This is your thread to discuss anything. Like, say, why the US government spends a greater fraction of its GDP on health care than Australia without providing universal care.
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Let me be the first Yank to rise in umbrage against anyone even thinking about stating that our system isn't just the bestest in the whole world.
Why? well, we don't think about stuff like that - it just is - and anyone who says otherwise is a [insert this week's marginalization phrase here].
Best,
D
Someone asked in the previous thread why I was focusing my criticisms of "Universal Health Care" on the Canadian system. The reason is that is the one I'm familiar with, having lived half my life in Canada.
There are other things that the US could do to lower health care costs, btw. Our over the top litigiousness doesn't seem to help. And the notion of having a health care "plan" is somewhat ridiculous. I'm planning to work as a consultant when I graduate in the coming months, and the much better approach seems to be to pay out of pocket for doctor visits, and then get actual "insurance" to cover the things that would be a burden. Having a medical "plan" is kinda like having a grocery "plan". Kinda dumb.
And let's see... I could live in the Universal Health Care utopia of Canada, where if I earned $90k per year, I'd be paying about $22k in income taxes (not to mention 14% sales tax), or I could pay $5k per year in income taxes in Washington State (no state income tax) with a 8.8% sales tax.
Given that I've also got about $150k in student loan debt, I'd be quite a bit further behind in saving for the kid's college educations, and for retirement. And most of my student loan debt is from Canada. Living there didn't help much with college affordability.
As a fellow Canadian, Ben, just let me say Woo Woo Woo cry me a river.
Hah!
Perhaps I'll comment on Gray and the NSRP, since the last thread was flooded with irrelevant comments...
McLean left this note on my blog:
Dave asks for detail (numbers and statements of vested interests). He should read http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/sppi_originals/peerreview.html if he desires this information.
Dr Vincent Gray has published in "Energy & Environment", a peer-reviewed journal from the UK. To save you the trouble, E & E is not liked by warming alarmists because it does give voice, and peer reviewed voice at that, to those who are sceptical of man-made warming.
Dr Vincent Gray has also told me in personal communication that he grew tired of fully justifying every comment in his IPCC review and adopted the practice of referring back to full justifications made in his earlier review comments (i.e. earlier chapters or earlier in the same chapter.
He says that the responses which claim that his comments contained no justification were dishonest.
I meant to italicize the entire quote, not just the first paragraph.
Dave, the reason Energy and Environment is not liked by anyone who knows anything about global warming is that it published rubbish like this:
http://n3xus6.blogspot.com/2007/02/dd.html
i.e the infamous Archibald paper attempting to link solar cycles with warming. However it does so by using data from 5 rural meteorological stations in South Eastern USA.
The stupidity of this should be easily apparent.
There's more wrong with it, that Nexus6 covers in his post.
Also, DAve, regarding Vincent- "no justification" can also mean "we cannot find any evidence to back up your ideas".
However the bit I looked at in the introduction, some of Grays comments did in fact improve the readability of it, so he did some good.
E&E's version of peer-review is not like that of a normal journal. Sonja usually gives you a choice as to which you prefer.
...by which I mean a choice as to peer or non-peer review. I don't know of any REAL journal that does that.
(previous post got away a bit early)
Has anyone considered trying to publish rubbish in E&E to prove a point, like what the writers did with "Bacteria in the ocean are causing global warming" paper?
OOps, sorry Dave- your formatting in your first post was unclear, so I thought the later non-italic part was yourself typing.
Hehe, I was a bit confused guthrie.
Just for the people who do not know about E&E (not Dave S since the italics should go down to the end of the post).
The editor is on record saying that due to her upbringing (Nazi Germany and DDR) she automatically mistrusts consensus and will publish anything that goes against said consensus.
"As a fellow Canadian, Ben, just let me say Woo Woo Woo cry me a river."
Er, whatever dude. I'm not Canadian, I just lived there for many years. I'm not crying a river, I just left. If you like paying what I consider outrageously high taxes, then I'm glad that you're happy. I'm happy too. Seems like a win-win to me.
I've had a lot of Old Year's Revelations
One is that it takes less scientific knowledge and ingenuity to comprehend the scientific consensus on a topic than it does to continue coming up with ever more elaborate denialist and crank schemes that will stay plausible long enough to cloud the waters.
We can rely on hundreds of thousands of scientists, and seek help, they basically cannot.
If you're earning $90K per year in income and only paying $5K per year in federal income taxes?
Can I have your full name, please? IIRC the IRS is still paying bounties for turning in tax cheats.
Guthrie, I think your #6 and Dave's #5 crossed in the mail. Just to make it excruciatingly clear, everything after "blog:" in Dave's post is a quote from John McLean.
