• 478 Posts
  • 6.45K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle



  • It was a groupchat

    Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

    A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

    The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”

    The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA.


  • More info

    There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

    “Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business, unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account,” Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told Harris.











  • In the U.S., a consumer will go into a drug store, in this case Walgreens, after their doctor prescribes medication, and then the consumer will make a copayment. A Walgreens pharmacist then dispenses it. After doing so, Walgreens gets a set reimbursement from that consumer’s insurance company for that medication. How much does it get? Well, those insurance company’s contract with what’s called pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) to manage negotiations with pharmacies. A PBM sets up a network for insurance companies, manages drug prices, and handles all the payment logistics between patients and pharmacies. PBMs negotiate with pharmacies, and set up a pricing agreement on which drugs are covered and how much those pharmacies get reimbursed in return for allowing those pharmacies to serve its customers.

    Reads like parody.