Bluestem Prairie's editor is working on a commissioned article for another venue. Between that and vegetable garden prep, we're taking a break from posting here.
We're hoping to be back on Tuesday, April 28, but wanted to let readers know we're happy and healthy, and on an assignment.
In the meantime, enjoy these wonder pieces we've been reading around the web:
Dorr brothers’ dodgy business strategy isn’t new in Republican politics, by J. Patrick Coolican in the Minnesota Reformer. Our favorite item:
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee had an endorsement deal with a South Dakota company selling a cinnamon and chromium compound to “reverse diabetes.”
The tales of Chaska Senator Scott Jensen's veracity or lack there of keep recycling. We recommend a couple of fact checks by USA Today.
This one was updated on Monday, April 27: Fact check: Hospitals get paid more if patients listed as COVID-19, on ventilators, and concludes the claim is true. We recommend reading the entire article.
Moreover, another fact check from the same source--Fact check: Is US coronavirus death toll inflated? Experts agree it's likely the opposite--considers another element of Jensen's now infamous appearance on the "The Ingraham Angle" host Laura Ingraham on April 8 on Fox News.
The ruling is "false." As with the first fact check, read the entire piece.
We caution readers from sharing posts--often from sketchy outlets--that claim that doctors and hospitals are inflating the death toll from COVID-19 in order to pump up their income. The first fact check note:
Ask FactCheck weighed in April 21: "The figures cited by Jensen generally square with estimated Medicare payments for COVID-19 hospitalizations, based on average Medicare payments for patients with similar diagnoses."
Ask FactCheck reporter Angelo Fichera, who interviewed Jensen, noted, "Jensen said he did not think that hospitals were intentionally misclassifying cases for financial reasons. But that’s how his comments have been widely interpreted and paraded on social media."
Ask FactCheck's conclusion: "Recent legislation pays hospitals higher Medicare rates for COVID-19 patients and treatment, but there is no evidence of fraudulent reporting."
Julie Aultman, a member of the editorial board of the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics, told PolitiFact it is “very unlikely that physicians or hospitals will falsify data or be motivated by money to do so.”
While there's much sympathy for hog farmers in the media, few venues look as closely at the meat processing industry itself as Patrick Anderson in the Argus Leader feature, Efficient but fragile: How COVID-19 stalled the meat industry. Money graphs:
The meat packing industry’s shift toward factory-style work flows in the 1970s resulted in years of acquisitions and closures.
Processing plants and slaughterhouses across the country slowly disappeared during the 1980s and 1990s, a period of great upheaval in the meat industry, defined by a roller coaster of shutdowns, re-openings, labor disputes, massive wage concessions and acquisitions.
The number of federally inspected hog slaughter plants in the United States decreased drastically during the 1980s and 1990s, but the number of pigs being slaughtered has reached new heights in recent years, according to research from Iowa State University economists.
It started with a single processor in Denison, Iowa. Industry veterans A.D. Anderson and Currier J. Holman founded Iowa Beef Packers in 1960 and later revolutionized the industry with their focus on efficiency.
Before IBP, meat processors employed a workforce of laborers classified as butchers, each having more training and higher pay – equivalent to roughly $80,000 a year in today’s dollars, said Dave Swenson, an Iowa State economist.
“IBP comes in and it changes,” Swenson said. “They created much more of an assembly line operation, effectively de-skilling the jobs.”
Not even Sioux Falls’ top employer at the time was immune: Smithfield acquired the Sioux Falls plant in 1995 from the old-line processor John Morrell & Company, which had already closed plants elsewhere and had been struggling for more than a decade to compete with packing companies that had streamlined their production with a lower paid workforce. . . .
There are 835 federally inspected livestock slaughter plants in the United States, according to the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service. In 1979, there were 1,682.
Even the recent openings of massive pork plants in Sioux City and Eagle Grove, Iowa, haven’t been enough to make up for the decades of consolidation and closures in the region and across the country:
- South Dakota had 13 federally inspected slaughter plants in 1979, now down to seven.
- Iowa had 49 such plants in 1979, now down to 23.
- Minnesota had 63, now down to 21.
Pork plants were only wrapped up in a trend that was affecting the meat processing industry as a whole. Federally inspected hog plants in the United States continued to increase in number until 1982, before the path toward greater efficiency caused hundreds of facilities to go dark.
There's much more there.
We'll be back as soon as possible.
Photo: Gone fishing for another.
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