▪️Anyone with a brain should have known that there was probably more to the viral “they’ll stop paying for your anesthesia” memes. It turns out that the left, in their recent demonic rush to defend the murdering of insurance execs, parroted an advocacy group for members who make over $400k/yr over attempts to reign in surprise billing and bring it in line with current Medicare practices.
▪️Anesthesia is among the specialties with the highest proportion of “surprise billing” complaints because patients usually do not choose an anesthesiologist. Attempts to reign in this phenomenon have led to lower costs, particularly lower out-of-network costs.
▪️Because of the collective freakout over this on social media, Blue Cross backed off this, which the left is treating as a victory. And in their next breath will continue to complain about things like surprise billing.
🔹Here are the sources for the community note:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2782816
https://www.cms.gov/files/document/chapter2cptcodes00000-01999final11.pdf
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
...
▪️I was playing around with the new Grokipedia and it already seems much better than Wikipedia (which admittedly isn’t saying much). I was looking for a topic that is politically polarizing that I also knew a lot about, so used “Kenosha unrest shooting” to compare the two.
▪️A key component to the shooting was understanding the broader context behind the Kenosha riots and who Kyle Rittenhouse ended up shooting. Wikipedia simply says that Jacob Blake was shot by police and was paralyzed, thus unrest. Grokipedia gives a much more in-depth account so the reader can see that Blake was a serial criminal with a warrant who had a knife and was resisting arrest while fleeing with children in his car.
▪️When it comes to those who were shot, Wikipedia just gives the names and ages. Grokipedia goes in-depth on each person and about their violent criminal history and mental instability that night.
▪️Part of the left wing mythology over Rittenhouse was removing the context and ...
