Archive for December 2024

There’s plenty of data to back up the anger over private health plans expressed online since the shooting. Insurance costs are far outpacing inflation, leaving patients with soaring out-of-pocket costs. Health insurance companies are notorious for exploiting prior authorization schemes to avoid paying for care and have denied claims at alarming rates in recent years. However, corporate consolidation of industry “middlemen” that experts say are partially to blame for the prescription drug affordability crisis has received less scrutiny from the general public, despite efforts by lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to shine light on the notoriously opaque and confusing corporate bureaucracy that determines the cost of medicine.

> Conservative-leaning “parent rights” groups are succeeding in their children’s book ban campaigns as sales drop.
> Librarians say they are afraid to put books considered controversial on the shelves.
> Most of the banned children’s books deal with race or LGBTQ+ themes.

One open-access publisher, MDPI, based in Switzerland and founded in 1996, has published one million articles since its establishment, including 295,186 peer-reviewed articles in 2022 in its 403 journals. As an open-access publisher, MDPI charges a transaction fee of approximately US$2,000 per article. MDPI reports that it relies on 600,000 reviewers and has a rejection rate of 57%. These numbers are impossible to verify.

Analysis of student essays using generative AI detection systems to identify GenAI users showed that students who use GenAI score significantly lower in exams – on average 6.7 out of 100 points lower – with the negative effect particularly large for students with high learning potential, according to researchers in Germany and Canada.

Jackie Chen appeared at Hong Kong’s District Count… for her rioting retrial.

… the industry is rife with health and safety violations. Not only are American consumers – mostly women, eager for low-cost manicures and pedicures – increasingly at risk for bacterial and fungal infections, but the salon workers themselves – many of them undocumented, and over 80% women – face workplace exploitation in addition to threats of toxic contamination. The industry is in desperate need of regulatory reform, union organizing and stronger labor enforcement.

On Dec. 9, WW first reported that CareOregon, the state’s largest Medicaid provider, would stop reimbursing next year for services provided by associate therapists and social workers who practice independently of an in-network clinic. The announcement sent shock waves among mental health professionals, some of whom said the policy change would worsen Oregon’s mental health care access crisis.