Bruce Japsen: Hospital Profits Soar As Obamacare Prescribes More Paying Patients
Hospital operators continue to see profits and revenue not seen in a decade thanks to the Affordable Care Act and related efforts to sign up uninsured patients to coverage so facilities can reduce unpaid medical bills. Large hospital operators HCA Holdings HCA +2.78% (HCA), Tenet Healthcare THC +2.5% (THC) and Community Health Systems (CYH) in the last month issued robust 2014 earnings, revenues and large declines in uncompensated care costs, a key measure of expenses.
“We reported Tenet’s strongest quarterly EBITDA in more than 10 years,” Tenet chief executive officer Trevor Fetter boasted last week of a key earnings acronym in the hospital chain’s 2014 fourth quarter. Hospital operators are reporting more paying patients and fewer uninsured, which means far fewer unpaid medical bills. “For the last four quarters, the decline in self-pay admits and adjusted admits and the increase in Medicaid in expansion states have grown quarter over quarter,” Community Health CFO Larry Cash said.
1. The private sector has added 10 million jobs over 54 straight months of job growth, extending the longest streak on record. Today we learned that total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 142,000 in August, mainly reflecting a 134,000 increase in private employment. Private-sector job growth was revised up for July and down for June for little total revisions. Over the past twelve months, private employment has risen by a total of 2.4 million.
3. The last time the economy added 10 million private-sector jobs over four-and-a-half years was November 1996 to April 2001. There are some notable differences between the current stretch of job gains and the one that began in 1996. In particular, the manufacturing sector has added more than 700,000 jobs over the last four-and-a-half years, while it lost more than 400,000 jobs during the 1996-2001 period. 4. On a not-seasonally-adjusted basis, local government educational services employment rose by more than 200,000 in August, continuing a recent trend that has seen an increasing number of these employees return to work before September.
MarketWatch: U.S. Manufacturers Surge Again In August, ISM Finds
U.S. manufacturing companies grew in August at the fastest pace since March 2011, a survey of executives found. The Institute for Supply Management said its manufacturing index climbed to 59% last month from 57.1% in July. That easily beat the 56.1% forecast of economists surveyed by MarketWatch. Readings over 50% indicate more companies are expanding instead of shrinking.
Bloomberg: Chrysler Luring Toyota Owners Helps Lift U.S. Share
Chrysler is on an unprecedented winning streak. As Jeep benefits from consumers’ renewed attraction to SUVs, the company also has been aided by strong demand for Ram pickups and Town & Country minivans. That helped propel its U.S. sales up 12 percent last month, the largest increase of any major automaker, according to the average of eight analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. That would be Chrysler’s 53rd straight month of rising sales — about 4 1/2 years — after almost being given up for dead before its government-sponsored bankruptcy in 2009.
Bloomberg: Saudi Arabia Oil Sales To U.S. Imperiled By Shale Boom
After years of keeping the price of crude sold to the U.S. low enough to maintain market share, Saudi Arabia is losing ground as the shale boom leaves U.S. refiners with ample supplies of inexpensive domestic oil. Arab Light crude for sale in the U.S. averaged 48 cents a barrel less than Light Louisiana Sweet, a Gulf Coast benchmark, in August, the narrowest discount in data compiled by Bloomberg back to 1991.
The U.S. imported 878,000 barrels of Saudi crude a day in the first four weeks of August, the least since 2009. Shale drilling has boosted U.S. oil output to the highest level since 1986. As refineries turn to lower-priced domestic oil to make fuel at a record pace, the Saudis and other foreign suppliers are left with dwindling slices of the market. In June, imports from Saudi Arabia accounted for the smallest share of crude processed at U.S. refineries since February 2010.
Jeffry Bartash: U.S. Factory Orders Jump 10.5% In July On Aircraft Contracts
Orders for goods produced in U.S. factories leaped 10.5% higher in July, as expected, owing to a big surge in contracts for commercial aircraft, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had expected orders to climb nearly 11%. Factory orders also rose by a revised 1.5% in June instead of 1.1% as initially reported.
