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Zero Hedge: President Joe Biden’s United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Thursday stopped executive orders from his predecessor designed to significantly lower prescription drug prices for Americans, including insulin and epinephrine.

The new administration will apparently re-evaluate the executive action from President Donald Trump toward the end of March. It remains unclear if it will be reinstated.

“The HHS Thursday froze the former Trump administration’s December drug policy that requires community health centers to pass on all their insulin and epinephrine discount savings to patients,” Bloomberg Law reported Thursday. “Centers that don’t pass on the savings wouldn’t qualify for federal grants.” Read More

Zero Hedge: Of all the technological revolutions we’ll live through in this next decade, none will be more fundamental or pervasive than the transition to digital cash. Money touches nearly everything we do, and although all those swipes and taps and PIN-entry moments may make it seem as though cash is already digital, all of that tech merely eases access to our bank accounts. Cash remains stubbornly physical. But that’s soon going to change.

As with so much connected to digital payments, the Chinese got there first. Prompted by the June 2019 public announcement of Facebook’s Libra (now Diem)—the social media giant’s private form of digital cash—the People’s Bank of China unveiled Digital Currency/Electronic Payments, or DCEP.

Having rolled out the new currency to tens of millions of users who now hold digital yuan in electronic wallets, the bank expects that by the time Beijing hosts the 2022 Winter Olympics, DCEP will be in widespread use across what some say is the world’s biggest economy.

Indeed, the bank confidently predicts that by the end of the decade digital cash will displace nearly all of China’s banknotes. Read More

Seattle Times: Amazon wants the upcoming unionization election at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse to be held in-person, arguing against National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) guidance to hold mail-in balloting in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

The e-commerce giant late Thursday appealed the ruling by an NLRB hearing officer a week ago to allow roughly 6,000 workers to take seven weeks, starting Feb. 8, to cast their ballots by mail to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). Amazon argued in one of two filings that the agency’s pandemic-voting policy is flawed, in part because it fails to define what a COVID-19 “outbreak” actually is.

That guidance “reflected assumptions developed comparatively earlier in the pandemic — before scientific understanding of the virus and possible precautions had developed to where it is today,” Amazon says in the filing.

A union spokeswoman declined to comment on the filing. Read More

Breitbart: President Joe Biden’s first day in office may have been historic in more ways than one: he may have set a single-day record for the number of jobs killed by an American president.

Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, as promised. In so doing, he killed some 11,000 direct jobs that the pipeline’s construction was to have created, and an estimated 60,000 indirect jobs in secondary, related industries.

Over 1,000 workers already on the job — mostly union workers — will be laid off as a result of the decision, even if it is litigated, as many expect it will be, in the courts.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) confronted Secretary of Transportation nominee Pete Buttigieg over the Keystone XL decision on Thursday morning, during Buttigieg’s confirmation hearing. If the administration was serious about infrastructure, Cruz asked, why was it killing an infrastructure project with “good, paying union jobs”? Read More