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LPE Originals

The Same Script: Value-Based Payment, Managed Care, and Neoliberalism

Though heralded as a policy innovation, value-based payment has not succeeded in lowering costs and has instead fueled corporate consolidation, as many physicians are ill-equipped to assume the financial risk that the payment model requires. Embodying the core tenets of neoliberalism, VBP is ultimately a failure of policymakers to equitably and efficiently administer a public health care program.

LPE Originals

Local Electricity and Bottom-up Energy Planning

To build an electric system that meets the needs and opportunities of the 21st century, we need proposals that strengthen public control and improve regulation of Investor-Owned Utilities. Yet on their own, such proposals ignore a fundamental issue: almost all federal, state, municipal, and coop utilities currently operate with the same centralized, top-down planning and system control as Investor Owned Utilities. Unless that changes, public ownership will do little to remove the barriers that now largely block the evolution of decarbonized, resilient, and more equitable electric service.

LPE Originals

State Efforts to Rein in Corporate Medicine

Private equity firms are acquiring dominant shares of physician practices, creating conflicts between shareholder value and physicians’ professional and ethical duties. While longstanding state laws that prohibit lay ownership of medical practices have been under-enforced and evaded, recent litigation and legislative proposals suggest they could be revitalized to address today’s forms of corporatization.

LPE Originals

Anti-Domination and the Future of Progressive Administration

The Trump administration is simultaneously dismantling, weaponizing, and centralizing state capacities in order to enact a reactionary vision of administration — one which seeks to roll back efforts by prior generations to equalize economic and social relations. In contrast to this vision, progressives ought to aspire to a regulatory state whose purpose is to prevent domination. This alternative vision can guide us in deciding which forms of administrative power we should build and which we should actively work to restrain.

LPE Originals

Beyond Redistribution: Rethinking UBI and the Politics of Automation

Silicon Valley tech bosses often promote Universal Basic Income as a progressive solution to job losses caused by automation. However, by portraying such displacement as inevitable rather than socially determined, these proposals obscure the critical role that power structures and market dynamics play in shaping technological innovation. They also fail to address how automation further concentrates control over technology, production, and data.

LPE Originals

Antimonopoly and Artificial Intelligence

While debate over AI regulation in the United States has largely focused on safety, the future of AI progress will also be determined by market structure. To ensure continued innovation, policymakers must use antitrust tools to protect competition at all levels of the supply chain — from hardware and cloud infrastructure to models hubs and consumer applications.

LPE Originals

How Anti-Trans Attacks Forge the Anti-Social State

The Trump Administration’s anti-trans policies should be seen as central, rather than peripheral, to the creation of what Melinda Cooper has called “an anti-social state” — a state that would abandon every duty to serve its citizens and residents, whose sole purpose would be to amplify presidential executive power.

LPE Originals

The Political Economy of Trans Healthcare Bans

Much as Reagan invoked the welfare queen as a diversion to absorb public outcry against devastating cuts to the social safety net, Trump today offers trans people – with their supposedly abundant, easily accessible healthcare – as scapegoats to justify a broader conservative health policy agenda.