1:05: PBO delivers remarks at a campaign event in Corona Del Mar, Calif.
2:45: Departs Los Angeles, California en route San Francisco
3:30: Arrives San Francisco
5:00: Attends a campaign event
10:10: Delivers remarks at a campaign event
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AP: The number of people seeking unemployment benefits fell to the lowest point in almost four years last week, the latest signal that the job market is steadily improving.
The Labor Department says weekly applications for unemployment benefits dropped 13,000 to a seasonally adjusted 348,000. It was the fourth drop in five weeks and the fewest number of claims since March 2008.
USA Today: General Motors earned its highest profit ever last year. The 103-year-old company made $7.6 billion in 2011, up 62% from 2010. Full-year revenue rose 11% to $105 billion.
ABC (Devin Dwyer): Fact Check – Obama and the Resurgence of American Manufacturing
President Obama is this week heralding the resurgence of American manufacturing as a leap toward an “economy built to last,” and a sign that he deserves a second term. …. Obama’s claim is corroborated by government statistics, which show an undeniable rebound for manufacturers during his term, both in terms of productivity and employment of American workers.
When Obama took office in January 2009, unemployment in the manufacturing sector stood at 10.9 percent and spiked to 13 percent a year later, according to the Labor Department. But in the two years since, unemployment has fallen precipitously, now holding at 8.4 percent in January 2012.
In terms of raw manufacturing jobs, the trajectory is similarly positive …. U.S. manufacturers have also increased production by 15 percent since the recession officially ended in late 2009….
New York Times (Editorial): There’s nothing like a deadline – and the prospect of acute political embarrassment – to concentrate the mind. With Congress about to go on recess, and with Republicans fearing a voter backlash, negotiators on Wednesday were putting the finishing touches on a deal to extend the payroll tax cut and federal jobless benefits through 2012.
The agreement is imperfect but sound. It will help struggling Americans and the struggling economy. It is also a political win for Democrats and President Obama, who had made extending the payroll tax cut and the jobless benefits a centerpiece of his jobs agenda. We hope that it gives them the courage to stick to that agenda if they face another round of Republican obstructionism…..
LA Times: ….. President Obama was expected to raise a total of more than $3 million during two events at the expansive Holmby Hills estate of “The Bold and the Beautiful” producer Bradley Bell and his wife, Colleen. The outdoor event, with tickets priced at $250 and $500, featured a performance by the Foo Fighters and appearances by comedian Jack Black and actress Rashida Jones.
Obama spoke later to a more intimate gathering inside the Bells’ Spanish-style home, which about 80 supporters each paid $35,800 to attend. Among those present were George Clooney, Jim Belushi and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who on Wednesday was named chairman of the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.
Washington Post: …. If Obama is suffering any lingering Hollywood blowback after his administration failed to get behind a pair of high-profile Internet piracy bills championed by the entertainment industry, it wasn’t apparent …. The two Tinseltown events were expected to reap more than $3 million….
“Anything we can do to help,” said Andy Spahn, a political consultant to DreamWorks chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of Obama’s top campaign bundlers and staunchest Hollywood supporters. “The events are sold out,” Spahn said of Wednesday’s concert and dinner at the home of Bradley and Colleen Bell, producers of “The Bold and the Beautiful.” “I expect the president to continue to enjoy strong support.”
SF Gate: …. this week, The Chronicle has learned that the Obama campaign has, for the first time, opened a new type of campaign office in San Francisco: A Technology Field Office. It is believed to be the first such type of campaign office for a presidential campaign.
“We learned from 2008 that using the talents and skills of our supporters was a key to building the most effective organization,” said Obama campaign deputy press secretary Katie Hogan. “We’re taking the next step by providing tools and space for supporters in the technology community to help the campaign extend our current tools like BarackObama.com and our mobile applications.”
