2024 & The Inevitable Rise Of Biometrics

 by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

Have you noticed a lot of two-factor authentication prompts lately? Are you getting emailed verification codes that take forever to arrive, so you have to request another?

Perhaps you are asked to do captchas to “prove you’re human” and they seem to be getting more complex all the time or simply not working at all?

Why do you think that might be?

We’ll come back to that.

Did you know we’re in a “breakthrough year” for biometric payment systems?

According to this story from CNBC, JPMorgan and Mastercard are on board with the technology and intend a wide rollout in the near future, following successful trials.

In March this year, JPMorgan signed a deal with PopID to begin a broad release of biometric payment systems in 2025.

A Mastercard spokesman told CNBC:

Our focus on biometrics as a secure way to verify identity, replacing the password with the person, is at the heart of our efforts in this area,”

Apple Pay already lets you pay with a face scan, while Amazon have introduced pay-by-palm in many of their real-world stores.

VISA showcased their latest palm biometric payment set-up at an event in Singapore earlier this year.

As we covered in a recent This Week, PayPal is pushing out its own biometric payment systems in the name of “preventing fraud”.

As always, this is not just an issue in “the West”.

Chinese companies have been leading this race for a while, with AliPay having biometric payment options since 2015.

Moscow’s Metro system has been using facial recognition cameras for biometric payments for over a year.

And it’s not just payments, “replacing the password with the person” has already spread to other areas.

Hoping to corral support for biometrics from the right, national governments are collecting biometrics to “curb illegal immigration”. You can expect that to spread.

The European Union will be implementing a new Biometric Entry-Exit System (EES) as soon as October of this year.

Biometric signing is on the rise too.

Laptops tablets and smartphones already come with face-reading and fingerprint scanning technology to confirm your identity.

Social media companies have been collecting biometric data “for security and identification purposes” for years.

Google Play launched a new biometric accessibility feature only a couple of weeks ago.

It’s all just so convenient, isn’t it? So much faster than e-mailing security codes and solving increasingly impossible captchas (both of which have unaccountably got harder and more complicated recently, and will doubtless continue to do so).

That’s how they get you: Convenience.

They won’t ever remove the “old-fashioned” ways of accessing your accounts, but it will get increasingly slow and difficult to use while biometrics get faster and easier.

Meanwhile, the propaganda will begin to flow.

Influencers will be paid to use “cool” “futuristic” biometric payment options that “feel like having superpowers” in contrived “viral” videos. Biometrics will save the day in a trendy movie or TV show. Some old fuddy-duddy will go on Question Time and rant about the new technology…just before saying something racist or denying climate change.

Maybe a major hack or cyber-attack will only affect those who haven’t switched to biometric authentication yet.

You get the idea.

And all the while supra-national corporate megaliths will be creating a massive database of voice recordings, finger and palm prints, facial and retinal scans.

It’s a good thing we’re ruled by a morally upright elite. Imagine the damage they could do with all of that.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/2024-inevitable-rise-biometrics

UnitedHealth argues lawsuit should be dismissed as patients didn’t spend years appealing denials

 UnitedHealth Group should be released from a lawsuit that alleges its algorithm-based technology prematurely cut off care to its Medicare Advantage members, the company said in court filings this week, because patients and their families did not finish Medicare’s appeals process.

“Plaintiffs have failed to exhaust the exclusive administrative appeal process set by the Medicare Act,” UnitedHealth’s lawyers argued. Even if those requirements were met, they added, the grievances of patients and families are with the federal government, not UnitedHealth and its subsidiary NaviHealth. “The plaintiffs have sued the wrong defendants,” the filing states.

Medicare’s appeals process is backlogged and complicated. Completing it can take years in some instances, potentially draining the finances of Medicare beneficiaries and their families who decide to pay for care on their own while they wait for a resolution. For patients who do appeal, the frailest ones may die before they ever get a decision.

The arguments from UnitedHealth are the company’s first attempt to dismiss a class action lawsuit that was spurred by a series of STAT stories. Last November, people enrolled in a UnitedHealth Medicare Advantage plan and their families sued UnitedHealth and its subsidiary, NaviHealth, for cutting off payment for rehab care.

