Latest news with #NewYorkTimes
Axios
24 minutes ago
- Business
- Axios
Traditional Medicare to add prior authorizations
Medicare is requiring more pre-treatment approvals in its fee-for-service program in a bid to root out unnecessary care, federal regulators announced Friday. The big picture: Traditional Medicare historically hasn't required prior authorizations to access most drugs or services, a major perk for enrollees. Prior authorization in privately-run Medicare Advantage plans has become a hot-button issue, with Congress and federal regulators working to rein in the practice. Federal inspectors found in 2022 that prior authorization in MA prevented some seniors from getting medically necessary care. Major health insurers this week made a voluntary pledge to streamline and improve the prior authorization process across all health insurance markets. State of play: Medicare's innovation center announced that it will solicit applications from companies to run the prior authorization program. Medicare is looking for companies with experience using AI and other tools to manage pre-approvals for other payers, and with clinicians who can conduct medical reviews to check coverage determinations. The program will start Jan. 1, 2026 and run through the end of 2031. It will only apply to providers and patients in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona and Washington. The change will apply to 17 items and services, including skin substitutes, deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's Disease, impotence treatment and arthroscopy for knee osteoarthritis. CMS selected the services based on previous reports and evidence of fraud, waste and abuse, as well as what's already subject to prior authorization in Medicare Advantage. Overuse of skin substitutes to help heal wounds has especially come under fire in recent years. Medicare spent more than $10 billion on the products in 2024 — more than double what was spent the year before, according to the New York Times. CMS noted that it may make other services subject to the prior authorization program in future years. Providers in the geographic areas can choose whether or not they want to submit an authorization request before delivering a service. But if they decide not to, they'll be subject to post-claim review and risk not getting paid for a service that was already delivered. "In general, this model will require the same information and clinical documentation that is already required to support Medicare FFS payment but earlier in the process, namely, prior to the service being furnished," the notice reads. Zoom in: The companies hired to manage the program will be paid based on how much they saved the government by stopping payments for unnecessary services. "Under the model, we will work to avoid any adverse impact on beneficiaries or providers/suppliers," CMS wrote in the notice.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Onion' CEO on That Brutal ‘New York Times' Op-Ed: ‘Expect Us in Weird Places'
Readers of Sunday's New York Times were treated to an unusual full-page ad from a rival newspaper — the venerated satire periodical The Onion. Most of the available space was taken up by a mocking editorial piece with a headline that blared: 'Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice.' In a note at the bottom of the page, the company revealed that print copies of the op-ed were being delivered to the very lawmakers it ripped apart as complacent do-nothings under an increasingly authoritarian Donald Trump. And, just by wild coincidence, the stunt came right as the administration barreled ahead with the bombing of Iran, a destabilizing and politically unpopular action that for many Americans recalled the preludes to other catastrophic wars the U.S. has initiated in the Middle East. Whether Congress can successfully challenge Trump's unilateral show of military force — something it is technically obliged to do under the Constitution — remains to be seen. But the smart money is almost always on The Onion's prescient cynicism. More from Rolling Stone 'The Onion' Mocks Congress' 'Cowardice' in 'New York Times' Full Page Editorial Judge Blocks The Onion's Bid to Take Over Alex Jones' Infowars He Wrote The Onion's Famous Mass-Shooting Headline. It Still Haunts Him Here, Ben Collins, who has served as CEO of the 37-year-old publication since it changed owners in April 2024, talks about why the staff decided to make a bold statement in the Gray Lady, the success of their relaunched print model, an ongoing legal battle with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and how The Onion's writers stay one step ahead of a surreal new normal. So, this op-ed. Can you tell me how that came together, and why this was the moment for it?[The writing staff] have been sitting around looking at the failure of the legislative branch, which I thought was a co-equal branch of our government, but I guess it isn't. We're learning a lot of new stuff all the time. And they really wanted to go for it. The only note that I give them is just, if you are ready to go for it, let's go for it as hard as we can. So we reached out to the New York Times for editorial space. We didn't even know what we were going to put in there yet, necessarily, months ago. I just wanted them to have the ability to do something in that space. And they came up with that headline, and they were like, it's time. They also came up with the idea to mail that headline to Congress. I don't know who was in the room, but somebody on editorial staff was like, why don't we just make this all one thing, let's mail it to Congress, publish it as a full page of the New York Times, and make it a big hairy deal. We're hitting the gas pedal here, and think it's working. Hopefully they should be showing up in the mailboxes of every single congressperson. What kind of a reaction are you expecting?I have no idea! The thing that The Onion does best is it creates, in my opinion, some catharsis. It [allows] people without the full vocabulary for the moment to create a complete sentence for themselves. It allows them to put up a protest sign. We wanted people to understand that they are not alone in feeling particularly helpless