…. instead of cold-calling independents, a techie who wants to help Team O can come in and help develop something new for the website, etc…..
If you want to get involved, contact techvolunteers@barackobama.com.
The Guardian: …. Obama has critics and doubters. Maya Angelou, the sage of black America, now 83, has no time for them. “I think he has done a remarkable job, knowing how much he has been opposed,” she says. “Every suggestion he makes, the Republicans en masse fight against him or don’t vote at all.”
…. “I was hoping for the best. And I think I have gotten the best from him.” What of his detractors? “Those are people who didn’t see the morass into which he stepped.”
….. “His physical self, just being there, his photograph in the newspapers as president of the United States; that has done so much good for the spirit of the African American. We see more and more children wanting to be like President Obama, wanting to go to school.”
…. More recently, her presidential link has been via the first lady, Michelle Obama. “She’s the grand dame,” says Angelou. “I wrote her a note a few months ago because I was in a gathering. The president and his party were there, but I had to leave early. I know that’s a gaffe because no one leaves the building before the president so I wrote and apologised. I got a letter from her in her own handwriting. She said: ‘I have only one regret – that I didn’t come over and hug your neck.'”
Reuters: A surge in hiring in the world’s largest economy last month drove the Nasdaq to an 11-year high on Friday as optimism grew that the labor market is on a steady path to recovery.
The broad-based gains on solid trading volume also sent the Dow Jones industrial average near a four-year high….
The U.S. economy created jobs at the fastest pace in nine months in January and the unemployment rate dropped to nearly a three-year low of 8.3 percent, the government said.
“It is really hard to find something not to like in the jobs report,” said Andrew Goldberg, market strategist at JP Morgan Funds in New York. “There is genuine strength in this report with broad-based jobs creation.”
President Obama thanks Lt. Jacob Johnson, an Arlington County firefighter and U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, for introducing him at Fire Station #5 in Arlington, Virginia
President Barack Obama poses for a picture with people in the audience following his remarks on the Veterans Job Corps at Fire Station #5 in Arlington, Va., Feb. 3, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
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NYT: The comeback from bankruptcy at Chrysler hit a milestone Wednesday when the smallest of the Detroit automakers reported a $183 million profit for last year, its first full year of positive earnings since 2005.
…. Last year’s results show how far Chrysler has come since 2009, when it was taken over by Fiat as part of the bailout engineered by the Obama administration.
Its revenue for the year increased 31 percent to $55 billion, and worldwide sales of its cars and trucks grew 22 percent to 1.85 million vehicles. In the United States, its market share increased to 10.5 percent, up from 9.2 percent a year earlier.
WMUR: A new poll shows that the improving economy has also raised President Barack Obama’s standing in New Hampshire.
….Obama has seen his job approval rating nearly flip from the last Granite State Poll in October, with 51 percent now saying they like the job the president is doing, compared to 43 percent who don’t. Just 41 percent said they approved in October.
…. Obama’s improved fortunes are also reflected in head-to-head matchups against the Republican field in New Hampshire. In hypothetical matchups, Obama leads Mitt Romney by 10 points, Ron Paul by eight points, and trounces Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum by 25 and 21 points respectively.
Robert Shrum: …. So it’s Romney in 2012, despite glaring weaknesses revealed in the primaries, from his animatronic awkwardness to his plutocratic profile. The latter has been a product not just of attacks from his opponents — and the attacks will be unremitting in the general election — but of gaffes that are in reality self-revelations of his actual character and conviction. When he slips the confines of his canned answers, when an off-message moment or question deflects him from toeing his adviser’s carefully formulated tropes, he tends to shift from Ken Doll to Gordon Gekko.
