1. Older innovations that failed: the pedestrian catcher.
2. Atul Gawande on the Senate health care bill. David Brooks on the bill. Holtz-Eakin on the bill.
3. How ESPN got into economic trouble.
5. Valuable thread on ACA and mortality risk through opiates.
4: As I noted in my comment about the Charmin Van-Go in Monday’s assorted links, these promotional vehicles (in both senses) are of a piece, publicity vehicles for the 21st century. Uber-WCs and WeinerDrones.
Next: self-driving Uber-AirBnBs. Do you want a place to sleep or have you had too much to drink? Call up a portable motel/flophouse. Could be used for illicit activities too.
self-driving Uber-AirBnBs.
Brilliant use of arbitrage to profit from government subsidized roads.
is david brooks getting paid by the lowest common denouement?
exacerbates social segmentation – makes people more different
income redistribution – unfair policy, subsidy if you wish. Like when the insurance company says those are all costs before the deductible. IE. They are out of pocket expenses right? Out of my pocket?
vapid generality that was utterly detached – I quit
completely unworkable – would not work
This is not a conservative vision of American society. It’s a vision rendered cruel by its obliviousness – so they do have a vision? And the vision is it?
3. I wonder how easy it is internally to think of yourself as the biggest cable free loader of all time. Certainly they know how much free money they were getting from people who don’t even watch, but can you honestly plan around that? Would you slowly trick yourself into thinking all these paying customers actually do what you, even though you really know they never watch?
Rent seeking. Internally those at ESPN would advocate for Disney to not pursue digital trends – to hold on to a dying old business with high fees, instead of securing space in future with Netflix and Hulu. If only they could milk the gravy train for longer.
Telling quote from article:
“Non-sports fans who wanted to watch ABC’s entertainment programming would have more of an incentive to ditch their pay-TV subscription. Add in Disney’s 2012 streaming deal with Netflix and its 30 percent ownership in Hulu as factors that hastened the cord-cutting trend, and distribution executives complained that it seemed to them like Disney was encouraging cord cutting.
“It was akin to pouring kerosene on a cord-cutting fire,” one distribution executive said. “Everybody could see where the industry was headed. But if Disney took longer, would it have been a 20-year process instead of 10? It’s hard to know.”
Don’t use “rent seeking” when you just mean profit seeking.
Disney is almost pure rent seeking. How many new creative works has Walt Disney done since his copyrights have been extended twice?
His ideas for Disneyland were considered insane, and then for the new city in Florida even more insane. But what crazy insane things has he done since copyright and other government protection on his insanity has been expanded?
Disney has bought those who were locked out of old traditional stories by Disney copyyrights instead of being as creative and insane when Walt did not have all the monopoly power thanks to copyright, which by the way, let him reboot old brands, eg Grimm.
Bundling cuts both ways. Plenty of people, myself included, only subscribe to cable to get ESPN. From my perspective its the other channels that are free loaders.
Cable bundling breaks everyone’s brains. On an economics blog we should understand that it is bundled and bundles are the natural way to distribute goods where building the channels is expensive but the marginal cost (to the provider) of shipping and supplying additional units is small.
Netflix has killed a lot of the old model, but it’s just another bundle. There’s boatloads of stuff on Netflix, that Netflix paid money to produce, that I will never watch.
Surely it is not hard to work out what ESPN’s problems are. Sports are watched by people who voted for Trump. ESPN is run by, and employs as on-screen talent, people who think Hillary was too right wing.
Berating your customers as racist troglodytes is rarely a winning strategy.
They should engrave the name “Kaepernick” on ESPN’s tombstone.
While the behavior of ESPN’s talent and editorial staff likely did not help, I think this is mostly a story about technological change.
” It is looking to maintain profit margins by cutting staff, trimming production costs and shoring up its management team. But the growth has slowed, forcing the company to make tough decisions.”
An imaginative response to falling profit margins and slower growth, cutting edge thinking.
It is not a coincidence that the point of financial inflection was the Kapernick story. My perception is that sports got a lot more political right at that point, as did the beginning of the ratings decline.
So NFL fans become disenchanted with America’s sports obsession because a journeyman player has a societal opinion, not a political one, and then refuse to watch games in which he doesn’t play. Makes the love affair with football look pretty superficial.