in this moment. And we want Congress to understand that maybe they could fucking do something at some point in any capacity about the litany of horrors that we have been subjected to in the last six months. It's also fun to do it in the in the , since their editorial section has advocated for some questionable things over the I mean, we're right back in 2003. The timing is crazy in terms of the the the Iran bombing — I almost called it Iraq, because the language and the op-eds are the same as when I was growing up. I read a David Shields book called War Is Beautiful, it's a collection of New York Times photos of Iraq and Afghanistan where they made war look like this beautiful Disneyfied fireworks display, and that's not what it is. War is fucking brutal and horrible and evil. And it does feel like we're back in this mode where completely disconnected elites are killing people for sadomasochistic enjoyment. I grew up with this, and so did The Onion. This is where The Onion is at its at its best, when they are fully lined up against what is very clearly 'The Man,' and the machine is in full swing, from cable news to the Times op-ed page to the government itself, with every Republican in Congress and some Democrats [embracing] the idea that if we just annihilate some of these people, there will be no consequences. We've been through this before. During the Iraq War, The Onion was one of the only places to stand up against it. It was just, like, The Onion and the fucking Dixie Chicks, and now we're right back in that moment. Thankfully, I think more people can smell that this reeks and are not buying the party line of lobbyists that appear in the mainstream news saying that this will end all of our problems in the Middle East. We're just doing what we did 20 years ago. It's been a little over a year since the leadership shakeup at . What have you learned in that time, and are you feeling a sense of accomplishment a year later?Things have dramatically changed in the media landscape, and the fact that we're important and viewed as truth-tellers is an incredible indictment of the rest of the press. It's insane. I will say I am so deeply proud of the independent journalists out there that have stepped up and have a lot to lose in the face of harassment campaigns and lawfare and the immense power against them — they've done some of the best work ever. That's why we gave the scoop to Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket, she is just one of many people in independent media right now who are doing some of the best and most unafraid journalism I've seen in my lifetime. What we've seen is people who have told the truth and not kowtowed and not just bent over for this administration, or tried to meet halfway on fascism. Those are the places that have done really well. We've gone all in on speaking the truth, despite how dangerous it is now — the truth is incredibly absurd, so it just happens to line up very nicely with our business model. But yeah, it's been both horrible and horrific and and heartening to see that our work is more important than ever. And, you know, I would guess that by the end of the year, we're going to be one of the biggest newspapers in the country by distribution. We ship this paper to all 50 states and over 50 countries. I'm proud of the people who work here because they stood up a newspaper in a three months and have only made it bigger and better and sharper and more incisive. A lot of people would look around at the state of the world and say it's beyond parody or satire. How do your writers think about that and face that challenge?That's a question that we get a lot, and I think that it just shows how hard this is and that you need professionals. What we do is incredibly inefficient, and it's art, and it's hard, and that's what makes us great. We throw away like 150 headlines a day. That's not an exaggeration. Every day, they go in there, they write usually over 150 headlines, and they whittle them down to two or three. Sometimes it's zero. Sometimes nothing comes out of that. And then they they decide, like, is this a video? Is something we grab as a NIB, which stands for 'news in brief.' Where does this live in the Onion universe, basically. And then from there, they build out the joke. It's surgery every single time on each verb and and article and everything. It's just a tremendous amount of work. If Sam Altman or whoever came in here and took over this company, it would be fucking obliterated instantly. Because it's an old-fashioned machine that we have that works really well. We have 40 years of institutional knowledge here. The thing that I've come to realize is there's a math and a science and art to this. I think most people feel that satire is like, turn everything up to 2x speed or just do the inverse or something. I think what The Onion does is like 1.25x speed. It allows you to see into some funhouse future. And it just allows [the writers] to cook a lot easier. They don't overdo it. And by doing that, it kind of like keeps it within the bounds of reality, but in a way that is both funny and biting. There's a strong tradition there, but in this last year, we've seen some big swings that we wouldn't have seen from the old . I realize it didn't quite work, but are we going to see more stuff like the out of bankruptcy?We're still working on that, brother. As I've said, Alex Jones is the Michael Jordan of evading justice. He's gummed up the work so substantially in every way, and scared every judge and every person that he can intimidate. So we're still trying to get through it, and we are confident we'll end up with it by the end of the day, but I don't know when the end of that day is, so we're still fighting. But yes, expect us in weird places. We constantly want to show up, saying the sentence that everybody's thinking but can't say in public right now. We have this incredible market advantage of not being beholden to anybody right now. And it's great for our bottom line. What I'm trying to say is, we're going to be rich. It's a gold mine for us, baby! Expect us to do both the right and the funny thing in incredibly surprising and weird ways in the next few months and hopefully years. We have a bunch of