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Is COVID Still A “National Emergency”? Biden Must Soon Decide…

Is COVID Still A "National Emergency"? Biden Must Soon Decide…

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics.com,

The omicron variant may be nearing its peak in some states, but across the country it’s produced a dizzying array of…

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Is COVID Still A "National Emergency"? Biden Must Soon Decide...

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics.com,

The omicron variant may be nearing its peak in some states, but across the country it’s produced a dizzying array of conflicting signals on whether the nation should remain under a COVID national emergency or move on to an endemic “new normal.”

Comedian Bill Maher’s “I don’t want to live in your mask-paranoid world anymore” monologue went viral last week, just days after the Atlantic, the standard-bearer journal for the liberal intelligentsia, ran a story headlined: “COVID Parenting Has Passed the Point of Absurdity.” Accompanying the article was a black-and-white photo of a woman frozen in a more desperate and primal state of panic than the subject of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

Omicron, for most people without co-morbidities, produces much milder symptoms than do the coronavirus’s previous variants, but it’s far more infectious, racing through schools, shutting down classrooms and forcing parents to consult their district’s ever-shifting COVID “decision trees” on a seemingly daily basis.

“When will the emergency end?” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a mother of seven, asked during the Supreme Court’s recent vaccine mandate hearing.

It’s a question on most people’s minds.

As the country and the world enter the third year of the pandemic, many states have moved past the worst of the omicron outbreak, but in other parts of the U.S. the tally is still rising – fueling more questions about whether people are being hospitalized and dying with COVID or because of it.

There has been no consistent national reaction, leading to even more confusion about whether omicron is the beginning of the end of COVID or just another in an endless series of variants, each with its own dangers and, possibly, silver linings.

San Francisco last week announced that it will soon replace its indoor mask mandate with a kind of honor-rule system that allows added freedom if someone is fully vaccinated and boosted, although there’s no real verification system. On the other side of the country, however, New York state’s mask mandate is back in effect after an appeals court judge issued a stay on a lower court ruling that struck it down.

Meanwhile, some school boards in Virginia are in court fighting an executive order by new Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin that allows parents to opt their children out of local school mask mandates.

After courts struck down the federal vaccine mandate for companies with more than 100 employees, President Biden subsequently rescinded the executive order. Now Starbucks, Boeing and Delta are rehiring employees fired for refusing to get the jab. Yet, other big companies are voluntarily keeping the requirement in place even as it hurts their businesses in the middle of a labor shortage.

In a particularly worrisome sign for the depleted health care field, nurses – who still must be vaccinated or face firing – are increasingly being allowed to stay on the job if they are COVID-positive but have mild symptoms or none at all.

As more people get COVID, there’s more natural immunity throughout the population, although just how much each variant provides is hard to know. Coronavirus antibodies generated by omicron infection last at least six months in 88% of cases, according to experts, but after that period the protection rate drops to 74%. Beyond that, it’s hard to predict.

It’s a disjointed patchwork of conflicting health policies and local responses, reflecting the lack of national consensus about just how disruptive the pathogen should still be.

While calls are intensifying to transition the country into treating COVID as an endemic disease – a state where its presence is constant but predictable and manageable – the Biden administration’s top experts warn it’s too soon.

“When you have over 2,000 deaths, 150,000 hospitalizations, and you have people getting infected to the tune of somewhere around 700,000 a day, we’re not there yet,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last week.

Fauci, the national COVID icon reviled on the right while beloved on the left, then unveiled a worst-case scenario prediction for 2022: that there could be a new variant that evades vaccines and natural immunity. “I hope that’s not the case,” he said flatly.

Other health officials and political figures are striking a more hopeful note.

President Biden last week said the U.S. hasn’t yet reached its “new normal,” but added, “We’re moving toward a time when COVID-19 won’t disrupt our daily lives, when COVID-19 won’t be a crisis but something to protect against and treat.”

Cynical conservatives argue that Biden, whose flagging poll numbers are hurting Democratic prospects in November’s midterms, is shifting his rhetoric only in an attempt to convey a sense of control and calm ahead of those elections – even though omicron is still making that shift difficult if not impossible for many Americans.

