“For nearly five years, pandemic-era waivers allowed patients to receive telehealth visits from home under Medicare and most commercial plans. That flexibility ended on September 30, 2025 when Congress failed to renew permanent parity. Beginning October 1, a patient’s home no longer counted as an eligible originating site for most non behavioral medical visits, with only a narrow set of mental health exceptions. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not ban telemedicine — it simply stopped paying for it. In modern health care, that is the same result. Regional insurance plans followed, affecting more than thirty million Medicare beneficiaries who used telehealth last year. They all risk losing access again in a matter of weeks.” (11/20/25)
Source: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
by Ricardo Vaz
“Since August, the US has been amassing military assets in the Caribbean. Warships, bombers, and thousands of troops have been joined by the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, in the largest regional deployment in decades. Extrajudicial strikes against small vessels, which United Nations experts have decried as violations of international law, have killed at least 80 civilians (CNN, 11/14/25). Many foreign policy analysts believe that regime change in Venezuela is the ultimate goal (Al Jazeera, 10/24/25; Left Chapter, 10/21/25), but the Trump administration instead claims it is fighting ‘narcoterrorism’, accusing Caracas of flooding the US with drugs via the Cartel of the Suns and Tren de Aragua, both designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Over the years, Western media have endorsed Washington’s Venezuela regime-change efforts at every turn, from cheerleading coup attempts to whitewashing deadly sanctions.” (11/20/25)
“[T]he negative impacts of Trump’s global tariffs are already being felt by American businesses and consumers. The Budget Lab at Yale University projects the net impact will be a slowing of the U.S. GDP for years to come and net losses to the average household of about $1,300. In just the first few months of the Trump presidency, Californians coughed up over $11 billion in tariff payments as a result of Trump’s decrees. That’s real money taken out of the hands of California businesses and consumers. So it struck me as odd, the other day, when I saw GOP Rep. Young Kim post on X, ‘California’s gotten too expensive for small businesses to take off. I fought to make President Trump’s pro-growth tax cuts permanent — so local job creators can keep more of what they earn.'” (11/20/25)
“Some readers will come to this series with the prior belief that political entrepreneurship has a negative impact on freedom and flourishing. Those of us who believe that people tend to flourish most fully when governments refrain from interfering with their lives may hold that belief. We certainly have good reasons to be skeptical about the impact of political entrepreneurs on human flourishing. Nevertheless, if we are serious about promoting libertarian ideals, we cannot avoid considering the possibility that political entrepreneurship might have a role to play in getting us from where we are now – or where we seem to be heading – to a political and legal order that is more conducive to human flourishing.” (11/20/25)
“I noted last week that the Biden era vibecession — people feeling bad about an economy that looked good by standard measures — has persisted under Trump. In fact, public perceptions of the economy appear to be plumbing new depths. Honestly, I’m surprised. One factor in poor economic sentiment under Biden was partisanship. People’s reported perception of the economy is strongly affected by whether their preferred party is in power …. This is true for both parties, but historically Republicans have tended to cheer harder and boo louder than Democrats. So other things equal we would have expected average sentiment to improve under Trump II. Now, things aren’t equal. Objectively, the economy is worse in important ways than it was a year ago. Still, the extent of the plunge in perceptions is remarkable.” (11/20/25)
“Political views are often misleadingly discussed as though they span a single left/right spectrum. I want to suggest that a similar mistake gets made when thinking about economic systems and policies. As a corrective, consider that economic systems can be understood along more than one axis or spectrum – and these different axes are often conflated with each other. Here I propose four axes for evaluating a country’s economic system. Each axis should be thought of as a sliding scale, rather than a binary switch. It’s not a matter of if a country is entirely on this or that side, it’s a question of what side the balance tends toward.” (11/20/25)
Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, podcaster and influencer Candace Owens has floated a succession of conspiracy theories implicating everyone in the murder, from the Israeli government to Kirk’s own organisation, Turning Point USA. This week, her speculation reached its apogee when she suggested that Donald Trump himself was involved. In a recent broadcast, Owens linked the commemorations of Kirk’s death to a supposed plot, remarking that ‘when they give you a holiday and a boulevard … they definitely killed you.’ Owens’[s] wild theorising isn’t an anomaly; it’s part of something older and darker. There’s a distinctly medieval quality to much of the conspiratorial right—a world animated by unseen cabals, moral corruption, and divine punishment disguised as politics.” (11/20/25)
“Donald Trump may not be able to remember what things were like five years ago, when he handed the economy and the country to Joe Biden, but it is important that the rest of us do. As in so many other areas where Trump tries to turn reality on its head, he pushes the story of Biden inheriting a great economy, which he then wrecked. The reality is the opposite, Biden turned around an economy in shambles due to the pandemic, and handed off an economy that was widely touted as the envy of the world.” (11/20/25)
“When the Danish scholar Bjorn Lomborg published The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001, the reaction from the environmental establishment was not debate but an attempted excommunication. Scientific American devoted a special package to attacking the book as biased and error-ridden. Union of Concerned Scientists accused him of misrepresenting science and overstating good news. … Two decades later, the world looks more like Lomborg’s spreadsheets than like the early-2000s apocalypse rhetoric.” (11/20/25)
“Tucker Carlson’s effort to bring neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes into the mainstream of the conservative movement is not only morally reprehensible, it is a path to political suicide for the right. Those defending or excusing Carlson’s sane-washing of Fuentes need to ask themselves a simple question: Do they want to be a majoritarian movement or not? Conservatives cannot build a lasting majority without appealing to minority voters — and that won’t happen if they embrace White nationalists.” (11/20/25)
