Skip Coogler retweeted
Why does American healthcare cost so much? Why is an insurance policy for a family of three now over $50,000?
When Republicans blame Obamacare, they have a point.
It's impossible to know how much Obamacare and post-Obamacare administrative changes Democrats made to Medicaid have driven up healthcare spending since 2010, but it has to be hundreds of billions of dollars annually, maybe over $1 trillion.
On the hospital and commercial insurer side:
Obamacare forced hospital and physician practice consolidation that has led to local quasi-monopolies
Mandated lots of very expensive coverage for stuff that doesn't work (endless drug rehabs)
Eliminated any incentive for insurers to push back (they have to spend 85 cents of every premium dollar)
Imposed administrative and legal requirements that swelled bureaucracies for both providers and insurers
Meanwhile, Medicaid now costs $1 trillion a year (!), almost as much as Medicare.
Why? States have found ways to fund their share of Medicaid through "provider taxes," which means they don't care what Medicaid costs anymore, because the federal government is paying way more than half of it
And as a result they have vastly raised Medicaid pay rates, especially to fancier hospitals - Medicaid pays MORE than Medicare in some states
And vastly expanded Medicaid coverage to illegal immigrants, among others.
The Trump "big beautiful bill" pushed back on some of the more ridiculous Medicaid stuff (amid MUCH weeping from the legacy media), but it will only slow the growth, not end it.
Unfortunately, explaining all this is impossible in a sound bite. The Democrats have a solution - to tax the rich and throw more money at healthcare subsidies, with an eye to nationalizing health insurance.
What is the Republican solution?
Skip Coogler retweeted
The guy who kept Shaq and Charles Barkley in line on TV for 37 years used to spend his mornings shaving and dressing his son, who could barely move and breathed through a ventilator. Then he'd go to work and laugh with those guys all night like nothing was going on.
Tonight Ernie Johnson said this season will be his last, and Barkley tried to thank him on air and couldn't get the words out.
I don't think most people watching that clip know what Ernie was carrying all those years.
He and his wife Cheryl adopted Michael from an orphanage outside Bucharest in 1991, when he was 3. He had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and doctors didn't think he'd make it to his 20s. He lived to 33. When Ernie was home, getting Michael ready in the morning could take an hour and a half, and Ernie did the showering and shaving and dressing himself.
In 2006 he told viewers he had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and by the end of October he was back at the desk while he was still going through chemo.
When Michael died in 2021, Ernie wasn't on the show that week, and Shaq, Kenny and Chuck spent about six minutes trying to hold it together while they talked about a kid most of America never met.
Then last year he had heart bypass surgery, and this summer he turned 70.
Ernie's dad pitched in the big leagues and then called Braves games for decades, and he gave his son a rule Ernie's talked about forever: if somebody spikes you at second base, never rub.
If you've ever wondered why nobody's been able to copy Inside, that rule is a big part of it. Barkley could say the dumbest thing imaginable, Shaq could fall out of his chair, Kenny could go running to the big board, and Ernie would just pick it up and bring it back to basketball with that yellow legal pad. Those three got to be chaos because the guy in the middle never made his own stuff the show.
He still calls hosting a "get-to job," and he was calling it that the same year he buried his son.
So when Charles Barkley, who's roasted pretty much everybody alive on live TV, can't finish a sentence to the man, that's why.
Charles Barkley and the guys give Ernie Johnson his flowers. This is a must watch.
(via @ohnohedidnt24)
Skip Coogler retweeted
Saddened to hear of the loss of the stunning Elke Sommer - it marks the passing of a truly luminous presence in cinema, a woman whose radiant beauty, sparkling blue eyes, and irresistible European allure brought glamour and sophistication to the screen. #RIP
Skip Coogler retweeted
Cary Grant on “Notorious” (1946): “It wasn’t an easy part for me to play. Usually I played ordinary guys whom extraordinary things happened to, as in “North by Northwest”, but in this film I played an FBI agent who was, frankly, a heel. He treats Ingrid’s character shamefully and lets Claude Rains die. I know Rains was supposed to be the villain, but he loved Ingrid and believed in what he was doing. I honestly didn’t think that there was much difference between us.” Originally, Hitchcock had wanted Clifton Webb to play Rains’s character of Alexander Sebastian, but producer David Selznick overruled him. Rains' performance transformed Sebastian into a new Hitchcock villain: sympathetic, nuanced, and in some ways as admirable, or not, as the protagonist.
