"Last year, Maine crossed a crucial aging milestone: A fifth of its population is older than 65, which meets World Bank definition of 'super-aged.' By 2026, Maine will be joined by more than 15 states, including VT, NH, MT, DE, WV, WI & PA, and more than a dozen more by 2030."
"Janet Flaherty got an alarming call last October from the agency tasked with coordinating in-home care for her 82-year-old mother. It could no longer send her mom’s home caretaker. It knew of no other aides who could care for her mother, either."
"Maine’s largest long-term-care provider, North Country Associates, has been forced to temporarily close admissions in each of its 26 nursing homes because of staffing shortages, sometimes for as long as several months, in an unprecedented change from a few years ago."
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
After Anthony Barksdale became deputy police commissioner in Baltimore, homicides plummeted, falling under 200/year for the first time in decades in 2011. Arrests fell sharply too, as the dep't targeted the most violent offenders.
He left the job for health reasons.
After Freddie Gray's death and ensuing unrest in 2015, homicides surged to over 300, year after year.
Barksdale returned as deputy mayor for public safety, in 2022. Homicides have since plummeted again, with 113 so far this year.
Correlation is not causation. But Tony Barksdale's impact in Baltimore is undeniable.
"At California’s Yosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms." And at other parks:
"As we emerge from our most restrictive covid precautions, the tables have turned: I find myself in a world in which many have become more introverted. And I hate it." Great column by @rebeccamakkai: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…
Key graf:
"I reconnected with a large group of friends at an outdoor restaurant...At the end of dinner, [two] announced that although they’d had a wonderful time, they wouldn’t make it to another planned gathering three weeks later; they needed at least a month to recover.
This is a v sharp Janan Ganesh column noting how similar Britain and France have come to be: same size, same hyper-dominant capital region, same post-imperial wistfulness. Some quotes follow. ft.com/content/beff18…
"Each nation has a monstrously dominant capital. Politics, media, finance and culture are concentrated in one city. No European nation of comparable size--not Spain, not Italy, not Germany--does that. Nor does the US, Australia or Canada..."
"...The result is two similarly distorted countries. Lots of democracies have angry hinterlands but in few is the populist rage so focused against one place...."
Hospitals are closing at disprortionately high rates in Mississippi and the other nine red states that have refused to accept Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, even though the fed gov't picks up 90 pct of the cost and has further sweetened the pot recently. nytimes.com/2023/03/28/us/…
"Expanding Medicaid would uncork $1.35 billion a year in federal funds to [Mississippi] hospitals and health care providers...And it would guarantee coverage to 100,000 uninsured adults making less than $20,120 in a state whose death rates are at or near the nation’s highest..."
Of the "close to two million other [uninsured] Americans who live in the states that have not expanded Medicaid, three in five are adults of color, according to a 2021 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities...In Mississippi, more than half are Black."
Wow. Boeing is arguing that it is not liable for victim suffering claims in Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash because "victims died painlessly because the airplane crashed into the ground so fast that their brains didn’t have time to process pain signals." wsj.com/articles/boein…