STAT’s investigation found those payment denials were based on an algorithm’s predictions, unbeknownst to patients, and UnitedHealth’s employees were advised not to stray from those calculations — forcing extremely sick and injured patients to pay for care out of their own pockets or return home even if they couldn’t walk or go to the bathroom independently.

As the class action case has ramped up, a flurry of changes have unfolded at NaviHealth, the company that monitors care and implements the algorithm. Its longtime CEO, Harrison Frist, the son of former Senate Majority leader Bill Frist — who helped write Medicare Advantage into law — recently resigned. A round of layoffs also swept through the company, and UnitedHealth has scrubbed NaviHealth’s brand off its ledger, even as it continues to use its computer model to help decide how much rehab care patients should receive.

Medicare has a multi-step process for Medicare Advantage enrollees to appeal payment denials. If they lose after first appealing to the health insurance company, they then go to an independent contractor called a quality improvement organization. If appeals fail there twice, patients can next appeal to an administrative law judge. The final stop is the Medicare Appeals Council.

Patients rarely appeal, and if they do, they almost never make it to the administrative law judge or Medicare Appeals Council. However, UnitedHealth said the court “cannot disregard or override” the federal rules that require patients to go through that process before initiating a lawsuit, contending that several plaintiffs didn’t appeal their denials at all.

“When a plaintiff has not exhausted administrative remedies and obtained a ‘final decision,’ the plaintiff’s claims are not ripe for judicial review,” UnitedHealth’s attorneys wrote in their motion to dismiss the case.

However, in their complaint, attorneys for patients and their families said they should be exempt from having to go through Medicare’s entire appeals process because “they would suffer irreparable harm.” If people stayed in nursing homes or other facilities with no insurance coverage, they “risk being responsible for months’ or years’ worth of medical bills if their appeals are denied,” according to the class action complaint. If they simply go home and forgo care, their health is put in jeopardy.

“Plaintiffs are elderly people who have suffered serious medical traumas. If they opt to forgo care while waiting for a decision on appeal, they risk further serious injury or death,” the plaintiffs alleged.

UnitedHealth said patients can’t allege they will be hurt or that their appeals attempts are “futile” because, sometimes, patients win appeals if they invest time and money to do so. “The delay in the administrative proceeding, standing alone, does not constitute irreparable harm,” UnitedHealth’s attorneys wrote in the motion to dismiss the case.

Gene Lokken’s family has been mired in that appeals process for nearly two years, struggling to recoup money they had to pay for his care following algorithmically-facilitated denials.

After he was hospitalized for a broken leg in the spring of 2022, Lokken became severely ill and briefly stayed in a hospice facility before bouncing back. “When the hell am I going to get out of this chair?” his daughter Pam, remembers him asking. He needed more rehab care, but was denied coverage by UnitedHealth, which followed the NaviHealth algorithm to cut off payment.

“I was just thunderstruck,” Pam Lokken, Gene’s daughter, said of the denial. She thought that perhaps she just needed to explain the situation, to talk to a human who would quickly realize the mistake — that her dad was a fighter, that he was getting stronger, and that he needed more rehab to get back to his life.

But the algorithm had spoken, and UnitedHealth followed it. She ended up paying thousands of dollars out-of-pocket while appealing — a process that is still going on even after her father’s death. “This is devastating for families,” she said of the drawn out denial-and-appeal process.

UnitedHealth listed several other reasons why a federal judge should toss out the case. The company argued that federal law requires Medicare Advantage beneficiaries to sue the Department of Health and Human Services, not insurance companies. It also said any alleged violations of state law don’t apply because this lawsuit involves Medicare Advantage, which is governed by federal law and supersedes state laws.

https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/22/unitedhealth-class-action-lawsuit-algorithm-motion-to-dismiss/

Bird Flu Cases Spur Retail Trader Rush Into Vaccine Stocks

 Mounting cases of bird flu in humans is luring the day trading crowd to snap up stock in vaccine developers. It’s a familiar setup for industry veterans who have witnessed past trading frenzies at the first signs of an outbreak.

Shares of CureVac NV, which has a bird-flu vaccine in early-stage testing, jumped 15% Wednesday as concerns grow over a potential outbreak of bird flu in humans following reports of a new case in Australia. Novavax Inc. — which recently touted its plans to explore an avian flu vaccine — gained for the third day closing at its highest level since December 2022.