Skip Coogler retweeted
Do not fear the end. Dune: Part Three only in theaters and IMAX December 18. Tickets on sale now around the world. fandan.co/DunePartThree #DuneMovie #FilmedForIMAX
Skip Coogler retweeted
Godzilla is coming... Experience the colossal threat with the new custom IMAX countdown, exclusively in #GodzillaMinusZero screenings. #FilmedForIMAX
Skip Coogler retweeted
Michael Gray, best known for playing Billy Batson in the original SHAZAM! television series (1974–1976), has passed away at 75.
He returned to the franchise with a cameo in SHAZAM! FURY OF THE GODS (2023), sharing a moment with the new generation of the hero he helped bring to life. 🕊️
Skip Coogler retweeted
IMAGINE IF THIS COUNTED 😱
What could've been the game-winning bucket was made after the timeout whistle 😅
Skip Coogler retweeted
Humanity's most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, is rapidly approaching an unprecedented cosmic milestone. On November 18, 2026, NASA anticipates that the legendary probe will officially reach a distance of one light-day from Earth. This monumental span equates to approximately 16.1 billion miles, which is roughly 25.9 billion kilometers.
At this profound depth of space, the vast physical gap severely impacts communication lag. Even a radio signal, which inherently flashes through the void at the absolute speed of light, requires a full 24 hours to cross the distance in a single direction. Consequently, when flight controllers on Earth beam a command to the spacecraft, the instructions require a whole day to arrive, and any corresponding reply takes another full day to travel back. This latency creates a grueling 48-hour round-trip delay for a single exchange, a baseline timeline that does not even account for deep-space network scheduling or onboard computer processing times.
Voyager 1 has traveled for nearly half a century to reach this historic boundary. Originally launched on September 5, 1977, the spacecraft primary mission focused on exploring Jupiter and Saturn, famously transmitting unprecedented, close-up observations of their swirling cloud tops, intricate ring systems, and diverse moons. Rather than stopping there, the probe maintained its outward trajectory. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made history by becoming the very first human-made object to breach interstellar space, crossing the heliopause, which is the magnetic boundary where the solar wind gives way to the raw interstellar medium.
It is vital to recognize that a light-day is a strict measurement of immense distance, rather than an indication of travel duration. It has taken the mechanical explorer 49 years of continuous flight to achieve a separation that a single photon of light can cross in a mere 24 hours. Even at this unimaginable distance, the scale of our cosmic neighborhood remains humbling. While Voyager 1 has long since exited the sun's protective bubble, the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, a colossal and distant reservoir of icy primordial bodies bound by solar gravity, still lies far ahead on its endless journey.
For the dedicated engineering teams remaining on Earth, this expanding gulf transforms the nature of spaceflight operations. The luxury of real-time troubleshooting is entirely gone, forcing engineers to meticulously program sequences in advance and patiently wait days to discover if their commands succeeded.
Skip Coogler retweeted
Richard Donner tells a fantastic story about SUPERMAN involving himself, Gene Hackman and a moustache.
Skip Coogler retweeted
有楽町マリオン の時計は
いま
#ゴジラ
#ゴジラマイナスゼロ
仕様！
ゴジラと金色の三人が可愛い
Skip Coogler retweeted
First poster for the first-ever 70mm film and IMAX release of Christopher Nolan's ‘THE PRESTIGE’.
In theaters on January 29.
Skip Coogler retweeted
🚘 In 1975, Ricardo Montalbán became the face of the Chrysler Cordoba and delivered one of advertising’s most memorable lines: ‘fine Corinthian leather.’ The phrase turned into a lasting pop-culture punchline that was referenced and parodied for decades. Of course, the leather itself had nothing to do with ancient Corinth, it was pure marketing that helped make the Cordoba a hit