With union support, “nearly half of New York’s nursing homes would be effectively exempted from a two-year-old minimum spending law under terms of a rollback” passed last week, grumbles the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond.
Before the 2021 law mandating nursing homes to spend “at least 40 percent [of revenue] on patient-facing staff” could kick in, “the Legislature unanimously voted to overhaul the law as part of its end-of-session rush.”
And “the revised law would also roll back penalties.”
Notably, powerhouse health-workers union SEIU 1199 pushed both the 2021 law and this rollback bill — “reportedly with the understanding that” for-profit homes “will renegotiate their contracts with 1199 if the bill becomes law.”
Democrats are fools to see “the youth vote as a tsunami about to overwhelm the Republican Party,” explains The Liberal Patriot’s Ruy Teixeira. Millenial/Gen Z voters boosted Dems in 2022, but that’s partly just because more of the cohort was eligible to vote, and voters turn out more often as they age.
More: They also shift toward the center. And it’s a huge mistake to assume “generations post-Z and post-post-Z” will lean the same way: “One political carbon copy of the Millennials after another cannot go on forever and, yes, it will stop.”
Crucially, “Demographics are not destiny”: “Voter preferences do not generally remain the same.” Witness how “white working-class voters moved toward the Republicans and, more recently, nonwhite voters themselves have become more Republican.”
Bottom line: “The boring, tedious, difficult task of persuasion is still the key to building electoral majorities.”
The EPA’s “latest proposed rule on car emissions” would “effectively eliminate the choice of gasoline-powered cars for American drivers,” warns Diana Furchtgott-Roth at The Hill.
It’d require 60% of new vehicles sold in the U.S. “to be battery-powered electric by 2030,” vs. just 6% now.
This “will increase drivers’ costs,” as “gasoline-powered vehicles are more affordable than their battery-powered equivalents.” EVs also “have to be recharged every 200 to 300 miles, and recharging takes 45 minutes to an hour.”
The rule would also “make the economy more dependent on China,” as “China produces almost 80 percent of global batteries and controls a substantial share of the minerals used to produce batteries.”
Considering the drawbacks, Americans’ “choice of cars should be preserved.”
“Instead of blindly continuing and expanding it,” asks Dr. Scott Atlas at RealClearPolitics, “shouldn’t we consider the actual access to care and results under Medicaid?”
Yes, “socioeconomic differences correlate to health outcomes,” a key point in arguments “to expand single-payer.”
But the same “disparities for minorities” occur in “the countries with the longest history of single-payer healthcare systems.” E.g., in the UK, “black Caribbean and black African infant mortality rates are double those of whites.”
And Medicaid’s low payments for care limits “access to doctors, treatments, medications, and technology” and so produces “worse outcomes from disease than private insurance.”
So let’s “change Medicaid to a bridge to private insurance” by “adding the same choices of health care” for “the poor as for the rich.”
The number of US hate groups in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s yearly report is “always rising,” thanks to the outfit’s “characteristically clever counting,” rails Reason’s Robby Soave.
A falling number would “strike most people as good news,” but “cut against SPLC’s long-documented goal of raising money by inspiring concern about rising levels of hate.”
So SPLC now counts groups like Moms for Liberty, not distinguishing “between activities that could reasonably be described as hateful (i.e., violent and incendiary rhetoric toward the LGBT community) and normal, right-of-center political organizing.”
And it counts each of the Moms chapters separately, whether or not “members have espoused genuinely hateful views.” “They’re just all extremists, extremists everywhere.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board