Shares of Moderna Inc. rose 2.9% in afterhours trading while Pfizer Inc.’s gained 1.4% following a report that the companies are in talks with the US government about the development of vaccines for bird flu. Moderna and fellow Covid shotmaker BioNTech SE notched double-digit advances in regular trading, while Pfizer rose 3.6%.

Read more: Second US Human Bird Flu Infection Reported in Michigan

“Bird flu is adding momentum to stocks that were already going higher,” Jared Holz, a health-care specialist at Mizuho said. “A lot of it is probably just big picture — more retail-oriented trading on the back of these headlines linking the problems that are arising with bird flu with the vaccine stocks.”

Past outbreaks like Ebola, Zika and monkey pox have spurred similar swings — particularly for smaller players — as companies come out of the woodwork touting their plans for a vaccine or treatment. Day trader chatrooms search for potential winners but only a handful may eventually emerge — if at all — with successful treatments. Even fewer stocks end up becoming household names like Moderna or BioNTech.

So far, the stocks’ reactions have been “fairly extreme,” Holz said. He recommended selling into the strength as its as of yet unclear if the illlness will spread or have any impact on revenue, though “the story is definitely catching on more.”

Read more: US Bird Flu Surveillance Gets $100 Million Funding Boost

Many of the vaccine names had been jumping prior to the newly reported case. Novavax’s stock has been soaring ever since it inked a license pact with Sanofi — and revealed its bird flu plans — two weeks ago. A rally in Moderna shares kicked off after a recent patent win against Pfizer.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/human-bird-flu-cases-spur-200446931.html

HHS advances plan to produce 4.8 million H5N1 vaccine doses

 Response (ASPR) at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said officials are moving forward with a plan to produce 4.8 million doses of H5N1 avian flu vaccine for pandemic preparedness.

Dawn O'Connell, JD, said health officials have identified a manufacturing line at one of its manufacturing partners for fill-and-finish steps, without disrupting production of seasonal flu vaccine. Currently, the vaccine is in bulk form and will be produced in multidose vials.

She said it takes a couple months to fill and finish the vaccine doses, which would save time in case a vaccine is needed. Federal health officials have said one of two H5N1 candidate vaccine viruses is well matched to the circulating strain.

Feds eye triggers for deploying vaccine

O'Connell added that active discussions are under way across federal agencies about what the key triggers would be for deploying H5N1 vaccine doses. She also said discussions are still under way with mRNA vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna, with an announcement expected soon on how the companies might be involved in vaccine development.

Nirav Shah, MD, JD, principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said potential trigger factors might include a change in transmission propensity, such as human-to-human in addition to animal-to-human spread, and any sign of increased illness severity.

He also said a change in the complexion of the cases might be a trigger, such as H5N1 infections cropping up in people who have no epidemiologic links to affected dairy farms. "And we're always looking for mutations," Shah said. "We're in rich discussions across federal agencies."

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/hhs-advances-plan-produce-48-million-h5n1-vaccine-doses

Cencora to buy $400 million in stock back from Walgreens

 Cencora has agreed to buy about $400 million in stock back from Walgreens Boots Alliance, the second time the pharmacy chain has reduced its stake in the company this year as it looks to free up cash to pare down debt.

Walgreens Boots (WBA) said it would use the proceeds for paying down its debt, as well as for general corporate purposes. The company in February sold nearly $1 billion in shares of Cencora (COR) and said it would use proceeds for the same purposes.

Walgreens Boots will have a stake of about 12% in Cencora after the deal, down from its previous holdings of about 13%.

Cencora, a drug distributor, said the deal was an example of its opportunistic approach to buybacks. The company said it now expects $13.35 to $13.55 in adjusted per-share earnings, compared with its previous guidance range of $13.30 to $13.50.

Cencora said the guidance change was to reflect a lower weighted average diluted share count, partially offset by higher net interest expense because of cash being used for repurchases.

