwidth,” said Adams, who also serves as acting deputy assistant attorney general.

So far, more than $58 billion worth of sanctioned Russians’ assets have been blocked or frozen worldwide, according to a report last week from the Treasury Department. That includes two luxury yachts each worth $300 million in San Diego and Fiji, and six New York and Florida properties worth $75 million owned by sanctioned oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

The U.S. has begun attempts to punish the associates and wealth managers of oligarchs — in Vekselberg’s case, a federal court in New York indicted Vladimir Voronchenko after he helped maintain Vekselberg’s properties. He was charged in February with conspiring to violate and evade U.S. sanctions.

The case was coordinated through the KleptoCapture group.

“I think it can be quite effective to be sanctioning facilitators,” Adams said, calling them “professional sanctions evasion brokers.”

A February study led by Dartmouth University researchers showed that targeting a few key wealth managers would cause far greater damage to Russia than sanctioning oligarchs individually.

Other attempts to inflict pain on the Russian economy will come from the efforts to liquidate yachts and other property owned by Russian oligarchs and the Kremlin, turning them into cash to benefit Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has long called for Russian assets to be transferred to Ukraine, and former Biden administration official Daleep Singh told the Senate Banking Committee on Feb. 28 that forfeiting Russia’s billions in assets held by the U.S. is “something we ought to pursue.”

Singh suggested the U.S. should “use the reserves that we have immobilized at the New York Fed, transfer them to Ukraine and allow them to put them up as collateral to raise money.” He ran the White House’s Russia sanctions program when he was national security adviser for international economics.

Adams said the KleptoCapture task force is pursuing efforts to sell Russians’ yachts and other property, despite the legal difficulties of turning property whose owners’ access has been blocked into forfeited assets that the government can take and sell for the benefit of Ukraine.

He stressed that the U.S. will operate under the rule of law. “Part of what that means is that we will not take assets that are not fully, totally forfeited through the judicial procedures and begin confiscating them without a legal basis,” Adams said.

He added that the task force has had “success in working with Congress and working with folks around the executive branch in obtaining authorization to transfer certain forfeited funds to the State Department.”

The Treasury Department said on Thursday that the government is “paving the way” for $5.4 million in seized funds to be sent as foreign assistance to Ukraine.

Additionally, strengthening laws that serve as loopholes for sanctions evaders will also be a priority across federal departments, officials say.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, under Treasury, is expected to roll out rules to address the use of the U.S. real estate market to launder money, including a requirement on disclosing the true ownership of real estate.

Steven Tian, director of research at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, who tracks companies’ disengagement from Russia, said the new real estate rule is long overdue.

“I would point out that it’s not just unique to Russian oligarchs. As you know, the real estate market makes use of shell companies in the United States, period,” Tian said.

Erica Hanichak, the government affairs director at the FACT Coalition, a nonprofit that promotes corporate transparency, urged the administration to put the rule forward by late March, when the U.S. co-hosts the second Summit for Democracy with the governments of Costa Rica, Netherlands, South Korea and Zambia.

“We’re viewing this as an opportunity for the United States to demonstrate leadership not only in addressing corrupt practices abroad, but looking to our own backyard and addressing the loopholes in our system that facilitate corruption internationally,” she said.

Russia turns to high-tech hypersonic missiles in latest attack on Ukraine

CBS News

Russia turns to high-tech hypersonic missiles in latest attack on Ukraine

Imtiaz Tyab – March 10, 2023

Near Dnipro, southeast Ukraine — Across Ukraine, people were left Friday to pick up the pieces of Russia’s latest blistering coordinated assault, a barrage of missiles the previous day that left at least six people dead and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands more. The attack saw Moscow turn some of its most sophisticated weapons to elude Ukraine’s potent, Western-supplied air defense systems.

Among the more than 80 missiles unleashed on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure Thursday were six “Kinzhal” [Dagger] hypersonic cruise missiles, according to Ukrainian air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat. The jet-launched rockets are believed to be capable of reaching speeds up to Mach 10 or 12, double the speed of sound (anything over Mach 5 is considered hypersonic).

People look at the ruins of houses destroyed by a Russian missile that hit a residential area in the village of Velika Vilshanytsia, near Lviv, Ukraine, March 9, 2023. / Credit: Pavlo Palamarchuk/Anadolu Agency/Getty

Ukraine has acknowledged that it cannot intercept the missiles, which can carry conventional or nuclear warheads. The Russian military has used them at least once previously during the war, about a year ago.

Fitted with conventional warheads hypersonic missiles don’t inflict significantly more damage than other, less-sophisticated rockets, but their ability to avoid interception makes them more lethal. It also makes them more valuable resources for Russia’s military to expend, which may be further evidence of long-reported ammunition and missile shortages that Vladimir Putin has asked his allies in Iran, North Korea and even China to remedy.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it hit military and industrial targets “as well as the energy facilities that supply them” with its attack on Thursday.