There isn’t much actual football on ESPN. So someone who likes football and hates ESPN really wouldn’t have that hard of a time cutting out ESPN.
You are a remarkable belligerent person for someone with such little command of basic facts.
I find the commentators vacuous and annoying. I don’t subscribe to espn, but watching clips from that network are like reading page 26 New York Times articles. Fools blathering on about things they don’t have a clue about.
What is really annoying is these sports channels where turning off the sound isn’t an option since they don’t bother showing any actual sports.
The article clearly says the subscription and distribution declines started in 2011, good work by the right leaning audience to anticipate Kaep’s protest by 5 years. It’s hard for me to believe there are 50 something conservatives going to the Hulu instead of just changing the channel to Fox sports. As long as they don’t cancel their packages ESPN still gets their money either way.
ESPN loathes itself and its audience. At some point producing sporting events and SportsCenter got boring to the people who run it. This is why ESPN is always trying to convince you that you should be watching European soccer leagues instead of the NFL. “If you must watch sports, at least watch something classy,”
From my point of view, ESPN has had a big hand in making sports boring by overhyping every free throw or strikeout.
Every game is the most important ever, every play a highlight, everything that happens draws hyperventilating comments. If a player or coach says something that is not right out of the Dictionary of Sports Cliches it is immediately “controversial.”
Stop it! I know I’m in the minority, but sometimes a game is just a game. Sports can be interesting to watch even if the future of the universe does not depend on the outcome.
#4…Finally, a drone that makes sense to me.
#6 I think it’s a stretch to assume pre-ACA there were no differences between the states that would opt for expansion and those that wouldn’t. Even if this isn’t, though, is this result able to be replicated? I doubt it. In the amber of the data you’ve captured a behavior doctors had right around the time of the ACA….the belief that newer pain drugs could be ‘addiction proof’. More access to doctors means you have more access to doctor’s mistakes. As they say 50% of advertising spend doesn’t work, some portion of medical intervention is wrong too…we just don’t know which.
It seems insane to argue that on net Medicaid provides no benefit. Sometimes I wonder though. My personal thought experiment is this:
What if you got rid of every Dr. and Hospital. And then everyone in the US gave up smoking, drinking, found themselves at a reasonable weight, and got 30 minutes of exercise a day. If you want to be extra political you could add – got rid of their car and firearms.
You think we’d be better off or worse?
The only qualifier I might add to that is Vaccinations – that might makes me think we might be worse for the scenario. Antibiotics is a bit more marginal. My only thought in this is that Public Health is a) much more important then anything that involves a Dr and b) really hard to pull off.
Is this an argument against Medicaid expansion or simply a data point? Fact is no serious person would say a few more opiod deaths per 100,000 people is an argument against health coverage. Anyone who does argue that should show me one right wing think tank where the employees declined coverage because they are afraid they might become addicted to opiods and overdose.
Murray as usual cherry picks his data.
Opiate overdoses in New Hampshire have increased at the same rates as Massachusetts, neither of which are “Medicaid expansion States”.
Massachusetts had already expanded coverage since 2006, so implementation of ACA did not expand insurance coverage in any significant way, but only shifted funding sources and allowed lower State taxes.
New Hampshire has not expanded Medicaid, but got waivers to get more Medicaid money to pay to private managed care by insurers for some previous Medicaid government single payer. More were covered in this program, but under old Medicaid rules, not the ACA rules. This was done the same way Massachusetts implemented Romneycare for the poor who fit under Medicaid for 2007 to 2011.
Massachusetts has a high rate, but not as high as New Hampshire, but both have seen the same high rate increase rate, long after Massachusetts provided coverage to the same group covered by Medicaid expansion, while New Hampshire has not covered those people.
The biggest driver of the ODs is the programs to control prescription drug “diversions”. Ie, State databases make it hard get prescriptions from many doctors or many from one doctor and then fill them at multiple drug stores. Thus the only source is criminals where the quality varies, not the global legal drug pushers.
Once again, Brazil is an economic marvel. I say, Brasilia and the Pantanal are organic marvels. Brazil will one day and once again become Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Sega Genesis.
MSGKINGS@ b carefuly lil bro, you don’t know nothing about hash tags. Twenty four hour news coverage is artificial intelligence.
