Private equity finally delivered Sarah Palin’s death panels: Hospices are unregulated, heavily subsidized charnel houses.

Cory Doctorow:

The private healthcare sector is designed to deny care. Its first duty is to its shareholders, not its patients, and every dollar spent on care is a dollar not available for dividends.

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Medicare pays private hospices $203-$1,462 per day to take care of dying old people – seniors that a doctor has certified to have less than six months left. That comes to $22.4b/year in public transfers to private hospices. If hospices [take] that $1,462 day-rate, they have lots of duties, like providing eight hours’ worth of home care. But if the hospice is content to take the $203/day rate, they are not required to do anything. Literally. It’s just free money for whatever the operator feels like doing for a dying elderly person, including doing nothing at all.

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This is absolute catnip for private equity – free government money, no obligations, no enforcement, and the people you harm are literally dying and can’t complain. What’s not to like?

One technique favored by corrupt hospices: Give the patients unlimited access to opioids, and when the cash fountain from the government runs dry, let the patients die of overdose. No autopsy when the victim dies in hospice care. Everybody wins!

This immature osprey was standing on the footpath at Lake Murray for a long time this morning; passers-by said he’d been there for hours. There’s an osprey nest on a utility pole high above the footpath. Probably the immature osprey fell out and could not fly up. Another osprey was standing just outside the nest, high above, watching. In the video, you can hear the immature bird call out plaintively.

I’ve been putting energy into Mastodon, but Bluesky looks interesting and may just lap Masto. I’ve been dismissive of Bluesky until now, but I just signed up for the private beta.

I keep wanting to read Nostr as “Nostril.”

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick looks at options post-twitter. Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options

35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. Right Now (The New York Times)

Why Your Family Name Was Not Changed at Ellis Island (and One That Was). (The New York Public Library)

Tech journalist and online safety expert Larry Magid describes a terrifying exchange with scammers who claimed to have kidnapped his wife.

Dropbox is laying off 500 people and pivoting to AI (The Verge). Dropbox is done. Steve Jobs was right. It’s a feature, not a company.

Today I learned that Oxiclean does an amazing job cleaning years of coffee crust from the inside of my Hario insulated metal coffee server. It’s like new. Sadly, my coffee loses some flavor served from a clean container.

Ron DeSantis’s Disney Miscalculation: ‘Disney Is Playing the Long Game’. Even Florida Republicans are questioning DeSantis’s strategy. (WSJ)