Bill Hammond
@NYHammond
Senior Fellow, the @EmpireCenter. A truth-seeking guy navigating a post-truth world
Over 11 annual budgets on Cuomo's watch, New York's state-funded Medicaid spending increased 57%. Over just four budgets under Hochul, Medicaid has spiked by 62%
Thorough @nicolegelinas dissection of Mamdani's pitch for city-run grocery stores: "Before casually proposing to disrupt a complex system, it’s a good idea to know how that thing works." nytimes.com/2025/07/23/opi…
R.I.P., Chuck Mangione, huge part of my aural landscape in high school and college
Breaking News: Chuck Mangione, the fluegelhorn-playing hitmaker who helped create the genre known as “smooth jazz,” is dead at 84. nyti.ms/452HRYL
Breaking News: Chuck Mangione, the fluegelhorn-playing hitmaker who helped create the genre known as “smooth jazz,” is dead at 84. nyti.ms/452HRYL
A reminder that provider "taxes" are actually provider subsidies - which is why the health care industry would request a grace period that would allow them to continue being "taxed"
New Yorkers will be able to use many Soviet jokes. Like when the furious guy leaves the long bread line to go shoot Brezhnev but comes back because the line to do that is even longer.
For all the Zohran fans, let’s check in on how the city-funded grocery store experiment is going in Kansas City… Maybe capitalism isn’t the boogeyman you think it is.
I understand that nobody wants their payment rates to decline. But is it really plausible to argue that, say, radiology reads or joint replacements have NOT become more efficient over the past 10-15 years? 🤨 statnews.com/2025/07/16/med…
No-one defends the inherit merits of expanding Medicaid dark money financing. They just assume that more spending is inherently better, even though there's little assurance about what the extra money is buying. Why blindly trust giving the healthcare industry extra $?
Jonathan, fortunately from your perspective, the main reforms that the Freedom Caucus pushed - and which were successful - were Obama proposals to limit Medicaid provider taxes as well as limits on the massive corporate welfare by enacting sensible caps on state-directed payments
This is playing very differently in the dove media
Ozzy Osbourne, the singular metal legend whose Black Sabbath virtually invented heavy metal and in later years became a reality TV pioneer, has died at the age of 76. More on his life and legacy 🖤 rollingstone.com/music/music-ne…
Something similar just happened in the Northern District of New York politico.com/news/2025/07/2…
Furthermore, I resent how much time #PPL has stolen from me in working through problems. Recently, 1 of my PAs was mysteriously clocked in, and it took at least 5 hours of phone calls, email, texting, and analysis to fix the issue. I DON'T WANT TO BE THEIR UNPAID EMPLOYEE!…
It’s not just rogue employees at PPL stealing wages. Robbing from home care workers is PPL’s entire business model. Reporting via @SamMellins nysfocus.com/2025/07/21/new…
This scandal is ridiculous and epic at the same time
Breaking News: Speaker Mike Johnson said he would shut down the House until September to block a vote on calling for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. nyti.ms/4nZtblR
On this map, New York is one of the reddest states
Eeek Upstate NY 🥴
Politics has become so disconnected from substance that you can have an extended debate about a proposal for city-owned grocery stores without any participant mentioning (or even knowing) that they already exist gothamist.com/news/zohran-ma…
Underappreciated? It's in my top 3
“Lunch is the Thanksgiving of meals, neither underwhelming nor extra luxurious, adapting easily to various contingencies and configurations.” Lauren Collins writes about the underappreciated meal. nyer.cm/lRWzulT
Eeek Upstate NY 🥴
Slowly be surely, we approach hive cities. The heartland will soon be covered in vast tracts of solar panels and completely automated farms
The real path by which a bill becomes a law in New York is less Schoolhouse Rock and more a mix of improvisational jazz and whack-a-mole. substack.micahlasher.com/p/a-view-from-…