When Biden took office, his plan to stop the virus relied heavily on increasing vaccinations, safely reopening schools, and pushing stimulus bills to help states and local officials battle the pandemic. But Biden and his top officials didn’t (and possibly couldn’t) anticipate omicron and the desperate need for testing that the rapid-spreader would spur. Critics and supporters alike argue the administration’s laser focus on vaccinations, including forcing people to get shots through mandates, came at the expense of producing and distributing more tests and therapeutics.

“They frankly focused on the vaccine – the vaccine did not end up being as extinguishing as we had hoped … and so they went ahead and added the booster,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told RealClearPolitics.

“In emergencies, the issue isn’t whether you made a decision that turns out not to be the ideal one; the issue is how you recover – and this administration has recovered well.”

But others argue just the opposite – that Biden waited far too long to pivot to more testing, and that the tests the administration is providing every American for free will only reach most people after the omicron peak has subsided.

“The Biden administration has failed its COVID test,” declares a recent headline in the Guardian, a left-leaning British newspaper.

In Europe, where the omicron surges have peaked ahead of the U.S., officials are more optimistic and appear more determined to move on and learn to live with COVID and any variants it spawns. The top European regional official at the World Health Organization recently   that “omicron offers plausible hope for stabilization and normalization.”

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson a week ago announced an easing of coronavirus restrictions in England amid growing calls from inside and outside of his party for him to resign over his repeated violation of the rules.

Denmark, meanwhile, has announced plans to scrap all of its coronavirus restrictions and reclassify COVID-19 as a disease that no longer poses a threat to society despite infections remaining at record-high levels.

In the next month, Biden must decide whether to extend the national emergency status, which expires at the end of February. It’s a big decision with both practical and symbolic consequences. The emergency declaration, coupled with the public health emergency pronouncement issued by the Department of Health & Human Services, gives the federal government several critical tools to remove legal barriers and regulatory red tape, including the manufacturing of personal protective equipment by sources not yet completely reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration. It also allows HHS to use funding and authority under the Defense Production Act to improve onshore and near-shore production of vital resources. Additionally, it gives Federal Emergency Management Agency the ability to dispense PPE from the strategic national stockpile.

When it comes to health care providers, the emergency declarations authorize a long list of waivers from federal requirements – including expanding the type of health care professionals who can offer telehealth services billable under Medicare and Medicaid. It also allows hospitals and long-term care facilities to screen patients at locations offsite to prevent the spread of COVID.

The American Hospital Association earlier this month called on the federal government to renew both emergencies to ensure continued support for heavily burdened hospitals.

“The emergency declarations have proven critical in equipping hospitals and health systems with the tools and resources necessary to manage the recent COVID-19 surges and ensure high-quality care in this unprecedented environment,” the AHA wrote. “In their absence, the challenges of the pandemic will be exponentially more difficult to overcome.”

In mid-January, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra extended his department’s public health emergency, continuing the declaration for another 90 days. This is the eighth time it has been extended since Becerra’s predecessor, Alex Azar, first announced it in January 2020.

But the White House hasn’t said whether it will extend the broader national emergency. A White House aide initially said he would look into the matter but didn’t respond to several follow-up questions from RCP.

Benjamin suggested Biden could follow HHS’s lead and provide just a 90-day extension instead of the year-long one he issued last year.

In addition to its practical impact on health care across the country, Biden’s decision will inevitably be politicized. Critics are likely to characterize any move to extend the emergency as proof that Biden didn’t shut down the virus as promised during his 2020 campaign – and to remind voters that the number of deaths during the first year of his presidency were similar to or only slightly less than the first year of the pandemic under Trump, despite having the vaccine in place.

Critics seized on Biden’s comments to U.S. governors in early January that there is “no federal solution” to the disease. Afterward, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and others tried to explain that Biden meant the federal government cannot solve the pandemic alone without working in partnership with governors and leaders at the local level.

But that explanation only poured fuel on the fire. Bobby Jindal, the two-term former governor of Louisiana, penned an op-ed for the Washington Examiner arguing that the milder omicron strain should spur a transition to endemic status.