In his daily video address to the Ukrainian people, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was as defiant as ever after the latest assault.

“No matter how treacherous Russia’s actions are, our state and people will not be in chains,” he said. “Neither missiles nor Russian atrocities will help them.”

While Russia’s air war has reached far across the country, hitting targets even in the far-western city of Lviv on Thursday, the worst of the suffering has been for Ukrainian civilians in the east, where Russian forces have seized a massive swath of the Donbas region — and where they’re pushing hard to seize more.

There, Thursday’s assault was met with a mixture of defiance and disgust.

“This is horrible,” Vasyl, a resident of hard-hit Kherson said. “I don’t have any other words, other than Russia is a horrid devil.”

Moscow’s destruction is evident across the small towns and villages of eastern Ukraine, including in Velyka Novosilka. The town right on the edge of Russian-held ground was once home to 5,000 people, but it’s become a ghost town.

Only about 150 people were still there, and CBS News found them living underground in the basement of a school. It was dark, without electricity or running water, and most of those surviving in the shelter were elderly.

Oleksander Sinkov speaks with CBS News in the basement of a school in the southeast Ukrainian village of Velyka Novosilka, where he took shelter with dozens of other mostly-elderly residents after his home was destroyed early in Russia's invasion. / Credit: CBS News/Agnes Reau — Oleksander Sinkov speaks with CBS News in the basement of a school in the southeast Ukrainian village of Velyka Novosilka, where he took shelter with dozens of other mostly-elderly residents after his home was destroyed early in Russia’s invasion. / Credit: CBS News/Agnes Reau

Oleksander Sinkov moved in a year ago after his home was destroyed.

Asked why he didn’t leave to find somewhere safer, he answered with another question: “And go where? I have a small pension and you can’t get far with that.”

The residents of the school pitch in to help cook and take care of other menial chores as they can, but there’s very little normal about their life in hiding.

Inside the basement of a school in the southeast Ukrainian village of Velyka Novosilka, where dozens of mostly-elderly residents are taking shelter from the war outside. / Credit: CBS News/Agnes Reau

Iryna Babkina was among the youngest people we met in the school. She stayed behind to care for the elderly.

“They cling to this town,” she said of her older neighbors. “We have people here who left and then came back because they couldn’t leave the only home they’ve ever known.”

Iryna Babkina speaks with CBS News in the basement of a school in Velyka Novosilka, southeast Ukraine, where she is sheltering from Russia's war and helping to look after other residents. / Credit: CBS News/Agnes Reau — Iryna Babkina speaks with CBS News in the basement of a school in Velyka Novosilka, southeast Ukraine, where she is sheltering from Russia’s war and helping to look after other residents. / Credit: CBS News/Agnes Reau

It had been weeks since Russia carried out a coordinated attack across the country like Thursday’s, but in the front-line towns like Velyka Novosilka in the east, the shells fall every day, leaving those left behind to survive, barely, however and wherever they can.

Russian wives beg Putin to stop sending husbands into ‘meat grinder’

The Telegraph

Russian wives beg Putin to stop sending husbands into ‘meat grinder’

George Styllis – March 12, 2023

More than a dozen Russian women made the brave appeal to the president

A group of Russian women have appealed to Vladimir Putin to stop sending their husbands and children to the front line like ‘meat’ without adequate training.

In a video shared online, the women say the mobilisation of new recruits to the army has been a betrayal after the Russian President said they would not be sent to the front line immediately.

The women say their sons, husbands and brothers have been “thrown like meat” to storm fortified areas in Ukraine. In the video shared by the independent Telegram news channel SOTA, they can be seen standing in a group holding a sign in Russian that reads, “580 Separate Howitzer Artillery Division”, dated March 11, 2023.

“My husband… is located on the line of contact with the enemy,” one woman says.

“Our mobilised [men] are being sent like lambs to the slaughter to storm fortified areas – five at a time, against 100 heavily armed enemy men,” she continued.

Putin ordered the mobilization of more than 300,000 men in September – the first since 1941 – to the shock of many ordinary Russians. Of those who were drafted, many have perished.

Among the reasons for the high casualties have been poor training and a lack of equipment. New recruits have reported being sent to battle with old weapons and unsuitable clothing.

A team of independent Russian journalists called the No Future project says authorities have attempted to cover up the deaths of dozens of mobilised Russians from Volgograd who were sent to fight without any ammunition. The group says new recruits are also deprived of first-aid kits and hot food, while during one training session the men just “played on their phones” for two weeks.

“They are prepared to serve their homeland but according to the specialisation they’ve trained for, not as stormtroopers. We ask that you pull back our guys from the line of contact and provide the artillerymen with artillery and ammunition,” said the woman.

