Mike Pence And His Book Deal Shenanigans

January 11th, 2023 by Tom Lynch

There are so many compelling and thought provoking things happening every day that it’s ridiculously easy to miss a few you’d rather have known about. Today, I see my job as helping you avoid that unfortunate circumstance. Read on and be enlightened.

Question: How many books must an author sell in order to make the New York Times Bestseller List?

Answer: A minimum of 5000 book sales in a single week across diverse retailers and from multiple geographic locations.

There are ways to manipulate sales, chief among them bulk sales and authors buying their own books. Wikipedia has a nice synopsis of sales manipulation:

Manipulation by authors and publishers. In 1956, author Jean Shepherd created the fake novel I, Libertine to illustrate how easy it was to manipulate the best-seller lists based on demand, as well as sales. Fans of Shepherd’s radio show planted references to the book and author so widely that demand for the book led to claims of it being on the Times list. Author Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls) attempted to “butter-up” Times-reporting booksellers and personally bought large quantities of her own book. Author Wayne Dyer (Your Erroneous Zones) purchased thousands of copies of his own book. Al Neuharth (Confessions of an S. O. B.), former head of Gannett Company, had his Gannett Foundation buy two thousand copies of his own autobiography. In 1995, authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema spent $200,000 to buy ten thousand copies of The Discipline of Market Leaders from dozens of bookstores. Although they denied any wrongdoing, the book spent 15 weeks on the list. As a result of this scandal the Times began placing a dagger symbol next to any title for which bookstores reported bulk orders. However, daggers do not always appear; for example Tony Hsieh‘s Delivering Happiness was known to have been manipulated with bulk orders but didn’t have a dagger.

Enter stage right former Vice President Mike Pence. In 2021, CNN reported the ex-VP had signed a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster worth $3 million to $4 million, a pay day few, if any, Trump alums will get, especially if they did not resign immediately after the 6 January insurrection. Also not getting book deals are members of Congress who voted not to certify the 2020 presidential elections. All these people are damaged goods in the publishing world. Nothing personal; publishing is a business.

To fulfill the first half of his deal, Pence recently released So Help Me God. Now, it is assumed by everyone masochistic enough to follow the political scene that Pence aspires to run for President in 2024 (he also aspires to win) and that his book lays a marker down, a sort of sword in the sand. But how to get people to read it (Another question: How to get them to believe it?)? Although Pence is known to be deeply religious (in his own way) his book isn’t exactly as captivating as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which spent 136 weeks on the Times Bestseller List.

The way out of this dilemma is to join the manipulators. And that’s what Mr. Pence did. As reported by Zach Everson, writing for Forbes, on 9 November 2022, Pence’s PAC, the Great America Committee, paid Books on Call NYC $91,000 for what the PAC described as “collateral materials,” according to a report the PAC filed in December with the Federal Election Commission. A spokesperson for Pence confirmed the money went to buy the book at $21.78 per copy, 4,178 of them to be precise, leaving friends and family only having to buy another 822 to make the Bestseller list. Sort of reminds me of Donald Trump in the early 1990s masquerading as fictional publicist John Miller (sometimes John Barron) and calling reporters to let them know what a brilliant and wonderful person his employer Donald Trump was.

Because Pence was not yet an official candidate for the 2024 election, it was legal for his PAC to do this.

So Help Me God debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times’ best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction and remained there for six weeks. The Times says when retailers report bulk orders of a book a dagger marking is supposed to appear beside the book’s name on the List. Inexplicably, no dagger ever appeared next to So Help Me God.

If you’re interested in being able to talk about So Help Me God without having to actually read it, you can find a number of reviews all in one place. The general verdict from all of them: Although the book is “well-written and well-paced,” (so says the Wall Street Journal), once again Pence is all things to all people. Whenever he writes something in So Help Me God, you can be sure it will be followed by, “On the other hand…”

I know it’s not charitable, but Mr. Pence has always reminded me of a cross between the David Copperfield’s unctuous Uriah Heep and a mortician describing his casket collection to the relatives of the dearly departed.

“Autobiography,” George Orwell once wrote, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful…since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” The defeats Pence documents in So Help Me God are the ones that make him look good.

One thing Pence doesn’t talk about in the book is his brother Greg, a member of the House of Representatives from Indiana’s 6th congressional district since 2019. That’s the seat brother Mike held for 12 years. On the day of the insurrection, after the madding crowd had erected a gallows outside the Capitol Building and were now marching through the halls looking for brother Mike and screaming, “Hang Mike Pence,” Greg was with his brother and family. The Secret Service evacuated him with the Vice President.

Hours after emerging from a secure location, Mike Pence gaveled the joint session of Congress back in session and presided over the certification of the election, despite Trump’s demands. His finest hour. The one the history books will mention.

Greg Pence, meanwhile, joined 146 other Republican election-denying members of Congress who sided with Trump and cast a vote rejecting the outcome in Pennsylvania, the state that clinched the election for Biden.

You won’t find any of that in So Help Me God.

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Politics, Publishing

Once More Unto The Mayhem

January 9th, 2023 by Tom Lynch

I don’t know how you welcomed in the month of December, 2022, the month ending a year most were happy to put behind them, but I spent the early morning hours of the 1st of December undergoing a total anatomical replacement of my right shoulder. Since then, I’ve been living 24/7 in the Donjoy super-duper Ultra-Pro Sling (except for showering, thank you very much). Tennis did this to me. Specifically, hitting nearly one million various forms of overheads. Serves, put-aways, you name it. Then there’s the Rafael Nadal buggy-whip topspin forehand. That certainly didn’t help. What we sow, we reap.

But now, nearly six weeks later, although I’m still not allowed to lift even a coffee cup, I do seem able to traverse a computer keyboard (as long as it’s in my lap). So, time to return to the fray.

And what a fray it’s been, culminating in House Republicans sending white smoke up the chimney early Saturday morning after 15 Freedom Caucus-driven votes over four tumultuous days to elect a Speaker for the 118th Congress. Let’s begin there.

Habemus Ducem! Sed infirmus est.
We have a Leader, but he’s wounded.

Throughout history, Populist political movements have appeared with regularity, most often in times of economic hardship when, at the instigation of fire and brimstone rabble rousers, people perceive their government working against them rather than for them.  America has been no exception. Consider the proto-populist Greenback and Granger movements in the 1860s and ’70s, William Jennings Bryan’s Populist Party in the 1890s and Louisiana politician Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth program during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then there were the Anarchist and Socialist movements of the late 19th and early 20th century. Historically, there’s nothing new about the Freedom Caucus; it’s just new to us.

