Brittany Giroux Lane gave birth to her daughter, Alexandra, a few days before Christmas in 2018. The baby had dark eyes and longish legs. She had also arrived about 13 weeks early, and weighed just two pounds. Alexandra initially thrived in the neonatal intensive care unit at Mount Sinai West. Ms. Lane, 35, recalls the nurses describing her daughter as a “rock star” because she grew so quickly. But her condition rapidly worsened after an infection, and Alexandra died early on the morning of Jan. 15 at 25 days old. A flurry of small medical bills from neonatologists and pediatricians quickly followed. Ms. Lane struggled to get her breast pump covered by insurance because, in the midst of a preterm birth, she hadn’t gone through the health plan's prior approval process. Last summer, Ms. Lane started receiving debt collection notices. The letters, sent by the health plan Cigna, said she owed the insurer over $257,000 for the bills it accidentally covered for Alexandra’s care after Ms. Lane switched health insurers. Ms. Lane was flummoxed: It was Cigna that had received the initial bill for care and had paid Mount Sinai West. Now, Cigna was seeking the money it had overpaid the hospital by turning to the patient.

This is not a forum that attempts to change minds. It’s much darker.

Away from the social pressure of the office kitchen, you guys have been busy.

The House proposal for paid family and medical leave, a signature piece of Democrats’ new social spending in what is called the Build Back Better Act, smuggles in a major giveaway to private insurers. It’s happening with the consent of key center-left advocates calling for the legislation. Even as the Senate develops its complementary plan, these groups are backing away from their long-standing push for a public paid leave policy. The framework put forth earlier this month by House Ways and Means Committee chair Richard Neal (D-MA) breaks with a proposal that has long been championed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Both Neal’s paid leave plan and Gillibrand’s FAMILY Act would give up to three months of paid leave to care for a new child, or nurse a sick family member. But while Gillibrand’s older plan would send paid leave benefits directly to workers through the Social Security Administration, Neal’s program, run through the Treasury Department, leaves in place employer-provided private insurance. Many employers who currently provide paid leave do so by taking out insurance to manage the benefit. They often outsource policy management to life insurers, who already dominate the disability insurance market. The Treasury, under Neal’s plan, would reimburse employers for paid leave benefits, ponying up 90 percent of the national average paid leave rate in refunds. For employers already providing paid leave, that coverage would now be subsidized. Employers would likely pass along the reimbursement to the private insurers, using money they had spent on paid leave for other priorities. Meanwhile, the vast majority of employers, who currently do not provide paid leave, would be flush with cash to shop for private plans, creating a roaring new life insurance market with tens of millions of workers eligible to become enrollees. INSURERS ARE IN HIGH SPIRITS about the House plan. The American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI), a trade group that lobbied Neal to include private business, praised the final product in a statement to the Prospect, thanking Neal for “the opportunity to partner and for continued dialogue.”

Attack on US farming provider NEW Cooperative may disrupt the food supply chain.

LAPDA mom and daughter who allegedly posed as plastic surgery pros have been charged with murder after an aspiring adult film actress’ illegal butt augmentation surgery turned deadly.Libby Adame, 51, and Alicia Galaz, 23, were arrested Aug. 5 in Riverside, California, in connection with the death of 26-year-old Karissa Rajpaul, who died at a local hospital hours after she underwent the botched procedure.

A curious news story popped up in the Sonoma County Press-Democrat this summer, just as a bipartisan group of US senators was trimming the sails on Joe Biden’s infrastructure plans and sending their own $1.2 trillion package to the Senate floor: The Wine Country paper of record reported that one of those senators, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, had traveled to the city of Sonoma in August 2020, where she earned $1,117.40 as a paid intern at a winery.

It’s painful to feel repelled by the sensibilities of the young.

We present evidence that in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

A metro train that crashed through a barrier near Rotterdam is left suspended thanks to a sculpture.