“Emergency order expiration dates are looming,” he wrote. “… Policymakers need to relinquish emergency powers at the end of the surge and plot a sustainable path forward.”

Jindal quoted Dr. Monica Gandhi, a University of California, San Francisco infectious disease expert, who months ago predicted that COVID-19 would become endemic, like the flu, always circulating with seasonal peaks. The transition should occur when disease severity decreased and the immunity from vaccines and prior infections increased, she reasoned.

“We are amid that transition,” Jindal argued in his op-ed.

Four front-line health care providers also with UCSF agree. Last week they sent an online petition to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, all public school superintendents, and every county public health officer in the state, calling for a pivot in language that recognizes the virus as an “endemic.” This pivot, they argued, should coincide with an end to remaining restrictions, “particularly as they apply to children.”

The change.org petition had more than 30,000 signatures by Sunday evening. “We are particularly concerned about the toll that our state policies continue to have on children and teens,” the doctors wrote. “We are writing to ask California officials to acknowledge the endemic nature of COVID-19 after the omicron surge and immediately shift our public dialogue toward defining a path for removing all remaining COVID-19 restrictions in public schools.”

In addition to promising to shut down COVID, the Biden administration pledged to let scientists and public health experts drive its pandemic strategy. But omicron has produced such differing opinions among health experts and scientists that it’s scrambled the plan to have consistent and authoritative public policies, according to some health experts.

Lindsay F. Wiley, a health law professor at UCLA, said recent missteps by the CDC have once again damaged public trust and reinforced public perception that the administration’s guidance is “pretty chaotic.”

“There’s confusion after the CDC changes its guidance, and [it] has not always provided a robust explanation or justification for that change,” she told RCP, noting the back-and-forth on mask guidance and more recent changes governing isolation and quarantine that at first did not incorporate any kind of testing.

But, “the national emergency [declaration] is a much different framework than most people assume,” Wiley added, “so [it’s] still playing an important role and is still an appropriate measure in my opinion.”

Benjamin agreed, although he recommends Biden extend it for only a few months at a time, instead of continuing the declaration for a full year. Potential new variants are developing, and though Benjamin said they thus far don’t seem too worrisome, he warned of unpredictable twists and turns ahead.

He described three possible future COVID scenarios. The worst-case one, as Fauci outlined, would involve the development of an extremely infectious and lethal variant similar to delta. Another possibility is more seasonal outbreaks of COVID, as with the flu. And the third, he said, are spats of reoccurring lethal outbreaks in different states, which would require resources being moved around to put those fires out.

“We're still tracking other new variants that are developing day by day,” he said. “We don't think that there are problems, but this is going to be an issue for a while.”

Tyler Durden Fri, 02/04/2022 - 19:00

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International

IVI starts technology transfer to Biological E. Limited to manufacture oral cholera vaccine for India and global markets

  Credit: IVI IVI will complete the technology transfer by 2025 Oral Cholera Vaccine to be manufactured by Biological E. Limited for India and international…

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Credit: IVI

  • IVI will complete the technology transfer by 2025
  • Oral Cholera Vaccine to be manufactured by Biological E. Limited for India and international markets

 

March 20, 2024, SEOUL, Republic of Korea and HYDERABAD, India — The International Vaccine Institute (IVI), an international organization with a mission to discover, develop, and deliver safe, effective, and affordable vaccines for global health, today announced that it has commenced a technology transfer of simplified Oral Cholera Vaccine (OCV-S) to Biological E. Limited (BE), a leading India-based Vaccines and Pharmaceutical Company.

 

Following the signing of a technology license agreement in November last year, IVI has begun providing the technical information, know-how, and materials to produce OCV-S at BE facilities and will continue to support necessary clinical development and regulatory approvals. IVI and BE entered this partnership during an unprecedented surge of cholera outbreaks worldwide and aim to increase the volume of low-cost cholera vaccine in India as well as the global public market.

 

IVI will complete the technology transfer by 2025 and the oral cholera vaccine will be manufactured for India and international markets by Biological E. Limited.

