A few days ago, I joined a discussion with Dr. Tim Slekar and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci about the current state of public education. It was aired on their show “Busted Pencils,” which is dedicated to teachers, students, and public schools.
We talked about charters, vouchers, testing, and how to get involved. Everyone can stand up for what they believe.
Carol Burris reports on an important decision in Vermont:
By a 19-9 vote, the Vermont Senate refused to approve Zoie Saunders, a former strategist for the for-profit Charter Schools USA, as the new Superintendent of Instruction in Vermont.
Saunders, a Florida resident, had worked briefly for a Florida public school district (3 months) even as she was applying for the Vermont position. She was Republican Governor Scott’s choice.According to a source in the state, “Senators in opposition spoke eloquently about her complete lack of vision (her best vision communication to a Senator in individual conversation was – schools in Middlebury should partner with Middlebury College) and her lack of relevant public education experience.”
The Governor is given great deference regarding his appointees. However, there was a groundswell of opposition to her appointment among Vermont citizens who feared she would bring charters to the state and expand the private school town tuition program. There was also great concern for her lack of experience in public schools. NPE Action stood in opposition to her appointment.
You can read more about the controversy here:
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/zoie-saunders-gov-scotts-pick-for-education-secretary-faces-questions-about-her-qualifications-40628713 “The Senate of Vermont took a courageous stand that will surely raise the ire of the Governor who last night tried to delay their vote. Hopefully, Governor Scott will come back with a candidate worthy to serve Vermont’s families.”
Unfortunately, Governor Scott did not come back with a better candidate. He appointed Ms. Saunders as “interim commissioner.”
The Vermont Senate is comprised of 22 Democrats and seven Republicans.
Chris Tomlinson, a columnist for The Houston Chronicle, writes here about the audacious, mendacious plan of Lt. Governor Dan Patrick to destroy public schools. Patrick was a talk-show host like Rush Limbaugh before he entered politics. In Texas, the Lt. Governor has more power than the Governor, so his actions must be closely scrutinized.
Dan Patrick hates public schools. He wants to abolish them and replace them with vouchers.
Tomlinson explains Dan Patrick’s malevolent plan:
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s fantasy of abolishing property taxes would set the state up for financial failure and end public education as we know it by placing a greater burden on low- and medium-income Texans.
The most powerful man in Texas politics wants you to believe he’s looking out for homeowners, but there’s always an unacknowledged goal for significant initiatives like this one. You need only look at who deposited $3 million in Patrick’s campaign account and who gave the record $6 million donation to Gov. Greg Abbott to boost private religious schools.
As lieutenant governor, Patrick appoints the leaders of Senate committees, sets their agendas and decides whether a piece of legislation gets a vote. Patrick also rewards senators who appease him and punishes those who don’t with his fat campaign war chest.
Last week, the lite guv ordered the Senate Finance Committee to “determine the effect on other state programs if general revenue were used to fully replace school property taxes, particularly during economic downturns.”
Rising property taxes are directly correlated to the growing cost of housing in Texas. When home or apartment values go up, so do taxes, and the two combined create a crisis across the country.
Median property taxes in Texas rose 26% between 2019 and 2023, according to data from real estate research firm CoreLogic, and first reported by Axios, an online news agency. In four years, the median payment rose to $4,916 from $3,900 as property values nationwide grew 40%.
Texas has crazy property taxes due to a convoluted system that protects the wealthy and pushes the burden of paying for government services onto low- and middle-income families.
To understand how and why, Texans must remember that we pay for schools through property taxes levied by school districts. The state is forbidden from collecting a property tax, so the Legislature depends primarily on sales taxes and severance taxes levied on oil and gas production.
The Texas Constitution also forbids an income tax, perpetuating the myth Texas is a low-tax state. The wealthy, who spend less of their income on retail purchases and real estate, get off easier than in other states. But the half of Texans who struggle to make ends meet pay a higher proportion of their income in sales and property taxes.
Most states rely on the proverbial three-legged stool of income, property and sales taxes to fairly charge families and businesses based on their ability to pay. Texas relies on only two legs, and Patrick is talking about kicking away one of them.
Patrick’s command comes less than a year after the Legislature took $18 billion from sales taxes and oil and gas severance taxes to pay down school taxes. Most of that money came from high crude oil and natural gas prices and a roaring economy that generated huge sales tax returns. The move marked the first tax reduction paid by most property owners in decades.
