An archive of articles and listserve postings of interest, mostly posted without commentary, linked to commentary at the Education Notes Online blog. Note that I do not endorse the points of views of all articles, but post them for reference purposes.
Members
of the United Automobile Workers union have given their backing to new
contracts with the three big U.S. automakers, agreements that deliver
hefty wage increases and other gains that had eluded the union for more
than 20 years.
In the most closely
contested vote, the tentative contract agreement at General Motors won
the support of 55 percent of the nearly 36,000 members casting ballots,
according to a tally from all the G.M. locals that the union posted on Thursday.
Tentative agreements with Ford Motor and Stellantis,
the maker of brands including Jeep and Chrysler, appeared headed for
approval by more decisive margins, nearly complete results there showed.
A spokesman for the union confirmed the accuracy of the tallies but declined to comment further.
The
agreements are similar across the three automakers and raise the top
wage for production workers 25 percent, to more than $40 over four and a
half years, from $32. They were reached last month after a six-week
wave of strikes that hobbled the companies — a strategy spearheaded by
the union’s new president, Shawn Fain, who had vowed to take a more
adversarial approach to negotiations than his predecessors.
The agreements appear to have quickly reverberated across the auto industry, with Toyota, Hyundai and Honda announcing significant wage increase at nonunion plants in the United States only days later.
“We call that the U.A.W. bump, and that stands for ‘U Are Welcome,’” Mr. Fain said in testimony
before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee this
week. “And we’re very proud of that. And when these workers decide to
organize and join the U.A.W., they’re going to realize the full benefit
of union membership and get what they’re fully due.”
The
new contracts also included larger company contributions to workers’
retirement plans and the right to strike over plant closures. All three
automakers declined to comment on the ratification votes.
Mr.
Fain said the union was seeking to capitalize on its momentum by waging
muscular organizing campaigns at nonunion plants, and, in remarks
submitted to the Senate committee, he added that thousands of workers
were already contacting the union and signing union cards.
But
even Mr. Fain’s tough approach in the talks with the Big Three did not
yield terms attractive enough to many union members. G.M. workers at
several large plants voted against the tentative agreement by large
margins.
In contrast, members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters recently approved
a new contract at United Parcel Service with 86 percent support, while a
new contract between the Writers Guild of America and Hollywood studios
passed with 99 percent support.
Rebecca
Givan, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, said Mr. Fain
had achieved a major victory despite having taken office only a few
months earlier with a goal of reorienting the union.
Dr. Givan said the union’s approach of initially striking at one plant
at each of the three automakers and ramping up over time had “really
upended a lot of conventional wisdom” in the labor movement and had
proved unusually successful at reversing some concessions that the union
had accepted years earlier, like the suspension of a cost-of-living
adjustment.
“This shows that if workers build enough power, they can win things back,” she said.
U.A.W. members at Mack Truck also ratified a contract on Wednesday, after rejecting an initial agreement with the company.
Across
the three automakers, skepticism toward the agreements arose in large
part from veteran workers who felt that the proposed contracts did not
go far enough to compensate them for years of concessions and weak wage
growth, even given strong gains for newer workers. Wages for some newer
workers will more than double over the next four years.
Huey
Harris, a G.M. employee at a large truck assembly plant in Flint,
Mich., who has worked at the company for over 20 years, said the deal
should have gone further in rewarding veteran workers, though he
ultimately voted for it. “The traditional people didn’t think they were
offered enough in the contract,” he said.
Several
longtime employees of the Big Three automakers said that even after the
large gains of the new contract, they would not be making more than
when they started their careers.
Dianne Feinstein deserves to be
remembered as a representative of the country’s monied interests — and
her centrist legacy should be rejected.
Dianne Feinstein helped lead the Democratic Party’s neoliberal turn.
California senator
Dianne Feinstein died last week at age ninety, and mainstream media
outlets are rushing to eulogize her. She deserves recognition — and it
should go without saying that Feinstein’s death is sad for those close
to her — but the hymns of praise miss her real significance. Celebrated
as a “pragmatist,” Feinstein in fact helped remake the Democratic Party
into a political vehicle for the very rich, and relatedly, the
military-industrial complex.
The New York Times’s obituary calls her “a tough campaigner who sometimes took conservative positions.” Even the left-leaning Mother Jones — which is named after, well, Mother Jones! — got in on the festschrift,
labeling Feinstein a “trailblazing Democrat” and citing their own 2017
feature on the senator, which quoted her friend Orville Schell calling
her “the last bastion of bridge building in the Senate.”
What the establishment loved about Feinstein is clear from these
obituaries: she opposed what elites deem the excesses of the Left. On
the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, before Roe v. Wade, she carried out harsh penalties against illegal abortion providers, and in a 2022 interview with New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister, she didn’t seem to regret her actions in the least.
California senator Dianne Feinstein died
yesterday at age ninety, and mainstream media outlets are rushing to
eulogize her. She deserves recognition — and it should go without saying
that Feinstein’s death is sad for those close to her — but the hymns of
praise miss her real significance. Celebrated as a “pragmatist,”
Feinstein in fact helped remake the Democratic Party into a political
vehicle for the very rich, and relatedly, the military-industrial
complex.
Politicodescribes
Feinstein’s mayoralty in San Francisco, from 1978 to 1988, as one of
“healing.” While it’s true that she came into office during a crazy
period — in 1978, San Francisco’s then-major, George Moscone, was
assassinated along with supervisor Harvey Milk by fellow supervisor Dan
White — her tenure only inflicted more devastation on the troubled city.
