Nose, cutting off to spite, etc.

~ susie

Don't come here,

See what George voters get in return for symbolism?

For the fourth time in two years, a rural hospital in Georgia is shuttering its doors over a dearth of patients who can pay for their medical services, the Albany Herald reports. An increasing number of hospitals that serve large numbers of poor and uninsured Americans are being forced to close in states that are refusing the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.

The Lower Oconee Community Hospital, a so-called “critical access” hospital in southeastern Georgia with 25 beds, will close down and possibly re-open as an urgent care center that provides services that aren’t quite serious enough to necessitate an emergency room visit. Patients in the Wheeler County region who need more extensive medical care after the hospital closes will need to travel upwards of thirty miles in order to receive it.

“We just did not have sufficient volume to support the expenses,” said CEO Karen O’Neal in an interview with local CBS affiliate WMAZ. “It’s a terrible situation, and it’s tragic, the loss of jobs and the economic impact.”

Last fall, Bloomberg reported that at least five public hospitals in Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia — including three in Georgia alone — were cutting staff and services in the wake of their refusal to expand Medicaid. These hospitals are so-called “Disproportionate Share Hospitals” — providers that serve a disproportionate number of poor and uninsured Americans, and as such don’t always receive payments for the care they give patients.

This will be interesting

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

| #OccupyWallStreet #NATGAT |

I figured Taibbi was ready to leave Rolling Stone when I noticed him pulling punches about for-profit schools in an expose. They’re big RS advertisers:

Matt Taibbi, who made a name as a fierce critic of Wall Street at Rolling Stone magazine, has joined First Look Media, the latest big-name journalist to leave an established brand to enter the thriving and well-financed world of news start-ups.

Mr. Taibbi will start his own publication focusing on financial and political corruption, he said in an interview on Wednesday. First Look is financed by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who is worth $8.5 billion, according to Forbes. Mr. Omidyar has pledged $250 million to the project.

“It’s obvious that we’re entering a new phase in the history of journalism,” Mr. Taibbi said. “This is clearly the future, and this was an opportunity for me to be part of helping to found something and create something that might carry us into the next generation.”

The site, as yet unnamed, will open this year. Mr. Taibbi will write for it and take an editorial role, while based in New York. There will be “an emphasis on bringing in talented writers who can have fun with the subject in addition to producing solid investigative journalism,” he said.

First Look began its first publication, The Intercept, with the national security reporters Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. In recent weeks, the group has hired Lynn Oberlander, formerly of The New Yorker, as its general counsel, and the author and journalist Peter Maass, among others.

The rentiers

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Good guy Netflix http://advice-animal.tumblr.com/

I’m perfectly happy to switch back to DVDs if they really want to push the issue. (Until they make it illegal to sell them used, of course.):

Long-running disputes involving Verizon, Netflix, and Internet bandwidth providers are flaring up, causing recent slowdowns in Netflix speed.

According to a Wall Street Journal report tonight, “[t]he online-video service has been at odds with Verizon Communications Inc. and other broadband providers for months over how much Netflix streaming content they will carry without being paid additional fees. Now the long simmering conflict has heated up and is slowing Netflix, in particular, on Verizon’s fiber-optic FiOS service, where Netflix says its average prime-time speeds dropped by 14 percent last month.”

One possible interpretation of the above statement is that Verizon has been demanding direct payments from Netflix in exchange for carrying any video traffic beyond some numerical limit. That’s probably not precisely what’s happening, however, because the report says this particular dispute has been simmering for months—meaning it started before the court decision last month that overturnedthe Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules. Prior to that court decision, it would not have been legal for Verizon to refuse to carry Netflix traffic when its payment demands weren’t met.

However, there are other ways Verizon can play hardball and affect Netflix performance. Netflix has been pushing ISPs to host its caching equipment within their data centers and to peer directly with the video provider—that is, exchange traffic without a third-party intermediary.

“Netflix wants broadband companies to hook up to its new video-distribution network without paying them fees for carrying its traffic,” the Journal noted. “But the biggest US providers—Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T Inc.—have resisted, insisting on compensation.”

ISPs are under no obligation to accept Netflix’s peering and caching offers. Teaming up with Netflix might improve performance for consumers, but not doing so isn’t the same as refusing to carry traffic. If Verizon’s network and its interconnections with third-party networks are strong, Netflix quality should be reasonably good.

The biggest problem is probably the same one we’ve seen in previous disputes: the connections between ISPs and the Internet bandwidth providers that Netflix pays to distribute its traffic to the rest of the Internet.

As we’ve reported before, those bandwidth providers, such as Cogent Communications, have traditionally exchanged traffic with consumer ISPs without money changing hands. But ISPs are using increases in Netflix traffic as justification to demand payment.