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Here’s where all the official Democratic presidential candidates stand on climate

by rmac22221971 Posted on April 18, 2019

So far, 18 Democrats have announced bids to tussle with Donald Trump for the presidency in 2020, with more expected to throw their caps in the ring. In such a crowded field, it’s hard to decipher where each candidate stands on any issue, including climate change — a topic that was conspicuously absent in the 2016 election but appears will be front and center this time around. Luckily, the New York Times sent around a survey to each of the 18 declared Democratic candidates and got them all on the record about everything from a carbon tax to nuclear energy to renewables.

There are a few things that all of the candidates seem to agree on: The U.S. should stay in the Paris climate accord, reinstate President Obama’s climate legacy (which has suffered under Trump’s deregulation push), and invest in renewable energy. Some candidates said they would go even further in one or more of those issue areas, by adding their own flourishes to Obama’s Clean Power Plan or promising to work with the global community to strengthen the Paris pact.

Taking a look at where the candidates diverge yields a much more interesting analysis. Though there are many small distinctions between the 18 presidential hopefuls on climate policy, there are two issues where there is meaningful daylight between candidates.

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A carbon tax

A carbon tax is still controversial in the United States, despite its prominence in countries like Sweden and Norway, and the success of carbon-trading schemes in the state of California and the multi-state coalition named the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative on the opposite seaboard. That’s in part because politicians don’t agree on what to do with the money generated by the tax — though most of the candidates said they’d at least be willing to consider a price on carbon.

Cory Booker, in his response to a survey question on whether he supports a carbon tax, said he would like to see the money from the tax go toward alleviating inequality. That progressive approach clashes with Pete Buttigieg’s response. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor said he supports a tax but advocates for returning the money generated by the fee to American families — a scheme favored by some Republicans.

Both the progressive and conservative versions of a carbon tax failed to pass in Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s deep-blue state. The self-described climate candidate has watched many iterations of such a tax fail, in spite of his state’s liberal voter base. Perhaps that’s why Inslee is still in the undecided camp when it comes to pricing emissions — there’s only so many times you can bang your head against the same wall.

Nuclear energy

Like it or not, nuclear energy will likely have to play a role in weaning the United States off of its oil and gas addiction. Any candidate who supports the Green New Deal (five senators and counting) will have a hard time achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 without leaning on nuclear, at least in the short-term.

Regardless of that inconvenient truth, the question on nuclear energy was the most divisive in the survey, according to the Times. Seven out of the 18 were in favor of new nuclear development, including Booker, Inslee, John Hickenlooper, and Amy Klobuchar. Bernie Sanders, one of the earlier proponents of the Green New Deal and the emissions target it centers around, is not in favor of new nuclear. Eight of the candidates either didn’t respond or had “strong reservations.”

“Nuclear energy is not ideal, by any stretch,” said Marianne Williamson, the spiritual healer who famously counseled Oprah Winfrey and is one of those with reservations. “But it is still head and shoulders above coal and natural gas.”

In such a crowded field, it’s these minute differences between candidates that will help climate-conscious voters decide who’s serious about tackling rampant warming, among the many other issues facing the nation. As a presidential candidate, it’s easy enough to say you’ll reenter a climate agreement that nearly every other global leader supports. It’s much more difficult to speak with literacy about controversial topics like nuclear energy, or thorny emission reduction plans like a federal carbon tax. As election season heats up, these candidates will have to expound on the ways they aim to cool the planet down.

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Here’s where all the official Democratic presidential candidates stand on climate

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What is your town’s risk of wildfire? New media tool lets you see for yourself

by EmmanueV06 Posted on April 11, 2019

Which California town might be the next to burn? That’s the driving question behind Destined to Burn, the brand new media package produced via a partnership between the AP, Gannet, McClatchy, and others. The project examines how California can prevent wildfire devastation.

Wildfires have always been a risk in drought-prone California. But due to climate change’s drying effects on the soil and vegetation, burns are getting bigger, deadlier, and more expensive for the Golden State. Just last year, the Camp Fire killed almost 90 people and completely leveled the town of Paradise in Northern California. The climate-induced tragedy was 2018’s most expensive natural disaster.

Since then, many communities throughout California have been grappling with how to adapt to this type of threat.