As Bay Area leftist journalist Larry Bensky has written, she dutifully
advanced the interests of the rich, allowing the real estate industry in
particular to add “30 million soulless square feet” of downtown office construction, while neglecting the needs and neighborhoods of the working class.
What the establishment loved about Feinstein is clear from
these obituaries: she opposed what elites deem the excesses of the Left.
On the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, before Roe v. Wade, she carried out harsh penalties against illegal abortion providers, and in a 2022 interview with New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister,
she didn’t seem to regret her actions in the least. As a senator, she
supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, catastrophically. Even more
horrendous, her husband, Richard Blum, had significant investments in
the arms industry, which meant that Feinstein profited personally from
the wars she backed — and, therefore, from the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis, Afghanis, and Americans.
From 2015 on, the movement around Bernie Sanders gave Feinstein’s centrism a new importance for the ruling class. As the Washington Post put it,
“she held down the center of the Democratic Party as it moved swiftly
to the left.” She was a leading voice urging Sanders to drop out of the
2016 presidential primary, and publicly fretted
ahead of the 2016 Democratic convention that his supporters would
unleash riots and chaos, in a repeat of 1968. (Many Democratic elites
believe that Richard Nixon won the presidency that year in part because
of violent televised confrontations between police and antiwar
protesters at the Democratic convention. A government-supported study
later pinned the blame for most of the violence on the police, but that
did not affect the narrative: liberals have been blaming the Left for
the chaos and for Nixon’s election for the last fifty years.)
In recent years Feinstein’s role as centrist disciplinarian took the
form, perhaps most notably, of bringing enormous condescension to the
climate debate. When a group of children visited Feinstein’s office in 2019
as part of a delegation from the Sunrise Movement, the progressive
climate group, demanding that the senator support the Green New Deal,
the sweeping blueprint for decarbonizing the economy championed by
democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Feinstein had the most
bluntly patronizing reaction. “You can take that back to whoever sent
you here,” she remarked, implying that the young people were not
political actors in their own right. Learning that one of the activists
was sixteen, she still dismissed her with a brusque “you didn’t vote for
me.” Equally winningly, the senator informed the young people, “I’ve
been doing this for thirty years. I know what I’m doing.“ The exchange
went viral and served to educate many young people about the depraved
indifference of the Senate — and Democratic Party leadership — to the
very real threat climate change poses to their futures.
In what seemed a fitting coda to a career spent serving the monied class, Feinstein’s refused to give up her Senate seat
to the very end despite the consequences. Because she was no longer
able to reliably show up, Feinstein became an obstacle to confirming
President Biden’s judicial nominees and counteracting the conservative
project of stacking the judicial branch. Her absence also caused the
defeat of Biden’s effort to curb pollution from heavy trucks, a measure
that would have, over the next couple decades, saved an estimated 18,000
children from developing asthma.
Feinstein deserves credit for evolving on some issues, as all
politicians should do. Like most centrist Democrats, she initially
opposed but ultimately supported gay marriage. She changed her mind on
the death penalty, eventually rejecting it. In one of her more dramatic
and significant reversals, she went from an enthusiastic proponent of
George Bush’s post–September 11 war on terror measures to one of their
most powerful critics; as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
she oversaw a 2014 report on the CIA’s horrific torture techniques, and
the Obama Administration did not appreciate her honesty.
Those moments were admirable, but Feinstein should be remembered far
more for her stalwart advocacy against the Left, and for representing
the nation’s worst monied interests. Let’s hope her passing will be seen
in retrospect as part of the demise of the centrist, plutocratic
politics she espoused, in which socialists and young climate activists
are mere irritants and war is just a good investment opportunity.
Contributors
Liza Featherstone is a columnist for Jacobin, a freelance journalist, and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart.
Major cities such as New York, Chicago and Boston moved to mayoral control of schools in the 1990s.
They pushed through some reforms, but many voters found their approaches heavy-handed.
Only a dozen mayors are still responsible for schools, but almost all mayors still seek influence.
Chicago residents will get to do something next year that they haven’t
done since the 1990s. They will cast votes for members of the school
board. Thirty years ago, Chicago was in the vanguard of major cities
where mayors took direct control of schools. That idea is now in
retreat.
Los Angeles, Detroit and Oakland, Calif., have already
moved away from mayoral control of schools. In Boston, nearly 80 percent
of voters approved a nonbinding resolution in 2021 to restore an independent school board, but Mayor Michelle Wu vetoed a proposal earlier this year from the City Council to do just that.
For
the most part, running schools has come to be seen as a complicated
endeavor that is just one plate too many to juggle for the person also
in charge of parks, public health, transit, crime and much else. “What
you’re seeing is that the idea you can hold a mayor accountable at the
ballot box for the performance of our schools has just not borne fruit,”
says Ricardo Arroyo, a member of the Boston City Council.
It’s a dim memory at this point, but mayoral control of schools was a buzzy policy approach
back in the 1990s. The experiment was ultimately run in only about two
dozen major cities — there are just under a dozen where mayors are still
in control — but they included some of the nation’s largest districts.
Michael Bloomberg and his handpicked Superintendent Joel Klein drew
national attention for pushing competition in New York, while the embrace of charters in Washington, D.C., and other cities became the subject of a high-profile documentary.
The
clout of mayors offered a counterweight both to teachers unions and
sometimes stodgy educational bureaucracies. At least in some places.