Ending property taxes is part of the Republican Party of Texas platform, but it would require collecting $73.5 billion from the remaining leg of the stool, the sales tax.
The state sales rate is 6.25%, while local authorities can collect up to 2% more. The Texas Taxpayers and Research Association in 2018 calculated the sales taxes would need to reach 25% to replace property taxes.
Right-wing fantasists will point at Texas’ colossal budget surplus last year as proof that lawmakers will only need to raise sales taxes a tiny bit. However, anyone who’s lived in Texas for a decade or more knows the fossil fuel business goes through boom-and-bust cycles.
During a bust in 2011, Texas lawmakers slashed school funding by $4 billion. When the money runs out, the Republicans who control every lever of power in Texas do not hesitate to sacrifice public education to avoid raising taxes. Even with last year’s windfall, they refused to give teachers a raise.
This is where school vouchers and property taxes collide. The billionaires backing Abbott and Patrick believe public schools are Marxist, woke indoctrination factories. They want to give parents vouchers to choose Christian nationalist indoctrination factories exempted from state or federal oversight.
The vouchers, though, are insufficient to cover private school tuition, so families must pay the difference. The GOP hopes to create a system in which the state pays a defined amount and normalizes parents’ paying the rest.
Don’t be fooled by promises of lower taxes; this is about killing public schools by underfunding them and shifting more of the burden onto young families and off the wealthy.
This malicious proposal could be politically palatable. There are some five million public school students in Texas. There are more than six million privately owned homes. The population of Texas is majority-minority, like the public school students. The Republican-dominated legislature is overwhelmingly white. Do the math. The people with the power, the people who pay the most property taxes, are white. Do they want to pay property taxes for other people’s children?
Award-winning opinion writer Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at houstonhchronicle.com/tomlinsonnewsletter or expressnews.com/tomlinsonnewsletter.
Tim Slekar is a fearless warrior for public schools, teachers, and students. I will be talking to him about Slaying Goliath and the struggle to protect public schools from the depredations of billionaires and zealots.
Grab your pencils—BustEDpencils is gearing up for a no-holds-barred revival of Diane Ravitch’s game-changing book, *Slaying Goliath*, live this Thursday on Civic Media.
Launched into a world on the brink of a pandemic, *Slaying Goliath* hit the shelves with a mission: to arm the defenders of public education against the Goliaths of privatization. But then, COVID-19 overshadowed everything. Despite that, the battles Diane described haven’t paused—they’ve intensified. And this Thursday, we’re bringing these crucial discussions back to the forefront with Diane herself.
This Thursday at 7pm EST on BustEDpencils, we’re not just revisiting a book; we’re reigniting a movement. Diane will dissect the current threats to public education and highlight how *Slaying Goliath* still maps the path to victory for our schools. This isn’t just about reflection—it’s about action.
**It’s time to get real. It’s time to get loud. It’s time to tune in this Thursday at 7 PM EST on Civic Media.**
If you believe that without a robust public education system our democracy is in jeopardy, then join us. Listen in, call in (855-752-4842), and let’s get fired up. We’ve got a fight to win, and Diane Ravitch is leading the charge.
Mark your calendars and fire up Civic Media this Thursday at 7pm Central.
Tom Ultican, retired teacher in California, smells a scam in the making. The science behind “the Science of Reading” movement is not very scientific, he writes. Publishers and vendors are preparing to cash in on legislative mandates that force reading teachers to use only one method to teach reading despite the lack of evidence for its efficacy. Ultican zeroes in on the role of billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs as one of the key players in promoting SofR.
He writes:
Laurene Powell Jobs controls Amplify, a kids-at-screens education enterprise. In 2011, she became one of the wealthiest women in the world when her husband, Steve, died. This former Silicon Valley housewife displays the arrogance of wealth, infecting all billionaires. She is now a “philanthropist”, in pursuit of both her concerns and biases. Her care for the environment and climate change are admiral but her anti-public school thinking is a threat to America. Her company, Amplify, sells the antithesis of good education.
I am on Amplify’s mailing list. April third’s new message said,
“What if I told you there’s a way for 95% of your students to read at or near grade level? Maybe you’ve heard the term Science of Reading before, and have wondered what it is and why it matters.”
Spokesperson, Susan Lambert, goes on to disingenuously explain how the Science of Reading (SoR) “refers to the abundance of research illustrating the best way students learn to read.”