…. For other candidates, the verbal miscue is an episode; for him, it’s an epidemic – offering $10,000 bets, saying foreclosures should run their course, claiming he feared getting a pink slip, explaining that $400,000 isn’t much money, announcing that he likes to fire people. (And at that, Romney has had a lot of practice.) He blithered about releasing his tax returns, then released only two years — and will face intensifying scrutiny about off-shore tax havens and whether he paid any tax, or almost none, in years we haven’t seen, like 2008 and 2009.
….Romney not only looks like the face of the Republican establishment; by his own words and deeds, he has become the face of unfairness in America, a profile in numbness and indifference.
Steve Benen: Several weeks ago, I launched a Friday afternoon feature, highlighting the most offensive Mitt Romney falsehoods of the week. I was off last week, but let’s get it started again.
1. Romney claimed President Obama “went before the United Nations” and “said nothing about thousands of rockets being rained in on Israel from the Gaza Strip.”
True or false? The claim isn’t even close to being right.
2. Romney said Democrats “passed Dodd-Frank,” which “has made it almost impossible for community banks.”
True or false? He’s has said this before, and it’s still completely untrue.
Think Progress: House Minority Whip Eric Cantor has often expressed concern for how Obama administration policies are supposedly a “grave danger to America’s prosperity.” Now, the Wall Street Journal finds that Cantor actually invests in an exchange-traded fund that “takes a short position in long-dated government bonds” – effectively betting against the U.S. Treasury bonds that the government uses to fund its operations:
[Cantor] bought up to $15,000 in shares of ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury ETF last December, according to his 2009 financial disclosure statement. The exchange-traded fund takes a short position in long-dated government bonds. In effect, it is a bet against U.S. government bonds – and perhaps on inflation in the future.
If Cantor truly cares about “America’s prosperity,” one would have to wonder why he is literally betting against its financial future. The Washington Independent’s Annie Lowrey adds that “Cantor is not a very canny investor. The fund is down 31 percent this year.”
(The first guy in the video is Peter Morici who wrote an article recently entitled ‘In Wisconsin, the governor is right, Obama is wrong’ – so you get the drift. The second guy, Carl Horowitz, is from the National Legal and Policy Center which, like lots of conservative groups, is funded by billionaire right-winger Richard Mellon Scaife – see here)
Just sayin’:
Detroit News: The United Auto Workers union says that by fall, General Motors Co. will recall the last 2,000 of its laid-off workers, clearing the way for new hiring at its U.S. plants.
Most of the recalls will be in southeastern Michigan, whose economy was devastated in the downturn.
GM declined to confirm the timeline, but Joe Ashton, UAW vice president in charge of GM, said Wednesday “those people will all be back at work in September. We will have full employment in September for the first time in a long time.”
The recalls are further evidence of the recovery of GM, and the auto industry as a whole….
…GM spokeswoman Kimberly Carpenter: “We have announced several actions that will help people get back to work,” she said. Among them: adding a third shift of 750 to GM’s truck plant in Flint, a second shift of 600 in Lansing to build a small Cadillac and 1,550 workers being recalled to build two small cars at the Lake Orion assembly plant.
😉
Oh, almost forgot this:
Mlive.com: Flint Democratic lawmakers and UAW officials gathered this afternoon to celebrate a nearly $5,000 profit sharing check being given to General Motors’ employees this week.
The check, they say, is a sign of the progress GM has made since it filed for bankruptcy in June 2009.
President Barack Obama and the then-Democratic Congress made the right decision to bail out the automaker, said Norwood Jewell, Region 1-C director of the UAW.
“What would have happened to Genesee County? What would have happened to Flint,” he said of the government’s loans to the automaker.
Jonathan Cohn (The New Republic): The federal government’s rescue of Chrysler and General Motors was highly unpopular at the time … most experts on the right and quite a few on the left predicted it would end badly. As the argument went, the companies were in a hopeless situation …. if the government got involved, surely it’d mess things up.