That said, how did we get to this political moment, the ascendency of the Republican Party’s Freedom Caucus, a 54-member disruptive group within the House of Representatives? Did it begin in the early 1970s with the corruption of the Nixon Administration’s Watergate scandal? Or maybe it began in 1992 with Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America? Or perhaps they spawned on 19 February 2009, when Rick Santelli, a commentator on the business-news network CNBC, referenced the Boston Tea Party (1773) in his response to President Barack Obama’s mortgage relief plan during the Great Recession?

More likely, the Freedom Caucus gradually grew out of all those things and found its apotheosis in the bile falling from the mouth of Donald Trump, who continues to cling, as skin clings to a grape, to his hatred for anything or anyone not sufficiently worshipful.

However it began, they’re here now, and 20 of them held government hostage last week while they extorted concession after concession from now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who ultimately prevailed when he had nothing more to give. After it was all over, one of their ringleaders, Florida’s Matt Gaetz, told the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, “I ran out of things I could even imagine to ask for.”

Speaker McCarthy, after he had finished selling what remained of his soul, took the gavel from Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffreys, and proudly announced to the world he had proven he would “never give up.” Maybe not give up, but sure as shootin’ give in. He’s now the quintessential hollow man.

And what about these House Disruptors? What they seem to want, crave even, is power, but to what end? They’re long on cutting spending, but short on good governance.  It looks as if they’ve come to Washington, a place they deride, for the sole purpose of feeding red meat to their base back in Wherever, USA. The Republican Party created the Freedom Caucus, an animal with four back feet, each pointed in a different direction. What we sow, we reap.

Look closely at the Freedom Caucus. Try to find one coherent, let alone intelligent, proposal to do anything vaguely related to public service. You’ll be looking a long time. Every one of these characters is a one-trick pony, and the pony limps. They deftly avoid offering up their own proposals, as a helmsman avoids rocks. Why? Because if they did, they’d have to defend them.

They’re Kevin McCarthy’s problem now. Will he still wield the gavel six months from now? Or will the US House more closely resemble Animal House, food fights and all? Tonight’s vote on the Rules Package McCarthy and this Mephistopheles agreed to will provide the first opportunity to see whether adults have entered the room.

Government will certainly be difficult for a while, but, as has happened so many times in our nation’s journey, these people and their corrosive vitriol will someday fade into history’s dust when better people with good ideas emerge, as surely they will.

However, it’s hard to imagine that happening in this 118th Congress.

What we sow, we reap.

 

Posted in Misc.

A Few Items To Ponder, Two Of Them Important

November 30th, 2022 by Tom Lynch

Type 1 Diabetics get good news

As I have written before, Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a horrific disease. It is a leading cause of stroke, heart disease, blindness, kidney disease and non-traumatic amputations. It also costs a lot to manage. The media has been full of stories of unfortunate people who have had to choose between taking insulin or food. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August, caps the cost of a vial of insulin at $35 for Medicare beneficiaries, but does nothing for diabetics not on Medicare. About 70% of the nation’s 1.9 million Type 1 diabetics are on Medicare.

Research has proven Type 1 diabetics contract the disease in three stages over time. According to a 2015 study on the presymptomatic stages of Type 1 diabetes:

Insights from prospective, longitudinal studies of individuals at risk for developing type 1 diabetes have demonstrated that the disease is a continuum that progresses sequentially at variable but predictable rates through distinct identifiable stages prior to the onset of symptoms. Stage 1 is defined as the presence of β-cell autoimmunity as evidenced by the presence of two or more islet autoantibodies with normoglycemia and is presymptomatic, stage 2 as the presence of β-cell autoimmunity with dysglycemia and is presymptomatic, and stage 3 as onset of symptomatic disease.

Type 1 diabetics go through two stages of disease development before full-blown diabetes appears in Stage 3. Imagine a platform diver. Stage 1 is climbing to the platform and standing at the edge. Stage 2 is lifting off and moving through the air. Stage 3 is hitting the water and getting very wet. Diabetics don’t know they have the disease until they hit the water. But what if they did, and what if the time in the air between the platform to the water could be extended, say by 25 months?

On 17 November, the FDA approved a biologic therapy that delays the onset of Stage 3 by about that much.

The monoclonal antibody teplizumab, which will be marketed under the brand name Tzield, from ProventionBio and Sanofi is given daily through intravenous infusion over two weeks. And it works. Patients who take it extend Stage 2 by a little more than two years.

But there’s a catch, two, in fact. First, PreventionBio announced last week it is pricing Tzield at $193,900, which is considerably higher than insurers anticipated. Second, how does a person know they’re in Stage 2 and, therefore, should be taking the drug? The answer is screening for autoantibodes that are markers for diabetes. This will also incur a cost. More about that below.

The question to be answered is will insurers cover the considerable cost for screening and drug infusion?

In 2014, the FDA approved Harvoni as treatment for Hepatitis C, which is the leading cause of liver failure. Hep C is a life-threatening disease. Harvoni cured it. Completely. Its maker, Gilead, priced the pill at $95,000 for a twelve-week course of treatment. At the time, I was a Director at a Boston HMO. We wrestled with the cost issue. In the end, because Harvoni cured what was a horrific and terrifically costly disease, we gladly decided to provide it for our members.

Tzieild is different. It does not cure diabetes. Rather, it delays its onset. The American Diabetes Association and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) are ecstatic about the arrival of Tzield. They point out this is the first time a successful treatment for diabetes has appeared on the scene, although it’s not really a treatment. However, they’re concerned about the screening issue.

Aaron Kowalski, CEO of JDRF, says the main challenge in prescribing Tzield will be finding people who need it. The drug is approved for people who don’t have any symptoms of the disease and may not know they’re on the road to getting it.

“Screening becomes a really big issue, because what we know is, about 85% of type 1 diagnoses today are in families that don’t have a known family history,” Kowalski said. “Our goal is to do general population screening” with blood tests to look for markers of the disease.

It will be interesting to learn how insurers and health plans react to Tzield. According to the JDRF, 64,000 people a year are diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. If every one of them received the drug the total cost would be about $12.5 billion. But if you were one of the 64,000, my guess is you’d happily stand in line for it. So would I.

Donald Trump and the Mar-A-Lago fiasco

By now, every sentient person in America knows ex-president Donald Trump dined last week with Nick Fuentes, the poster child for anti-Semitic white nationalism, and Kanye West, who now calls himself Ye and has also spouted anti-Semitic whinge. Afterwards, when social media lit up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, Trump claimed he didn’t know Fuentes was going to be there; West just brought him along.