“When you had a strong mayor who was invested in it, it created
coherence and a focus on school performance that was otherwise lacking
in these big urban centers,” says Frederick Hess, director of education
policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative
think tank in Washington.
That didn’t happen everywhere. Not all
mayors were as transparent about their plans for schools as elected
school boards had been. Nor were all of them willing or able to take the
political risks involved in driving real change. And it proved
difficult to find compelling evidence that mayors running schools worked
any miracles, compared with the performance of peer cities.
“In the scheme of things, how big were these impacts?” Hess asks. “It’s hard to argue they were that big.”
Problems With the Model
A
couple of things are driving this move away from mayoral control. For
instance, the changing racial and ethnic mix within many cities means
many residents believe they will be better represented when they can
vote for multiple members of a school board, rather than letting the
mayor appoint everyone. “A school board can make everybody in the
community feel like somebody is articulating their agenda, where you had
folks who felt they were locked out of the mayor’s agenda,” Hess says.
There
have been other downsides. Members of appointed school boards who’ve
crossed swords with mayors on key decisions have found themselves booted out of office.
Even as they sometimes seem to act as rubber stamps, they can also
serve to insulate mayors from taking responsibility for unpopular
decisions.
It’s the school board who did it, not me, a mayor
might say. “What makes an elected school committee more responsive is
that the constituency believes it’s working for them, rather than an
appointed committee that essentially works for the mayor,” Arroyo says.
Mayors Still Get a Say
When Phillip Jones took office as mayor of Newport News,
Va., he knew he had no formal control over schools. Not only does his
office not run the schools, he has no say at all about policy or
priorities. But he understood that schools are essential to the health
of his community, so he’s done everything he can to prod them in the
right direction. He intends to spend time this fall working as a
substitute teacher to draw attention to classrooms and their needs.
“I
have zero agency, but I have been the first mayor to attend school
board meetings,” Jones says. “I am deep in their budget. I am actively
participating.”
If contemporary mayors mostly don’t want to be in
charge of schools — and their constituents don’t want that, either —
that doesn’t mean mayors will have no say. Schools are too important.
They represent the biggest item in the typical city budget and are often
the largest local employer. Months before Tuesday’s one-day strike brought many city services to a halt in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass stepped in to mediate a strike that shut down schools for several days.
Mayors
concerned with schools are finding lots of other ways to make their
wishes known. Some are pushing for specific policies, whether early
childhood education or afterschool programs. Dozens of mayors have
created children’s cabinets meant to coordinate services for children
and youth. All mayors spend plenty of time visiting schools and meeting
with parents and school officials.
“Instead of direct, formal
control, mayoral leadership is picking up through these other
mechanisms,” says Kenneth Wong, an education professor at Brown
University. “Mayors are not shy to take on districtwide initiatives, but
they’re using cross-sector collaboration to support this work.”
The
idea that mayors were going to take over schools and save education has
come to an end. Today’s mayors have gone back to the old way of doing
business, trying their best to make schools better while standing safely
on the sidelines. And that’s where voters seem to want them.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the country’s
most influential pro-Israel lobbying group, is recruiting candidates to
challenge progressive members of the Congressional Black Caucus in
primaries next year.
The CBC has been silent on the AIPAC bid to challenge at least three
of its members who are part of the so-called Squad, a loose group of
progressive representatives. According to media reports and The
Intercept’s investigation, the only incumbents AIPAC has targeted so far
in this election cycle are CBC members.
The CBC’s silence on the electoral challenges reflects the divide
among Democrats on Israel — with progressives increasingly willing to
buck Capitol Hill orthodoxies and speak up for Palestinian rights — and
fundraising dynamics among caucus members. AIPAC has endorsed more than
half of CBC members. The AIPAC-backed members of the caucus, some 31
lawmakers, have received a previously unreported total of at least $3.6
million from AIPAC since February 2022, according to Federal Election
Commission records.
“AIPAC
and its Republican donors are intentionally targeting progressive
members of the Congressional Black Caucus with right-wing primary
challenges.”
The silence has given rise to calls for the CBC to speak up for
members under attack — especially given AIPAC’s propensity for directing
Republican money to challenge incumbent progressive Democrats in
primaries.
“AIPAC and its Republican donors are intentionally targeting
progressive members of the Congressional Black Caucus with right-wing
primary challenges,” said Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of
Justice Democrats, which backed all five CBC members from the Squad.
“The CBC — and every caucus in Congress — has the opportunity now to
demonstrate their power and stand up for all incumbents against AIPAC’s
role in funneling GOP dollars into Democratic primaries.”
AIPAC is seeking to challenge CBC members Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.,
and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., because of their support for putting
restrictions on U.S. aid to Israel, Jewish Insiderreported last month.According to three sources with knowledge of the recruiting process,
who asked for anonymity to protect professional relationships, AIPAC
asked Pittsburgh-area Democrat Lindsay Powell to challenge Rep. Summer
Lee, D-Penn.; Powell declined. Allegheny County Controller Corey
O’Connor also declined an AIPAC invitation to challenge Lee, according
to two of the sources. (Powell declined to comment, and O’Connor did not
respond to a request for comment.)
Bhavini Patel, a council member in the city of Edgewood,
Pennsylvania, is reportedly planning to run against Lee. Jewish Insider reported that it was unable to confirm if AIPAC had met with Patel. (Patel did not respond to a request for comment.)
While AIPAC declined to respond to specific questions about its
involvement in the challenges against CBC members, the pro-Israel lobby
defended its record supporting Black candidates for Congress.