stuff lined up that will hopefully get people off their couch a little bit. We want to be able to say stuff that other people, for institutional reasons, can't say, or they're too afraid to say. You may be the only CEO in America making that in a unique position, certainly. And other places have to learn from this — being afraid all the time and just constantly making transactional moves. How long can you survive like this? What is even the point of being alive if you're just gonna continue managing rot? And it seems like that's what 98 percent of people are doing in these media companies right now. I don't know, take a chance. Nobody likes what's happening. Especially if you're a journalism company or a media company, you're [meant to be] actually reflecting what people want or what people believe. So get some guts and do something interesting. It's not that hard. So that's your advice to ?Him, no, he shouldn't. He should not do anything ever again. He should just stop whatever he's doing. [Those] people who have gotten us to a very bad spot should go take their boats into the ocean and do sea-steading or whatever they keep saying they're going to do. Go light fireworks in the ocean and look at them for the rest of your lives, just be happy. Go away from us, please. I have an ethics question. Your partner, Kat Abughazaleh, is . I was just wondering if you'll abuse your power to endorse her through the through the paper of record.I've been threatening all of everyone in Illinois with personal punishment if they don't say that she's the coolest person who's ever lived. I'm extremely rich. What I do is I drive my Lamborghini to everyone's house and I just berate them at their doorstep. So that's my plan. If you haven't been berated yet by me at your doorstep, or had me shouting at you from the Lamborghini, then, frankly, I haven't done my job. She's fucking great. I'm proud of her. She's doing so good. And yeah, the second that we get into internecine local politics at The Onion is the second that we've lost the plot. Though it is a Chicago paper, after is a Chicago paper. That's correct. I'm assuming we've done some Chicago stuff, right? I'm actually gonna look it up. I don't really know, but let me see if we did, like, a Rod Blagojevich story. Oh, these are fucking ancient. Let's see. 'Rod Blagojevich Trying To Sell Presidential Commutation to Cellmate For $2.8 Million.' Pretty good. So, yeah, there is Illinois politics in general. But no, that whole thing is very strange, because I've never been around actual politics, so to hear it in the other room when I wake up every day — she spends every day just like, pounding on doors and shaking hands. And it's very different lifestyle, certainly. It seems in the nature of that it's going to take rotten people down a notch rather than elevate good politics. But then you had this idea to put up information about gun violence on the Infowars site. Is there room for earnestness at , where it's not just sarcasm? I don't actually think so. I think there are words and there are actions. You can do good deeds with your actions, but in terms of the words that we put out on a day-to-day basis, we are going to remain stupid as fuck and silly, and we're going to try as hard as we can to get to the to the meat of stuff by not telling the truth. That is what The Onion is, writ large. We will obviously do stuff too, we will do whatever we can to make the world better. Hopefully, you'll see that in the next few months, as we kind of grow and build on top of this weird little newspaper empire established in a year. But we don't let anybody get in the way of the actual writing or the editorial or the videos they make, or anything like that. That stuff is sacrosanct, and if we can do some good on the side as a means of getting that writing in front of more people, even better. Good stories are kind of against the law right now. We want to show up in places and make people believe that good things are possible and that you're not going nuts, that things are actually quite exactly as bad as you think they are. And here's, like, a very short sentence that will allow you to think about the world through that construct. That's the whole goal here, man. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up
CNET
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CNET
Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints, Answers for June 28 #278
Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles. Today's Connections: Sports Edition has some oddball categories that I wouldn't really consider sports. They're more like games, and hobbies or leisure activities. But you get the idea. Read on for hints and the answers. Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That's a sign that the game has earned enough loyal players that The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by the Times, will continue to publish it. It doesn't show up in the NYT Games app but now appears in The Athletic's own app. Or you can continue to play it free online. Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta Hints for today's Connections: Sports Edition groups Here are four hints for the groupings in today's Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group. Yellow group hint: Reel it in. Green group hint: 21. Blue group hint: Between the bases. Purple group hint: Score! Answers for today's Connections: Sports Edition groups Yellow group: Fishing terms. Green group: Options in blackjack. Blue group: MLB shortstops. Purple group: ____ goal. Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words What are today's Connections: Sports Edition answers? The completed NYT Connections: Sports Edition for June 28, 2025, #278. NYT/Screenshot by CNET The yellow words in today's Connections The theme is fishing terms. The four answers are bait, hook, rod and tackle. The green words in today's Connections The theme is options in blackjack. The four answers are double down, hit, split and stand. The blue words in today's Connections The theme is MLB shortstops. The four answers are Betts, Story, Volpe and Witt. The purple words in today's Connections The theme is ____ goal. The four answers are empty net, field, golden and own.
