Powerball Jackpot Climbs To $1.73 Billion—Here’s What The Winner Will Take Home After Taxes | Who profits most from America’s baffling health-care system? | Charles Feeney, Who Made a Fortune and Then Gave It Away, Dies at 92 | Did bitcoin leak from an American spy lab?

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Powerball Jackpot Climbs To $1.73 Billion—Here’s What The Winner Will Take Home After Taxes - Forbes

The Powerball jackpot surged to $1.73 billionâthe second-largest lottery prize in U.S. historyâafter no tickets matched all six numbers drawn on Wednesday night, although the winner will take home a much smaller amount after paying their taxes.

Powerball tickets are seen on a counter after being purchased in a store on in Miami, Florida.

If a winner emerges in the next draw, they can choose between a $1.73 billion payout spread over 30 annual installments or a lump sum cash prize of $756.6 millionâusually the more popular choice.

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Who profits most from America’s baffling health-care system? - The Economist

ON OCTOBER 4TH more than 75,000 employees of Kaiser Permanente, a large health-care chain, began a three-day strike. The walkout was the biggest in the history of America’s health sector, and called attention to the staffing shortages plaguing the country’s hospitals and clinics. In the same week ten drugmakers said they would negotiate medicine prices with Medicare, the public health-care system for the elderly, following legislation which all but forced them to. It will be the first time that companies have haggled over prices with the government.

These events are symptoms of the deeper malaise in America’s dysfunctional health-care system. The country spends about $4.3trn a year on keeping citizens in good nick. That is equivalent to 17% of GDP, twice as much as the average in other rich economies. And yet American adults live shorter lives and American infants die more often than in similarly affluent places. Pharmaceutical firms and hospitals attract much of the public ire for the inflated costs. Much less attention is paid to a small number of middlemen who extract far bigger rents from the system’s complexity.

Over the past decade these firms have quietly increased their presence in America’s vast health-care industry. They do not make drugs and have not, until recently, treated patients. They are the intermediaries—insurers, pharmacies, drug distributors and pharmacy-benefit managers (PBMs)—sitting between patients and their treatments. In 2022 the combined revenue of the nine biggest middlemen—call them big health—equated to around 45% of America’s health-care bill, up from 25% in 2013. Big health accounts for eight of the top 25 companies by revenue in the S&P 500 index of America’s leading stocks, compared with four for big tech and none for big pharma.

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Charles Feeney, Who Made a Fortune and Then Gave It Away, Dies at 92 - The New York Times -

After piling up billions in business, he pledged to donate almost all of his money to causes before he died. He succeeded, and then lived a more modest life.

Charles F. Feeney, a pioneer of duty-free shops and a shrewd investor in technology start-ups who gave away nearly all of his $8 billion fortune to charity, much of it as quietly as he had made it, died on Monday in San Francisco. He was 92.

His death was announced by the Atlantic Philanthropies, a group of foundations he had started and funded since the early 1980s. He lived in a modest rented apartment in San Francisco.

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Did bitcoin leak from an American spy lab? - The Economist

The origins of covid-19 remain unknown. Most scientists think it jumped from wild animals to humans at a meat market in Wuhan. But it is also possible it escaped from a virology research lab in the same city.

But a theory circulating online holds that bitcoin was dreamed up by the National Security Agency (NSA), an American spy agency that also does cutting-edge cryptography research. “I think it was a shuttered internal R&D project which one researcher thought was too good to lay fallow on the shelf and chose to secretly release,” tweeted Nic Carter, a prominent bitcoin fan. Mr Carter and his fellow travellers think they have a smoking gun: a paper written in 1996 by NSA employees entitled “How to make a mint: the cryptography of anonymous electronic cash”. And the paper cites work by a researcher named “Tatsuaki Okamoto”.

But the paper is more smoke than gun. It is merely a survey of cryptographic ideas that might be used in digital cash. Unlike bitcoin, whose big innovation was its decentralised design, the schemes in the paper rely on an overseeing authority. It discusses the risks that electronic cash would pose to taxation and law enforcement. “Thus the idea that the NSA would develop a decentralised, trustless cryptocurrency as a ‘monetary bioweapon’ that would impair their own government’s functions” is implausible,” writes David Rosenthal, a cryptocurrency sceptic, on his blog.

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