 

Dr. Jerome Kim, Director General of IVI, said: “In an era of heightened risk of poverty-associated infectious diseases such as cholera, the world needs a sustainable source of high-quality, affordable vaccines and committed manufacturers to supply them. We are pleased to partner with Biological E., a company with a proven history of making life-saving vaccines accessible globally, to address this supply gap and protect communities from this deadly, though preventable, disease.”

 

Ms. Mahima Datla, Managing Director, Biological E. Limited, said: “We are glad to be in collaboration with IVI for the manufacture of simplified Oral Cholera Vaccine. Our efforts are aimed to not only combat the disease but to also be part of a sustained legacy of innovation, collaboration, and health stewardship. Together with IVI, we are happy to be shaping a healthier and more resilient future by making this vaccine accessible globally.”

 

This technology transfer and licensing agreement is the sixth of its kind for IVI, transferring such technology to manufacturers in India, the Republic of Korea, Bangladesh, and South Africa. All these partnerships have led to or seek to achieve, pre-qualification (PQ) from the World Health Organization, a designation that enables global agencies such as UNICEF to procure the vaccine for the global market. BE already has 9 vaccines with WHO PQ in its portfolio, and IVI and BE will pursue WHO PQ for OCV-S as well, following national licensure in India.

 

Dr. Julia Lynch, Director of IVI’s Cholera Program, said: “The cholera situation is dire, and the availability and use of oral cholera vaccine is an essential part of a multifaceted approach to cholera control and prevention, especially as outbreaks increase and the global vaccine supply remains strained. With more manufacturers like BE entering the market, the future supply situation looks strong. IVI remains committed to ensuring the availability of the oral cholera vaccine and to developing new and improved vaccines that are equally safe, effective, and affordable and made around the world, for the world.”

 

OCV-S is a simplified formulation of OCV with the potential to lower production costs while increasing production capacity for current and aspiring OCV manufacturers. IVI’s development of OCV-S and ongoing technology transfers are part of an institutional strategy to confront cholera with 3 main goals: 1) Ensure supply of OCV 2) Improve cholera vaccines 3) Support OCV use and introduction. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been supporting IVI’s cholera program since 2000 and is funding this latest technology transfer to BE.

 

###

 

About the International Vaccine Institute (IVI)

The International Vaccine Institute (IVI) is a non-profit international organization established in 1997 at the initiative of the United Nations Development Programme with a mission to discover, develop, and deliver safe, effective, and affordable vaccines for global health.

IVI’s current portfolio includes vaccines at all stages of pre-clinical and clinical development for infectious diseases that disproportionately affect low- and middle-income countries, such as cholera, typhoid, chikungunya, shigella, salmonella, schistosomiasis, hepatitis E, HPV, COVID-19, and more. IVI developed the world’s first low-cost oral cholera vaccine, pre-qualified by the World Health Organization (WHO), and developed a new-generation typhoid conjugate vaccine that also achieved WHO prequalification in early 2024.

IVI is headquartered in Seoul, Republic of Korea with a Europe Regional Office in Sweden, an Africa Regional Office in Rwanda, a Country Office in Austria, and a Country and Project Office in Kenya. IVI additionally co-founded the Hong Kong Jockey Club Global Health Institute in Hong Kong and hosts Collaborating Centers in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Madagascar. 39 countries and the WHO are members of IVI, and the governments of the Republic of Korea, Sweden, India, Finland, and Thailand provide state funding. For more information, please visit https://www.ivi.int.

 

 

About Biological E. Limited

Biological E. Limited (BE), a Hyderabad-based Pharmaceuticals & Biologics Company founded in 1953, is the first private sector biological products company in India and the first pharmaceutical company in Southern India. BE develops, manufactures and supplies vaccines and therapeutics. BE supplies its vaccines to more than 130 countries and its therapeutic products are sold in India, the USA and Europe. BE currently has 8 WHO-prequalified vaccines and 10 USFDA approved Generic Injectables in its portfolio. Recently, BE has received Emergency Use Listing (EUL) from the WHO for CORBEVAX®, the COVID-19 vaccine. Recently, DCGI has approved BE’S 14-Valent Pneumococcal Conjugate vaccine.