CNET
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CNET
Today's NYT Connections Hints, Answers for June 28, #748
Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Today's NYT Connections puzzle could be tough. Just remember, sometimes last names can disguise themselves as regular nouns. Read on for clues and today's Connections answers. The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak. Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time Hints for today's Connections groups Here are four hints for the groupings in today's Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group. Yellow group hint: Go get it, boy! Green group hint: Lots. Blue group hint: What's the trouble, officer? Purple group hint: They came up with novel items. Answers for today's Connections groups Yellow group: Things a dog can fetch. Green group: Great many. Blue group: Possible results of a traffic violation. Purple group: Industrial Revolution inventors. Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words What are today's Connections answers? The completed NYT Connections puzzle for June 28, 2025, #748. NYT/Screenshot by CNET The yellow words in today's Connections The theme is things a dog can fetch. The four answers are ball, bone, Frisbee and stick. The green words in today's Connections The theme is great many. The four answers are drove, host, load and score. The blue words in today's Connections The theme is possible results of a traffic violation. The four answers are boot, points, ticket and tow. The purple words in today's Connections The theme is Industrial Revolution inventors. The four answers are Bell, Diesel, Singer and Watt.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
This Unexpected Wedding Movie Was Just Named One of the Best Films of the 21st Century
This week, the New York Times released their list of the top 100 movies of the 21st century, as selected by notable directors, actors, and Hollywood insiders. Bridesmaids, the hit 2011 wedding film starring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, and Melissa McCarthy, was ranked as number 32. The film beat out other beloved wedding movies released since January 1, 2000, like Wedding Crashers, 27 Dresses, and Bride far as classic wedding films go, movies like Father of the Bride, My Best Friend's Wedding, and Four Weddings and a Funeral are generally consider to be some of the very best. What do these flicks all have in common—beyond a wedding serving as significant part of the plot, that is? They were all released in the 20th century. There have been more contemporary wedding hits, though, like Wedding Crashers, The Wedding Singer, The Wedding Planner, and 27 Dresses, which were all released in the last 25 years. But the modern wedding movie that officially reigns supreme is none other than the 2011 cult-classic Bridesmaids. That's not just our opinion—the movie was just named one of the top 100 best movies of the 21st century by the New York Times. The list, which was released in full today, June 27, highlights the top 100 movies from the last 25 years. To compile their winners, the New York Times asked 500 "influential directors, actors, and other notable names in Hollywood and around the world" to cast ballots for their favorite films released after January 1, 2000. Voters included names like Sofia Coppola, Barry Jenkins, and Julianne Moore. Related: Julia Roberts Wants to Do a 'My Best Friend's Wedding' Sequel One standout winner spotted by the editors at BRIDES was the 2011 cult-classic wedding film Bridesmaids, which was ranked at number 32. Starring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, and Melissa McCarthy, the hilarious movie follows a group of women as they prepare to support their pal, Lillian (played by Rudolph) as she prepares to walk down the aisle. Wiig stars as Annie, Lillian's longtime best friend and maid of honor, who instantly feels competitive with the bride's newest girlfriend, Helen (played by Byrne). The movie follows the group doing everything from the engagement party and choosing bridesmaids' dresses (an unforgettable scene for those in the know) to planning pre-nuptial events and trying (and failing) to head to Las Vegas for a bachelorette party. "What surprises is how deeply felt this Paul Feig film is: Annie is sad and jealous, unable to get out of her own way," The New York Times writes of why the film made their list of the top 100 of the century. "We've all been there, though perhaps not with explosive diarrhea." The movie is the only one on the list centered around a wedding, beating out other contemporary favorites people might expect like My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bride Wars. Up Next: The 30 Best Movie and TV Wedding Vows to Inspire Your Own Read the original article on Brides