In “Dream Land,” Sam Quinones makes opioid addiction sound crushing for 200 pages but then suggests it is a supply problem, that folks could function on opiates forever if only the methadone clinics would stay open all night and supply higher doses.
I doubt this would help much, it’s not hard to OD on opiates especially mixed with alcohol. Addicts need more and more to feel the same rush, and that’s a problem.
#2 I’d be interested in what Holtz-Eakin is smoking when he comes up with an article title like, “The Senate health-care bill **will give us better care** and a better economy”
In fact, Holtz-Eakin literally at no point in the article ever justifies this claim, or talks about health outcomes. I guess that was for people who only read headlines and never the actual text? But of course he has to know it was a lie to begin with; he spends most of the article praising the ‘reforms’ and lower spending on healthcare to the tune of billions of dollars, so absent the bill making healthcare spending significantly more efficient, that would have to imply worse health outcomes.
Re: David Brooks, I’m just wondering at what point he’s going to realize he’s a Democrat.
“Re: David Brooks, I’m just wondering at what point he’s going to realize he’s a Democrat.”
That would require a level of self-awareness I’m not sure he can attain. He taught a class in humility and apparently it wasn’t some kind of Andy Kaufmanesque prank.
That would require a level of self-awareness I’m not sure he can attain.
I agree. I wonder at what point in his criticism of Republicans he is going to say, “You know, I have some responsibility for that.”
Jus to because the right wing has changed the Republican party into a party not even Reagan would recognize does not make Brooks or Reagan Democrats because they are booted out of the Republican party by the right.
The right wing and McConnell did not make Arlen Specter a lifelong Democrat, rewriting decades of history when Democrats sought his defeat. His illness and death were not the reason he never got the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat he had filled for 3 terms. He was not seen by Democrats as a Democrat just because he was forced out of the Republican Caucus by McConnell.
People voluntarily left the Democratic Party because Democrats became too big tent. Many fled to the Republican party because Democrats gave blacks the same rights as whites, not because Democrats booted out racists.
But Republicans booted people out of the party, a lot of people. They first called them RINOs, then went to war to exterminate RINOs.
But a lot of people ended up with no party affiliation. Ie, union racists were not welcome in the anti-union Republican Party. But they could not stand Democrats forcing unions to admit blacks, so they left the Democratic party with no place to go.
He’s gone evangelical Christian, evidently, and that seems incompatible with anything other than radicalism.
#1. Modern cars are required to have a form of pedestrian catchers in the form of crumple space between the hood and the engine to absorb the impact. This is one of the reasons cars are taller than they used to be. Some cars have an active version that instantly raises the hood in case of pedestrian impact:
http://www.businessinsider.com/jaguar-f-type-pyrotechnic-hood-to-protect-pedestrians-2013-8
#1 – Buses already catch pedestrians safely, as proved this week in the UK :
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/27/i-get-knocked-down-man-hit-by-bus-gets-back-up-again-and-heads-to-pub
5. That’s what I’ve been saying! Why isn’t anyone curious about why the opiod crisis happened, why it just came out of nowhere? It was the Medicaid expansion that did it, specifically when they added single disabled males to the rolls. They’re getting their opiods for the $3 co-pay and selling them.
Yep. A great way to “expand Medicaid” is for that program to spend more to help create a problem and then spend more to help alleviate that same problem. It is a virtuous circle of expansion!
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2017/04/11/medicaid-responds-to-the-opioid-epidemic-regulating-prescribing-and-finding-ways-to-expand-treatment-access/
“States are tailoring their efforts to expand substance use disorder benefits ”
BUT, is there any such program that treats opiate abuse with a long-term success rate that is not dismal? These programs are costly, and seldom effective except for highly motivated individuals.
A partial solution might be to screen treatment candidates for that all-important motivation, yet there are no incentives for treatment providers to do so (and probably little political will to direct benefits toward treatment providers who can and do achieve good long-term results).
Practically everyone, it seems, wants to believe in treatment as a valuable and necessary solution, when much of it is both costly and of little value. Except to those who provide it, of course.
If we’re looking for jobs for people, have delivery vans that go around and give people their morning opiods and observe them be consumed.
If you are concerned about hijacking, limit their supply or make them armored cars.