And they may be right to worry. One in 12 homes in the state of California is at high risk from wildfires. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Cal Fire Maps, the Sacramento Bee recently released a search tool, which Californians can use to find out how much of their towns might be in the danger zone.

Based on their analysis, there are more than 75 California towns and cities in which at least 90 percent of residents live in “very high fire hazard severity zones,” as designated by Cal Fire. As part of the Destined to Burn package, The Sacramento Bee highlighted 10 California communities from that list: Shingletown, Nevada City, Colfax, Kings Beach, Pollock Pines, Arnold, Wofford Heights, La Cañada Flintridge, Rancho Palos Verdes, and Harbison Canyon.

In 6 out of these 10 communities, 100 percent of residents live in very high fire hazard zones — at least, according to 2010 census info. In Nevada City, the hometown of Grist’s very own Nathanael Johnson, 3,064 out of 3,068 residents live in high hazard areas. (A number that may leave some wondering: What’s the deal with those four lucky people?)

But aside from their exceptionally high wildfire risk, there isn’t that much that unites the communities on the Bee’s list. Residents of the affluent Rancho Palos Verdes (the most populated city on the list), for instance, don’t seem to be sweating too hard about wildfires. Scott Hale, an assistant fire chief for Los Angeles County, told the Sacramento Bee: “This being a coastal community, we don’t get the type of brush and that kind of fire behavior that you might get in somewhere like Paradise.”

Kings Beach, on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, is a popular tourist destination. Because so many of the homes there are vacation rentals, it could be harder to mobilize the local community to push for more fire prevention measures.

In contrast, Nevada City is taking its fire prevention measures seriously. The city launched a Goat Fund Me campaign in December, hoping to raise enough funds to rent brush-clearing ruminants to maintain the city’s lands, a method that has caught on throughout California and beyond. Residents have also taken fire prevention into their own hands, creating citizen-led controlled burn squads and even helping out neighbors who may have trouble clearing dry brush near their homes.

The list isn’t exactly intended to predict the next “Paradise.” The data has its limitations — age being one of them. A new census is approaching in 2020, and Cal Fire is currently at work on a new set of fire hazard maps, which will incorporate wind patterns and other important factors. Instead, the tools put together by Gannett, McClatchy, Media News, and the Associated Press, are designed to be used as a resource as communities figure out how to prepare for their unique wildfire risks.

“Our goal with this collaboration is to put a spotlight on policy issues that can and should be raised in the halls of the state Capitol and by local communities,” wrote McClatchy Regional Editor Lauren Gustus of the project. “This is a wicked problem with no easy answers. And the more information we can share about where and how we’re falling short, the quicker we can come together on potential solutions.”

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What is your town’s risk of wildfire? New media tool lets you see for yourself

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While one Washington ignores climate change, the other, rainier one is killing it.

by GitaBlacklock Posted on January 31, 2018

On Monday, newly minted Governor Phil Murphy signed an executive order to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state carbon trading program that aims to reduce greenhouse gases from the power sector.

New Jersey’s former governor (and bona fide bully) Chris Christie had pulled the state out in 2011, saying the initiative increased the tax burden for utilities and failed to adequately reduce greenhouse gases. Murphy said that Christie’s decision to withdraw had cost the state $279 million in revenue.

The state Department of Environmental Protection and the Board of Public Utilities will begin drawing up a game plan to re-enter the pact.

Nine eastern states already participate in RGGI: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. Now, New Jersey is joining the fray, and Virginia may soon follow.

“With this executive order, New Jersey takes the first step toward restoring our place as a leader in the green economy,” Murphy said. Jersey shore knows what it’s doing!

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While one Washington ignores climate change, the other, rainier one is killing it.

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FEMA said it was ending food and water aid to Puerto Rico, but now it isn’t.

by ChuPlainwgantew Posted on January 30, 2018

On Monday, newly minted Governor Phil Murphy signed an executive order to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state carbon trading program that aims to reduce greenhouse gases from the power sector.

New Jersey’s former governor (and bona fide bully) Chris Christie had pulled the state out in 2011, saying the initiative increased the tax burden for utilities and failed to adequately reduce greenhouse gases. Murphy said that Christie’s decision to withdraw had cost the state $279 million in revenue.

The state Department of Environmental Protection and the Board of Public Utilities will begin drawing up a game plan to re-enter the pact.

