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HN thread

Context is Zip Comics #5, page 57

Transcript:

Mr. Satan: This is their game. They printed queer money and travelled up and down the river distributing it! When we butted in on them, we just had to be rubbed out!

State Sen. Justin Eichorn, R-Grand Rapids, was arrested in Bloomington on suspicion of soliciting a minor for sex.

Bloomington Police led Eichorn, 40, to believe he was talking to a 16-year old girl and then met the senator and arrested him Monday near the 8300 block of Normandale Avenue, according to a Bloomington Police Department press release.

Senate Republicans have called for Eichorn’s resignation.

“We are shocked by these reports and this alleged conduct demands an immediate resignation. Justin has a difficult road ahead and he needs to focus on his family,” Senate Republicans said in a statement Tuesday afternoon.

Police say they saw Eichorn arriving in the area by pick-up truck and arrested him without incident outside his vehicle.

Eichorn was booked into the Bloomington Police Department jail and will be transported to the Hennepin County Adult Detention Center, the release said. Felony charges of soliciting a minor to practice prostitution are pending, Bloomington police said.

“As a 40-year-old man, if you come … looking to have sex with someone’s child, you can expect that we are going to lock you up,” Bloomington Police Chief Booker Hodges said in the release. “I have always advocated stiffer penalties for these types of offenses … We need our state Legislature to take this case and this type of conduct more seriously.”

Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, in a statement, said the allegation against Eichorn is “deeply disturbing.”

“The felony allegation against Sen. Eichorn is deeply disturbing, and raises serious questions that will need to be answered by the court, as well as his caucus and constituents.”

Eichorn’s arrest complicates efforts by Senate Republicans to expel DFL Sen. Nicole Mitchell from the upper chamber, following her arrest last year after she was alleged to have burglarized her stepmother’s home.

Although some Democrats — including Gov. Tim Walz and some of Mitchell’s colleagues — have called on Mitchell to resign, the ethics case against her has been blocked by Democrats, who say expulsion should only come after she’s received due process in the courts. Her trial is scheduled for after the session.

Republicans have said she’s brought dishonor to the institution and should be immediately expelled, even before a criminal trial.

During debate about a motion to expel Mitchell, Sen. Jordan Rasmusson, R-Fergus Falls, said doing so would restore integrity to the Senate.

“We don’t need the results of a criminal trial to know Sen. Mitchell’s conduct fails to meet the standards of ethical behavior that we expect from senators,” Rasmusson said in January.

That argument presumably now applies to Eichorn, as well.

In February, Eichorn reposted an article on Facebook about attempts to expel Mitchell, saying that the “growing scandal keeps pulling focus from the Legislature’s important work. We need to end the disruption and let voters choose a new senator.”

In 2021 he objected to a bill requiring Minnesota schools to teach about sexual orientations and gender identities, saying “before you know it, they’ll be reading kids ‘50 Shades of Grey.’ This discussion is better had at a more mature age.”

Eichorn was first elected to the Minnesota Senate in 2016 and works at his family’s outdoor store in Grand Rapids.

Eichorn also co-authored a bill to classify “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness.

Sociopaths Misappropriate Hit Song From MN

Setting aside its singular devotion to the financial interests of the 1%, fetish for deregulation that threatens our workers and planet, and obsession with stripping rights from trans people, the MAGA movement, tonally, is really fucking mean. Case in point: This official White House video posted Monday to Instagram, in which we see footage of handcuffed young men being rounded up like dogs by Border Patrol as—Jesus Christ how is this real...—"Closing Time" by Semisonic plays, mockingly.

As you'd expect, the Minneapolis band behind the 1998 pop-rock hit isn't cool with being used for sadistic far-right propaganda. Through their publicist, Semisonic wasted no time issuing the following statement earlier today...

We did not authorize or condone the White House’s use of our song in any way. And no, they didn’t ask. The song is about joy and possibilities and hope, and they have missed the point entirely.

What is "Closing Time" about, specifically? Frontman Dan Wilson told Billboard in 2018 that it's inspired by the birth of his daughter, Coco.

The guys wanted a new song to close our sets with. I thought "Closing Time" would be a good title. We had spent seven years of our lives at that point, four nights a week entertaining people. That was our life. Some bouncers yelling things, closing time coming, all that imagery, literally, that’s how the song started and then when I was halfway done, I started realizing the whole thing was a pun about being born, so I just made sure that the rest of the thing could ride with that double meaning, but nobody got the joke and I didn’t bother to explain. I thought everyone would get it.