“AIPAC proudly endorsed more than half the Black Caucus last cycle
and United Democracy Project” — an AIPAC-backed super PAC — “helped
ensure pro-Israel African American Democrats in Ohio, North Carolina,
and Maryland won their elections,” an AIPAC spokesperson said in a
statement to The Intercept. “While we have not made any decisions on
specific races this cycle, we are constantly evaluating every seat held
by a detractor of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and we base our
assessments exclusively on their anti-Israel votes and statements.”
The CBC did not respond to a request for comment.
Old Guard Versus the Squad
Five Black progressive officials have joined the CBC’s ranks since
2019. Their additions strained already shifting dynamics in the caucus,
which has long been governed by traditional structures of seniority and
patronage.
The caucus has sometimes stood against the new crop of rising Black
progressives. The CBC bet against Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., in 2018
and backed her white incumbent opponent, former Rep. Mike Capuano;
Pressley won and joined the CBC. Bowman angered the old guard of the
caucus when he endorsed progressive candidate Cori Bush in her 2020
primary in Missouri against Rep. William Lacy Clay, a centrist who had
been a CBC member for two decades. Bush also won and joined the CBC.
Divisions on Israel in the CBC, however, go beyond election alliances
to policy stances and votes. Since taking office, progressive CBC
members — including Omar, Bowman, Lee, Bush, and Pressley
— have criticized human rights abuses against Palestinians or voted
against military aid to Israel. They were among the 10 House Democrats
who voted against a July resolution to absolve Israel of being an
apartheid state. The critical stance on U.S. support for Israel drew
AIPAC’s ire, with the group ramping up its efforts to challenge the CBC incumbents.
AIPAC’s shifting campaign strategy presents contradictions for the
CBC. The caucus’s leaders have close relationships with AIPAC, but the
group has also historically put an emphasis on the importance of
protecting incumbents.
Since 2022, the CBC’s top AIPAC recipients includeRep. Glenn Ivey,
D-Md., who has taken $756,000 from the group; House Democratic Caucus
Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who has taken $485,300; Rep. Valerie
Foushee, D-N.C., who has taken $456,800;Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who has taken $459,900; and Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, who has taken $349,600.
Jeffries, who has led congressional efforts to protect incumbents against primary challengers, is a close ally of AIPAC, as are CBC leader Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., and CBC PAC leader Rep. Gregory Meeks.
CBC members have regularly led and attended AIPAC’s annual trips to
Israel, conferences, and other events. (Horsford, Meeks, and CBC PAC did
not provide comment for this story.)
The alliance has put CBC members at odds. Omar and Bush joined other
progressives in protesting an official congressional address by Israel
President Isaac Herzog in July amid efforts to radically politicize the country’s judiciary system. Jeffries said he welcomed Herzog “with open arms.” The next month, he led AIPAC’s annual congressional delegation to Israel.
More centrist CBC members and their political allies have been
involved in combatting progressive gains in the Democratic Party. In
June 2021, Jeffries, along with Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Terri
Sewell, D-Ala., another recipient of AIPAC cash, launched Team Blue PAC
to protect Democratic members facing primary challenges from their
left. And last June, Democratic operatives closely aligned with CBC
leaders launched a new dark-money group to fend off primary challengers.
In their individual capacities, however, some of the centrist CBC
members are supporting their progressive colleagues. After news broke
that AIPAC was recruiting Omar’s challenger, Jeffries endorsed her last
month.
For some observers, Jeffries’s ascendency in Democratic leadership,
and many CBC members’ support of it, complicates the political calculus.
To invite a fight with an influential group like AIPAC could prove
folly for Jeffries, souring relationships in the wider Democratic caucus
where the group still holds sway. “Some of the older members have
trouble letting go,” said one senior Democratic strategist who requested
anonymity in order to speak freely. “And I think more than anything,
they want a Black speaker of the House, not protecting progressive
members.”
Jeffries’s spokesperson Christie Stephenson declined to say whether
Jeffries planned to endorse Lee and Bowman but said Jeffries would keep
backing Democratic incumbents across the political spectrum.
“Leader Hakeem Jeffries intends to continue his practice of
supporting the reelection of every single House Democratic incumbent,”
she said, “from the most progressive to the most centrist, and all
points in between.”
AIPAC’s Republican Money
The rift between AIPAC and progressive CBC members reflects a broader
disconnect between more senior and moderate CBC members and the
caucus’s small but growing progressive wing. Those frictions have bled
into other recent primary elections. CBC membersreportedly
pushed former Rep. Mondaire Jones to run against Bowman last year.
Bowman is one of the five progressive Squad members who are also part of
the CBC.
“The CBC should be sounding the alarm and should be concerned,” said
Democratic strategist Camille Rivera, a partner at New Deal Strategies.
“We need to be very careful about letting power and influence change the
overall goal of the caucus, which is to protect Black incumbents and
expand representation, especially those that have been doing the work
and representing their constituents. We shouldn’t let any entity try to
divide and conquer.”
AIPAC’s attacks on Black progressives are not new. The group funneled money from GOP donors to back the more centrist Brown’s successful House campaigns against Ohio progressive Nina Turner. And the group spent $4 million to try to thwart Lee’s insurgent 2022 campaign.