In recent years, BE has embarked on new initiatives for organizational expansion such as developing specialty injectable products for global markets as a means to manufacture APIs sustainably and developing novel vaccines for the global market.

Please follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter

 

 

MEDIA CONTACTS

IVI

Aerie Em, Global Communications & Advocacy Manager
+82 2 881 1386 | aerie.em@ivi.int

 

Biological E. Limited

K. Vijay Amruth Raj
Email: Vijay.Kammari@biologicale.com
www.biologicale.com/news


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Young People Aren’t Nearly Angry Enough About Government Debt

Young People Aren’t Nearly Angry Enough About Government Debt

Authored by The American Institute for Economic Research,

Young people sometimes…

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Young People Aren't Nearly Angry Enough About Government Debt

Authored by The American Institute for Economic Research,

Young people sometimes seem to wake up in the morning in search of something to be outraged about. We are among the wealthiest and most educated humans in history. But we’re increasingly convinced that we’re worse off than our parents were, that the planet is in crisis, and that it’s probably not worth having kids.

I’ll generalize here about my own cohort (people born after 1981 but before 2010), commonly referred to as Millennials and Gen Z, as that shorthand corresponds to survey and demographic data. Millennials and Gen Z have valid economic complaints, and the conditions of our young adulthood perceptibly weakened traditional bridges to economic independence. We graduated with record amounts of student debt after President Obama nationalized that lending. Housing prices doubled during our household formation years due to zoning impediments and chronic underbuilding. Young Americans say economic issues are important to us, and candidates are courting our votes by promising student debt relief and cheaper housing (which they will never be able to deliver).

Young people, in our idealism and our rational ignorance of the actual appropriations process, typically support more government intervention, more spending programs, and more of every other burden that has landed us in such untenable economic circumstances to begin with. Perhaps not coincidentally, young people who’ve spent the most years in the increasingly partisan bubble of higher education are also the most likely to favor expanded government programs as a “solution” to those complaints.

It’s Your Debt, Boomer 

What most young people don’t yet understand is that we are sacrificing our young adulthood and our financial security to pay for debts run up by Baby Boomers. Part of every Millennial and Gen-Z paycheck is payable to people the same age as the members of Congress currently milking this system and miring us further in debt.

Our government spends more than it can extract from taxpayers. Social Security, which represents 20 percent of government spending, has run an annual deficit for 15 years. Last year Social Security alone overspent by $22.1 billion. To keep sending out checks to retirees, Social Security goes begging to the Treasury Department, and the Treasury borrows from the public by issuing bonds. Bonds allow investors (who are often also taxpayers) to pay for some retirees’ benefits now, and be paid back later. But investors only volunteer to lend Social Security the money it needs to cover its bills because the (younger) taxpayers will eventually repay the debt — with interest.

In other words, both Social Security and Medicare, along with various smaller federal entitlement programs, together comprising almost half of the federal budget, have been operating for a decade on the principle of “give us the money now, and stick the next generation with the check.” We saddle future generations with debt for present-day consumption.

The second largest item in the budget after Social Security is interest on the national debt — largely on Social Security and other entitlements that have already been spent. These mandatory benefits now consume three quarters of the federal budget: even Congress is not answerable for these programs. We never had the chance for our votes to impact that spending (not that older generations were much better represented) and it’s unclear if we ever will.

Young Americans probably don’t think much about the budget deficit (each year’s overspending) or the national debt (many years’ deficits put together, plus interest) much at all. And why should we? For our entire political memory, the federal government, as well as most of our state governments, have been steadily piling “public” debt upon our individual and collective heads. That’s just how it is. We are the frogs trying to make our way in the watery world as the temperature ticks imperceptibly higher. We have been swimming in debt forever, unaware that we’re being economically boiled alive.

Millennials have somewhat modest non-mortgage debt of around $27,000 (some self-reports say twice that much), including car notes, student loans, and credit cards. But we each owe more than $100,000 as a share of the national debt. And we don’t even know it.

When Millennials finally do have babies (and we are!) that infant born in 2024 will enter the world with a newly minted Social Security Number and $78,089 credit card bill for Granddad’s heart surgery and the interest on a benefit check that was mailed when her parents were in middle school. 