Putting aside the fact that Trump’s Secret Service detail would never in a month of Sundays allow just anyone to drop in to break bread with the big cheese without getting clearance from the big cheese himself, I’m more concerned with the response of the Republican Party’s leadership to this. Republicans who are likely to run for President, notably Mike Pence and Chris Christie, criticized their former leader, although it took them two or three days to do it. It took more than a week for anyone in Republican leadership to put their wet finger in the air and decide to say he shouldn’t have done it.

The stench wafting from the halls of Congress is remarkable, indeed.

A personal note

Starting tomorrow I shall be away from this, and any other, keyboard for a little bit.

Since I was eight years old, I have been an avid, competitive, pretty good, tennis player. I’ve calculated that in the intervening years I have hit somewhere around just under a million overhead smashes. That’s a lot of serves and put-aways. And they have taken their toll. So, at 7:00 AM tomorrow morning, a very good doctor (I hope) will be concentrating deeply (I hope) on the job of giving me a new shoulder. I’m told it will be a little painful for a while, but on the other side lies bliss, and more overheads.

I look forward to being back at the keyboard.

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Posted in Drugs, health care, Leadership, Medical Issues, Research

Today, We Thank Our Veterans ― Ninety Years Ago, We Did Something Else

November 11th, 2022 by Tom Lynch

Well, that was interesting. The midterm election, not yet over, showed once again experts and their predictions are worth about as much as a sneaker full of puppy poo. All the supposedly smart pundits who predicted the end of democracy as we know it are now doing their best to explain what happened, and why. They forgot, or ignored the fact, that, on the whole, Americans are decent, loyal citizens. Right now, regardless of how the election turns out, we can feel proud of most our neighbors around the nation thoughtfully exercised their right and duty to vote, regardless of how they voted and for whom.

It would be nice to think the Congress we are now still electing will be as thoughtful, decent and loyal to the oath it will collectively take in January. However, I can’t help fearing that in Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill,” internecine, malodorous warfare will remain on full display. Looking for all the world like a gussied-up version of the Hatfields and McCoys, Republicans and Democrats will once again assemble in a highly organized circular firing squad, seeming far more intent on annihilating each other than on devoting themselves to the moral imperative of governing.

But enough of that. This is Veterans Day, a day to give thanks to all the men and women who gave themselves to the defense of our country.

We’ve come a long way in that regard. It wasn’t always so. One hot summer, fourteen years after Johnny came marching home, he was persecuted, dehumanized and then cast into the darkness of the Great Depression. Here’s what happened.

1932 – Washington, D.C.

At the close of World War I, Congress decided to thank the war’s veterans for their service with some cash — $500, which, in today’s dollars, would be about $7,500. Quite a bonus. But there was a catch: The “bonus” authorized by the Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 would not be paid until 1945. The veterans did not complain at the time. It was The Roaring Twenties. Everyone was flush.

But then along came the Great Depression. The economy descended from full employment in 1929, where the unemployment rate was 3.2 percent, into massive unemployment in 1933 when the unemployment rate reached 25 percent. From sitting on top of the world, plutocrats were suddenly seen jumping out of windows on Wall Street. Breadlines became the meal du jour. The word, “Hobo,” which had been around, but hardly used, since 1888, became a symbol for the forgotten man.

In the summer of 1932, 25,000 penniless, desperate veterans and their wives and children descended on Washington, D.C. They camped in District parks, dumps, abandoned warehouses and empty stores.  These aging warriors had come to the nation’s capital to ask Congress, admittedly 13 years early, for their $500. Newspapers christened them “the bonus Army,” or “the bonus marchers.” They called themselves the “Bonus Expeditionary Force,” the BEF.

The men drilled, sang war songs, and, once, led by a Medal of Honor winner and watched by a hundred thousand silent Washingtonians, marched up Pennsylvania Avenue bearing flags of faded cotton.

The BEF had pleaded in vain with Congress for the money. They were ignored and left to wither. As a last resort they appealed to President Hoover to meet with them. He sent word he was too busy. Then, confronted with 25,000 squatters he would later label “communists,” while asserting less than 10% of them were veterans*, he isolated himself from the city, canceled plans to visit the Senate, had police patrol the White House grounds day and night, chained the gates of the Executive Mansion, erected barricades around the White House and closed traffic for a distance of one block on all sides of the Mansion. A one-armed veteran, attempting to picket, was beaten and jailed.

Conditions for the veterans were pathetic. The summer heat was severe. Lacking shade or screens, the BEF was beaten down by the climate’s fury. Since the founding of the city, Washington was viewed as a place to be avoided in the summertime. In the words of an official guidebook, Washington was “a peculiarly interesting place for the study of insects.” The veteran men and their families had arrived at the height of Cherry Blossom season, but by July they were debilitated, ghostly, dehydrated and hot. Very hot. The columnist Drew Pearson called them “ragged, weary and apathetic with no hope on their faces.” Downtown businessmen complained through the Chamber of Commerce that “the sight of so many down-at-the-heel men has a depressing effect on business.”

And that was the extent of their crime, their threat to the country. They weren’t good for business.

General Douglas MacArthur, the Army’s only four star general who, even then, referred to himself in the third person, had met with some of the men and assured them if he had to evict them he would allow them to leave “with dignity.” But when the end came for the BEF at 10:00 A.M. on 28 July 1932 there was no dignity to be found. Hoover had had enough, and he ordered “Mac” to get rid of them. Trouble was, he didn’t tell the General “how” to get rid of them. MacArthur, who never did anything small in his life, was unleashed.

First, Police Commissioner Glassford, who had been sympathetic to the men, was sent to tell them they had to leave, orders of the President. They refused, which was when MacArthur sent the Army in, led by then Major George Patton and his 3rd Mounted Cavalry — with him prancing at the front atop his privately-owned horse (he had a stable-full; he was rich) — followed by infantry and a World War I vintage Tank Brigade. Bullets began to fly. BEF men were killed. Two babies were gassed to death. And Joseph Angelino suffered a deep wound from Patton’s sabre-wielding cavalry, the same Joseph Angelino, who, on 26 September 1918, had won the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest medal, for saving the life of a young officer named George Patton.

By midnight that day, the Army had driven the BEF veterans, their wives and children across the Potomac and out of the city. But that wasn’t good enough for MacArthur and Hoover. The BEF was chased and harassed west and south, out past Ohio and all the way down to Georgia. Then, the veterans just folded into the vast transient population that roamed the land in 1932.

In 1936, overriding a veto by President Roosevelt, Congress voted to immediately pay World War I veterans their full $500 bonus specified in the Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924.

____________________________________________

*The Veterans Administration, which had the actual service records, would subsequently refute Hoover’s claim with an exhaustive study concluding that 94% of the  bonus marchers were veterans of World War I.