This whopper is followed by a bigger one, stating:
“A shift to a Science of Reading-based curriculum can help give every teacher and student what they need and guarantee literacy success in your school. Tennessee school districts did just that and they are seeing an abundant amount of success from their efforts.”
A shift to SoR-based curriculum is as likely to cause harm as it is to bring literacy success. This was just a used-car salesman style claim. On the other hand, the “abundance of success” in Tennessee is an unadulterated lie. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tracks testing over time and is respected for education testing integrity. Tennessee’s NAEP data shows no success “from their efforts.” Their reading scores since 2013 have been down, not a lot but do not demonstrate an “abundance of success”.
NAEP Data Plot 2005 to 2022
Larry Berger and Greg Dunn founded Wireless Generation in 2000 to create the software for lessons presented on screens. Ten years later, they sold it to Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation for $360 million. Berger pocketed $40 million and agreed to stay on as head of curriculum. Wireless Generation was rebranded Amplify and Joel Klein was hired to run it.
Murdoch proposed buying a million I-pads to deliver classroom instruction. However, the Apple operating system was not flexible enough to run the software. The android system developed at Google met their needs. They purchased the Taiwanese-made Asus Tablets, well regarded in the market place but not designed for the rigors of school use. Another issue was that Wireless Generation had not developed curriculum but Murdoch wanted to beat Pearson and Houghton Mifflin to the digital education market place … so they forged ahead.
In 2012, the corporate plan was rolling along until the wheels came off. In Guilford County, North Carolina, the school district won a Race to the Top grant of $30 million dollars which it used to experiment with digital learning. The district’s plancalled for nearly 17,000 students in 20 middle schools to receive Amplify tablets. When a charger for one of the tablets overheated, the plan was halted. Only two months into the experiment, they found not only had a charger malfunctioned but another 175 chargers had issues and 1500 screens were kid-damaged.
This was the beginning of the end.
By August of 2015, News Corporation announced it was exiting the education business. The corporation took a $371 million dollar write-off. The next month, they announced selling Amplify to members of its staff. In the deal orchestrated by Joel Klein, who remained a board member, Larry Berger assumed leadership of the company.
Three months later, Reuters reported that the real buyer was Laurene Powell Jobs. She purchased Amplify through her LLC, the Emerson Collective. In typical Powell Jobs style, no information was available for how much of the company she would personally control.
Because Emerson Collective is an LLC, it can purchase private companies and is not required to make money details public. However, the Waverley Street Foundation, also known as the Emerson Collective Foundation, is a 501 C3 (EIN: 81-3242506) that must make money transactions public. Waverly Street received their tax exempt status November 9, 2016.
The Amplify email gave me a link to two documents that were supposed to explain SoR: (Navigating the shift to evidence-based literacy instruction 6 takeaways from Amplify’s Science of Reading: The Symposium) and (Change Management Playbook Navigating and sustaining change when implementing a Science of Reading curriculum). Let’s call them Symposium and Navigating.
Navigating tells readers that it helps teachers move away from ineffective legacy practices and start making shifts to evidence-based practices. The claim that “legacy practices” are “ineffective” is not evidence-based. The other assertion that SoR is evidence-based has no peer-reviewed research backing it.
Sally Riordan is a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London. In Britain, they have many of the same issues with reading instruction. In her recent research, she noted:
“In 2023, however, researchers at the University of Warwick pointed out something that should have been obvious for some time but has been very much overlooked – that following the evidence is not resulting in the progress we might expect.
“A series of randomised controlled trials, including one looking at how to improve literacy through evidence, have suggested that schools that use methods based on research are not performing better than schools that do not.”
In Symposium, we see quotes from Kareem Weaver who co-founded Fulcrum in Oakland, California and is its executive director. Weaver also was managing director of the New School Venture Fund, where Powell Jobs served on the board. He works for mostly white billionaires to the detriment of his community. (Page 15)
Both Symposium and Navigating have the same quote, “Our friends at the Reading League say that instruction based on the Science of Reading ‘will elevate and transform every community, every nation, through the power of literacy.”’
Who is the Reading League and where did they come from?