Headlines and comments sections love to sneer at “snowflakes” who’ve just hit the “real world,” and can’t figure out how to make ends meet, but the kids are onto something. A full 15 percent of our earnings are confiscated to pay into retirement and healthcare programs that will be insolvent by the time we’re old enough to enjoy them. The Federal Reserve and government debt are eating the economy. The same interest rates that are pushing mortgages out of reach are driving up the cost of interest to maintain the debt going forward. As we learn to save and invest, our dollars are slowly devalued. We’re right to feel trapped.  

Sure, if we’re alive and own a smartphone, we’re among the one percent of the wealthiest humans who’ve ever lived. Older generations could argue (persuasively!) that we have no idea what “poverty” is anymore. But with the state of government spending and debt…we are likely to find out. 

Despite being richer than Rockefeller, Millennials are right to say that the previous ways of building income security have been pushed out of reach. Our earning years are subsidizing not our own economic coming-of-age, but bank bailouts, wars abroad, and retirement and medical benefits for people who navigated a less-challenging wealth-building landscape. 

Redistribution goes both ways. Boomers are expected to pass on tens of trillions in unprecedented wealth to their children (if it isn’t eaten up by medical costs, despite heavy federal subsidies) and older generations’ financial support of the younger has had palpable lifting effects. Half of college costs are paid by families, and the trope of young people moving back home is only possible if mom and dad have the spare room and groceries to make that feasible.

Government “help” during COVID-19 resulted in the worst inflation in 40 years, as the federal government spent $42,000 per citizen on “stimulus” efforts, right around a Millennial’s average salary at that time. An absurd amount of fraud was perpetrated in the stimulus to save an economy from the lockdown that nearly ruined itTrillions in earmarked goodies were rubber stamped, carelessly added to young people’s growing bill. Government lenders deliberately removed fraud controls, fearing they couldn’t hand out $800 billion in young people’s future wages away fast enough. Important lessons were taught by those programs. The importance of self-sufficiency and the dignity of hard work weren’t top of the list.

Boomer Benefits are Stagnating Hiring, Wages, and Investment for Young People

Even if our workplace engagement suffered under government distortions, Millennials continue to work more hours than other generations and invest in side hustles and self employment at higher rates. Working hard and winning higher wages almost doesn’t matter, though, when our purchasing power is eaten from the other side. Buying power has dropped 20 percent in just five years. Life is $11,400/year more expensive than it was two years ago and deficit spending is the reason why

We’re having trouble getting hired for what we’re worth, because it costs employers 30 percent more than just our wages to employ us. The federal tax code both requires and incentivizes our employers to transfer a bunch of what we earned directly to insurance companies and those same Boomer-busted federal benefits, via tax-deductible benefits and payroll taxes. And the regulatory compliance costs of ravenous bureaucratic state. The price paid by each employer to keep each employee continues to rise — but Congress says your boss has to give most of the increase to someone other than you. 

Federal spending programs that many people consider good government, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance for children (CHIP) aren’t a small amount of the federal budget. Government spends on these programs because people support and demand them, and because cutting those benefits would be a re-election death sentence. That’s why they call cutting Social Security the “third rail of politics.” If you touch those benefits, you die. Congress is held hostage by Baby Boomers who are running up the bill with no sign of slowing down. 

Young people generally support Social Security and the public health insurance programs, even though a 2021 poll by Nationwide Financial found 47 percent of Millennials agree with the statement “I will not get a dime of the Social Security benefits I have earned.”

In the same survey, Millennials were the most likely of any generation to believe that Social Security benefits should be enough to live on as a sole income, and guessed the retirement age was 52 (it’s 67 for anyone born after 1959 — and that’s likely to rise). Young people are the most likely to see government guarantees as a valid way to live — even though we seem to understand that those promises aren’t guarantees at all.

Healthcare costs tied to an aging population and wonderful-but-expensive growth in medical technologies and medications will balloon over the next few years, and so will the deficits in Boomer benefit programs. Newly developed obesity drugs alone are expected to add $13.6 billion to Medicare spending. By 2030, every single Baby Boomer will be 65, eligible for publicly funded healthcare.