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Posted in History

A Midterm Reminder That Bears Repeating

November 7th, 2022 by Tom Lynch

The Midterms are tomorrow, and, if you’re like me, you can’t wait for the campaigning to be over. The constant emails, texts and television ads will stop―for about a week, after which we’ll begin getting bludgeoned by the 2024 campaign. God help us all.

According to Bloomberg, the two political parties and their candidates will have spent nearly $17 billion to get elected, by far the most for any Midterm election in history. That’s more than the budgets of 14 US states.

Predictions are Republicans will win in the House, and perhaps the Senate, too. If they do, what will happen then?

In early April of this year I wrote about that when I analyzed Florida Senator Rick Scott’s Plan to Rescue America. Scott was the only Republican lawmaker willing to put a stake in the ground and tell America what the GOP would do when, at least in his mind, it inevitably came to power. At that time I thought his plan so outlandish and, to use a technical term, flat out wacky, it would die a quick death. I was wrong. By my count, the majority of Republican candidates, especially for the House, have been trumpeting, Trump-like, many of Scott’s prescriptions for “rescuing” America. And that’s not all. One of the things not in Scott’s manifesto is the myriad investigations the Republican-controlled House will begin immediately upon taking power to show the rest of America all the evil things done by President Biden and his fellow Democrats in the last two years. Impeachment will likely follow. This is not hyperbole, but it sure is scary.

Therefore, today I’m republishing the April analysis to give us all an idea of what might be in store for us over the next couple of years, and maybe beyond. Fasten your seatbelts.

Rick Scott Is Going To Rescue America!

Rick Scott is the junior U.S. Senator from Florida. Elected in 2018, Scott has now served in Congress for 39 months. In November, 2020, his Senate GOP colleagues elected him Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). His job is to get Republicans elected and reelected to the Senate.

Prior to the Senate, Scott was a two-term governor of Florida, succeeded by Republican Ron DeSantis. Before that, he was a businessman. We’ll get back to that later.

You would think the Chairman of the NRSC would be lock-step with Republican leadership in the strategy to take the Senate from the tenuous hold of the Democrats in the upcoming mid-terms. But this does not appear to be the case. Senator Scott is marching to his own drummer.

On Thursday, after no consultation with or cooperation from Senate GOP elites, Scott officially unveiled and launched the Rick Scott, 31 page, 11 Point Plan to Rescue America. The Rescue Plan has 117 agenda items.

This is not a surprise to GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. Scott’s Plan has been discussed for more than a month, and as far back as 1 March McConnell publicly rebuked Scott for it. McConnell is fixated on making the mid-terms a referendum on President Biden, not on laying out a Republican plan he and the GOP establishment would have to spend the entire mid-term campaign defending. He wants Biden playing defense. Scott, on the other hand, wants America to know what Republicans will do if given control of the Senate. Right at the beginning of his Rescue Plan he says, “Americans deserve to know what we will do if given the chance to govern.” If Scott gets his way, now they will. And you have to hand it to him; he certainly doesn’t tap dance around the many issues facing the country.

Before diving into his 11 point, 117 agenda item plan, Scott lays out what the future will look like if nothing changes:

The militant left now controls the entire federal government…Among the things they plan to change or destroy are: American history, patriotism, border security, the nuclear family, gender, traditional morality, capitalism, fiscal responsibility, opportunity, rugged individualism, Judeo-Christian values, dissent, free speech, color blindness, law enforcement, religious liberty, parental involvement in public schools, and private ownership of firearms.

Holy Militant Left, Batman! We need a plan to stop all that!

A few of Senator Scott’s 117 agenda items, guaranteed to be saliva-producing red meat for the trumpiest of trumpsters caught my eye.  For instance,

We will secure our border, finish building the wall, and name it after President Donald Trump.

Kids in public schools will say the Pledge of Allegiance, stand for the National Anthem, and honor the American Flag. We must foster national unity.

Teacher tenure at public schools must be eliminated

We will not allow political or social indoctrination in our schools. Teachers who refuse to comply will need to find new jobs.

We will close the federal Department of Education. Education is a state function.

Government will not ask American citizens to disclose their race, ethnicity, or skin color on any government form.

Our military will engage in ZERO diversity training, teachings on critical race theory, or any woke ideological indoctrination that divides our troops.

We will force prosecutors to prosecute. At present, many prosecutors in big cities are allowing criminals to go free with no justice, and they are doing it on purpose.

Immigrants will not be eligible to collect unemployment benefits or welfare for the first 7 years after arriving in the US.

No government assistance unless you are disabled or aggressively seeking work.

If Congress does not pass a budget, the members of Congress do not get paid. Full stop.

Other than disaster relief, the federal government must stop spending money on non-essential state and local projects until the budget is balanced.

All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.

Enact term limits for the Washington ruling class – 12-year limits for Congress and government bureaucrats.

All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.

We will immediately cut the IRS funding and workforce by 50%.

Humans are born male and female, there are two genders, and to deny that is to deny science. No government forms will include questions about “gender identity” or “sexual preference.”

We will protect women’s sports by banning biological males from competing.

No tax dollars will be used to pay for any diversity training or other woke indoctrination that is hostile to faith.

We will not pay any dues to the United Nations or any international organization that undermines the national interests of the USA.

The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.

There are a few difficulties with a number of these policy tectonic changes. Ending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in five years being among the biggest. Also, Scott’s colleagues in Congress might have something to say about going without pay and getting sent home after 12 years. Increasing taxes on 50% of Americans may prove challenging for Republicans on the campaign trail. Pulling billions of dollars from the states until we have a balanced budget might irritate a few Republican governors. And reducing the IRS’s funding and currently understaffed workforce by 50% would have brought tears to the eyes of mobster Al Capone.*

Although Senator Scott’s plan is dead on arrival, the problem is it arrived in the first place. It’s not about getting Republican senators elected; it’s about Rick Scott.

And what about Rick Scott? As I mentioned above, before getting into government, Scott was a “businessman.” He co-founded Columbia Hospital Corporation in 1987. Columbia later merged with another corporation to form Columbia/HCA, which eventually became the nation’s largest private for-profit health care company with Scott as Chief Executive. According to The New York Times, “[in] less than a decade, Mr. Scott had built a company he founded with two small hospitals in El Paso into the world’s largest health care company – a $20 billion giant with about 350 hospitals, 550 home health care offices and scores of other medical businesses in 38 states.”

Sounds good, right? Quite the businessman.

But there were problems. In March of 1997, the FBI, the IRS, and the Department of Health and Human Services arrived with search warrants. Four months later, Scott was forced to resign by his Board. He didn’t leave willingly, but when he did, he left with a settlement of $9.88 million and 10 million shares of stock worth $350 million. Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600+ million fine in what was at the time the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history.

