Taxpayers spend about $2 billion annually on Medicaid for Amazon and Walmart employees

The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment: Evidence from the First Year*

Abstract In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for Medicaid. This lottery provides an opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use, financial strain, and health of low-income adults using a randomized controlled design. In the year after random assignment, the treatment group selected by the lottery was about 25 percentage points more likely to have insurance than the control group that was not selected. We find that in this first year, the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization (including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations), lower out-of-pocket medical expenditures and medical debt (including fewer bills sent to collection), and better self-reported physical and mental health than the control group.

Amazon reveals plans to spend $200bn in one year the day after Bezos guts Washington Post

Tech giant reports $213bn in revenue after its founder, who owns the Post, lays off a third of newspaper’s employees

Amazon’s data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water last year

Amazon’s using a lot of water, but claims it’s using it efficiently.

Can Consumers Make Affordable Care Affordable? The Value of Choice Architecture

Tens of millions of people are currently choosing health coverage on a state or federal health insurance exchange as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We examine how well people make these choices, how well they think they do, and what can be done to improve these choices. We conducted 6 experiments asking people to choose the most cost-effective policy using websites modeled on current exchanges. Our results suggest there is significant room for improvement. Without interventions, respondents perform at near chance levels and show a significant bias, overweighting out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles. Financial incentives do not improve performance, and decision-makers do not realize that they are performing poorly. However, performance can be improved quite markedly by providing calculation aids, and by choosing a “smart” default. Implementing these psychologically based principles could save purchasers of policies and taxpayers approximately 10 billion dollars every year.

The Cost of Deportations Calculator

The Trump administration is taking billions of _your_ taxpayer dollars to pay for mass deportations. The Cost of Deportations Calculator shows what could this money be used for instead.

FTC alleges Amazon illegally made $20 billion by rigging billions of ad auctions

FTC says firm replaces actual ad-auction results "with higher prices set by Amazon."

Amazon Data Centers In Mississippi Have Already Raised Electricity Rates for Local Customers, Report Suggests

Three Amazon data centers aren't even open yet, but local residents are already paying at least $10.60 extra per month for them, according to a new study.

Anthropic commits to spending $200 billion on Google's cloud and chips: Report

The commitment suggests the AI startup accounts for more than 40 per cent of the revenue backlog Google disclosed to investors last week, according ‌to the report.

Big Tech’s A.I. Spending Is Accelerating (Again)

Despite the risk of a bubble, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon plan to spend billions more on artificial intelligence than they already do.

Nonprofit Explorer - ProPublica

Since 2013, the IRS has released data culled from over 1.8 million nonprofit tax filings. Use this database to find organizations and see details like their executive compensation, revenue and expenses, as well as download tax filings going back as far as 2001.

Emails show Amazon colluding with other firms to raise prices, California authorities allege

The previously redacted messages were unveiled as part of an antitrust battle with California attorney general Rob Bonta

The Hidden Tax on Blue-Collar Workers and Building in America

The unemployment insurance system has a design flaw that penalizes the construction industry, leading to fewer workers and lower productivity. Over time, that means less – and more expensive – housing.

Newly unsealed records reveal Amazon’s price-fixing tactics, California attorney general claims

Exclusive: A trove of previously redacted documents was filed as part of the tech giant’s anti-trust battle with the state of California. Amazon denies it engages in price-fixing

Choose to Lose: Health Plan Choices from a Menu with Dominated Option*

Abstract We examine the health plan choices that 23,894 employees at a U.S. firm made from a large menu of options that differed only in financial cost-sharing and premium. These decisions provide a clear test of the predictions of the standard economic model of insurance choice in the absence of choice frictions because plans were priced so that nearly every plan with a lower deductible was financially dominated by an otherwise identical plan with a high deductible. We document that the majority of employees chose dominated plans, which resulted in excess spending equivalent to 24% of chosen plan premiums. Low-income employees were significantly more likely to choose dominated plans, and most employees did not switch into more financially efficient plans in the subsequent year. We show that the choice of dominated plans cannot be rationalized by standard risk preference or any expectations about health risk. Testing alternative explanations with a series of hypothetical-choice experiments, we find that the popularity of dominated plans was not primarily driven by the size and complexity of the plan menu, nor informed preferences for avoiding high deductibles, but by employees’ lack of understanding of health insurance. Our findings challenge the standard practice of inferring risk preferences from insurance choices and raise doubts about the welfare benefits of health reforms that expand consumer choice.

Google's TPU Paradox

Why the massive Anthropic deal ($50-80 billion over six years) is a map to a thousand-customer problem.