Nine eastern states already participate in RGGI: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. Now, New Jersey is joining the fray, and Virginia may soon follow.

“With this executive order, New Jersey takes the first step toward restoring our place as a leader in the green economy,” Murphy said. Jersey shore knows what it’s doing!

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FEMA said it was ending food and water aid to Puerto Rico, but now it isn’t.

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It’s OK that Democrats don’t have a national climate policy

by AurelioSowell Posted on November 16, 2017

More than a year after the election of Donald Trump, the opposition Democratic Party still hasn’t found its voice on climate change.

That’s according to an essential overview of the situation from the Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer. Taken at face value, it’s not good news: Despite consistent rhetoric that climate change is among the most important challenges of the century, the Democratic Party has no large-scale cohesive plan to tackle it.

OK, that fact is worrying.

However, while Meyer is correct in his assessment of national politics, he makes one glaring omission: Climate action at the local and state level around the United States is, if anything, healthier and more ambitious than ever before. And it’s more often than not driven by Democrats. After a two decade-long quixotic quest for a unified federal climate policy, party members are finally willing to admit that their climate strategy can’t rest on economy-wide national legislation alone.

“We need to do everything we can to fight climate change,” says Keith Ellison, a congressman from Minnesota and deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee. “That means having a bill ready for passage when we take power, and it also means pushing for more immediate wins to lower carbon emissions at the state and local levels by building upon the work of aggressive climate policy in states like Minnesota, California, and New York.”

In city halls, boardrooms, and statehouses across America, what’s (not) happening on climate in today’s Washington is mostly a sideshow. The science is clear, climate-related disasters are happening now, and in most cases, it makes economic sense to take action immediately. So on the front lines of climate change, from San Juan to San Francisco, Minneapolis to Miami, the message is clear: This problem is too important to wait for Congress and the president to get their act together.

Since President Trump announced his intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement back in June, more than 2,500 local leaders from all 50 states have signed a pledge saying, “We are still in.” In aggregate, those leaders — mayors, governors, CEOs, university presidents, etc. — represent more than half of all Americans. As an independent nation, they’d rank third in the world in terms of share of total emissions — nearly 10 percent of the global total. But this collective is pushing some of the most ambitious climate policy anywhere on Earth.

And contrary to what you might hear in Washington, pro-climate efforts don’t come at the expense of the economy. In New York City, emissions are down 15 percent since 2005. In the same timeframe, the economy has grown by 19 percent. In Minneapolis, emissions are down 18 percent while the economy is up 30 percent.

Even in red states like Kansas and Texas, bipartisan coalitions are emerging to take advantage of tremendous renewable energy resources in wind and solar. In 2005, Kansas sourced less than 1 percent of its electricity from wind. Now, it’s at 25 percent and, like California, is on pace to get 50 percent of its energy from renewable sources in the next few years. There is now a nationwide job boom in construction and installation of renewable energy.

If you ask Democrats and advocates directly, this kind of progress has changed the prevailing wisdom of what effective U.S. climate policy looks like.

“We know it’s possible because we’re doing it,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said in a statement from Bonn, Germany. “The West Coast offers a blueprint: This is how you build a thriving, innovative economy that combats climate change and embraces a zero-emission future.”

Inslee is helping lead a sizeable, but unofficial, U.S. delegation at the ongoing United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn. Dan Firger of Bloomberg Philanthropies, whose boss, Michael Bloomberg serves as an outspoken U. N. special envoy for cities and climate action, calls it a “shadow climate government.”

“We’re less concerned about a silver bullet bill in Congress than we are about how best to get near-term carbon reductions done,” Firger told Grist, adding that the former New York City mayor believes in “bottom-up climate action.”

Lou Leonard, a senior vice president at the World Wildlife Fund, points to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a market-based approach to reducing carbon emissions among several northeastern U.S. states. Already, one of the largest carbon schemes in the world, it stands to expand after this month’s elections resulted in Democratic victories in the Virginia and New Jersey governor races. Those states are now set to join the initiative.

“We cannot put all our chips in a federal solution,” says Leonard from Bonn, where his organization is helping support the We Are Still In delegation. “That’s not the way the U.S. economy works, that’s not the way politics works, and it’s certainly not the most obvious path to success.”