But the news out of Detroit has been good for a while. And it just got even better. From the New York Times:
General Motors, which nearly collapsed from the weight of its debts two years ago before reorganizing in a government-sponsored bankruptcy, said Thursday that it earned $4.7 billion in 2010, the most in more than a decade ….. It was the first profitable year since 2004 for G.M., which became publicly traded in November, ending a streak of losses totaling about $90 billion …. In addition, G.M. said 45,000 union workers would receive profit-sharing checks averaging $4,300, the most in the company’s history ….
….the usual caveats apply: The two companies could still stumble …. Still, it looks increasingly like the rescue of the auto industry was an overall success, saving hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of jobs and bolstering the country’s manufacturing base for years (if not decades) to come. Maybe it’s time to start giving President Obama some credit for it – and recognizing that, when properly managed, the federal government can do a lot of good.
Steve Benen (Washington Monthly): Nearly two years ago, NBC News established a tough benchmark: “As the GM bailout goes, so goes the Obama presidency.” I don’t imagine White House officials mind that standard at all.
What I find amazing about this … is that Republicans still consider this a failure – it was, for example, a common area of complaint at CPAC a few weeks ago. As far as the right is concerned, the Obama administration’s rescue of the American automotive industry wasn’t just wrong, it was one of the president’s most dreadful mistakes. Confront conservatives with reports like the latest from GM, and the response tends to be that the success of the policy doesn’t change anything.
The thesis about the right valuing ideology over practical results needs no better example ….Conservative activists got this wrong, and so did their Republican friends in Congress, many of whom literally predicted “disaster.”
These same folks are now insisting the economy will improve just as soon as the House GOP plan – take money out of the economy, lay off hundreds of thousands of American workers – is approved. Given their track record, perhaps now’s a good time to question their credibility.
(The first guy in the video is Peter Morici whose latest media contribution is an article entitled ‘In Wisconsin, the governor is right, Obama is wrong’ – and Morici sure knows about getting it wrong. The second guy, Carl Horowitz, is from the National Legal and Policy Center which, like lots of conservative groups, is funded by billionaire right-winger Richard Mellon Scaife – see here)
Meanwhile, let’s look back:
Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): “Does anyone really believe that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington can successfully steer a multi-national corporation to economic viability?” [6/1/09]
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC): “Now the government has forced taxpayers to buy these failing companies without any plausible plan for profitability. Does anyone think the same government that plans to double the national debt in five years will turn GM around in the same time?” [6/2/09]
Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ): When government gets involved in a company, “the disaster that follows is predictable.” [7/22/09]
As soon as I find a video showing all these fools admitting they got it hopelessly wrong and apologizing to the President, I’ll post it – promise. 😉
Wall Street Journal: U.S. economic growth accelerated in the final three months of 2010 as Americans spent more, suggesting the recovery may pick up speed this year.
Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of all the goods and services produced, rose at an inflation-adjusted annual rate of 3.2% in the fourth quarter…The increase takes total output to its highest level since the end of 2007, when the recession started.
Consumer spending, accounting for about 70% of demand in the U.S. economy, rose at a 4.4% rate in the fourth quarter. That’s the fastest pace since the start of 2006 and double the average rise in spending in the previous three quarters of 2010.
…For the first time in 2010, the economy also benefited from a trade surplus in October to December……Spending on durable goods like cars and furniture jumped by 21.6%, while spending for nondurable goods like food and clothing was up by 5.0%.
MSNBC: Ford earned its largest profit in more than a decade in 2010, as demand for its cars and trucks rose and it benefited from years of restructuring. It was the company’s best performance since 1999 and the first time it has earned back-to-back annual profits in six years.
Ford earned $6.6 billion, or $1.66 per share. That’s more than double its 2009 profit of $2.7 billion… Ford’s U.S. sales jumped 20 percent last year — double the rate of the industry — as an improving economy spurred demand for the company’s F-Series pickups and other vehicles. Ford became the top-selling brand in the U.S. last year, beating out Chevrolet and Toyota for the first time since 2003.
The Obama Diary 
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