The group’s criticism of the Kremlin comes amid growing anger among Russian wives and mothers over the war.

In a rare acknowledgment of the government’s failings, Putin last year told a group of angry mothers that he felt “their pain” during a choreographed sit-down in which he at times appeared emotional.

He has also said “mistakes” were made in the call-up to reinforcements. Despite that, the Kremlin has hinted at a second mobilisation.

MPs have proposed a law that will give Russia’s National Guard more power to enforce military draft orders and another that will allow property to be confiscated from Russians who flee abroad.

Mortality rate of Russian soldiers from east 30 times higher than in Moscow, St Petersburg

The New Voice of Ukraine

Mortality rate of Russian soldiers from east 30 times higher than in Moscow, St Petersburg

March 12, 2023

That’s according to the latest the U.K. Defense Intelligence report, tweeted on March 12.

Ethnic minorities often bear the brunt of the Russian military’s meat-grinder fighting tactics, according to the report. In Astrakhan, for example, about 75% of the casualties come from the city’s Kazakh and Tatar minorities.

Meanwhile, the populations of Russia’s richest cities – Moscow and St. Petersburg – remain relatively untouched by the carnage in Ukraine. This is especially true for the Kremlin elite.

UK intelligence analysed the families of Russian top officials visible in the first two rows of the audience during the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s speech on state of the nation. None of their children are known to serve in the army.

As the Russian Ministry of Defense tries to address the issue of a constant shortage of combat personnel, the isolation of the well-off and more influential part of Russian society from military problems is likely to remain a major consideration, UK intelligence concluded.

Free coffee for BLM demonstrators horrifies neighborhood snowflakes: A Virginia bakery gave BLM activists free coffee. Then came the backlash.

The Washington Post

A Virginia bakery gave BLM activists free coffee. Then came the backlash.

Tim Carman, The Washington Post – March 10, 2023

Brian Noyes and Josephine Gilbert agreed to sit down on March 1 and talk it out. Noyes, founder of the celebrated Red Truck Bakery, and Gilbert, the leader of a loose coalition that demonstrates under the banner of All Lives Matter, wanted to reach an accord before events spun out of control in the usually restful town of Warrenton, Va.

The issue was coffee – and the weekly demonstrations on Courthouse Square in downtown Warrenton, where two groups have been trying to poke and prod the conscience of the city.

Since June 2020, not long after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, a handful of organizations have hosted a Black Lives Matter Vigil For Action on Saturday mornings when, for 45 minutes, dozens of people quietly hold up signs to remind locals about racial injustice and institutional racism. The demonstrations eventually led to counterprotests across the street, aimed at shutting down the vigils that All Lives Matter activists see as destructive to this conservative community in Fauquier County, a traditional Republican stronghold.

Red Truck got dragged into this drama on the last Saturday in February when a relatively new member of the ALM group entered the bakery, camera phone in hand. Jennifer Blevins Ragle asked a young employee why the shop was giving out free coffee to participants at the BLM vigil, but not others on the square. She implied Red Truck was discriminating against ALM.

“I just don’t understand giving free coffee to some people, but not others. I mean, that makes your store very political,” Ragle said to the 17-year-old employee behind the counter. “I’ll make sure it gets to the paper and everything else.”

Ragle’s video was posted on a YouTube channel called Singing Patriot, where it gained little traction. But it was also posted on a TikTok account, named crossstitch1954, where it has racked up more than 21,000 views and generated more than 800 comments, many of them calling for boycotts of Red Truck. Or worse.

“Hope this place burns to the ground,” wrote one commenter. “Close the place down! Let those black lives keep the place open. All the other lives don’t matter,” wrote another. “Someone please put a pallet of bricks in front of that store so we can protest against Red Truck Bakery,” added a third.

Negative reviews started appearing on Red Truck’s Yelp and Google pages, sometimes from people far from the streets of Warrenton. The bakery began receiving harassing phone calls, too. “Threats of damage and injury,” Noyes told The Washington Post.

One caller said, simply, “we are watching you,” Noyes said. “Picture a young girl answering the phone at a small bakery and hearing that.”

On Feb. 27, Noyes issued an apology and an explanation to try to defuse the situation. The owner wrote that he is not in the Warrenton store often – Red Truck’s headquarters are in Marshall, Va. – and that when he first encountered the BLM vigil in 2021, he saw no counterprotesters on the square. He treated the vigil participants to water and cranberry muffins. Noyes then told his staff that BLM members might occasionally wander in for water or coffee, which would be on the house.

“It started as an innocent and spur-of-the-moment neighborly gesture, but no good deed goes unpunished, I guess,” Noyes wrote. “I don’t remember an All Lives Matter group being there back then, but if they had ever asked me about this, I certainly would have given them the same consideration.”