Walgreens said the sale did not change the two companies' long-term partnership.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20240522978/cencora-to-buy-400-million-in-stock-back-from-walgreens

Creating So Many Jobs that Destroy Wealth

 When Americans face an intense, hyper-partisan Presidential election, every labor market report becomes fodder for Administration claims of what great managers of the economy they are and counter-claims of how misleading such stewardship claims are. 

Of late, such dueling narratives have featured issues such as the seven-digit (and growing) difference between the official employment rate and the lower employment rate implied by the household unemployment survey, whether growing official employment has not meant more full-time jobs for American citizens because of sharply increasing employment of immigrants, and how the reduction of hours worked by full-time workers and the shift from full-time to part-time work has resulted in less labor services rendered even when official employment increases.

Of particular interest to me lately has been the large fraction of jobs that have been “created” in government. While it hasn’t got much attention in (reflexively pro-Biden) mainstream media, some more careful observers are noticing. For example, last month, Ryan McMaken published a piece in Mises Wire titled “Employment Falls for the Third Month In Spite of 50,000 New Government Jobs,” which noted that “the growth in government jobs makes up about 20 percent of all new jobs.” This month, the Wall Street Journal had an editorial titled “The Government-Spending Jobs Boom,” noting that “more than half of the new jobs last month were in government, health care and social assistance” (the latter two areas relying on “transfer payments from government”). 

The reason this issue is so important is that government spending doesn’t really create jobs, but instead moves them from where people themselves would have chosen to where the government dictates by way of its tax, spending, and regulatory policies. And the distinction between creating jobs and moving jobs makes a substantial difference, given that there are almost 3 million federal employees and roughly 20 million state and local government employees in America (13 percent of total jobs). That substitution means that many of the jobs created directly or indirectly by government policies impose net costs on society rather than producing benefits, which worsens rather than improves Americans’ wellbeing. 

The most obvious illustrations come from the vast (and getting vaster) crazy-quilt of federal executive agencies, mandates, regulations, etc. But those are piled upon mountains of state and local interventions (or is it vice versa?) for “good” measure (at least if you are mistakenly looking up antonyms for the term rather than synonyms). Peaceful wealth creation arises from voluntary agreements among people, but the primary activity of the regulatory state is often to interfere with mutually productive jobs, undermining social coordination and destroying wealth. Imposing added constraints on voluntary productive arrangements does create some jobs, but that acts as a massive regulatory tax on jobs that benefit other people.

Professors Susan Dudley and Melinda Warren have studied federal regulatory agencies that explicitly restrict private sector transactions. They found 277,000 such regulators in 2015 (substantially larger than General Motors’ worldwide workforce) and an 18-fold increase in those agencies’ inflation-adjusted budgets since 1960, to over $57 billion (in 2009 dollars). 

More recently, The American Action Forum reported that Biden administration agencies “published $875.3 billion in total costs and added 4.7 million annual paperwork burden hours” in just one week last month, “just $20 billion less than what President Obama did in two terms,” which its president Douglas Holtz Eakin called “simply a jaw-dropping regulatory blitz.”

Forcible federal interventions often lead to multiplier effects on state and local government employment as well (even if not the Keynesian multiplier effects students hear about in macroeconomics courses). Further, interventions at all those levels also create private sector jobs to comply with the growing extent of their dictation. Many human resources and health care industry jobs, for example, were created to comply with Obamacare, and the mushrooming of Medicaid since then. But for ill-advised programs and restrictions, such jobs can create costs rather than benefits for society.

The sharp increase in government’s “Peter-Paul” (robbing Peter to pay Paul) approach evident in almost every area of public policy also multiplies into more lobbyists being hired to help special interests benefit at others’ expense. Others, in turn, are forced to hire more of their own in self-defense, to combat the extent of robbery they will be forced to bear. The expanded fight to control federal government theft has created a booming job market in the influence industry, which has dramatically stimulated the economy in Washington, DC, but destroyed wealth for people everywhere else in a massive negative-sum game.

Similarly, when laws or rules of questionable constitutionality or legality are promulgated (as with the Biden Administration’s environmental and education policies), it increases the number of lawyers and legal resources the government employs. It also increases the number employed by those who would be abused. Such opposition can be one of the most valuable investments for Americans in stopping such inroads on people’s rights, but even fighting them to a standstill leaves Americans worse off than if those overstepping initiatives had not been advanced in the first place.  