The company admitted to systematically overcharging the government by claiming marketing costs as reimbursable, by striking illegal deals with home care agencies, and by filing false data about use of hospital space. It also admitted to fraudulently billing Medicare and other health programs by inflating the seriousness of diagnoses and to giving doctors partnerships in company hospitals as a kickback for the doctors referring patients to HCA. It filed false cost reports, fraudulently billing Medicare for home health care workers, and paid kickbacks in the sale of home health agencies and to doctors to refer patients. In addition, it gave doctors “loans” never intending to be repaid, free rent, free office furniture, and free drugs from hospital pharmacies.

And that’s not all. In 2002, HCA agreed to pay the federal government an additional $631 million, plus interest, and $17.5 million to state Medicaid agencies, in addition to $250 million paid up to that point to resolve outstanding Medicare expense claims. The entire fiasco cost the company $1.7 billion. Nobody went to jail.

All on Senator Scott’s watch.

There’s one last twist. In a civil suit deposition connected to the case (there were a lot of civil lawsuits), Senator Scott invoked his 5th Amendment rights 75 times.

Somehow, all of that has been forgotten, and Scott has managed to be a governor, a Senator, and, I’m guessing, a man, a businessman, who has his eyes on the biggest prize of all, the one up for grabs in 2024.

Rescue Plan, indeed.

*Capone was a nationally famous, Chicago-based killer and crime boss who went to prison in 1931 for tax evasion.

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Posted in Politics, Public policy

The Earth Is Moving Under Medicare And The Price Of Drugs ― But Slowly.

November 4th, 2022 by Tom Lynch

Prologue

This is a story, 16 years in the making, of government-enabled corporate greed. It’s complicated and somewhat dense. It has to be to go on that long. It’s a story of how one industry, the Pharmaceutical industry, has done Olympian good while achieving Titanic profit, which has been surgically excised, Midas-like, from the hides of American taxpayers who never felt the touch. The story ends with a different way, a better way, but a way we common folk won’t likely see.

The story

Medicare Part D, a prescription drug benefit plan for Medicare beneficiaries, became law on 1 January 2006 under the George W. Bush administration and a Republican controlled Congress. The legislation was enacted with no funding provisions whatsoever. Since then, Washington politicians have been arguing over whether this government program should be allowed to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies the prices it pays for drugs its members need. Medicare beneficiaries, all 64 million of them, and the public at large, have overwhelmingly supported such a move. Over the years, pharmaceutical companies have spent a king’s ransom donating to politicians to secure―should we say “buy?”―their votes in opposition.

What’s been the result?

  • A study published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded more than a quarter (27.2%) of Medicare spending is now for prescription drugs;
  • That would be $180 billion, as reported by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission for 2020;
  • According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the total we in the US spent on prescription drugs in 2017 was $333 billion; and,
  • The Rand Corporation studied and compared US prices to 32 other OECD countries (The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – the most developed nations) and reported our prices are “nearly twice those of other countries after adjusting U.S. prices downward to account for rebates and other discounts paid by drug companies.”

And now, the gravy train may be slowing.

In August 2022, Congress finally passed―without a single Republican vote―and President Biden signed, the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, allows Medicare to move forward with drug price negotiations―sort of. Right about now, you may be asking what prevented Medicare from doing that all along since 2006 as a normal part of its drug-purchasing process?

As the Kaiser Family Foundation explains:

Under the Medicare Part D program, which covers retail prescription drugs, Medicare contracts with private plan sponsors to provide a prescription drug benefit. The law that established the Part D benefit included a provision known as the “noninterference” clause, which stipulates that the HHS Secretary “may not interfere with the negotiations between drug manufacturers and pharmacies and PDP [prescription drug plan] sponsors, and may not require a particular formulary or institute a price structure for the reimbursement of covered part D drugs.”

In other words, although Medicare is buying drugs for its members, all 64 million of them, it has not been allowed to even hint that a lower price might be more fair and appropriate for the government to pay. That is the very definition of a “sweet deal” for drug manufacturers.

Giving the negotiation contrarians the benefit of a doubt they more than likely don’t deserve, their argument in opposition hangs on the slim thread that negotiations will lower the income of drug manufacturers, and that will, in turn, reduce the amount of money the companies invest in research and development to discover new life-saving drugs. My own opinion is that this argument is chock full of what makes the grass grow green and tall. And, by the way, the Congressional Budget Office agrees with me, although their analysists said it with a bit more eloquence.

And what does the aforementioned Inflation Reduction Act do, anyway?

It does a number of things, one of which is to lay down new rules for price negotiations. These are its major health care provisions, leaving out, for the moment, the negotiation issue. It will:

  • Require drug companies to pay rebates to Medicare if prices rise faster than inflation for drugs used by Medicare beneficiaries, beginning in 2023;
  • Cap out-of-pocket spending for Medicare Part D enrollees and make other Part D benefit design changes, beginning in 2024;
  • Limit monthly cost sharing for insulin to $35 for people with Medicare, beginning in 2023. This might be the most far reaching and important item in the entire legislation.
  • Eliminate cost sharing for adult vaccines covered under Medicare Part D and improve access to adult vaccines in Medicaid and CHIP, beginning in 2023;
  • Expand eligibility for full benefits under the Medicare Part D Low-Income Subsidy Program, beginning in 2024; and,
  • Further delay implementation of the Trump Administration’s drug rebate rule, beginning in 2027.

Notice the years in which these provisions take effect. In most cases, it’s 2023.

The negotiation provision of the Inflation Reduction Act:

  • Requires the federal government to negotiate prices for some drugs covered under Medicare Part D and Part B* with the highest total spending, beginning in 2026. Note the year.

This provision targets the most expensive drugs. Here’s how.

Under the new Drug Price Negotiation Program, Medicare will negotiate the price of 10 Part D drugs for 2026, another 15 for 2027, another 15 for 2028, and another 20 for 2029 and later years. The drugs to be chosen for negotiation will be selected from among the 50 drugs with the highest total Medicare spending. The number of drugs with negotiable prices  will accumulate over time.

So, beginning four years from now, the law goes after the most expensive Medicare drugs.

There are debatable reasons for delaying implementation until 2026, all dealing with operational processes. The period of negotiation between the Secretary of Health and Human Services and manufacturers of the selected drugs will occur between 1 October 2023 and 1 August 2024, and the negotiated “maximum fair prices” will be published no later than 1 September 2024 and will go into effect 1 January 2026.

This seems to me a rather long and drawn out negotiation process, but it is, after all, a political compromise.

The better way

And now for the better way.

There is another government health care organization that has never had a prohibition with respect to negotiating drug prices. It is the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA.