Before Noyes posted the statement on his social channels, he sent it to Gilbert, as a courtesy. She acknowledged that she received it ahead of time and “thought it was fine,” she told The Washington Post. They then agreed to meet for coffee at Red Truck. They had a favor to ask of each other.

After exchanging pleasantries, Gilbert asked Noyes if he would talk to the BLM demonstrators. She hoped Noyes would use his influence in the community – earned by hosting fundraisers and events, garnering national acclaim for his baked goods, even getting a shout-out from President Barack Obama – to convince the BLM group to stop their weekly gatherings.

Gilbert had already petitioned others to stop the vigils. She had addressed the Warrenton Town Council. She had expressed her concerns to the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors. She had even talked to the city’s chief of police and mayor. “I appreciate you figuring out a way to stop this indoctrination,” Gilbert told the town council on Sept. 14, 2021.

Gilbert clarified her “indoctrination” comment for The Post.

“When I say ‘indoctrination,’ what I mean by that is, normalizing this type of protest for kids that come by every Saturday morning with their parents to the farmers market,” she said. “They’re not going to change my mind or any of the people who are standing with me. They are normalizing behavior that is not right. Warrenton is not racist.”

Like the public officials in Warrenton, Noyes rejected Gilbert’s proposal. Noyes told her that he has no control over BLM demonstrators. “That’s their right to be out there, just like it’s your right,” he said to her.

Once rebuffed, Gilbert started to raise her voice. Noyes called her loud and animated. Gilbert said she’s from Sicily. “As I get passionate about this and get excited, my voice automatically goes up,” she told The Post. She said she apologized to Noyes on the spot after raising her voice.

The meeting did the exact opposite of what Noyes had hoped. He left it feeling “discouraged and realizing that there’s no way to work with these people.” His employees were worried, too, after hearing the conversation turn intense.

Noyes decided right then he would shut down Red Truck in Warrenton for the weekend, including the Saturday when demonstrators would gather again on Courthouse Square. He said he would pay the staff for those two days. (The closure would stretch into Monday and not just in Warrenton; he also closed the Marshall shop that day as he worked to hire security to ease his staff’s fears.) Noyes even moved his signature red truck, a 1954 Ford F-100 that he bought from Tommy Hilfiger, out of an abundance of caution.

Noyes thought the closures would calm things down – and demonstrators were calm that weekend – but Gilbert thought the closings were “ridiculous.”

“Why didn’t he just shut down for the two hours that we were going to be there” on the square, Gilbert said. “This is just a game that Mr. Noyes is playing. He’s a smart man, but like I told him when I left, I’m smart too. I’m not stupid. I’m not rolling over.”

Even as the conversation turned noisy, Noyes reminded Gilbert that he still had a request. He wanted her to ask Ragle to take down the video. Not only was it stirring things up, it was putting a minor in the public eye, which was troubling to the girl’s parents and to Red Truck’s staff. Gilbert said she wouldn’t contact Ragle, that Noyes would have to do it. She said she didn’t believe in taking down the video. She wanted people to see it, as further evidence of how BLM demonstrators have divided the town, she said.

What’s more, Gilbert didn’t think Red Truck’s free coffee policy was an honest mistake or a misunderstanding, as Noyes alleges. “He got caught,” she said. “He told me he didn’t want to take sides, but he did take sides and now he got busted. And he doesn’t want the community to know he took sides.” (Noyes, incidentally, has halted the free coffee program.)

Both Red Truck employees and the minor’s mother attempted to track down Ragle, but Noyes wasn’t sure they ever made contact. Ragle’s video remains up on both YouTube and TikTok.

Ragle’s behavior has given Red Truck staff cause for concern, Noyes said. She refused to turn off her video camera, as requested by an employee, and as she exited the bakery, she bumped into a man at the front door. Ragle later contacted police and said the man, apparently a BLM demonstrator, was blocking her exit. “Our investigation revealed that that did not happen,” said Timothy Carter, Warrenton’s police chief. “It was probably just a big misunderstanding.”

Ragle has also posted more videos, including one where she appears to be on the opposite side of the street, yelling at BLM demonstrators. Another video scrolls through a recent article in the Fauquier Times, with added captions that suggest it was Noyes, not Gilbert, who raised his voice during their meeting. (Noyes denied the charge.) “Bryan [sic] Noyes,” the caption continues, “backs BLM period!!!” Cage the Elephant’s song, “Hypocrite,” plays in the background.

According to public records and one newspaper story, Ragle has had criminal charges filed against her. She was charged with violating a restraining order in 2013 and trespassing in 2014. The charges in both cases were dismissed. In 2016, the Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office arrested Ragle for assault and battery, according to the Culpeper Times. The Post could not immediately find out how the case was resolved.