While there are many words being exchanged in the battle over President Biden’s job creation “achievements,” and more to come before November (at least to the extent that the media’s cone of silence in Biden’s defense can be evaded), there is one area in which he has dramatically over-achieved. He has created lots of jobs in government (as well as in government compliance) that undermine our private efforts whose mutual gains are guaranteed by the need to get all parties whose rights are involved to agree to them. In the process he has expanded the government further into areas in which we have no such protections from it. But such over-achievement is diametrically opposed to what our founders understood (from John Locke) to be the main reason for government — to better protect all of our rights and property from invasion. And we would do well to remember that “creating” such jobs may pump up the employment numbers for Biden’s re-election chances, but they inhibit rather than increase our well-being.

Dr. Gary Galles is a Professor of Economics at Pepperdine.

His research focuses on public finance, public choice, the theory of the firm, the organization of industry and the role of liberty including the views of many classical liberals and America’s founders­.

His books include Pathways to Policy Failure, Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies, Apostle of Peace, and Lines of Liberty.

https://www.aier.org/article/creating-so-many-jobs-that-destroy-wealth/

DOWN WITH COAL?

 The Biden Administration is determined to limit America’s production of fossil fuels, of which we have the largest supply in the world. This will transition us from a position of energy independence, and potentially energy dominance, into a position of subservience to the Chinese Communist Party, on which we will depend for the vast quantities of materials that are needed for wind turbines, solar panels and batteries–which we will not be allowed to mine here. If this plan isn’t outright treasonous, it is possibly the stupidest program ever carried out by a government in world history.

The stated rationale for Biden’s policy, of course, is to save the world from carbon dioxide. There are many reasons why this rationale is preposterous, one of which is that our contributions to atmospheric CO2 are pretty much irrelevant. You can see this if you look specifically at the administration’s policies relating to coal.

Our friends at Steve Moore’s Committee to Unleash Prosperity bring us up to date on the latest Biden follies:

[Biden’s] plan would remove millions of acres of rich coal lands from development in states like Wyoming and Montana.

There is so much that is anti-America about this ruling that it is hard to know where to begin. How about starting with the fact that the United States has at least 500 years of coal reserves? There is probably no place on the earth with more known reserves than the U.S.

Then there is the reality that over 35% of the world’s electricity comes from coal. It’s not a question of whether the world will use coal, it’s a question of where the coal will come from.

China is the world’s number one emitter of carbon dioxide, and is steadily pulling away. Then, of course, there is India, the world’s most populous country, which has no intention of trying to supply its vast population with electricity via solar panels. China’s use of coal is burgeoning:

[T]he world’s largest polluter, China, is all in on coal. They aren’t transitioning away from coal. They are transitioning toward it with dozens of new plants under construction as we speak. No doubt Xi and the rest of the communists in Beijing are celebrating that Biden is going to make China the coal capital of the world.

China’s electricity production is pretty much all about coal, as is India’s. Our own declining reliance on coal is wholly irrelevant:

I am tempted to say, look at the pathetic amounts of electricity China and India are getting from “renewable” sources, other than hydropower. But then, we could say with equal justice: look at the pathetic amounts of electricity the U.S. is getting from “renewable” sources, other than nuclear.

The Committee asks a good question:

Why is Biden doing something so contrary to America’s security and economic interests? News reports tell us that Biden’s war on coal is an attempt to win back “climate-focused” young voters who are trending toward Trump.

As a reminder, America produces clean coal. …[E]missions are way down in America in no small part because of far fewer emissions from modern coal plants.

So Biden is willing to make global pollution levels worse, put at risk American energy security and mining jobs, and empower/enrich our greatest adversary in China – all a cynical ploy to win votes? Can you think of anything LESS patriotic?

It isn’t easy, but if we think hard enough about other Biden Administration policies we can probably come up with some contenders. I think that Biden is probably not the literal Manchurian candidate, although there is considerable evidence pointing in that direction. More likely, I think, is that not just Biden but the people around him, and the people who run the Democratic Party generally, are so ill-informed, so ignorant, so unintelligent, that their actions can easily be mistaken for those of a treasonous cabal.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/05/down-with-coal.php