Dr. Maria Murray is the founder and CEO of The Reading League. It seems to have been hatched at the University of Syracuse and State University of New York at Oswego by Murray and Professor Jorene Finn in 2017. That year, they took in $11,044 in contributions (EIN: 81-0820021) and in 2018, another $109,652. Then in 2019, their revenues jumped 20 times to $2,240,707!
Jorene Finn worked for Cambria Learning Group and was a LETRS facilitator at Lexia. That means the group had serious connections to the corporate SoR initiative before they began.
With Amplify’s multiple citations of The Reading League, I speculated that the source of that big money in 2019 might have been Powell Jobs. Her Waverly Street Foundation (AKA Emerson Collective Foundation) only shows one large donation of $95,000,000 in 2019. It went to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (EIN: 20-5205488), a donor-directed dark money fund.
There is no way of following that $95 million.
The Reading League Brain Scan Proving What?
Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University noted the League’s over-reliance on brain scans and shared:
“Many researchers in neurobiology (e.g., Elliott et al., 2020; Hickok, 2014; Lyon, 2017) have voiced alarming concerns about the validity and preciseness of brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect reliable biomarkers in processes such as reading and in the diagnosis of other mental activity….
“And Mark Seidenberg, a key neuroscientist cited by the “science of reading” movement, offers a serious wcaution about the value of brain research: “Our concern is that although reading science is highly relevant to learning in the classroom setting, it does not yet speak to what to teach, when, how, and for whom at a level that is useful for teachers.”
“Beware The Reading League because it is an advocacy movement that is too often little more than cherry-picking, oversimplification, and a thin veneer for commercial interests in the teaching of reading.”
The push to implement SoR is a new way to sell what Amplify originally called “personalized learning.”This corporate movement conned legislators, many are co-conspirators, into passing laws forcing schools and teachers to use the SoR-related programs, equipment and testing.
SoR is about economic gain for its purveyors and not science based.
When politicians and corporations control education, children and America lose.
To read an earlier post by Tom Ultican on this topic, see this.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill limiting the ability of non-parents to initiate book bans. That’s a step forward since any crank was free to challenge any book under previous law. But, the same law made it easier to close public schools and hand them over to the charter industry.
TALLAHASSEE — After more than 1,200 objections were filed to library books and other materials last school year, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday signed a bill to limit challenges by nonparents or guardians.
The wide-ranging bill (HB 1285) also includes changes designed to ease the process of charter schools taking over operations at traditional public schools that are failing.
The part of the measure dealing with book challenges came after the Republican-controlled Legislature and DeSantis approved measures that ramped up scrutiny of library books and classroom materials, leading to highly publicized disputes.
More than half of the 1,218 book objections during the 2022-2023 school year occurred in two counties, Clay and Escambia, according to a Senate staff analysis. The objections resulted in the removal of 186 books in the two counties.
The bill will require that any “resident of the county who is not the parent or guardian of a student with access to school district materials may not object to more than one material per month.”
During an event Monday, DeSantis said that some people who filed mass objections to books made a “mockery” of the process.
“The idea that someone can use the parents’ rights and the curriculum transparency to start objecting to every single book, to try to make a mockery of this, is wrong. And you had examples where books were put under review that are just normal books that have been in education for many, many years,” DeSantis said.
Meanwhile, parts of the bill related to underperforming public schools would “add some oomph” to the state’s process of allowing charter schools to take over operations, DeSantis said.
Under state law, if a school receives consecutive D or F grades based on various performance criteria, the school is given two years to improve to a C under what’s known as a “turnaround plan.” If the school’s grade doesn’t make such an improvement, one option is for the school to close and reopen as a charter school.
The bill signed Tuesday will speed up converting traditional public schools to charter schools under such circumstances, by giving districts a deadline to execute charter contracts. For schools reopening as charters, districts would have to execute contracts by Oct. 1 of the following school year, and charter organizations would assume “full operational control” by July.
Carol Burris writes here about a charter scandal in South Carolina. Carol is the executive director of the Network for Public Education.
She writes:
Last week, an excellent investigative report on a for-profit-run charter chain appeared in South Carolina’s Post and Courier. Entitled How a Florida principal with a controversial history became a SC charter school kingpin, it was written by Hillary Flynn and Maura Turcotte. These reporters put extraordinary care and diligent research into the piece. I know because, over the course of a year, Flynn would call me from time to time for insight into the for-profit charter world. There is no transparency in South Carolina. You need FOIAs to determine which schools in the state are even run by for-profits. Here is a summary of what they found.