The Post left a pair of voice mails to a number connected with Ragle in public records. A woman who called back did not identify herself and hung up after learning she was talking to a Post reporter. A short time later, Ragle posted another video featuring a screenshot of a 2014 news story about Red Truck. Ragle superimposed a caption over the story: “Prior Washington Post writer, sending out his goons to cover his backing of BLM.” (Noyes is a former art director for The Post.)

Ragle’s TikTok video has changed the dynamic in Warrenton, said Noyes and Carter, the police chief. It has taken an issue that was rooted in the community and spread it beyond the city’s borders. “This video on TikTok is just living a life of its own,” Noyes said. “It’s just bringing in so much… anger from people who don’t even know the store. It’s just reason for them to rally.”

The police chief harbors similar concerns: that someone from outside might “take action kind of in the fog of what’s going on,” Carter said. “I’m not really concerned about either one of our groups, but what I’m concerned about – what we’re always concerned about – is someone coming in and just using it as a platform to do something else.”

This weekend will be the first one, post TikTok video, when Red Truck is open and the demonstrators are back on the square. No one in Warrenton – not Noyes, not Carter, not BLM organizer Scott Christian – is sure what to expect. The dueling demonstrations have been generally peaceful, especially in recent weeks, said Carter and Christian, though the BLM leader has lately seen signs among ALM protesters about freeing the prisoners who were convicted of their actions during the Jan. 6 riots.

Gilbert said ALM has “no intention” of singling out Red Truck this weekend. “Our beef is actually with the town for not stopping what’s going on across the street,” she said.

Del. Michael J. Webert (R-Fauquier) released a statement on Thursday that said it was time for the community to put this incident behind them. The coffee, he noted, was given out in good faith. “We are a close-knit community that has no need to be angry or mistrust one another,” Webert said. “Let’s remember that we all have a stake in making our community the best it can be, and act like the neighbors we are.”

For his part, Noyes is debating just how neighborly to be on Saturday. He’s contemplating whether to bring muffins to people on both sides of the square, a kind of Red Truck peace offering. But he also wants to see how things unfold. He doesn’t want to make a wrong move. He’s already paid a price, both emotionally and financially. He figures he has lost between $15,000 to $20,000 because of the bakery closures. He’s paying out another $1,000 a day for security.

“That’s a lot of muffins,” he deadpanned.

Was Sweden right about Covid all along?

The Telegraph

Was Sweden right about Covid all along?

Fraser Nelson – March 10, 2023

This article was originally published on 23 February 2022.

While Britain locked down like the rest of the world, Sweden became the defiant outlier

To understand Sweden, you need to understand a word that’s hard to explain, let alone translate: lagom. It means, in effect, “perfect-simple”: not too much, not too little. People who are lagom don’t stand out or make a fuss: they blend right in – and this is seen as a virtue.

Essays are written about why lagom sums up a certain Swedish mindset – that it’s bad to stand out, to consider yourself better or be an outlier. That’s why it’s so strange that, during the lockdowns, Sweden became the world’s defiant outlier.

Swedes saw it the other way around. They were keeping calm and carrying on: lockdown was an extreme, draconian, untested experiment. Lock up everyone, keep children out of school, suspend civil liberties, send police after people walking their dogs – and call this “caution”? Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, never spoke about a Swedish “experiment”. He said all along he could not recommend a public health intervention that had never been proven.

Tegnell also made another point: that he didn’t claim to be right. It would take years, he’d argue, to see who had jumped the right way. His calculation was that, on a whole-society basis, the collateral damage of lockdowns would outweigh what good they do. But you’d only know if this was so after a few years. You’d have to look at cancer diagnosis, hospital waiting lists, educational damage and, yes, count the Covid dead.

The problem with lockdowns is that no one looks at whole-society pictures. Professor Neil Ferguson’s team from Imperial College London admitted this, once, as a breezy aside. “We do not consider the wider social and economic costs of suppression,” they wrote in a supposed assessment of lockdown, “which will be high.” But just how high? And were they a price worth paying?

As Sweden abolished all domestic Covid restrictions, it emerged with one of Europe’s lower Covid death tolls: the rate is 1,614 per million people, just over half the amount of Britain (2,335). Given that our death tolls were comparable at first (both among the worst anywhere), it’s hard to argue that there’s some demographic force which meant Covid was never going to spread in Sweden.

Nor is it possible to argue that Sweden was some hedonistic party-nation: its people were incredibly cautious. But unlike Brits, they had a government that trusted them.

There were some Swedish diktats: a “rule of eight” was set up for a while. Bars, restaurants and cafes were all socially distanced and, at one point, had to close by 8.30pm. For a few weeks, Swedes even had vaccine passports. But that was about it: the rest was guidance, and it was followed.

