DrunkEngineer

UnitedHealthcare is in hot water again as the insurance giant grapples with a reported government investigation of its Medicare billing practices, pursues employee buyouts and potential layoffs, and clashes publicly with billionaire Bill Ackman.

Those developments in recent days extend a tumultuous past year for its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, marked by the killing of a top executive, a costly cyberattack against its subsidiary and high medical costs in its insurance arm. UnitedHealth Group is the biggest health-care conglomerate in the U.S. based on revenue and its more than $420 billion market cap, and UnitedHealthcare is the nation’s largest private insurer.

Shares of UnitedHealth Group have tumbled roughly 23% over the last three months.

Managers were given just 200 characters to explain why the jobs these workers did mattered.

The ambient air pollution by particulate matter (PM) has strong negative effects on human health. Recent studies have found correlations between pollution and mortality due to Covid-19. We present here an analysis of such correlation for 32 locations in 6 countries of the Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom), for the 2020–2022 period. The data are weekly averaged, and the mortality values were normalized considering the population of the locations. A correlation is qualitatively found for the time-series of PM2.5 pollution and Covid-19 mortality.

The higher mortality values occurred during the pollutions peaks, as presented for the city of Paris (France) and the Lombardy regions (Italia), one of the more polluted locations in Western Europe. An almost linear trend with a factor 5.5 ± 1.0 increase in mortality when the pollution increases to ~45 μg.m−3 is found when considering all data.

When train carriages were returned to Poland’s state-owned railway company, it emerged that five pallets of mines were missing.

Onet reported that the missing mines were carried on a civilian carriage through several Polish cities, including Szczecin, Poznań, Warsaw and Białystok, over the course of nearly two weeks. They were eventually located near Orla, a village in northeastern Poland, inside a warehouse belonging to furniture giant IKEA.

For more than a half-century, there has been a widespread and largely unmonitored practice of spreading wastewater from oil and conventional gas drilling, by the millions of gallons, onto dirt and gravel roads in rural Pennsylvania.

The practice has found itself awash in controversy in recent years as a number of scientific studies have found that the wastewater brine contains unhealthy levels of radiation from naturally occurring radium as well as toxic chemicals such as benzene, iron, manganese, strontium, barium, aluminum, zinc, lithium, copper and lead.

In addition to being a hazard to human health, runoff of the wastewater can harm nearby streams, killing aquatic life and over time making streams too salty for trout, the studies found.

A recent study by Penn State found the brine is no more effective than plain water for dust control and in some cases can damage roads.

The oil and gas industry has fought back, saying the brine is a free and effective tool for municipalities and does not cause any harm to people or the environment when spread in the right places and the right times.

The head of the Big Apple’s most powerful teachers’ union flunked Gov. Kathy Hochul and “tone deaf” Democrats Thursday for socking working class New Yorkers with a $9 congestion toll — a week after the election where the party took a drubbing.

“It’s not what I expected to see Democrats doing a week after the election. It’s insane! Stop screwing the working class!” United Federation of Teachers President Mike Mulgrew told The Post, saying he will continue to press his active lawsuit to stop the congestion pricing plan.

It also puts Mulgrew on the same page as President-elect Donald Trump, who slammed the “congestion tax” as “massive” and “regressive” in exclusive comments to The Post earlier Thursday.

On November 15, 2021, President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) into law. The IIJA included a five-year transportation authorization for U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) programs, plus a standalone infrastructure law representing the largest-ever infusion ($643 billion over five years) of federal funding for surface transportation, including highways, roads, and bridges. The White House hailed the IIJA as “a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure and competitiveness,” along with making lofty promises that it would “repair and rebuild our roads and bridges with a focus on climate change mitigation, resilience, equity, and safety for all users.”

But the lion’s share of IIJA funding flows into what’s known as “formula” programs that are controlled by states and their departments of transportation, and they decide what to build, where, and how.

Unless these patterns change, we extrapolate that states’ federal formula-funded investments made over the course of the IIJA could cumulatively increase emissions by nearly 190 million metric tonnes of emissions over baseline levels through 2040 from added driving. This is the emission equivalent of 500 natural gas-fired power plants or nearly 50 coal-fired power plants running for a year.