After I finished “Dream Land,” which was very interesting by the way – although I was surprised the author mentioned in the first few pages that the wife of the inventor of the hypodermic needle was the first to die of a morphine overdose, as wikipedia calls this a “myth” – I found a Theodore Dalrymple piece on opiates. Dalrymple I believe is a physician in England, serving prisoners? For what it’s worth, he stated flatly that going cold turkey off opiates is unpleasant but not much worse than any other drug. The idea that the habit needed to be maintained at state expense, he felt, was owing to the unusually convincing histrionics of the users.
The opioid crisis has been building since the late ’90’s. It started getting attention around the time Obamacare passed, but there is no causation.
There appears to be no room in your all-or-nothing world of cause and effect between “no causation” (your characterisation”) and “helping to create a problem” (my words, but let’s call this a “contributing factor”, shall we?). And, I’m sure that Medicaid (and Medicare) were contributing to the problem prior to the Medicaid expansion due to the over-prescription of opoids to populations most vulnerable to addiction and misuse while trying to take credit for treatment programs with no corresponding responsiblilty for helping create the problem. It should cause you pause when reports come in that about 25 percent of Medicaid patients are prescribed opioids and that an alarming percentage of those have markers of abuse:
http://www.ajpb.com/news/medicaid-patients-hit-hard-by-opioid-epidemic
I was (attempting to?) respond to the Engineer, whose post does not leave room for subtlety (“It was the Medicaid expansion that did it.”
As I said, the assertion that the Medicaid expansion created the opioid crisis is false.
New Hampshire did not expand Medicaid.
Massachusetts had already covered the poor that fell under Medicaid expansion before ACA and had already implemented anti “drug diversion” programs, including a State registry of all prescriptions filled for controlled drugs before ACA went into effect.
Both New Hampshire and Massachusetts have both high rates of opiate ODS, and high increases in rates since California greatly and aggressively expanded Medicaid under ACA, a State with both low rates of ODs and no increase.
New Hampshire and Massachusetts lack the massive number of “Mexican drug dealers and racists” which have fueled the huge California ag economy. The “Mexicans” in New England are more likely to be from Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines (lots of medical personnel).
“ESPN’s subscriber base, which was more than 96 million homes at the time.”
This is a problem I have with a lot of business stories. Not all units are the ones the writer is familiar with. I am sure not all of ESPN’s 96 million subscribers are homes. I am sure a percentage are bars. And the only reason those bars subscribe to cable is being able to air content such as NBA games.
That percentage might be less than 10 percent, but I would be interested in how much it factored into the decision to renew the contract. The 3 million subscribers they have lost were probably going to be lost anyway. The number might have been greater if they lost those commercial outlets.
#5. His cited trend starts prior to states expanding Medicaid. Furthermore, one should be cautious about accepting any statistical or scientific work before kicking the tires well.
Plus he ignored the fact many Medicaid expansion States have no “crisis” while non-Medicaid expansion States have a “crisis”.
Classic conservative make a theory then cherry pick data to back up the theory.
Ie, paying for the medical treatment the poor gets does not immediately improve their health, but only gets the bill collectors offor their backs, so doctors and hospitals should not be paid, like they weren’t before, and bill collectors should return to harassing the poor and the government should return to bailing out hospitals to keep them from going bankrupt from unpaid medical bills, because bankrupting hospitals does not harm anyone’s health.
No one ever discusses EMTALA as a policy for tax and spending cuts without harming the health of the poor, in the short run.
5. I think if you want to cinch “ACA bad” you have to show that “ACA doctors” prescribed opiates more than others. This seems unlikely to me, and an unlikely path to remediation.
More likely all doctors were too free with prescriptions, and that is what should be addressed.
(Note that the real libertarian position is “who cares, opiates for everyone!)
“More likely all doctors were too free with prescriptions, and that is what should be addressed.”
Along with antibiotics and handicap placards.
Those too. A friend of a friend showed up for a backpacking trip. The guy took one of the handicapped spots, hung his placard, and the hiked ten miles carrying 30 pounds.
For some reason we treat doctors as impartial and ethical gatekeepers, when in reality they are just trying to get through the day like everybody else. Like most people, most doctors won’t do active bad, but if they can cut some corners and can blame any problem on some other actor with agency, yeah, don’t count on millions of them to avoid that temptation.