Even powerful progressives have fallen amid the Israel lobby’s
attacks. Endorsements from former Democratic presidential nominee
Hillary Clinton and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., weren’t enough to help
former Rep. Donna Edwards, D- Md., overcome the $6 million
AIPAC spent against her in her bid to reclaim her House seat. Pelosi, a
pro-Israel stalwart and at the time the speaker of the House, rebuked AIPAC
for its attacks against Edwards. Her opponent, Ivey, the top CBC
recipient of AIPAC cash, won the primary by 16 points and went on to win
the general election by a landslide.
AIPAC’s strategy fits into a larger trend of Republicans and
Democrats teaming up to defeat progressive candidates critical of U.S.
support to Israel. Republican donors poured last-minute cash
into former New York Rep. Eliot Engel’s reelection campaign in the face
of Bowman’s insurgent 2018 challenge. Pennsylvania billionaire Jeffrey
Yass, a major GOP donor and funder of the Israeli think tank leading the rightward lurch in the country’s judiciary, also funded a PAC run by Democrats and dedicated to challenging progressives in Democratic primaries.
Lee told The Intercept that AIPAC used Republican money to fund ads
meant to discourage Black voters from coming out on Election Day.
“AIPAC funneled money from Republican billionaires to spend $5 million attacking me with baseless lies and racist tactics.”
“AIPAC funneled money from Republican billionaires to spend $5
million attacking me with baseless lies and racist tactics,” Lee said.
She said political ads accused her of having ties to far-right figures
like former President Donald Trump “in order to keep Black voters from
showing up to vote.”
Lee drew a contrast to AIPAC’s support for scores of
“insurrectionist” Republicans who supported election denial and “shared
the same goals as a mob of armed white supremacists and antisemites.”
“Now they’re targeting Black incumbent champions for poor,
working-class, Black folks in districts where they’ve never been
represented,” she said. “These attacks add fuel to the fire of fascism
tearing away the history, civil rights, and lives of Black Americans,
who are the base of the Democratic party.”
The open enrollment period
for MA and Part D runs from October 15 through December 7 each year.
Beginning October 1, insurers, brokers, and other third-party entities
can begin marketing their plans, including through television ads. In
advance of this year’s ad blitz, KFF reviewed television spots that
aired last fall, examining plan marketing strategies in depth. Key
takeaways include:
MA ads were common during the annual enrollment period.
TV airways were flooded with ads for Medicare plans. There
were 643,852 airings of English-language Medicare ads run on broadcast
television and national cable between October 1, 2022, and December 7,
2022, an average of more than 9,500 airings per day. This is more than
were seen for any individual Healthcare.gov open enrollment period between 2013 and 2018.
Most—four of every five ads—were sponsored by health insurers, with the
remaining sponsored by brokers and other third-party entities, such as
marketing companies. Some TV ads used celebrity endorsements to promote
MA.Joe Namath was featured more often than any other celebrity,
appearing in nearly 10% of all MA ads.
Many MA ads were misleading or confusing by design.
Ads often implied Medicare’s endorsement. Over 27%
of ads included a government-issued Medicare card or image that
resembled it, and 16% urged viewers to call a privately-run phone line
described as a “Medicare” hotline. Importantly, new rules that take effect
before this year’s open enrollment period should help prevent this, by
prohibiting the misleading use of the Medicare name, logo, or card in
private marketing and communication materials.
Other ads used language to suggest viewers were “missing
out” on benefits they were “entitled to,” or receiving incomplete
coverage under OM. Such framing can give viewers with OM the
incorrect impression they need to take action, have inadequate coverage,
or have overlooked a necessary enrollment step.
Medicare Advantage ad airings often featured active “enrollees” engaged in physical activities (26%) but few (less than 5%) showed people who appeared to have a serious health problem or visible disability. This may represent an effort by insurers to target people in good health, but it fails to mirror the demographics of the Medicare population: One-fifth
(22%) of Medicare beneficiaries are in fair or poor self-reported
health, and more than one-quarter (28%) have at least one functional
impairment.
Many of the ads mentioned possible benefits of MA, but none of the trade-offs.
Most ads (92%) emphasized supplemental benefits, such as dental, vision, and hearing care.
However, not all benefits are available to all enrollees, which can get
lost in a commercial. The lack of data about supplemental benefit usage
and access means plan promises could be largely empty. Notably,
services that may appeal to people in poorer health—including allowances
for food or grocery spending (20%), transportation services (20%), and
meals (10%)—were marketed much less often than others. As with
depictions of physically active plan members this may represent an
effort to attract lower-cost, healthier enrollees.
The majority of ads (85%) touted lower out-of-pocket
spending, such as $0 co-pays, no additional premiums, or reductions to
the standard Part B premium. These ads may also imply a benefit is more available than it is. For example, in 2023, Part B rebates were offered by just 17% of plans, with an even smaller share of enrollees (10%) having access. New CMS rules
now prohibit marketing of benefits that are not available in the
service area where the ad is aired, with an exception for regional ads.
This change may improve marketing accuracy, but additional unbiased
consumer education, outreach, and enrollment assistance is still needed.
Ads rarely mentioned Original Medicare, or the potential limitations of MA coverage. MA-specific
features,such as limited and ever-shifting provider networks or prior
authorization requirements, were absent from the ads, leaving
beneficiaries with an incomplete view of their coverage options and the
tradeoffs among them.