What no statistic can convey is just how careful Swedes were; something that struck me whenever I’d visit. It was perfectly legal to meet up in bars and for a fika in a coffee shop, but most didn’t. A friend of mine had a rule that she’d only ever meet friends outside – even in the Stockholm winter (she did this so much that she got frostbite). In summer last year, studies showed Swedes working from home more than in any other European country.

This kept Covid low, while the lack of rules allowed for people to use their judgement while minimising economic and social damage. Sweden’s GDP fell by 2.9 per cent in 2020, while Britain’s collapsed by 9.4 per cent.

The cost of the various Covid measures is best summed up by the debt mountain: an extra £8,400 per head in Britain, and £3,000 in Sweden.

Swedish schools kept going throughout, with no face masks. Sixth-formers and undergraduates switched to home learning, but the rest of Swedish children went to school as normal. That’s not to say there weren’t absences as the virus spread: it was common to see a third, at times even half of the class absent due to sniffles or suspected Covid. But there were no full-scale closures and, aside from some suspicions about minor grade inflation (the average maths grade sneaked up to 10.1, from 9.3), there is no talk in Sweden about educational devastation.

In Britain, there is calamity and cover-up. By doling out more A grades than ever before – and telling universities to make more space – young people could be shovelled through the system with lost ground never recognised or quite made up.

With coronavirus restrictions lifted, life in Sweden is returning to normal - Nora Lorek/Bloomberg — With coronavirus restrictions lifted, life in Sweden is returning to normal – Nora Lorek/Bloomberg

Grade inflation was staggering: the number of A-level students marked at A or A* jumped to 45 per cent, up from 26 per cent pre-pandemic, but no one doubts that these students learned far less. By some measures, educational inequality has been set back 10 years. But some problems are too big to admit.

Academics suggest the effect of lost education is permanent: less education inevitably means lower salaries and slower career progression. The Institute for Fiscal Studies talks about £40,000 of lost lifetime earnings per pupil in Britain, £350 billion in all. Swedish studies estimate that Covid’s impact (on absenteeism and home-learning) could mean an £800 million overall hit – far smaller than the impact on Britain’s lost school days.

The impact on hospital waiting lists is also very different. Fear of a virus keeps people away – at the peak of the first wave, attendance at Swedish A&E was 31 per cent lower than normal; in Britain, it collapsed by 57 per cent. Routine operations were down by 20 per cent in Sweden and 34 per cent in England, so waiting lists grew in both countries. As they did pretty much world over.

But no country, anywhere, has had a waiting list grow as big as Britain’s: from 4.4 million pre-pandemic, it will peak at about 9.2 million, according to NHS modelling – that’s equivalent to one in five adults.

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, said from the start that he could not recommend a public health intervention that had never been proven - MAGNUS ANDERSSON/TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images — Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, said from the start that he could not recommend a public health intervention that had never been proven – MAGNUS ANDERSSON/TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images

A top-down health service is more easily disrupted if it’s ordered to transform into a Covid service (and people are told to “protect the NHS” by not using it). Sweden’s waiting lists, 130,000 pre-pandemic, hit 170,000 in October 2021. Even adjusting for population, it’s nowhere near the size of Britain’s problem.

Sweden will not declare victory. No one was properly prepared for Covid, and The country’s failure to protect care home residents is still seen as a national scandal. Sweden also took a bigger hit than its neighbours: Denmark, which did lock down, has more to shout about when it comes to combining a lower Covid hit with minimal economic disruption.

But, as Tegnell would say, it’s still too early to say – with any finality – who got it right and who didn’t.

As California gets drenched, officials opening Oroville Dam spillway for first time in 4 years

The Sacramento Bee

As California gets drenched, officials opening Oroville Dam spillway for first time in 4 years

Michael McGough – March 10, 2023

California water officials opened the main spillway at the Oroville Dam on Friday afternoon, doing so for flood control purposes for the first time since 2019.

Ted Craddock, deputy director of the State Water Project, said the water elevation at Lake Oroville has risen by close to 180 feet since Dec. 1 after a parade of storms this winter, now standing at about 840 feet — 60 feet shy of its maximum.

State water officials began to increase releases from Lake Oroville, which is operated by the state Department of Water Resources, on Wednesday for flood control purposes, Craddock said during a virtual news briefing ahead of the successful spillway opening at noon.

The dam was the center of a 2017 crisis. Torrential rainfall that February damaged the Oroville Dam’s main spillway. When rerouted water threatened failure on the dam’s emergency spillway, more than 180,000 residents downstream of the dam in Butte, Sutter and Yuba counties were ordered to evacuate.

Extensive repairs followed, and state water officials let water flow down the newly rebuilt spillway for the first time on April 2, 2019.