Or, to quote the top-voted comment from 24 years ago on mostly defunct lyrics website SongMeanings: "It means its closing time so get the hell out."

Semisonic join a long list of artists who've unwillingly soundtracked Trump shit, including Céline Dion ("My Heart Will Go On"???), Rihanna, Adele, Steven Tyler, and Neil Young.

Let's Hear From 3 Locally Based Ex-Federal Workers

Shoutout to Max Nesterak at the Minnesota Reformer for banging the actually, federal workers matter drum. In this great piece, he speaks to three ex-employees of the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), the General Services Administration (GSA), and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), all of whom had their lives upended by an unelected, deeply unlikable, ketamine-zooted freak who invented DOGE to gut the federal government. These unemployed Minnesotans are among the 60,000 government workers who've recently been cleaved from 17 different agencies, according to one estimate.

“I know it’s not personal, but it just feels personal,” says Iceley Andaya, an Air Force vet, who lost her job at the VBA.

“They’re talking about building smarter, better software and government (but) my skill set wasn’t even taken in consideration when it was time to fire people,” says Nina Sawyer, who lost her job at GSA. “They’re just going in with a hammer and breaking things.”

“The grant money that is made available to a city or a county is not going to go as far because now they’re going to have to hire me as a private consultant who can charge more for the work compared to someone who is a federal employee,” says Katie Haun Schuring, who lost her job with FRA.

Food Hall Trend Finally Reaching Richfield?

Hey, how about some non-depressing news? (Don't worry: We'll return to the pulling-out-your-hair beat in a sec.) The food hall craze of the past decade has yielded mixed results locally, and now one suburban holdout might give the concept a whirl. Last week Tim Naumann, co-owner of Plymouth's Luce Line Brewing, presented Richfieldians with his plans for a 7,500-square-foot food hall at 64th & Lyndale—aka vacant land just north of Lakewinds Food Co-op.

The proposed site is currently owned by Richfield-based Cornerstone Group, whose 10-acre Lyndale Garden Center development spree has reimagined much of that area; the city's Housing and Redevelopment Authority is offering Luce Line $750,000 to boost the project, which is estimated to cost $4.9 million. The food hall would feature three vendor stalls and Luce Line brews, J.D. Duggan at the MSP Biz Journal reports.

“It’s percolating. It’s moving along nicely,” Naumann tells Duggan, while stressing that plans are preliminary at the moment. “Generally, there’s a lot of support for this,” adds Melissa Poehlman, Richfield Director of Community Development.

Punishingly Stupid "Trump Derangement Syndrome" Bill Introduced

We'll keep this mercifully brief. On Monday at the Minnesota Capitol, five Republican senators—Eric Lucero of St. Michael, Steve Drazkowski of Mazeppa, Nathan Wesenberg of Little Falls, Justin Eichorn of Grand Rapids, and Glenn Gruenhagen of Glencoe, all of them hopeless and charmless dumbasses—introduced a bill that would classify “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness.

Ha, ha, ha! Way to seize on that MAGA mandate to help the lives of your constituents, you grievance-pilled, sore-winning dullards. “This is possibly the worst bill in Minnesota history,” DFL Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy says in a statement. She goes on to talk about how the trolling bill trivializes actual mental illnesses, but honestly could have full-stopped with the quote above. “Members are free to do as they wish” counters Republican Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson.

No House version of the bill exists at press time, and Sen. Melissa Wiklund (DFL-Bloomington) has vowed to let the Senate one die without a committee hearing.

Buy for a dollar and sell for two.

It’s the middleman’s credo, and lucrative — but not for the taxpayers getting fleeced.

America’s byzantine health system is beset with parasitic middlemen like pharmacy benefit managers and third party administrators, a key reason why it costs so much more per person than anywhere else in the world despite delivering mediocre results. Even in a supposedly public program like Medicaid — the federal/state partnership that provides care to low income and disabled Minnesotans — state government contracts with managed care organizations to actually administer it.

The Minnesota Legislature is staring at a gloomy, stormy fiscal horizon that includes structural budget deficits and the risk of a massive cut in federal Medicaid funding.

But there’s also a safe harbor in sight, if lawmakers can muster up the courage to cut out the middlemen.