In January, 2021, the Government Accountability Office released a study that concluded:

“the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) paid, on average, 54 percent less per unit for a sample of 399 brand-name and generic prescription drugs in 2017 as did Medicare Part D, even after accounting for applicable rebates and price concessions in the Part D program.”

This means what the VA pays is in line with those other 32 OECD countries.

Moreover, the GAO found that 233 of the 399 drugs in the sample were at least 50% cheaper in the VA than in Medicare, and 106 drugs were at least 75% cheaper. Only 43 drugs were cheaper in Medicare than in the VA.

What are the operational differences between the two organizations?

For one thing, the programs pay for drugs differently. Medicare reimburses the Part D plan sponsors to pay pharmacies through the middlemen―Pharmacy benefit Managers, but the VA buys drugs directly from manufacturers. It cuts out the middlemen. The VA can get lower prices because it can:

  • Negotiate as a single health system with a unified list of covered drugs; and,
  • Use discounts defined by law that Medicare doesn’t have.

As in everything political, it all comes down to economics. The VA, with only nine million health care beneficiaries, as opposed to Medicare’s 64 million, could fly under the political radar and avoid congressional restraint. It was able to keep the congressional camel’s nose and, more to the point, its sticky fingers out of its tent.

Medicare is so big, it could never do that.

And here we are.

______________________

*Medicare will also negotiate in a similar manner the prices of Part B drugs. These are drugs administered in physicians’ offices or hospital outpatient departments.

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Posted in Drugs, Law, Politics, Public policy

The Role Of Religion In Our Divided America

November 2nd, 2022 by Tom Lynch

Everyone who follows the political winds in the US is laser-focused on the upcoming midterms, which are six days from now. Most prognosticators expect Republicans to end up controlling the House of Representatives, and maybe the Senate, too. While that is certainly possible, perhaps even likely, if we look out farther into the future, the picture is decidedly less rosy for the Grand Old Party.

Stay with me as I try to explain why.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey, which provides insight into the beliefs of most of the nation’s faith groups, nearly three in four Americans (74%) say things in this country are going in the wrong direction, and 49% say things were better in the 1950s. That’s right, the 1950s when a third of the country, 51 million people, still had to use outhouses, a cancer diagnosis was a death sentence, rotary dial phones were how we communicated, and Jim Crow was alive and well and on the march. Sixty-six percent of Republicans believe our culture and American way of life have deteriorated since then. Thirty percent of Democrats feel the same way. PRRI sums up its September 2022 Values Survey this way:

Approximately three-quarters of Americans agree that the country is heading in the wrong direction, but there is considerable division over whether the country needs to move backward — toward an idealized, homogeneous past — or forward, toward a more diverse future. Though most Americans favor moving forward, a sizable minority yearn for a country reminiscent of the 1950s, embrace the idea that God created America to be a new promised land for European Christians, view newcomers as a threat to American culture, and believe that society has become too soft and feminine. This minority is composed primarily of self-identified Republicans, white evangelical Protestants, and white Americans without a college degree. The majority of Americans, however, especially younger Americans, the religiously unaffiliated, and Democrats, are more likely to embrace a competing vision for the future of America that is more inclusive.

When examined in concert with PRRI’s 2020 Census of American Religion, a pattern emerges that does not bode well for Republicans.

In 1996, 65% of Americans identified as white and Christian; that number is now 43%, down nearly a third. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans identify that way. Twenty-nine percent of Republicans are white evangelicals. The problem for Republicans is white evangelicals now make up just 14% of the total population. That is down significantly from 23% in 2006. The following chart depicts religious affiliation by age. It also shows vividly that white evangelicals, the rock solid foundation of the Republican party’s base, and to a lesser degree mainline protestants, are aging out of the population. They are being replaced by people unaffiliated with any religion.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, the unaffiliated are predominantly Democrats.

The PRRI data also shows younger generations, especially 18 to 29 year-olds, more often identify as Democrats than Republicans, which should be good news for the Democrats. The problem lies in getting them to vote. Seventy percent of Republicans say they are very or somewhat excited about voting next week. For the Democrats that number is only 64%.

One more startling point from the PRRI Values Survey. Among a host of other issues, the PRRI researchers asked about QAnon, and this is how they framed the subject:

To measure the scope of the QAnon movement, PRRI tracks agreement with three statements that form the core tenets of the conspiracy theory:

  1. The government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.

  2. There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.

  3. Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.

PRRI labels people who believe all three statements to be true as QAnon Believers. It may shock you to learn QAnon Believers now comprise 19% of the population. It may shock you even more to learn the number jumped five points in the last year. You might want to think about that.

What I take away from all of this is Democrats have a solid opportunity to take command looking out into a somewhat distant future, but they may first have to walk through the valley of death to get there. Republicans, on the other hand, will continue to yearn for “the good old days” of white isolated and insulated America. They may win next week, but that just might be the beginning of their collective swan song, a swan song the Chad Mitchell Trio suggested nicely way back in 1964 with Barry’s Boys, their white-hot roasting of Arizona Senator and that year’s Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater:

I wanna go back to the days when men were men
And start the First World War all over again
Back to Barry
Back to Cash and Carry
Back to Barry’s Boys.

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Posted in Politics, Religion, Religious affiliation, Research

“Where Is Nancy?”

October 28th, 2022 by Tom Lynch

Last night in San Francisco, 42-year-old David Depape broke into the home of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and went looking for her, yelling, “Where is Nancy?’

“Nancy” wasn’t home, but her octogenarian husband Paul was. He and Depape scuffled and Depape beat Mr. Pelosi with a hammer.

According to San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott, “The suspect pulled the hammer away from Mr. Pelosi and violently assaulted him with it. Our officers immediately tackled the suspect, disarmed him, took him into custody, requested emergency backup and rendered medical aid.”  CNN’s Jamie Gangel scooped that the attacker was attempting to tie up Paul Pelosi “until Nancy got home,” and said he was “waiting for Nancy.” (She was in D.C. at the time.)

Although 82-year-old Paul Pelosi suffered serious injuries (a hammer will do that) he is expected to make a complete recovery. And there you are. An assassination avoided. Let’s all move on.

Well, not so fast. Let me tell you a story.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, Europe’s political tectonic plates began moving precipitously as wealthy elite landowners were being challenged by emerging socialism whose leaders demanded power for the working classes, something anathema to the elites. One of the issues intensifying the socialist movement in France was the Dreyfus case.

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been falsely accused and convicted of treason for delivering French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was sentenced to life in prison on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Dreyfus was a 35-year-old Jewish Alsatian French artillery officer, and, yes, from its beginning antisemitism hung heavily over what came to be known as the Dreyfus Affair.