The KFF reports come as MA is becoming more complex for
beneficiaries, more costly for Medicare, and more lucrative for
insurers. Critically, these dynamics are interdependent. Fueled by surging profits, seemingly endless numbers of MA plans are coming to market: In 2023, beneficiaries had access to 43 MA plans, more than ever before. MA enrollment is also climbing, in part due to increased advertising by plans
and brokers. Such ads often feature “extra” benefits not available to
people with Original Medicare (OM), like dental coverage and gym
memberships. The MA overpayments that help fund these heavily marketed services are also on the rise,
worsening concerns about MA efficiency, Medicare sustainability, and
parity between OM and MA. Troublingly, many of the ads are misleading
and aggressive. Beneficiary marketing complaints grew
sharply in recent years, leading to heightened attention from
policymakers, including new rules that will apply to plan and
third-party marketers during the upcoming Medicare open enrollment
period. Medicare Rights welcomes these regulatory updates and will
remain vigilant during the open enrollment period and beyond to ensure
successful implementation. We will continue to urge Congress and CMS to
more fully protect people with Medicare through further reforms,
including setting and enforcing standards for the marketing of
supplemental benefits, restoring recently weakened consumer
protections, boosting plan oversight, filling gaps in marketing rules,
and providing adequate funding for unbiased beneficiary education,
including State Health Insurance Assistance Programs (SHIPs). We also
urge improvements to simplify enrollment, such as BENES 2.0,
and greater attention to Medigap restrictions as well as inaccurate
provider directories and mid-year network changes that may leave MA
enrollees without access to care and their providers of choice.
The
White House is trying to sell 'Bidenomics,' but poll after poll shows
that the public is extremely unhappy with the economy. What does the
public see that the bureaucrats don't?
Welcome
to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like
to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here.
Today’s
issue is about the incoherence of the Biden economic agenda, so-called
‘Bidenomics.’ With strikes in the auto industry and Hollywood, as well
as sour polling numbers, something about the White House framework for
policy isn’t working.
First, I want to offer a brief
summary of the Google trial, which seems to be going well for the
government. Trials are where the rubber meets the road on antitrust, so
we set up a special site, Big Tech on Trial,
where we’re covering the daily drama of the case. Here’s the TLDR so
far of the trial. The government has shown pretty clearly that the
search giant is paying large sums of money to block rivals from entering
the market. In addition, Google’s gotten busted covering up evidence -
or as I put it, Google is following the Stringer Bell rule. In addition,
in a separate Google trial, a judge tossed the search firm’s dirty
tricks attempt to go after the head of the Antitrust Division Jonathan Kanter as biased.
It
hasn’t been all roses for the government, Google drew some blood
showing that consumers, when faced with the choice of Bing, do switch to
Google. But the basic narrative of Google as a monopolistic liar is
working, and Google’s attempt to show this trial as just the government
trying to help Microsoft isn’t resonating. The biggest win for Google is
Judge Amit Mehta blocking a public audio feed, so the public just isn’t
tuned in. You can follow along by signing up at Big Tech on Trial.
This
is a real book for sale in D.C. next to bobblehead RBG and Pelosi
dolls. This is not a joke. Well it is, but it’s also true.
Strike!
I’ve
been out in Los Angeles for the last few days, and the big economic
problem here are the strikes against the movie studios, which have shut
down production. More broadly, as I read the news, the biggest economic
stories are the high cost of living, and then the United Autoworkers
going on strike against the big three car companies. The Washington Post
had a good article
asking workers why they are striking. Most cited inflation and
fairness. “We’re not making enough money” said Petrun Williams, a 58
year-old Ford repairman.“People should be able to buy their own houses, but right now it’s not possible.”
It’s
a hard problem to tackle, because GM, Ford, and Stellantis are giant
wildly inefficient bureaucracies with high costs optimized to make
$75,000 trucks, and electric vehicles are a completely different
product. But ‘Bidenomics’ isn’t necessarily helping.
In
fact, Biden’s White House staff just doesn’t seem to have the capacity
to hear what’s going on, or address it. Earlier this month, Biden gave a speech
in Philadelphia celebrating Labor Day, and ahead of it he said “I’m not
worried about a strike,” and “I don’t think it’s going to happen,”
comments that are clearly a result of his senior staff giving him bad
info. These delusional comments prompted a Detroit Congresswoman to call
up senior White House advisor Steve Ricchetti and scream, “Are you out
of your f---ing minds?”
And this gets to a common
question I hear in D.C., which goes as follows. Why is the public so
unhappy? The economy looks, by most conventional measurements, as if
it’s doing so well. Dave Dayen summarized
the statistics as follows. Unemployment is low, inflation is down,
consumer spending is rolling along, and certain manufacturing areas are
booming. “Several measures,” he wrote, “like economic growth and
prime-age employment, have actually rebounded to their trends from before the 2008 financial crisis, an almost unthinkable scenario just a few years ago.”
According
to consistent polling, the public thinks inflation is high and getting
worse, and that Biden has done very little to address any of their
problems. What explains how the White House is floundering? One problem
is plenty of people in the political class believe that the public is
simply wrong to be angry. Paul Krugman, for instance, wrote a column saying that normal people believe
the economy is bad, even if it isn’t. I see White House officials
interviewed on CNBC periodically, and while they don’t say that
outright, it’s clear they think the economy is doing well and inflation
is down, and their job is to sell their accomplishments.
There
are two reasons why the White House simply cannot seem to govern
effectively. The first is that the tools the political class uses to
understand inflation are misleading them. The second is that Biden
doesn’t have one unified policy agenda, but has a bunch of policy
agendas that work against each other. The result of these two factors is
that Biden’s story - look at all this prosperity I have delivered -
doesn’t work in the face of strikes and anger.