“As part of the reconstruction effort, we installed instrumentation throughout the structure,” Craddock said. “So we can monitor the pressure, drainage and also movement of the spillway as well.”

Spillway flow Friday began at 15,000 cubic feet per second, which Craddock called a “relatively small release.” The spillway is capable of releasing up to 270,000 cubic feet per second.

“As we look further into the upcoming storms, it’s possible we will be making adjustments to our releases,” he said. Releases during the rebuilt spillway’s only prior use, in 2019, peaked at 25,000 cubic feet per second.

Craddock said that due to near-record level snowpack in the Sierra this winter, water officials are confident that snowmelt will help to replenish Lake Oroville following flood releases and the end of the rainy season.

Water releases are also underway at the Folsom Dam, which is operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Water flows down the new spillway at Oroville Dam on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 in Oroville.

What is the Oroville Dam?

The Oroville Dam opened in 1968 and is the tallest dam in the U.S. at 770 feet. Located just northeast of Oroville city limits, water from the dam’s main spillway flows into the Feather River.

The main spillway failed catastrophically in February 2017, when a large and cratering fracture formed amid weeks of heavy rain, leading operators to curtail water flow onto the emergency spillway.

The wreckage of the main spillway at Oroville Dam in February 2017 left tons of concrete and other debris piled up in the Feather River below. The state plans to open the rebuilt spillway Tuesday.

The emergency spillway is a concrete lip along a hillside. When water began to spill over the lip, the hillside began to erode, and dam officials feared the emergency spillway would fail and release a “wall of water” downstream. Emergency authorities on Feb. 13, 2017, ordered some 188,000 residents of the Feather River Basin to evacuate.

Dam operators then ramped up water releases on the main spillway, easing lake levels and pressure on the emergency spillway. The emergency spillway held, and evacuation orders were reduced to warnings the following day.

A forensic team in 2018 determined the crisis resulted from “long-term systemic failure” by both state water officials and federal regulators, writing in a nearly 600-page report that design flaws were exacerbated by insufficient repair work over the years.

The crisis cost $1.1 billion, including more than $630 million in spillway repairs.

The Department of Water Resources says repairs and improvements made during 2017 and 2018 have brought the dam up to “state-of-the-art” standards, Craddock said Friday.

To keep the emergency spillway from crumbling, DWR dramatically ramped up water releases on the battered main spillway, bringing lake levels down and effectively ending the crisis. Water continued pounding the main spillway for days afterward, carving a giant crevice in the nearby hillside. This photo was taken Feb. 20. — To keep the emergency spillway from crumbling, DWR dramatically ramped up water releases on the battered main spillway, bringing lake levels down and effectively ending the crisis. Water continued pounding the main spillway for days afterward, carving a giant crevice

This Is the One Spice You Should Add to Your Diet if You’re Insulin-Resistant

Parade

This Is the One Spice You Should Add to Your Diet if You’re Insulin-Resistant

Emily Laurence – March 10, 2023

It will add a nice kick to your meals too.

If you’re prediabetic or have Type 2 diabetes, you’re likely already familiar with the role insulin plays in the body. It’s not something most people think about—until there’s a problem. Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas and allows glucose to enter the body’s cells and provide energy. When muscles, fat and liver don’t respond as they should to insulin, it’s called insulin resistance. This can elevate blood glucose levels and, over time, lead to prediabetes or Type 2 diabetes.

Here’s the good news: It’s possible to reverse insulin resistance through diet and lifestyle habits. This can help prevent or even reverse Type 2 diabetes. What we eat is that powerful. While it’s important to take into account your entire diet, registered dietitians who work regularly with people who are prediabetic or diabetic say that there’s one spice in particular that can be especially beneficial to add to your diet: turmeric.

How Turmeric Helps With Insulin Resistance

Turmeric has long been used medicinally, with its origins dating back nearly 4,000 years to Southeast Asia, where it was used in religious ceremonies. Turmeric is still an important spice in South Asian culture, used regularly in cuisine.

“Several studies have shown that turmeric has several benefits in lowering blood sugar,” says Lori Zanini, RD, a registered dietitian and author of The Diabetes Cookbook and Meal Plan for the Newly Diagnosed. Zanini explains that turmeric help improves insulin resistance by “turning off” several blood sugar-rising pathways.

Lauren Harris-Pincus, MS, RDN, a registered dietitian and author of The Everything Easy Pre-Diabetes Cookbook, explains that turmeric, and its main component curcumin, decrease inflammation and decrease glucose production in the liver, other ways the spice is particularly beneficial for someone who is insulin resistant.

Harris-Pincus says that while there hasn’t been a specific amount of turmeric directly linked to improving insulin resistance, she says that studies have included doses from 250 milligrams to a few grams. “Studies have also shown that doses of up to 12 grams per day of curcumin are safe, tolerable and non-toxic,” she says. Zanini adds to this by saying that it’s generally recommended to consume between 500 to 2,000 milligrams of turmeric a day if you are consuming it specifically for its health benefits.