Born in 1859, Jean Jaurès was a highly respected leader of the socialist movement in the Legislative Assembly. He, among others, took up the cause of Dreyfus and was instrumental in forcing a second trial once it became known that high military officers had conspired to frame Dreyfus. In 1896, after 12 years, Dreyfus was fully acquitted and went on to serve with distinction in the First World War. The Dreyfus Affair propelled Jaurès to the forefront of French politicians.

Between the end of the Dreyfus Affair and the war, Jaurès became the intellectual champion of the socialist cause as leader of the French Socialist Party. He was an antimilitarist who was able to pragmatically straddle France’s left and right political wings and could see both sides of an issue. However, in the feverish fervor of the run-up to World War I, while the vast majority of the French were convinced the ignominy of the Franco-Prussian War, with its mortifying defeat at Sedan and humiliating Treaty of Versailles, had to be avenged and Germany crushed, Jaurès advocated diplomacy. He continued tirelessly to prod the public to reject the calls for war.

On 31 July 1914, the day before both the Germans and French mobilized for battle, Jaurès, knowing he had lost the argument and worn out from his efforts, went to the Café Croisant a little after 9:00 pm, for dinner, sitting with his back to a window that looked out onto the street. That was when Raoul Villain, a 29-year-old French nationalist who’d been following him since the evening before, shouted “pacifist” and “traitor,” and fired two shots into his back. Jaurès slumped forward. Five minutes later, he was dead.

The killing of Jaurès stunned Paris. Everything came to halt. He was buried on 4 August, the day the war began.

The death of Jaurès is what can happen when seemingly rational people lose their rationality and are magnetically drawn to violence. Last night in San Fransisco we could have had a similar result.

The political rancor and hatred oozing throughout America today, with its tangible potential for violence, has been brewing for decades. Donald Trump did not begin it. He just made it fashionable.

Although both Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were quick to condemn last night’s home invasion, I’m wondering what they and the legislators they’re supposed to lead will do now. Will any of them condemn the former president for inciting this violence? Will they condemn any of the Republican leaders who, cult-like, mimic Trump’s incitement? The next 24 hours will be interesting.

On 6 January 2021, in the corridors of the Capitol, the traitorous insurrectionists were yelling, “Where’s Mike Pence?” I ask you what would have happened if they’d found him? And what would have happened last night in San Francisco if the Speaker of the House, the third-highest ranking person in US government, had been home?

Please. Think about that.

 

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Posted in History, Leadership, Politics

For Something Different, “What Are They Breeding In Snohomish, Washington”?

October 21st, 2022 by Tom Lynch

Recently, I had a bit of time on my hands, so I did what so many others do when they find themselves in that situation. I went online  devouring dumb and dumber stories from the internet. I found a doozy, the weirdest of the weird, and I’m going to pass it on to you as we enter what promises to be a wonderful weekend here in the Berkshires. You can thank me later.

I came away from my internet surfing asking, “What are they breeding in Snohomish, Washington?” For reference, Snohomish is a lovely town of about 9,000 residents and is known as “the antique capital of the Northwest.” Now you know all you need to know. Except for this: Danny Calhon lives there.

Danny Calhon is a 19-year-old, who achieved his 15 minutes of fame in a way I defy you to imagine in your wildest of wild dreams.

Regardless of Danny’s story, for some reason it made me think of my own when I was his age. So, please permit me a small digression of history, which I promise will segue into the tale of Danny, his thumb, and the 1990 Toyota Camry.

I grew up in Massachusetts in the idyllic Leave It To Beaver and Dobie Gillis era. Maynard G. Krebs was the closest thing to weird one could encounter, and he was tame fiction. True, we had our share of “Geez, Billy and Betsy have to get married” moments, but that was about as far as anyone my friends and I knew strayed from the beaten path, and that wasn’t often. Just often enough to make you sincerely grateful you weren’t Billy.

In those days, 1963, the closest one came to technology was the party line rotary dial phone sitting on the bench near the kitchen and the black and white, 15-inch television resting in the living room, gathered around which, every night at 6:30, the entire family would take in The CBS Evening News, with Walter Cronkite. Thirty minutes of all the news in the world ending with Walter’s iconic sign-off, “And that’s the way it was.”

There was no internet. There weren’t even area codes. Calculators were “adding machines,” and they were hand-cranked. People hand-wrote letters. The postal service was a marvel of efficiency (No Louis Dejoy back then). If someone mailed you a letter, within three days it would be delivered by hand through the mail slot in your front door by your own, personal, smiling, friendly (except when there were dogs around—no leash laws then) mailman. Sorry, no women. Feminism and women’s rights hadn’t hit the post office yet, or anywhere else for that matter. But it was in that year of 1963 that Gloria Steinem went undercover for about a month as a Playboy Bunny in Hugh Heffner’s New York Playboy Club. She later published a two-part exposé detailing her sordid experience in Show Magazine.

That world blew up, and this may surprise you, in 1975 with the appearance of the Texas Instruments hand-held calculator, which added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. That was it. In that year, I bought one for our office. It cost $479, which, in today’s dollars would be  $2,642.58. For those four functions.

After that, there was no stopping the communications bullet train (which didn’t exist back then, either). Pretty soon, Al Gore invented the internet, and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and, eventually, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey dragged everyone kicking and screaming into the galaxy we now inhabit. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, you name it. Everyone’s a reporter and everything gets reported.

If a Bumble Bee burps in Boston,
In a minute they know it in Austin.

One of the fun games my friends and I used to play when we were 11 or 12 was to take a deep breath and hold it while blowing really hard on our thumb, which we had stuck in our mouth. We’d then pass out for a few seconds, and a friend would catch us before we hit the ground. Seems childish, but, well, we were children.

Which brings me back to Danny Calhon. Remember him? Danny—he’s going to put Snohomish on the map—Calhon? Danny made it into the local newspaper, and eventually all over the country, maybe the world, for—get ready now—causing a three-car crash after fainting due to intentionally holding his breath with his thumb in his mouth while driving through the 772 foot long Dennis L. Edwards Sunset Tunnel near Manning, Oregon.

You can be forgiven right about now for asking yourself if you read that last bit correctly. Trust me. You did.

There’s good news and bad news here. The bad news (my wife always wants the bad news first—seems counterintuitive, but there you are) is that after he fainted, Danny’s 1990 Toyota Camry, which was carrying him and his friend, 19-year-old Bradley Meyring, drifted across the center line and crashed, head-on, into a Ford Explorer being driven without a care in the world just before the roof caved in—literally—by 67-year-old Thomas Hatch. His wife Candace, 61, was in the front passenger seat. The good news is there were no life-threatening injuries and both Hatches are still with us.