Sticker Price Versus Reality
Let’s
start with why the White House doesn’t see a problem. It’s true that
key members of Biden’s senior staff are mismanaging the situation, but
that doesn’t explain why Krugman, as well as many economists in the
administration, don’t see one either. Sure you can look at individual
strikes, but those are noisy events, not economy-wide.
How does
the government perceive the experience of ordinary people in the
economy? There’s a mess of information out there, what information
matters, and what doesn’t? The President can’t ask 100 million Americans
how they are doing before making a decision. Over the last century,
bureaucrats have answered these questions by inventing a host of
measurements to serve as proxy for what normal people experience.
The government has been measuring prices using some variant
of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) since 1913. When there’s a change to
inflation, what that usually means is that the CPI is going up or down.
And a change to inflation isn’t a change in absolute price levels. If
inflation is, say, down, it doesn’t mean prices are down, only that the
rate prices are increasing is less rapid than it was before.
Since
2021, prices have spiked fairly dramatically, with a CPI reaching up to
9% at certain points in 2022 before settling back to 3.7% last month.
Once again, that doesn’t mean prices are down, just that the rate of
increase is down. The crazy expensive fourteen dollar sandwich is still a
crazy expensive fourteen dollars, it’s just not going up to seventeen
dollars. One of the bigger contributors to the CPI last month was
housing, jumping by 7.3% over the past year.
But
does the CPI really show how people experience price increases? After
all, one of the most significant changes in what we pay is higher
interest rates, which the Federal Reserve has hiked dramatically over
the past few years. The Fed’s actions have increased credit card rates,
mortgage rates, auto financing, and corporate and government borrowing
costs. Surprisingly, none of this is directly included in our inflation
metrics. “The CPI’s scope,” writes
the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “excludes changes in interest rates or
interest costs.” The price of money, which is an input into everything,
isn’t included in how we see inflation today.
That’s crazy.
When
I was in the archives learning about Congressman Wright Patman, the
Chair of the House Banking Committee in the 1960s and 1970s, I found
that back then, people included the cost of interest rates in how they
understood inflation. The 1960 Democratic Party platform discussed inflation
in precisely this manner, saying that high interest rates enacted a
“costly toll from every American who has financed a home, an automobile,
a refrigerator, or a television set,” and was “itself a factor in
inflation.”
This logic made sense. When you borrow to buy a
car or a house, the cost of that car or house is your monthly payment,
not the sticker price. But in the 1980s, the government changed its
method of measuring inflation, so today, the CPI works under different
assumptions. So what does this change mean? Well, the two biggest
purchases for an American family are a car and a house, and in both of
these categories, the CPI excludes the key factor for normal people,
which is how interest rates affect the monthly payment. The sticker
price for a car is an important number, but it’s the monthly payment
that matters.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the price of cars over the last ten years.
New
car prices spiked from the beginning of 2021 to the end of 2022, but
price levels are starting to come down, ever so gently. But is the
monthly payment coming down?
No. According to Edmunds,
in Q2 of 2022, the average monthly payment for a car was $678, in Q2 of
2023, it was $733. So it’s a slight price decline for the CPI due to
new vehicle pricing, but an 8% inflation for what people actually pay.
Why are monthly payments going up if sticker prices are going down? It’s
simple - the price of money has gone up. The average interest rate for a
new car jumped to 6.63% in the second quarter of this year. It was 4.60% in Q2 of 2022, and 4.17% in Q2 of 2021.
And housing? Here’s chart from the Daily Shot of the monthly mortgage payment for a median home price.
Redfin reports the typical mortgage payment is up 20%
from a year ago. And while most homeowners have mortgages they got
prior to 2021, and so aren’t paying the higher prices, the exceptionally
high currently monthly payment means people can no longer move, and
they have to watch their children struggle to find a place to live.
Housing prices are social, since the home is so central to the American
order, so even if you are financially unaffected, seeing a lot of people
be unable to move, buy a home, or rent affordably gives everyone a
sense of economic insecurity. That’s why striking auto workers mentioned
the price of housing.
The calculation for housing in the CPI is a bit more complicated
than that for new cars, but the key piece to understand is that in
1983, the Reagan administration chose to exclude interest costs, instead
asking homeowners what they think they would be paying in rent if they
didn’t own the home they lived in. The government simply
“underestimates changes in housing costs,” according to an economist at
Redfin, especially when interest rates are spiking. “And that’s because
housing costs for the person who is actually active in the market
experiences much greater fluctuation.”
The reason to
change this measurement was so that inflation would look lower than it
actually was. Over time, subsequent administrations sustained this
shift. Lying about the symbols used to govern has a short-term political
benefit in that it perhaps gets you some good media coverage, but over
time, it meant that the CPI for housing costs isn’t necessarily reliable.
So
basically, the price of money is a big deal in terms of our experience
paying for things, and it’s being excluded from the inflation metric
that policymakers use to look at the economy. So that’s why policymakers
are confused. Some of their key tools aren’t reflecting reality, and
the people who originally broke the tools for political purposes aren’t
there anymore. Today’s political class doesn’t even know what they don’t
know.
What Is Bidenomics?
Of
course, housing and cars aren’t the only things people buy. Food is
much more expensive than it was just a few years ago, as are everything
from hotels to airfares to consumer packaged goods to seeds. I mean,
Visa and Mastercard, who are barely affected by inflation, are jacking
up their swipe fees to merchants. None of that is a secret, the CPI on
food shows that inflation might be coming down, but prices are still
high. So what is Joe Biden, and the Democrats in Congress, doing about
that? Well, White House officials call their plan ‘Bidenomics.’