Pinnacle, a Florida for-profit corporation, has three charter schools in South Carolina.
Its creator and owner, Michael D’Angelo, is a former Florida charter school principal who was fired from a for-profit chain. He then moved to another charter, where he wrote himself reimbursement checks with no invoices and got fired again.
Undeterred by his previous failures, D’Angelo tried to open several charter schools in Florida. Despite being told he did “not have the competency to operate a charter school,” he found an accountant, created a for-profit charter management company, and headed to South Carolina to open Gray Collegiate Academy.
When Pinnacle’s school got into trouble with the South Carolina Public Charter School District for noncompliance, Pinnacle went shopping for a new authorizer for its charter school. A Christian college, Erskine College, stepped in. It later accused Pinnacle of fraud. Then, two Pinnacle Schools moved to another Christian College, Limestone College, for authorization. Authorizers receive substantial fees from the schools, a bonanza for cash-strapped colleges.
The process of authorizer shopping, a common practice in states like Ohio and Michigan with large for-profit sectors, is a glaring loophole in the system. The authorizer, who stands to gain substantial fees from the schools, can provide a new lease of life to a shady charter school. A South Carolina Senate bill aims to curb this practice, but it faces fierce opposition from the charter lobby. The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools even lobbied to ensure that states with multiple authorizers are privileged when getting big CSP grants, further exacerbating the issue of authorizer shopping.
Meanwhile, Pinnacle plans to open two more schools, serving as additional cash cows for D’Angelo and his friends.
You can read the excellent investigative reporting on Pinnacle here. While you must register with the paper to see it, it is not behind a paywall. Kudos to Flynn and Turcotte.
Drew Harrell of The Washington Post published a sad article about the Trump devotees who have put their life savings into his DJT stock offering and have no concerns about its value or its future. They are so certain that he is a financial genius that they expect the stock to soar, once the “liberals” stop depressing its market price.
Jerry Dean McLain first bet on former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social two years ago, buying into the Trump company’s planned merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, at $90 a share. Over time, as the price changed, he kept buying, amassing hundreds of shares for $25,000 — pretty much his “whole nest egg,” he said.
That nest egg has lost about half its value in the past two weeks as Trump Media & Technology Group’s share price dropped from $66 after its public debut last month to $32 on Friday. But McLain, 71, who owns a tree-removal service outside Oklahoma City, said he’s not worried. If anything, he wants to buy more.
“I know good and well it’s in Trump’s hands, and he’s got plans,” he said. “I have no doubt it’s going to explode sometime.”
For shareholders like McLain, investing in Truth Social is less a business calculation than a statement of faith in the former president and the business traded under his initials, DJT.
Even the company’s plunging stock price — and the chance their investments could get mostly wiped out — doesn’t seem to have shaken that faith. The company has lost $3.5 billion in value since its public debut last month.
As a business, Trump Media has largely underwhelmed: The company lost $58 million last year on $4 million in revenue, less than the average Chick-fil-A franchise, even as it paid out millions in executive salaries, bonuses and stock.
And in two years, Truth Social has attracted a tiny fraction of the traffic other platforms see, according to estimates from the analytics firm Similarweb — one of the only ways to measure its performance, given that the company says it “does not currently, and may never, collect, monitor or report certain key operating metrics used by companies in similar industries.”
But for some Trump investors, the stock is a badge of honor — a way to show their devotion beyond buying Trump merchandise, visiting Trump golf courses or donating to Trump’s presidential campaign….
Trump Media has boasted that it has benefited from a flood of “retail investors” — small-time and amateur shareholders betting their personal cash. Its merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, said its shares were bought by nearly 400,000 retail investors, and Trump Media’s chief executive, Devin Nunes, told Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that the company had added over 200,000 new ones in the past couple of weeks.
“There’s not another company out there that has retail investors like this,” said Nunes, who this year will receive a $1 million salary, a $600,000 retention bonus and a stock package currently worth $3.7 million…
One investor said “the recent drops in share price have been the result of “stock manipulation” from an “organized effort” to make the company look bad. There’s no proof of such a campaign, but Schlanger is convinced. “It’s got to be political,” he said, from all the “liberals that are trying to knock it down…”
After the billionaire media mogul Barry Diller called Trump Media a “scam” stock bought by “dopes,” one account, @Handbag72, claimed to have bought more shares, arguing Diller didn’t “get it” or was “at risk of [losing] $$$$.” The next day, the account shared a 2021 blog post from the investing forum Seeking Alpha saying Truth Social could be worth $1 trillion in the next 10 years.
