Background on CMS’s Anti-Fraud Efforts in Hospice Care
On May 13, CMS announced a six‑month nationwide moratorium on enrolling new hospice providers, mirroring a similar pause for home‑health agencies. The move responds to a 35 % surge in hospice agencies since 2019, driven largely by for‑profit operators concentrated in four states. Medicare spent roughly $1.1 trillion in 2024, with hospice accounting for only 2.6 % of total outlays, yet per‑diem rates remain high at $261 for the first 60 days and $182 thereafter. CMS warns that lax entry barriers enable fraudulent firms to enroll patients without delivering adequate palliative care.
Does Our Spectrum System Need to Be Revamped?
Thomas Hazlett, former FCC chief economist, argues that the United States’ century‑old spectrum allocation system is outpaced by today’s wireless economy. He highlights the FCC’s lingering command‑and‑control approach, which creates costly delays and political bargaining over airwave rights. Hazlett champions...
Google’s AI Pivot Has a Lesson for Anti-Trust Enthusiasts
Google announced its most extensive search redesign, swapping keyword‑guessing for conversational AI queries and embedding autonomous agents that can, for example, track concert announcements for users. The move reflects Alphabet’s strategy to become an AI company rather than merely defend...
Fowler and Cannon Get It Right—And That’s the Easy Part
Economists Elizabeth Fowler and Michael Cannon argue that the tax exclusion for employer‑provided health insurance is the primary driver of rising U.S. health‑care spending. The exclusion foregoes about $478 billion in federal revenue this year and is projected to reach $749 billion...
Can a New Methodology Give Us “Headlights” On AI Work Disruption?
A new working paper by Philip Moreira Tomei and Bouke Klein Teeselink introduces a reinforcement‑learning feasibility index that rates all 17,951 task statements in the federal O*NET database. The authors argue that existing AI exposure metrics, such as the Eloundou...
The Jones Act Waiver Two Months In: What It Tells Us About the Costs of Unnecessary Regulation
The Trump administration granted a 150‑day Jones Act waiver in March 2026, the longest since 1950, allowing foreign‑flagged vessels to transport over 650 product categories between U.S. ports. Early data show foreign ships added capacity, moving 1.9 million barrels of energy...
To Buy Right, Pay for Performance Must Get Real About What It Measures
Pay‑for‑performance was introduced after the Institute of Medicine’s *To Err Is Human* report, promising that linking reimbursement to quality would curb waste and improve outcomes. In practice, the system has become a compliance exercise, rewarding documentation rather than real patient...
Brewing Government Bond Market Crises
The article warns that the United States, major European economies and Japan are on unsustainable fiscal paths that could trigger sovereign bond market crises. In the U.S., deficits are projected to exceed six percent of GDP—over $2 trillion a year—and foreign...
Internet Resilience and Workers’ Plights
On May 1, One NZ – New Zealand’s second‑largest ISP with roughly 20‑24% market share – suffered an eight‑to‑twelve‑hour outage that knocked out 4G, 5G, fiber, ADSL and roaming services for about one million customers, or one‑fifth of the population. The disruption...
A New AI Model Just Changed the Cybersecurity Game. Washington Wasn’t Ready.
In a 48‑hour swing, the White House floated then retracted an FDA‑style pre‑deployment vetting regime for frontier AI after Anthropic unveiled Mythos, a model that can locate and exploit software vulnerabilities. Mythos helped Mozilla fix more Firefox bugs in April...
White House AI Vetting Proposal Is Bad Policy
The White House is reportedly drafting an executive order that would subject generative AI models to a pre‑release government approval process, a sharp turn from its earlier pro‑innovation stance. The proposal was sparked by Anthropic’s decision to withhold its Mythos...
AlphaFold’s Surprising Revelation: AI Shifts Bottlenecks, Not Workers
AlphaFold’s Nobel‑winning protein‑fold predictions sparked fears that AI would replace structural biologists, echoing broader job‑pocalypse anxieties. A new NBER study finds experimental structure work and related publications stayed steady after the 2021 release of hundreds of thousands of AI‑generated models....
The Unbearable Lightness of Vibe Coding
Aditya Agarwal recounts how using Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant let him write more code in five days than in the previous five years, producing higher‑quality, more ambitious software. He describes a personal identity crisis that resolved into a “wild, reckless...
AI and the Treasury Debt Market
Two recent papers debate how artificial intelligence will reshape Treasury debt markets. Andrews and Farboodi find that after major AI model releases, long‑term Treasury and corporate yields fell 12 basis points, interpreting the move as market disappointment or relief. In...
Estimated Costs of Epic Fury and the Potential Supplemental Request
The American Enterprise Institute estimates Operation Epic Fury will cost between $26.5 billion and $36 billion, notably higher than the Pentagon Comptroller’s $25 billion figure presented to Congress. The discrepancy arises because the official number excludes special pay, deployment logistics, ship sustainment, and...