The best way to explain Bidenomics is to listen to a judge Biden recently appointed to the D.C. district court, Ana Reyes, who was hostile
to the Antitrust Division when they brought a case against two
smartlock makers. Last month, Reyes sat on an American Bar Association
panel where she attacked
the idea of stronger antitrust enforcement, focusing specifically on
her skepticism around labor-related claims. She bragged to the audience
of defense attorneys that during the antitrust case she heard, she
'pranked' government lawyers by spending three minutes pretending to
dismiss their key witness, before saying ‘April Fools. "I have never in
my life heard stunned silence," she later said gleefully.
Having
a corporate lawyer bully turned judge appointed by Biden killing an
antitrust suit brought by Biden officials is a great example of
Bidenomics, because it shows the lack of coherence of this
administration’s policy. I’m a big fan of Federal Trade Commission Chair
Lina Khan, but another Biden judge - Jacqueline Corley - let through
the largest big tech merger of all time, when Microsoft bought
Activision, after Khan challenged the deal.
These judges
matter in terms of inflation. Had Biden picked actual populists for the
judiciary instead of Corley and Reyes, the White House’s ability to
govern would look very different, and corporate America would be
changing their pricing behavior due to fear of crackdowns. In early
2022, there was a flurry of interest in using antitrust to attack how
corporations were informally colluding to raise prices. But an
aggressive legal theory needs judges willing to take market power
seriously, and Biden instead chose people who thwart his own
administration. It’s not just judges. Factions
in the administration - in this case the White House Council of
Economic Advisors - explicitly opposed the corporate profit-inflation
link.
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I
think a lot about antitrust, but the incoherence is systemic across
most policy areas (and Democrats in Congress). The pro-labor
administration indicated support
for the strikes in Hollywood against powerful studios, then a few
months later the former White House Domestic Policy Council head - Susan
Rice - rejoined the board of Netflix. For every attempt to make electric vehicles in America there’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pushing hard to ensure these cars are made abroad.
Normally,
policy disagreements would be decided by the President and his staff.
But Joe Biden is a procrastinator, and doesn’t like making choices. He’s
also very old. As for his staff, well, while Biden’s former chief of
staff Ron Klain was aggressive in terms of policy goals, his new chief
of staff, Jeff Zients, is a relentlessly cheerful former management
consultant wholly focused on process. Other important figures, such as
Tim Wu and Brian Deese, have also left. With Klain gone, there’s an
insular clubbiness at the top, and an inability to provide a vision or
pay attention to policy implementation. Even if you were to make the
point that housing prices need attention, there’s just no one there who
could or would do anything about it.
And that brings us
back to the strikes. The Biden administration should have headed off the
UAW labor action with discrete steps to help the workers, but the White
House just doesn’t have any coherence. And so while Biden is saying pro-labor things and agreeing the CEOs are paid too much, there’s this.
There
is also a sense among some Democrats and labor officials that Biden’s
team miscalculated the standoff and hasn’t understood the severity of
labor’s frustration or concerns. Even the news this week that the Biden
administration was considering providing aid to auto suppliers rankled
some in the union world, who thought it could undermine the strike and
saw it as evidence that there are always funds available for companies,
but not workers.
This isn’t to say there aren’t
significant achievements. Biden’s industrial policy push is real, with
increases in investment in semiconductor production, electric vehicles,
and batteries, as well new factories in general. His competition policy
approach is also real, with new merger guidelines, as well as crackdowns
in pharmaceuticals, mergers, the prohibition of non-competes, and the
Google suit.
There are routinely good decisions coming out of some of the regulators. The other day, for instance, the Department of Labor proposed a rule opening up 4 million more workers to overtime pay. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission begins a crackdown on private equity.
Unlike
the Obama administration, which was ideologically oriented to push
wealth and power upward, the Biden administration has a few populists
trying to do the opposite. But in an inflationary environment where the
stats are juiced to mislead policymakers, that’s not good enough.
What Happened to Biden’s State of the Union?
In February, Biden gave a State of the Union speech
focused on making things in the U.S., going after junk fees, and taking
on corporate power. His polling temporarily spiked. Since then, there
has been no messaging follow-up from the White House on anything he said
in that speech, almost as if Zients and the rest of the White House
were embarrassed that Biden put forward a populist set of arguments.
Instead,
various officials are out there on TV saying ‘look at these charts!’
They want credit for inflation being down, economic growth being up, and
unemployment being low. But without recognizing that the actual costs
of housing and transportation are increasingly unaffordable and going
up, that just looks weird. Moreover, there’s no actual policy regime,
just a disjointed set of factions trying to get as much done as possible
according to their preferred view. It’s mostly unclear how Biden is
actually affecting people’s lives, and the only genuinely organized
groups of workers, are showing that things aren’t ok.
The economy
isn’t great, and there’s no point in trying to pretend it is. That
said, Biden can save his administration. He has accomplishments, and his
State of the Union messaging resonated. He can argue that his first
term was about having America recover from Covid by re-shoring
factories, restoring full employment, and fixing supply chain problems.
He can brag about all the big companies suing him, like various
pharmaceutical firms mad that the White House is imposing price caps.
Then he can pledge that he’ll focus on bringing down housing costs in
his second term. Will such a story work? I don’t know. Maybe the current
pitch will work, in the 2022 midterms, Biden out-performed
expectations. But it’s at least more relatable than ‘Eat some charts!’
Thanks
for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send
me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And
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