This is also a good argument against “consumer-driven health care.” What people want from their doctors isn’t always what they should have. Even those without addictions and noble intentions can want a bunch of things that end up hurting them.
“(Note that the real libertarian position is “who cares, opiates for everyone!)”
The real Libertarian position is “We don’t care if you take opiates, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else and you pay for the drugs yourself.”
Sure, and if Doctor John prescribes Doctor John’s Famous Painkiller what does the state care what’s in it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Food_and_Drug_Act
1906 was a bad year for libertarians
I predicted last week that both sides would find tings to cherry pick from the Gawande et al article in the NEJM. I’m only slightly surprised to see that Gawande is one of them.
1. Government intervention can be beneficial.
2. Sigh.
3. Cord cutters, competition, and an outdated business model. I do not miss cable TV.
4. The ACA is being used as a whipping boy. In 50 years some will blame it for the rise in cancer rates because it paid for more X-rays. The culpabilty for this crisis dates back to the 1990s. The trendline for opioid prescriptions is clear.
The pharmaceutical companies touted less addictive products. Many doctors and nurse practitioners prescribed hydrocodone like candy. Pain clinics popped up everywhere. Pharmacies were ill-equipped to deal with pharmacy hoppers, fraudulent prescribing, and their responsibility to question their role. Government and the medical community was blind. In the meantime, small towns were declining, jobs were being outsourced, and family structures were disintegrating. And then the ACA allowed more people to access health care.
We are all to blame. So now can we have a meaningful discussion about solutions?
6. Changes in projected enrollment patterns are unpredictable. State budgets are in the toilet with their adherence to the balanced budget. In the coming years states will have to balance pensioners, low tax cult leaders, and the indigent. Wonder who will yet the axe?
Irresponsible is planning for the best and getting the worst. We are tinkering with the safety net after all.
“small towns were declining, jobs were being outsourced, and family structures were disintegrating.”
New Hampshire has the second highest opiate death rate in the US: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-06-28/why-new-hampshire-has-one-of-the-highest-rates-of-opioid-related-deaths
Pretty good economy in NH. These epidemics come and go look more like viruses than caused by despair.
#5 It could for a number of reasons be that the current western healthcare is not good for those at the low end of diligence, IQ, conscientiousness scales. MD’s often do not explain enough. Protocols are sometimes too complicated and require too much attention, opiates are too tempting etc.
Could explain why the more educated (a good measure of the above traits) are getting healthier faster than the less educated and why the health/income gradient is greater in Canada than the US.http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/09/scream-this-fro.html and why Medicaid does not seem to improve health.
Capitalism is great at giving people what they want. It might be the greatest invention ever in terms of giving people what they want.
But what people want isn’t always good for them.
. . .which is why they deserve to get it, good and hard.
A better response for #2:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/feberalism-is-dead-long-live-federalism/531933/
I ❤ that URL. Feberalism!
I prefer covfefederalism. I know, so two weeks ago.
#5.
Valuable thread? Some tweets and counter tweets – not much insight.
#2. I really wish David Brooks would stop pretending to be a conservative.
But he does ask a key question. Should Trumpcare benefit Trump voters, or should they take one for the team (*)?
* – leading to the question of what team, exactly?
Millenials got hosed with the ACA so why not?
Millenials (i.e. the young and healthy) voted for Obama and then ended up with jacked up insurance premiums.
I have never met a millennial in real life who said “I hate having medical insurance,” though in the old days I did know a few who had to call their parents with monster medical bills. Hit by drunk drivers, extreme sports mishaps, cancer too young.
But medical insurance was cheaper for them pre-ACA. Of course, without the penaltax, perhaps nobody was making them buy it, so they didn’t. But the ACA made it more expensive for the young and healthy, not cheaper. In fact, that was advertised as a feature — we’ll make the pool sustainable by bringing in them in. Well, that can’t stabilize anything unless they’re paying far more for insurance than the actuarial cost.
This really fails to answer the question of why Trump voters shouldn’t “take one for the team”.
It’s not like anyone really votes their self-interest, or votes for a coherent political philosophy. They’re just voting for their tribe, which is defined by being against the other tribe. So as long as the Republicans stay consistently anti-Democrat, I think Trump voters will be happy.