Still, The Atlantic’s Meyer has a point: Democrats need to be able to combine all these local policy victories into a national and global win. After all, worldwide carbon emissions are on pace for a new record high in 2017. But this inside-out approach has precedents for yielding real results.

Climate change inherently is a problem that requires local action. And increasingly, those working for climate policy have shifted their efforts to support local early adopters. It’s a strategy specifically designed to build an eventual national consensus.

“There’s more happening than many people are aware of,” says Steve Valk, the communications director for Citizens Climate Lobby. “City and state initiatives — as happened with gay marriage — can drive a national policy.”

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It’s OK that Democrats don’t have a national climate policy

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The EPA Used to Tweet About the Environment. Now It Just Tweets About Scott Pruitt

by CalebQ443110 Posted on March 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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One of the first actions the Trump administration took when it entered office was to crack down on the Environmental Protection Agency, starting with its social media feeds and website.

The agency’s work on climate and energy policy has slowed to a crawl, but it has been replaced with a different focus: The promotion of the new EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt. With one exception, all of the EPA’s tweets and Facebook posts since Pruitt’s confirmation have been about his various appearances or sharing quotes from the EPA chief or President Donald Trump. The only time EPA tweeted about an environmental issue, it was to promote Trump’s executive order attempting to roll back a Clean Water Act rule. (On Monday, outside of the three-week period we used for this analysis, the EPA finally tweeted about a local grant.)

This is unusual. During the Obama administration, the EPA Twitter account certainly publicized and promoted Administrator Gina McCarthy, but it was a far smaller portion of its work. Here’s a comparison of Tweets over a three-week period:

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Social media was then used as a tool for educating the public about public health problems and environmental initiatives, but under Pruitt, public education work is at a standstill.

“We tried to provide regular updates on the wide range of actions we were taking to protect people’s health and the environment all across the country,” Liz Purchia, a communications official for Obama’s EPA, said in an email. “People want to know that they are being heard; and social media is an essential tool for doing that. Right now what we’re seeing is a bunch of posts being thrown at us by Trump’s EPA without any effort to engage with the American people. All you have to do is take a look at EPA’s social media channels since Trump’s team took over and you can visually see the stark shift in control.”

Trump’s team froze all social media accounts and public communications when the new administration took office. The agency is posting updates again now that Pruitt is in charge, but its work on clean air, science, and climate change is far from the focus. The flurry of Twitter activity welcoming Pruitt after he was sworn in has since slowed mostly to promoting his speaking engagements. On Monday, which was out of the range for this comparison, the EPA had one additional tweet about policy, but kept up its Pruitt-focused ratio with one quote and retweet from Pruitt.

Under McCarthy, the EPA feeds were mostly run by career officials in coordination with the administrator’s political staff. The EPA then took a different tack. Over a similar time period when Gina McCarthy took over as administrator in 2013, the main house account tweeted 16 times about McCarthy herself and retweeted her nine times—most of which were during a public Q&A she conducted on Twitter. The overwhelming number of tweets was about the agency’s work. Here is a sampling:

All this suggests Pruitt and Trump’s team are carefully monitoring the public-facing side of the agency. An EPA career staffer, who requested anonymity, told Mother Jones that edits to the website must be approved first, and the website is “more tightly controlled” than it was before January.

There are a handful of exceptions: Regional offices in particular, where the Trump administration has not yet installed political appointees, are occasionally promoting local grants and cleanup projects.

Of course, the EPA is far more than its social media feeds. Its 15,000 employees are in charge of distributing grants, conducting scientific research, and enforcing the law. But social media is also a rough approximation of the priorities the agency wants to share with the public. The change of EPA’s emphasis on social media has also been more pronounced than that in other branches of the federal government, even ones focused on similar work. The Interior Department, for instance, is still sharing images of the nation’s national parks, and NOAA is still tweeting climate stats. The EPA hasn’t mentioned climate change once since Trump became president.