The first Millennial will be eligible to claim Medicare (assuming the program exists and the qualifying age is still 65, both of which are improbable) in 2046. As it happens, that’s also the year that the Boomer benefits programs (which will then be bloated with Gen Xers) and the interest payments we’re incurring to provide those benefits now, are projected to consume 100 percent of federal tax revenue.

Government spending is being transferred to bureaucrats and then to the beneficiaries of government spending who are, in some sense, your diabetic grandma who needs a Medicare-paid dialysis treatment, but in a much more immediate sense, are the insurance companiespharma giants, and hospital corporations who wrote the healthcare legislation. Some percentage of every college graduate’s paycheck buys bullets that get fired at nothing and inflating the private investment portfolios of government contractors, with dubious, wasteful outcomes from the prison-industrial complex to the perpetual war machine.

No bank or nation in the world can lend the kind of money the American government needs to borrow to fulfill its obligations to citizens. Someone will have to bite the bullet. Even some of the co-authors of the current disaster are wrestling with the truth. 

Forget avocado toast and streaming subscriptions. We’re already sensing it, but we haven’t yet seen it. Young people are not well-informed, and often actively misled, about what’s rotten in this economic system. But we are seeing the consequences on store shelves and mortgage contracts and we can sense disaster is coming. We’re about to get stuck with the bill.

Tyler Durden Tue, 03/19/2024 - 20:20

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Student loan borrowers may finally get answers to loan forgiveness issues

A major student loan service company has been invited to face Congress over its alleged servicing failures.

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U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wants answers from one of the top student loan service companies in the country for allegedly botching its student loan forgiveness process involving the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, leaving borrowers confused and without answers.

The senator sent a letter to Mohela CEO Scott Giles on March 18 inviting him to testify before Congress at a hearing on April 10 titled “MOHELA’s Performance as a Student Loan Servicer.” During the hearing, Giles will have to answer for why his company allegedly failed to send billing statements to student loan borrowers in a timely manner and miscalculated monthly payments for borrowers when it was time for them to repay their loans in September last year.

Related: Here's who qualifies for Biden's student loan debt relief starting next month

Also, in the letter, Warren highlighted a report that claimed that Mohela failed to perform basic servicing functions for borrowers eligible for PSLF, which led to over 800,000 public service workers facing delays in receiving student debt relief. The report also accuses the company of using a “‘call deflection’ scheme” to keep customers away from speaking to a customer service representative and instead redirecting them to parts of their website.

“Your company has contributed to student loan borrowers’ difficulties by mishandling borrowers’ return to repayment following the COVID-19 pandemic-related pause on payments, interest, and collections and by impeding public servants’ access to PSLF relief,” wrote Warren in the letter.

The move from Warren comes after the U.S. Department of Education withheld $7.2 million in payments to its servicer Mohela in October as punishment because it failed to issue timely billing statements to 2.5 million borrowers which resulted in 800,000 borrowers becoming delinquent on their loans. The department ordered Mohela to put those affected by the issues into forbearance until the mess was resolved.

U.S. President Joe Biden is joined by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona (L) as he announces new actions to protect borrowers after the Supreme Court struck down his student loan forgiveness plan in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on June 30, 2023 in Washington, DC. 

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Mohela is also currently facing two class-action lawsuits, one filed in December last year and another in January this year, for its alleged “failure to timely process and render decisions for student loan borrowers enrolled in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.”

In response to recent criticism surrounding its alleged issues and failures regarding the PSLF program, Mohela claimed in a statement to the Missouri Independent that it “does not have authority to process loan forgiveness until authorization is provided by FSA, which can take months to occur.”

The company also claimed that there are “false accusations” inside of the bombshell report, which was released in February, that details the company’s servicing failures.

“It is unfortunate and irresponsible that information is being spun to create a false narrative in an attempt to mislead the public. False accusations are being disingenuously branded as an investigative report,” said Mohela. 

Related: Amazon just made a major announcement that will bring you big savings — and we have all the details

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