#1. Cars today are so ridiculously over-engineered that such a thing is obviously now pointless. They’re way too fast and powerful to be on city streets. Maybe if they had maintained the same profile as their horseless carriage predecessors pedestrians wouldn’t be so imperiled.
Instead of trying to make entirely autonomous cars, why not have a stepping stone where people were still in command of the vehicle enough to make the truly hard decisions, but vehicle itself is severely limited in terms to top speed and acceleration?
#2 – Welcome to the alt-right, Mr. Brooks. Do come in. And thank you for including my favorite de Tocqueville quote.
Democratic politicians tell their voters here’s what we can do for you. Republican politicians tell their voters here’s what you need to do for us: enlist in our military and fight our foreign wars; donate to our think tanks; support our globalism which puts you in competition with the global wealthy for housing and the global poor for wages.
We’ve socialized medicine for the poor, the elderly, the veterans, the federal legislators, and the millions of municipal, state, and federal government employees. We provide foreign countries with billions of dollars in foreign aid and military protection. We have layers and layers of redundant bureaucracy from the local to the federal level. There is undoubtedly enough fat to trim and change in the sofa cushions to fund comprehensive medical insurance, as is the norm in the developed and developing world.
And look what follows from this: sensible immigration policy, like Canada’s points system–we can’t afford net consumers; people are no longer shackled to jobs for fear of losing medical coverage; moms can choose to stay home or work part-time, lowering the costs of family formation, which is how you grow conservatives; some sense of priority to US budgets and national cohesion–we take care of our own first.
The Republicans are in thrall to their donor class, even after Trump came along and showed them you don’t need donor dollars to win, you need the flyover votes.
The Republicans are in thrall to their donor class, even after Trump came along and showed them you don’t need donor dollars to win, you need the flyover votes.
I suspect the problem is that they’re largely a collection of indifferent lawyers and ordinary real estate agents who don’t what to do unless some outside authority tells them. It would be better if they listened to a scholar from Hoover or AEI or Heritage, but Eric Hanushek doesn’t cut checks and Donohue of the Chamber of Commerce does.
Republicans bought into free lunch economics. The more you cut costs of the masses, the more the rich can extract from the masses.
If you cut, or hold constant, the total labor costs of the masses, you can get 20% more from the masses instead of only 10% more from the masses by paying them 10% more.
If you slash food stamps, Walmart will sell lots more food to its working poor customer who formerly used their food stamps at Walmart. When Walmart reported it’s sales were suffering from loss of SNAP benefits, it was all just fake news from Walmart bean counters.
Welcome to the alt-right, Mr. Brooks. Do come in.
Now please take one of out informative pamphlets about the genetic inferiority of brown people.
LOL. As if libertarianism isn’t whiter than Augusta National.
6. Would Bouhouse agree with “x is unsustainable” if the chart were changed to show projected 2017-2027 for global population, CO2 concentration, gdp, global aggregate labor costs, all of which would show steady upward increases of the same relative magnitude?
More important, he is confusing how much is paid for in planned spending, not the actual costs incurred paid for by shifting the costs somewhat arbitrarily to other in higher prices charged insurer, charged wealthy people who pay bills,, paid by bankruptcy judges giving the money of those with money to the people who got medical care they could not pay for.
Not paying to fix roads and bridges or houses (new roofs) does not mean the costs of nature in entropy from wear and time have been stopped.
Not paying for medical care that must be provided under Federal law, EMTALA, no matter the ability to pay, does not make medical care free, ie, no cost.
Saying “The elderly and the disabled who were eligible for Medicaid prior to the ACA would remain eligible after its proposed repeal.” Will not stop people from becoming elderly and disabled in the future. The number of people with no assets unable to care for themselves is growing faster than the number dying, AND FASTER THAN THE POPULATION, GDP, etc.
And taking no action to prevent the increases by not treating diabetes, hypertension, etc until stroke, heart problems, blindness,, etc render people disabled or elderly and without means to care for themselves is not going to do anything to stop the increases.
Since ACA took effect, getting SSDI to qualify for Medicare before age 65 has not been required, so the number on the SSDI roles has not increased. New disabilities match the number aging out of under 65. With chronic health problems controlled, thanks to Medicaid expansion, older adults can work reliably enough to hold jobs.
Thank you for pointing me to Atlas Obscura! What a treasure trove of ideas!