In May, the Albuquerque Police Officers’ Association posted a cheeky video on Facebook narrating the saga of what it called “Burrito vs. Crime.” Jaunty music plays as a hand doodles the story of “Officer Mike,” who had been running from call to call all day and ate a burrito in his car — only to be in “BIG trouble.” “Officer Mike CAN’T eat a burrito in his car!!” the video says. “Now he faces being put on 16 hours suspension for eating his burrito!” It’s an oft-repeated story. In an interview earlier this month union President Shaun Willoughby cited it as an example of a ridiculous and out-of control system brought about because of the court-ordered reform of the Police Department. He said officers are “in trouble constantly,” which has led to rising crime, high turnover and low morale. But an Internal Affairs investigation shows a markedly different reality — for one thing, the officer was not just eating a burrito. He was driving through city streets and on Interstate 40 — with a prisoner in the back seat — at times steering his cruiser with his knee while he ate three burritos, one after another.

It began with only a few inquiries from state representatives and staffers on Sept. 1.  “I was hoping you could explain to me the reasoning of having the gay rights banners hung up in the state museum at the Capitol?” Rep. Ann Kelley said in an email that Wednesday morning to Rich Germinder, director of policy and legislative affairs for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR).  “I’m emailing you about a situation in the Missouri State Museum at the State Capitol because the Museum is under DNR,” Uriah Stark, a legislative assistant to Rep. Mitch Boggs, began his inquiry later that day. “The exhibit takes a controversial topic, the LGBT movement, and places it unavoidably in the center of the Missouri State Museum in our Capitol Building. … While history includes all history, I find it offensive that this particular aspect of history is being promoted with a partisan bent, especially in light of many other historical matters that have much more significance to Missouri history and Missourians than this biased exhibit.”  Stark’s email concluded: “Please look into this and see what can be done about it.”  A few hours later, Germinder told Stark the LGBTQ history display was “being removed from the Capitol.” 

The FBI's attempt to confiscate tens of millions of dollars from Beverly Hills safe deposit boxes draws resistance and charges of government misconduct.

Boston teacher Jim Mayers shared the experience over Twitter asking people to contact their elected officials about the shortage.

My first thought on reading the Eastman memo revealed yesterday was that it could wait until I do the relevant work for a planned second edition of Ballot Battles before I reflect on it in earnest. But in light of some discussion that I’ve seen on Twitter, it might be helpful to share these preliminary thoughts: Setting aside the fundamental fact that the memo outlines a strategy to overturn enough valid electoral votes to keep Trump in power for a second term that he did not lawfully win (and therefore appropriately can be considered as a kind of coup attempt–with all the moral depravity that a purely despotic power grab of that nature entails), on its own terms the memo does not address the countermoves that would have caused its strategy to end in failure. (My analysis of this point derives from my Loyola Law Review article, Preparing for a Disputed Presidential Election: An Exercise in Election Risk Assessment and Management, as well as the follow-up Atlantic essay co-authored with Larry Diamond.)

MSCHF is the group responsible for giving us projects involving stuff like astrologically sound investment planning, AI-generated foot pics, boomer email collections, and both sacred and blasphemous sneakers filled with either holy water or blood-containing, Lil Nas X-affiliated “Satan Shoes.” This last concept—and the predictable furor that accompanied it—seems to have inspired yet another “evil” idea: A website where visitors can order a Chick-fil-A sandwich when the restaurant’s closed on Sunday.

He just wants some of that sweet $10,000 bounty, and he might have just triggered the legal review of SB 8 that proponents were trying to avoid.

A lawsuit brought by the victims of violence at Charlotteville’s hate rally has exposed how white supremacists paid for their activities.

By the end of his life, Mr. Macdonald seemed to have abandoned even his well-known animus against O.J. Simpson. “All he’s guilty of to me,” he said on a Comedy Central program in 2019, was of being “the greatest rusher in the history of the N.F.L. Maybe I was the greatest rusher — to judgment.”

West Virginia harm reduction leaders are coming together this Saturday to launch a statewide coalition called Mountain State Harm Reduction. Harm reduction is effective, and provides the first line of defense against impacts of the addiction epidemic and the spread of infectious disease. West Virginians witnessed the overdose deaths of 1,275 of their neighbors and friends in 2020 (up from 878 in 2019). This tragedy was coupled with an HIV outbreak the CDC has called “the most concerning in the U.S.” And politicians in WV have made matters worse by fighting harm reduction efforts amidst this crisis.