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YMBI: Jackson’s 1824 election has some ‘interesting’ details/events’

‘CORRUPT BARGAIN’

Andrew Jackson received the most popular votes and the most electoral votes in the election of 1824. He did not become president.

https://millercenter.org/contested-presidential-elections/corrupt-bargain

Excerpt:

.....Jackson was the only candidate to attract significant support beyond his regional base, and his Jackson’s popularity foretold a new era in the making. When the final votes were tallied in the eighteen states requiring a popular vote, Jackson polled 152,901 votes to Adams’s 114,023; Clay won 47,217, and Crawford 46,979. The electoral college gave Jackson the highest total as well, but his 99 electoral votes electoral were 32 fewer than he needed for a majority and thus the presidency. Adams won 84 electoral votes followed by 41 for Crawford and 37 for Clay.

Acting under the Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution, the House of Representatives met to select the president from among the top three candidates. Henry Clay, as the candidate with the fewest electoral votes, was eliminated from the deliberation. As Speaker of the House, however, he became the most important player in determining the outcome of the election in the House, which took place in February 1825. With each state having one vote, as determined by the wishes of the majority of each state’s congressional representatives, Adams emerged as the winner with a one-vote margin of victory. Most of Clay’s supporters, joined by several old Federalists, switched their votes to Adams in enough states to give him the election. Soon after his inauguration, Adams appointed Clay as his secretary of state.

.....Jackson laid the blame on Clay, telling anyone who would listen that the Speaker had approached him with the offer of a deal: Clay would support Jackson in return for Jackson’s appointment of Clay as secretary of state. When Jackson refused, Clay purportedly made the deal with Adams instead. In Jackson’s words, Clay had sold his influence in a “corrupt bargain.”

.....Also, the loss of three states that Jackson had won in the popular vote—Illinois, Maryland, and Louisiana—due to the defection of congressmen who supported Adams suggests that more was involved in the outcome than the political maneuvering of one man. Enraged, Jackson resigned his seat in the Senate and vowed to win the presidency in 1828 as an outsider to Washington politics.

Within months of Adams’s inauguration, the Tennessee legislature nominated Jackson for president in 1828.

.....The 1828 campaign turned out more than twice the number of voters who had cast ballots in 1824—approximately 57 percent of the electorate. Jackson won the election in a landslide, and by a wide margin of 95 electoral votes. Adams carried New England, Delaware, part of Maryland, New Jersey, and sixteen of New York’s electoral votes—nine states in all. Jackson carried the remaining fifteen states of the South, Northwest, mid-Atlantic, and West. Incumbent Vice President John C. Calhoun won 171 electoral votes to 83 for Richard Rush of Pennsylvania, Adams’s running mate.

In four years, the “corrupt bargain” had yielded to “Jacksonian democracy.”

How Medicare Advantage Plans Use Algorithms To Cut Off Care For Seniors In Need

https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/03/13/2332231/how-medicare-advantage-plans-use-algorithms-to-cut-off-care-for-seniors-in-need

https://www.statnews.com/2023/03/13/medicare-advantage-plans-denial-artificial-intelligence/

Statnews is subscriber based.

Excerpt:

Health insurance companies have rejected medical claims for as long as they’ve been around. But a STAT investigation found artificial intelligence is now driving their denials to new heights in Medicare Advantage, the taxpayer-funded alternative to traditional Medicare that covers more than 31 million people. Behind the scenes, insurers are using unregulated predictive algorithms, under the guise of scientific rigor, to pinpoint the precise moment when they can plausibly cut off payment for an older patient’s treatment. The denials that follow are setting off heated disputes between doctors and insurers, often delaying treatment of seriously ill patients who are neither aware of the algorithms, nor able to question their calculations. Older people who spent their lives paying into Medicare, and are now facing amputation, fast-spreading cancers, and other devastating diagnoses, are left to either pay for their care themselves or get by without it. If they disagree, they can file an appeal, and spend months trying to recover their costs, even if they don’t recover from their illnesses.

The algorithms sit at the beginning of the process, promising to deliver personalized care and better outcomes. But patient advocates said in many cases they do the exact opposite — spitting out recommendations that fail to adjust for a patient’s individual circumstances and conflict with basic rules on what Medicare plans must cover. “While the firms say [the algorithm] is suggestive, it ends up being a hard-and-fast rule that the plan or the care management firms really try to follow,” said David Lipschutz, associate director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit group that has reviewed such denials for more than two years in its work with Medicare patients. “There’s no deviation from it, no accounting for changes in condition, no accounting for situations in which a person could use more care.”

STAT’s investigation revealed these tools are becoming increasingly influential in decisions about patient care and coverage. The investigation is based on a review of hundreds of pages of federal records, court filings, and confidential corporate documents, as well as interviews with physicians, insurance executives, policy experts, lawyers, patient advocates, and family members of Medicare Advantage beneficiaries. It found that, for all of AI’s power to crunch data, insurers with huge financial interests are leveraging it to help make life-altering decisions with little independent oversight. AI models used by physicians to detect diseases such as cancer, or suggest the most effective treatment, are evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. But tools used by insurers in deciding whether those treatments should be paid for are not subjected to the same scrutiny, even though they also influence the care of the nation’s sickest patients.