Young Mister Calhon faced a laundry list of charges. We don’t know why in the world he was holding his breath enough to faint while driving through the tunnel. Neither does Lt. Gregg Hastings, with the Oregon State Police, who drew the short straw to investigate. Maybe Danny doesn’t even know, himself.

Back in Leave It To Beaver country, we would never have known about this. Think of all we were missing.

Posted in Misc.

College Test Scores Have Declined For Five Straight Years. America’s Educational System Needs Fixing.

October 20th, 2022 by Tom Lynch

Over the last couple of years there have been significant incidents in the country and the world, all vying for space in one’s brain. We’ve seen the horror of the COVID 19 pandemic, the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia under the direction of Mr. Evil Incarnate Vladimir Putin, All Things Crazy with Donald Trump and his cultish followers, the ongoing implosion of Great (maybe not so much anymore) Britain where Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned this morning (at 45 days in office, she was more like a tourist than a resident at 10 Downing Street), the upcoming Midterm elections with their sucking up enormous amounts of money for political spending (you could probably run a moderately-sized country with what the Democrats and Republicans are spending to buy, excuse me, win, this election), and a host of other important events, including what the World Health Organization and the UN label as a “catastrophic hunger crisis” in Haiti. Only an Ed Sullivan Plate Spinner could keep it all straight.

Consequently, one could be forgiven for not noticing a burgeoning crisis in American education, and I’m not talking about the culture things, like whether it’s alright to discuss Critical Race Theory in class, or ways to achieve diverse and inclusive practices. No, what I’m referencing is ACT college admission test scores dropping to their lowest level in more than 30 years.

As the AP reports:

The class of 2022′s average ACT composite score was 19.8 out of 36, marking the first time since 1991 that the average score was below 20. What’s more, an increasing number of high school students failed to meet any of the subject-area benchmarks set by the ACT — showing a decline in preparedness for college-level coursework.

The test scores, made public in a report Wednesday (12 October), show 42% of ACT-tested graduates in the class of 2022 met none of the subject benchmarks in English, reading, science and math.

The decline in test scores did not begin with the pandemic; they have been dropping for five consecutive years. COVID merely exacerbated the trend.

According to ACT (American College Testing), administrator of the tests for 60 years, in its report of this year’s results:

  • Approximately 1.3 million students in the U.S. high school graduating class of 2022 took the ACT test, an estimated 36 percent of graduates nationwide.
  • The national average Composite score for the graduating class of 2022 is 19.8, down from 20.3 for the graduating class of 2021, the lowest average score since 1991.
  • Thirty-five percent of the ACT-tested graduating class took the ACT more than once, as compared to 32% for the 2021 cohort.
  • Thirty-two percent of ACT-tested graduates in the class of 2022 met at least three out of four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks (English, reading, math, and science), while 42% of students met none, and 22% met all four.

Rose Babington, senior director for state partnerships for the ACT, said, “Academic preparedness is where we are seeing the decline. Every time we see ACT test scores, we are talking about skills and standards, and the prediction of students to be successful and to know the really important information to succeed and persist through their first year of college courses.”

ACT CEO Janet Godwin put it more bluntly. “The magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming. We see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting college-readiness benchmarks in any of the subjects we measure.”

According to Prep Scholar, which follows and charts average SAT scores over time, scores there have also declined, although their decline has been less acute than that of the ACTs. From 2006 through 2015, SAT scores dropped 34 points, falling in all demographic groups except Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander, where they rose, and Whites, where they remained steady. In 2017, the SATs were massively redesigned in an effort to make them more equitable. This led to significantly higher scores in all demographics except American Indian or Alaskan Native, where, by 2021, they had declined 36 points. During the same period, Black, or African American, scores jumped 75 points, and scores of White students were up 49 points to 934 and 1112, respectively.

But there has been no large redesign of the ACT test, so the picture there is less cloudy. We can draw conclusions with more certainty.

The latest results offer a lens into systemic inequities in education, in place well before the pandemic shuttered schools. COVID just made things worse. ACT’s Babington said, “The decline hit rural, low income and minority students of color the hardest.” You know, the ones whose parents can’t afford expensive college admission test tutoring. The ones who go to schools that don’t have anywhere near as much money to invest as schools in upper income neighborhoods and communities.

Can these inequities be fixed?

Sure, but it all comes down to money. Who has it and who doesn’t.

Schools nationwide require resources to operate and the cash to fund them. The way in which schools get their funding varies from state to state and district to district. But there are some funding principles that are relatively uniform throughout the country.

According to Education Week, public school funding comes from a variety of sources at the local, state and federal level. Approximately 48 percent of a school’s budget comes from state resources, including income taxes, sales tax, and fees. Another 44 percent is contributed locally, primarily through the property taxes of homeowners in the area. The last eight percent of the public education budget comes from federal sources, with an emphasis on grants for specific programs and services for students that need them. Traditionally, Americans desire to keep control of  schools at the local level, rather than a national one. Consequently, poorer states have less money to invest in education.

For example, the World Population Review reports Mississippi has the lowest median household income in the nation at $43,781, and annually ranks at or near the bottom in high school educational attainment. Compare that to Massachusetts, which has the third highest median family income (after the District of Columbia and Maryland) at $85,843, nearly double that of Mississippi.

You’d expect Massachusetts, with all that money, to rank high in public school education. And, you’d be right. As reported by WalletHub, which compared all 50 states across 18 metrics that examined the key factors of a well-educated population: educational attainment, school quality and achievement gaps between genders and races, Massachusetts ranks first for Educational Attainment and third for Quality of Education. Money talks.

There is a trend among colleges to no longer require testing for admission as they attempt to more equitably examine students applying for admittance, and the number of students taking the ACT has declined 30% since 2018, as graduates increasingly forgo college altogether. Some colleges, such as the University of California system, even opt for a test-blind policy, where scores are not considered even if submitted. Consequently, it’s possible the days of the ACT and SAT may be coming to an end. Nonetheless, the continuing decline in test scores is alarming to educators around the country. More worrisome is participation in the ACT among Black students plunged 37% this year, with only 154,000 taking the test.

Over the last few years, we have seen another problem emerge for public education. Grandstanding politicians have parachuted themselves into the nation’s classrooms in attempts to legislate what can be taught and how to do it. This has further muddied the country’s educational system, and it should stop right now.

It is the tallest of orders, but to remain globally competitive, we need to let educators educate and reexamine how we distribute the money necessary to let them do it. Anything less is a continuing disservice to our nation’s students, bound for college or not, who deserve the best we can give them as they enter adulthood.

 

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Posted in Education, Public policy, Research

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