Scalise in IC: Today's News for July 6th

Fox News:

Rep. Steve Scalise re-admitted to intensive care unit

Doctors at the hospital where House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., has been recovering from a gunshot wound downgraded his condition from "fair" to "serious" Wednesday after he contracted an infection.

In a statement, MedStar Washington Hospital Center said Scalise had been re-admitted to the intensive care unit. The hospital added that it would provide another update Thursday.

Scalise and four others were hurt when a gunman opened fire on a GOP baseball practice in Virginia on June 14. The gunman, identified as James T. Hodgkinson, was fatally shot by Capitol police.

The congressman was struck in the hip and the bullet tore into blood vessels, bones and internal organs. He has undergone several surgeries.

This is the big story on both Fox and CNN today. But CNN missed out on this important part of the story:

Sources told Fox News that doctors had anticipated that Scalise would suffer an infection related to the shooting. Sources close to the congressman indicated that they had been told from the start that the Louisianan's recovery would have ups and downs. 

Basically, the doctors aren't surprised by this, so it isn't as bad as it seems.

In other news...

Fox News:

Cruz's ObamaCare fix gets support from Hill conservatives

A low-flying proposal from Sen. Ted Cruz to overhaul a major component of ObamaCare is attracting the kind of conservative enthusiasm that could prove critical in the broader GOP push to repeal and replace the 2010 law.

The Texas Republican senator has offered up his idea as an amendment that would allow insurers to offer bare-boned policies that don't meet Affordable Care Act standards -- provided they also offer plans in compliance.  

...The Cruz plan aims to roll back the requirements that boost coverage for individual plans but also increase cost.

“The mandates the federal government puts on [Americans] are so ridiculous that men are forced to carry coverage for mammograms, women are forced to carry coverage for prostate issues. It’s absurd,” Marc Short, Trump's director of legislative affairs, told “Fox News Sunday.” “We’re going to get rid of many of those regulations and mandates to lower cost.”

The Cruz amendment is intended to lower consumer costs and presumably help commercial insurance companies continue offering policies.  

The same story from the Left:

New York Times:

Ted Cruz Has an Idea for How to Cover High-Risk Patients

There is no public legislative language yet, but here’s how Mr. Cruz’s plan appears to work, based on his handout and statements: Any company that wanted to sell health insurance would be required to offer one plan that adhered to all the Obamacare rules, including its requirement that every customer be charged the same price. People would be eligible for government subsidies to help buy such plans, up to a certain level of income. But the companies would also be free to offer any other type of insurance they wanted, freed from Obamacare’s rules.

People who bought the Obamacare-compliant plans would be eligible for subsidies that limit their cost, as long as their income was less than about $42,000 per year for a single person. And those who earn more — or wish to buy skimpier, cheaper plans without all the rules — may also get a discount on those premiums, in the form of pretax health savings accounts, which the legislation would let them use to buy insurance.

As Mr. Cruz told Dylan Scott of Vox.com, “You would likely see some market segmentation,” meaning that healthy and sick customers would probably pick different kinds of insurance. Healthier, wealthier people would tend to gravitate toward the skimpy plans. Sicker people would opt for the compliant plans, which cover more benefits. Even though the compliant plans wouldn’t technically be more expensive for the sick, those choices would mean that mostly sick people would buy them, and the prices could get extremely high.

“There have been Nobel Prizes in economics awarded for the finding that when you allow an insurance market to segment like that, you end up with basically an unstable market,” said John Graves, an assistant professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University. Mr. Graves said that the government subsidies would blunt the financial impact for people below the income threshold, but the government would get stuck paying for most of the extremely high premiums.

The "unstable market" quote reveals the article's bias. In this situation, the market's instability is corrected by government funding. Mind you, that doesn't mean there won't be significant price increases within this segment going forward. When government money enters a free market, the prices tend to adjust higher to compensate for it (see college tuition for an example of this).

However, this still doesn't fix the inherent problem of our health care pre-Obama and Obamacare itself: Third party payer plans never work as they inevitably lead to the "Tragedy of the Commons", wherein limited resources get depleted by unaccountable consumers.

Ted Cruz's solution is good politics, but lousy economics.

Finally, in today's news...

Washington Times:

Hacked computer server that handled DNC email remains out of reach of Russia investigators

It is perhaps the key piece of forensic evidence in Russia’s suspected efforts to sway the November presidential election, but federal investigators have yet to get their hands on the hacked computer server that handled email from the Democratic National Committee.

Indeed, the only cybersecurity specialists who have taken a look at the server are from CrowdStrike, the Irvine, California-based private cybersecurity company that the DNC hired to investigate the hack — but which has come under fire itself for its work.

Some critics say CrowdStrike’s evidence for blaming Russia for the hack is thin. Members of Congress say they still believe Russia was responsible but wonder why the DNC has never allowed federal investigators to get a look at the key piece of evidence: the server. Either way, a key “witness” in the political scandal consuming the Trump administration remains beyond the reach of investigators.

This is like trying to study the Kennedy assassination without the Zapruder film. Why do it?

Here is the answer:

Both Republicans and Democrats say the DNC’s reaction to the hacking is troubling.

Jeh Johnson, who served as homeland security secretary under President Obama, told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last month that his department offered to assist the DNC during the campaign to determine what was happening, but Mr. Johnson said he was rebuffed.

“The DNC,” Mr. Johnson said at the time, “did not feel it needed DHS’ assistance at that time. I was anxious to know whether or not our folks were in there, and the response I got was the FBI had spoken to them, they don’t want our help, they have CrowdStrike.”

In January, Mr. Comey told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the FBI issued “multiple requests at different levels” to assist the DNC with a cyberforensic analysis. Those requests were also denied.

DNC officials said the Russian hack had already been discovered and dealt with when the Homeland Security Department approached them last summer.

There are only two reasons why the Democrats would not want their server to be seen by investigators: First, because it might prove the Russians were not behind the hack; or second, because there is proof on the servers of some other kind of illegal behavior by the Democrats. Or possibly both reasons.

If the Democrats want to scream "Russian collusion!", then they need to be willing to bring the proof.