Some of the EPA’s followers on Facebook and Twitter have noticed the abrupt shift:

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The EPA Used to Tweet About the Environment. Now It Just Tweets About Scott Pruitt

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Carbon prices are way down, thanks to the Supreme Court’s hold on Clean Power Plan

by FaithMcnamee Posted on July 6, 2016

Carbon prices are way down, thanks to the Supreme Court’s hold on Clean Power Plan

By on Jul 5, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

A temporary halt to the federal government’s plan to cut electric power plant emissions has caused carbon prices in the Northeast’s only cap-and-trade program to plummet, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Carbon prices in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, have fallen 40 percent since the Supreme Court’s decision in February to stay the Clean Power Plan — from their peak at $7.50 per metric ton of carbon dioxide in December to $4.53 per ton in June.

RGGI is America’s first mandatory market-based cap-and-trade program, which places a collective limit on carbon emissions among its nine member states. Power plant emissions under that limit are called “allowances,” and the program stamps a price on them so they can be traded among polluters. Carbon prices are set at quarterly auctions, and proceeds are invested in state renewable energy, energy efficiency, and other sustainability programs.

The program is one of the Northeastern states’ strategies to comply with the Clean Power Plan if it withstands court challenges. The program is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions among all the New England states plus New York, Delaware, and Maryland as a way to reduce their contributions to global warming.

Experts disagree about what the sudden drop means for the future of carbon cutting in the Northeast and what direction the prices will go. Long-term low carbon prices could make it cheap to cut carbon throughout the Northeast, or it could chill future investment in renewables and other carbon-cutting measures because it will be less profitable to do so.

RGGI caps member states’ collective annual carbon emissions at a specific level, and they are set to decline 2.5 percent annually through 2020, encouraging states to develop renewables and other low-emissions energy sources to replace highly polluting ones.

RGGI auction prices for carbon pollution are considered low compared to California’s carbon trading market, where carbon emissions have been valued between roughly $12 and $13 per metric ton since 2014. RGGI prices had increased steadily from about $2 per ton 2012 to about $7.50 per ton 2015, but they fell sharply at the auctions held immediately after the Supreme Court decision.

U.S. Energy Information Administration analyst Thad Huetteman said the agency cannot comment on where prices may be headed because there are too many unknowns about RGGI’s future. But he said that if the Clean Power Plan is upheld in court, the EIA’s forecast suggests prices may remain low.

A spokesperson for RGGI declined to comment.

The James A. Fitzpatrick Nuclear Power Plant in Upstate New York.Nuclear Regulatory Commission

There is wide disagreement about the long-term implications of low RGGI prices and whether they’ll bounce back in the near future.

“Low RGGI prices hamper the region’s ability to pursue additional carbon cuts,” and make clean energy investment less profitable, said Jordan Stutt, a clean energy analyst for the Acadia Center, a New England climate policy think tank.

He said lower prices mean states earn less money from trading carbon, reducing the amount of auction money they will get that can be reinvested in state-run clean energy and energy efficiency programs.

RGGI has not established a carbon emissions cap for after 2020, and a new cap mandating strict emissions cuts could raise prices in the long run, he said.

William Shobe, a University of Virginia public policy professor who was part of the team that designed the RGGI carbon auction, is more optimistic about what low carbon prices mean for carbon cutting in the future.

Shobe said low carbon prices are good news for both the future of the cap-and-trade program and the region’s ability to slash its emissions.

“If you had a choice between high prices and low prices, you’d want low prices because the cost of accomplishing the (carbon cutting) goal is lower,” he said. “That means you’re getting what you want cheaper, and in the end you’ll want to buy more of it.”

The key is that RGGI states’ carbon emissions are determined by the cap they place on them, not the price of those emissions, he said.

“That’s the nice thing about cap-and-trade programs — you’ve got a guarantee you’re going to meet the emissions goal,” Shobe said. “The question is how expensive it’s going to be.”

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Carbon prices are way down, thanks to the Supreme Court’s hold on Clean Power Plan

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This Likely GOP Presidential Candidate Actually Believes in Global Warming

by MillaZ18sqebdk Posted on May 11, 2015

Mother Jones

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a potential contender for the Republican presidential nomination, thinks climate change is real and caused—at least in part—by human activity, according to MSNBC.

Christie said he believes there’s “no use in denying global warming exists” but that he’s skeptical about most of the mainstream approaches to dealing with it. That includes cap-and-trade programs and unilateral steps to reduce America’s carbon footprint, such as President Barack Obama’s proposed restrictions on power plant emissions.

