Sunday, May 22, 2016

America's Sugar Daddies Are Voting for Bernie Saunders


What’s it like to be Sugar Daddy Warbucks? Likely white, middle-age, a Silicon Valley tech guru or some New York business tycoon with money to burn, or so says SeekingArrangement.com, which facilitates partnerships between cash-strapped coeds and wealthy benefactors. In fact, users of the site averaged a net worth of $5.2 million in 2015.
One more thing in common: Most sugar daddies are feeling a “Bern”-ing sensation, according to a survey of SeekingArrangement.com users.
Almost a third of sugar daddies who reported donating to a presidential campaign this year backed Bernie Sanders.
Despite being card-carrying members of the 1 percent that Sanders so often rails against, 345 sugar daddies reported donating to the Vermont senator, with Donald Trump (291) and Hillary Clinton (174) as the next biggest recipients. “A lot of people see Bernie supporters as ‘Bernie Bros,’ which is the opposite of what you might think of as a sugar daddy,” says Brook Ulrick, a spokesperson for SeekingArrangement.com, who adds that in 2012, most sugar daddies reported donating to Barack Obama. More than a thousand deep-pocketed donors with loose views on relationship norms said they gave to campaigns — and just as they bankrolled the aspirations of their sugar babies in return for time and favors, dozens of these men paid cold hard cash to help fuel the ambitions of candidates such as Ted Cruz and Ben Carson




Opioid Prescriptions Drop for First Time in Two Decades 

 NYT
WASHINGTON — After years of relentless growth, the number of opioid prescriptions in the United States is finally falling, the first sustained drop since OxyContin hit the market in 1996.
For much of the past two decades, doctors were writing so many prescriptions for the powerful opioid painkillers that, in recent years, there have been enough for every American adult to have a bottle. But for each of the past three years — 2013, 2014 and 2015 — prescriptions have declined, a review of several sources of data shows.
Experts say the drop is an important early signal that the long-running prescription opioid epidemic may be peaking, that doctors have begun heeding a drumbeat of warnings about the highly addictive nature of the drugs and that federal and state efforts to curb them are having an effect.
“The culture is changing,” said Dr. Bruce Psaty, a researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies drug safety. “We are on the downside of a curve with opioid prescribing now.”
IMS Health, an information firm whose data on prescribing is used throughout the health care industry, found a 12 percent decline in opioid prescriptions nationally since a peak in 2012. Another data company, Symphony Health Solutions, reported a drop of about 18 percent during those years. Opioid prescriptions have fallen in 49 states since 2013, according to IMS, with some of the sharpest decreases coming in West Virginia, the state considered the center of the opioid epidemic, and in Texas and Oklahoma. (Only South Dakota showed an increase.)

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