“It’s important to know that turmeric is poorly absorbed and quickly excreted, so more research needs to be done to determine appropriate doses and potential methods of delivery to improve absorption and utilization,” Harris-Pincus says. Want to ensure your body absorbs as much as possible? Scientific studies show that pairing it with black pepper can help.

Other Benefits of Regularly Consuming Turmeric and 10 Other Herbs To Try

Both dietitians say that turmeric is a beneficial spice for everyone to consume regularly, not just those who are insulin resistant. In addition to helping lower blood sugar, Harris-Pincus says that scientific research shows that consuming turmeric regularly can help with joint and muscle soreness. So if you are an athlete or have arthritis, it’s worth it to add more turmeric to your diet.

Additionally, scientific research shows that turmeric also supports immune health and brain health. Since the curcumin in turmeric is anti-inflammatory, consuming it regularly truly benefits the whole body and can help play a role in preventing chronic diseases and dementia.

While the vast majority of people can benefit from having more turmeric in their diets, Harris-Pincus says that turmeric supplements may not be safe for people on certain medications like blood thinners or non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs). “They may also contribute to gastrointestinal issues with long-term use, so speak to your doctor before adding turmeric capsules to your regimen if you take prescription medications or have medical conditions, especially gastrointestinal problems,” she says.

What if you aren’t into turmeric? Both dietitians say that there are other herbs that can help with insulin resistance. “Additional spices that have shown anti-diabetic properties include cinnamon, clove, cumin, fenugreek, ginger, licorice, marjoram, nutmeg, oregano and rosemary,” Harris-Pincus says. So if turmeric isn’t for you, integrating any of these herbs into your diet will have a similar effect.

Remember, insulin resistance can be reversed. Talk to your doctor or a registered dietitian about how you can use food to support your health and help keep blood sugar levels from rising. Incorporating more herbs into your diet is just one way to do it. And, bonus, it will make your meals taste even more flavorful too.

Mass Backstabbing Spree Over Putin’s War Sweeps Russia

Daily Beast

Mass Backstabbing Spree Over Putin’s War Sweeps Russia

Noor Ibrahim – March 10, 2023

Russian citizens are ratting each other out to authorities in droves for anti-war comments made in bars, beauty salons, and grocery stores in roughly a dozen cities across the country, according to a new report from the independent Russian news outlet Vrestka.

Legal filings obtained by the outlet from Moscow, Bryansk, Novosibirsk, and other cities indicate that citizens have been turned in for “violations” as minor as cracking a joke about the war, listening to Ukrainian music, or even just talking about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion in a public space.

Many of those jailed after being reported by other citizens were charged under Article 20.3.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation, a new law signed by Putin last year criminalizing “public actions aimed at discrediting” Russian Armed Forces.

One Russian man from Bryansk, Mikhail Kolokolnikov, was reportedly fined and jailed for two days after a stranger called authorities on him for saying the phrase “Glory to Ukraine” at a bar on Jan. 15. In an interview with Vrestka, Kolokolnikov said that two officers stormed the bar shortly after he said the phrase to another man, demanding to know, “Who said ‘Glory to Ukraine’ here?”

“The other day, a rocket hit a house in Dnipro,” Kolokolnikov, who was born in Ukraine, told the outlet—explaining why he said the slogan in a public place. “And I used to walk past this house every day to the beach, along the Pobeda embankment. In short, I was still a little angry because of this.”

From Murder Pigeons to ‘Evil’ Forces: How Putin Sold His War

In another case, Chita resident Ivan Sleponogov was jailed after being accused of saying an anti-war slogan during an Easter church service last April, according to a legal complaint. Sleponogov had allegedly claimed that he was actually chanting “Glory to the guys who died in Ukraine!” in reference to Russian soldiers who were killed in combat, and the case was eventually dropped—after Sleponogov had spent 10 days in jail.

Other cases detailed in the Vrestka investigation include complaints made against Russian citizens for playing a Ukrainian song in the car while driving, drunkenly making pro-Ukrainian statements from a balcony, and criticizing the war in private conversations with friends at a coffee shop. The individuals who made the complaints allegedly include eavesdropping neighbors, coworkers, and janitors.

In many of the cases, according to the outlet, little to no evidence was provided by witnesses who reported the alleged violations.

In some court filings, however, the “anti-war” sentiments allegedly expressed by accused citizens are not so subtle. In Serpukhov, a city near Moscow, two Russian army veterans accused Yuri Nemtov of approaching them at a shopping mall last November with some choice words. “Well, invaders! Go there to die like meat!” he allegedly said.