Christie’s comments essentially matched those he made in back in 2011, the last time he spoke publicly about the issue. In some respects, his position is refreshingly distinct from those of his probable rivals in 2016. Many of the GOP contenders—for example, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio—sit somewhere on the spectrum of climate change denial. But at the same time, Christie’s track record in New Jersey suggests that as president, he’d be unlikely to actually do much to confront global warming, even if he thinks it’s happening. As Climate Progress put it:

As governor, Christie withdrew New Jersey from the nine-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program aimed at reducing emissions, in 2011. Last year, Christie called RGGI “a completely useless plan” and said that he “would not think of rejoining it.” Christie even vetoed an attempt by the New Jersey state legislature to rejoin RGGI…New Jersey also doesn’t have a statewide climate change plan—the state is the only one on the eastern seaboard to not have one in place or be in the process of developing one, according to the Georgetown Climate Center.

Christie’s logic—that even if climate change is real, there’s nothing we can do to stop it—is out of step with mainstream science. And it ignores the growing international political momentum around climate action, which Obama has sought to lead. Moreover, if Christie thinks that kind of rhetoric is going to help him score points with Republican voters in the wake of the federal indictments handed down last week in the Bridgegate scandal, he has a long way to go: The latest polling puts Christie behind all of his serious opponents for the nomination.

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This Likely GOP Presidential Candidate Actually Believes in Global Warming

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How the US Embassy Tweeted to Clear Beijing’s Air

by Myrna Posted on March 9, 2015

The American government exposed just how “crazy bad” China’s air really was. Hung_Chung_Chih/iStock When the US Embassy in Beijing started tweeting data from an air-quality monitor, no one could have anticipated its far-reaching consequences: It triggered profound change in China’s environmental policy, advanced air-quality science in some of the world’s most polluted cities, and prompted similar efforts in neighboring countries. As the former Regional Strategic Advisor for USAID-Asia, I have seen first-hand that doing international development is incredibly difficult. Billions of dollars are spent annually with at best mixed results and, even with the best intentions, the money often fails to move the needle. That is why I was so inspired by the story of the US embassy’s low-cost, high-impact development project. They tapped into the transformative power of democratized data, and without even intending to, managed to achieve actual change. Here’s how it happened. In 2008, everyone knew Beijing was polluted, but we didn’t know how much. That year, the US Embassy in Beijing installed a rooftop air-quality monitor that cost the team about as much as a nice car. The device began automatically tweeting out data every hour to inform US citizens of the pollution’s severity (@beijingair). Read the rest at Wired. Read the article: How the US Embassy Tweeted to Clear Beijing’s Air ; ; ;

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How the US Embassy Tweeted to Clear Beijing’s Air

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A California Hospital Charged $10,000 for a Cholesterol Test

by LouisaDunckley Posted on August 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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By now, I assume we all know that hospitals charge widely varying rates for similar procedures. But it’s often hard to pinpoint exactly what’s going on. Sometimes it’s due to the amount of regional competition. Sometimes the procedures in question vary in ways that simple coding schemes don’t pick up. Some doctors are better than others. And of course, hospitals inflate their list prices by different amounts.

All that said, be prepared for your jaw to drop:

Researchers studied charges for a variety of tests at 160 to 180 California hospitals in 2011 and found a huge variation in prices. The average charge for a basic metabolic panel, which measures sodium, potassium and glucose levels, among other indicators, was $214. But hospitals charged from $35 to $7,303, depending on the facility. None of the hospitals were identified.

The biggest range involved charges for a lipid panel, a test that measures cholesterol and triglycerides, a type of fat (lipid), in the blood. The average charge was $220, but costs ranged from a minimum of $10 to a maximum of $10,169. Yes, more than $10,000 for a blood test that doctors typically order for older adults, to check their cholesterol levels.

A lipid panel! This is as standardized a procedure as you could ask for. It’s fast, highly automated, identical between hospitals, and has no association with the quality of the doctor who ordered the test. You still might see the usual 2:1 or 3:1 difference in prices, but 1000:1?

So what accounts for this? The researchers have no idea. No insurance company will pay $10,000 for a lipid panel, of course, so the only point of pricing it this high is to exploit the occasional poor sap with no health insurance who happens to need his cholesterol checked. Welcome to health care in America. Best in the world, baby.

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A California Hospital Charged $10,000 for a Cholesterol Test

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