Soon after it was launched March 26 on NASDAQ, the stock reached $79. By last Monday, it had fallen to $26.61, after news broke that DJT intends to issue millions of additional shares, which would dilute the value of the original shares.
Bibles, sneakers, perfume, wine, steaks, now stocks. Trump will keep selling, and his cult will keep buying.
Michigan, under Republican control for years, has given free rein to charter schools and has long been overrun with unaccountable for-profit schools. But the Governor, Gretchen Whitney, is now a Democrat, and the elected State Board of Education is no longer controlled by Republicans. The State Board took a shocking step this week. It resolved that charter schools should be held to the same rules as public schools.
The State Board of Education approved a resolution during its meeting today calling for legislation to open charter schools to be treated more like public schools in the state of Michigan.
Mitchell ROBINSON’s resolution made the agenda and asked the state Legislature to create and pass laws that would put charter schools under the approval of the Michigan Department of Education and make them more transparent by opening them up to the Freedom of Information Act and Open Meetings Act.
The resolution also asked for legislation that would require charter schools to follow many of the same requirements as public schools, such as bidding for vendors, requirements that no child be excluded from enrolling, not refusing transfer students if space is open, require teachers and administrators to hold certificates, and mandate contracts for management organizations be published online.
“So charter schools are technically public schools, so they should be expected to follow regulations regarding transparency, as all publicly funded schools are,” Robinson said.
However, he said many charter schools are dominated by politically-motivated special interest groups, those looking to be education reformers, and “predatory for-profit organizations.”
He said he’s looked at the charter school system in Michigan and found that they make up one-third of all the local education agencies in the state and are not accountable to the communities.
“I see no evidence of innovation in this service sector,” he said.
He said the public school system struggles to adequately fund itself, not even adding the charter system that also pulls funding for the 363 schools across 285 districts.
“This is financially irresponsible,” he said.
The sole no vote against the resolution came from Tom McMILLIN, a Republican board member.
He argued that charter schools fill in gaps in education and were already fully transparent with the public funding they received.
“These charter schools give parents choices. They fill up for a reason,” McMillin said.
He said the teachers and administrators were already required to be certified.
“What this would do is simply force charter schools to not open, which is what some people want,” McMillin said.
Marshall BULLOCK II pointed to troubles with charter schools in the Detroit area closing without warning or opening in a struggling district that could have the “unintended consequence” of splitting a neighborhood.
“That is how you destroy a neighborhood,” Bullock said.
McMillin called it “perverse” to not give parents a choice and “force them, based on their zip code, to a failing school.” He placed the problem at the feet of the state superintendent.
Tiffany TILLEY asked that the board hear a presentation to look at what other states are doing in terms of charter schools.
“Michigan has become kind of like the Wild Wild West when it comes to charter schools,” Tilley said.
She said you can’t have “thousands” of charter schools with no transparency and continue to maintain a well-funded system, but putting a limit on the number of charters schools could help.
“We do need to change the laws and this has gone on for a very long time,” she said.
Now if only the Michigan legislature would ban for-profit charters! No public school operates for profit. The “profit” is inevitably taken from students and teachers. It’s wrong.
Insurance companies have figured out that they can make big profits by denying surgeries and other care that doctors recommend for their patients. This happens under Medicare Advantage, programs where private insurance companies offer care that replaces Medicare. The CEOs of this industry are paid multiple millions.
The New York Times produced a video about this.
Should your insurance company be allowed to stop you from getting a treatment — even if your doctor says it’s necessary?
Doctors are often required to get insurance permission before providing medical care. This process is called prior authorization and it can be used by profit-seeking insurance companies to create intentional barriers between patients and the health care they need.
At best, it’s just a minor bureaucratic headache. At worst, people have died.
Prior authorization has been around for decades, but doctors say its use has increased in recent years and now rank it as one of the top issues in health care.
To produce the Opinion Video above, we spoke to more than 50 doctors and patients. They shared horror stories about a seemingly trivial process that inflicts enormous pain, on a daily basis. The video also explains how a process that is supposed to save money actually inflates U.S. health care costs while enriching insurance companies.
Diane Ravitch's blog 