Minnesota just has to follow Connecticut’s lead. In 2012, Connecticut was able to save on their Medicaid program by cutting out the unproductive managed care organization middlemen they had contracted with since the 1990s to run it. They were simultaneously able to ensure the cuts didn’t harm quality of care — in fact, they were able to improve quality — by prioritizing care coordination and accessibility in their new and more efficient MCO-free system.

In Minnesota, by contrast, MCOs to this day have the authority to set provider networks, limit patients to those networks, regulate how services can be delivered, require prior authorizations and other bureaucratic hurdles to receiving certain services, and set their own payment rates. In other words, they can do almost anything they want, especially when patients don’t feel confident enough to appeal denials.

The federal government claims MCO administration should “manage cost, utilization, and quality” in order to “reduce Medicaid program costs and better manage utilization of health services” as well as improve “health plan performance, health care quality, and outcomes.” Whether that’s actually true is both doubtful and unproven. For example, Medicaid MCOs nationwide deny over twice as many claims as privately-administered Medicare Advantage plans, which are themselves known for imposing incredibly onerous and expensive burdens on patients compared to publicly-administered traditional Medicare.

When Connecticut removed its Medicaid MCOs, the result was incredible. By 2023, Connecticut’s Department of Social Services reported that the state had reduced Medicaid administrative expenses to 2.75% of spending. Unfortunately, Minnesota still throws away money contracting out Medicaid. According to consulting firm Milliman, Minnesota’s administrative expenses were at 12.5% in 2023.

The benefits extend well beyond just a mere reduction in administrative costs.

When Connecticut cut out the Medicaid MCO middlemen, it was also able to do more to coordinate care for those on Medicaid. For example, by developing a special type of primary care clinic called the Patient Centered Medical Home, Connecticut Medicaid can better connect beneficiaries who frequently show up in the emergency room with the services they need to prevent expensive future emergencies. Efforts like these can generate even more savings, but are difficult to implement without first getting rid of the Medicaid middlemen because those middlemen tend to view necessary data about their enrollees as a trade secret.

Regardless, collecting and combining the differently formatted data from each one in order to gain useful insights for care coordination would be a statistician’s nightmare even if we make the big assumption that MCOs are willing to share their data and that combining it all is technically possible.

Estimating the precise savings from improved care coordination and reduced administrative costs is complicated, but we can make broad judgments by comparing Medicaid spending per beneficiary in Minnesota and Connecticut. To be sure, this is a simplification because the two states’ Medicaid programs differ in what they cover and the precise payment rates they use for specific services, but these differences are likely minor in the aggregate. Both Connecticut and Minnesota have been historically run by Democratic-leaning governments that tend to provide comprehensive benefits packages without creating onerous eligibility rules.

Doing that calculation, if Minnesota spent what Connecticut did on Medicaid per beneficiary, the state would have saved about $1.5 billion in 2024. The federal government would have saved about $2.6 billion, too. If MCOs save significant money, as is often claimed, such an extreme result shouldn’t be possible.

At the very least, $1.5 billion in savings would substantially reduce the state budget shock that would occur should Republicans in Congress follow through with their ongoing proposals to pass massive cuts to federal Medicaid funding. Former Rep. Jennifer Schultz, a health economist, recently estimated those cuts would cost Minnesota $2 billion.

It’s important to remember that federal Medicaid cuts don’t necessarily eliminate spending. They just pass the shirked expenses onto the states. State legislatures that must then decide whether to fill the gap with state tax dollars or actually cut health care for low income and disabled people. Our state Constitution requires that the state have a balanced budget, and meeting that requirement without cutting program benefits and eligibility — If Congress follows through on cuts to Medicaid funding — will be a fiscal nightmare if we do nothing about wasteful Medicaid MCO administrative costs.

This legislative session, Minnesota has divided control of government, requiring bipartisan cooperation.

Republicans might be willing to cut Medicaid spending to balance the state budget, but Democrats will definitely be hesitant to do so unless program benefits and eligibility can be protected.

The Connecticut model is a win-win for both. Cutting out the Medicaid middlemen is a great opportunity for both parties. They can fulfill their promises of bipartisan cooperation, reduce future budget deficits, and improve the quality of our Medicaid program, which funds crucial health care services for some of our state’s most vulnerable residents.

The legislation (SF1059/HF255) is ready to roll, but the clock is quickly ticking toward May 19.

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Author comment:

Jordan says I’m not allowed energy drinks anymore.

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