I can't help but note with some pleasure that John McLean, although he is a fairly small-bore cannon, does roll around on the decks quite a bit even in light seas.
Here, for example, he leads off his defense of Energy & Environment by saying that it has an ideological axe to grind and selects papers on that basis. All true, of course, but perhaps Sonja B-C might not want it stated so baldly.
First, just go the IRS website. Use the following information:
1. Married filing joint return
2. Can someone claim you as a dependent? No.
3. Child tax credit: select 2 children.
4. Income: $90k
5. $3000 for donations to charity
Result: $6,969. That's right from the IRS
Now use similar information at this website (province = BC).
Result: $22,886.
Looks like I'll be calling the IRS for a refund :)
Whoops, forgot the charitable contribution on the Canadian tax estimator.
Result: $21,621. I doubt I'd get $14,000 worth of additional medical care in Canada that I wouldn't get in the US. That, and Canadian gun laws suck. And so does the parliamentary system. I do miss the snow, though. And the proper pronunciation of French words (e.g. portage).
Child tax credit is $1000 a pop.
My tax calculator gives $9700 unless there's more you're not sharing.
Kaiser would run you about $10K/yr for medical care with co-pays etc.
$19K vs. $21K.
Oh, and Ben's not counting the 7.75% his employer pays on that $90K income, so add another roughly $7K to Ben's US federal tax.
So it's more like $14K w/o health care vs. $21K with.
Unless Ben wants to argue that the 7.75% FICA deducted from his paycheck doesn't really represent a tax.
#17 jre
Where was the quote by McLean you mentioned? (About Sonja's axe-grinding).
Also, since it probably got lost in that other thread, I'll repeat:
back to McLean, courtesy of Jennifer Marohasy (who is a PhD and has published a fair number of scientific papers):
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/002641.html , we find:
"BTW While I am unsure what John McLean's exact university qualifications are, it has been my observation that he is a committed and hard working 'student in research' which I believe qualifies him as a scientist. I understand the notion that all knowledge starts with a university degree is a relatively recent one.
Posted by: Jennifer M at December 22, 2007 10:29 AM"
I do find that an interesting view of what qualifies someone to be a scientist, coming from someone who does have a scientific background.
What is Jennifers background in the sciences?
You see, I would argue that someone is a scientist if they are doing scientific research. This would include someone who has no qualifications, but is doing scientific research of some kind. The problem is that very few denialists meet the criteria of doing scientific research. Does John Maclean do scientific research?
dhogaza, I was computing that as if I was an employee, not a consultant. Apples to apples you know. At $90k per year, that would include benefits and all that, so Canada loses badly on that front.
As a consultant, I'd make considerably more.
In other words, you weren't counting the 7.75% tax your employer pays WITH YOUR MONEY.
It's a tax on you.
That's why if you work for yourself, you have to pay it yourself.
You can fantasize that that 7.75% isn't coming out of your pocket but, as one who once ran a company of 65 people, I assure you that salary offers are based on total cost to the employer, not what you see on your paycheck.
That 7.75% plus your matching 7.75% come before tax-deductible benefits, deduction for you and your spouse and dependents, etc. The fact that the first 7.75% doesn't appear on your tax stub doesn't mean it's not real, and doesn't mean it's not money out of your pocket.
It appears, though, that keeping that money off your paystub has had the effect of making it easy for you to pretend you're not really paying it. Which is probably part of the point ...
"apples to apples" doesn't mean counting social services taxes in Canada while ignoring those you're charged here in the US.
Perhaps. Depends on how good you are at marketing yourself. It's harder than people think (I'm 53, and have either owned and operated my own company (with partners) or have worked for myself as a consultant my entire adult life).
At least you'd become educated as to how much you are really paying in taxes because you'd get to pay that 7.75% in a way that makes it impossible to ignore.
Ha! Ben, that US income tax figure is ONLY for the income tax. Not only doesn't it include the employer share of FICA, it doesn't even include YOUR share!
90K * 15.5% adds about $14K to your dream figure, dude.
The Canadian figure appears to include taxes for social services (including health care...)
re: #23
Here is a bio, plus comments by sourcewatch.
Google Scholar shows some credible-looking-at-first-glance research papers on entomology, weed control, etc, in the 1990s, with a U of Q affiliation. That seems to change later.
Oops, the bio = http://www.ipa.org.au/people/bio.asp?peopleid=4 and sourcewatch = http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jennifer_Marohasy
Hhmm, thanks. I know its a generalisation, but some areas of biology have had plenty of good work done by people without degrees in the appropriate area in which they are doing good work. Maybe that is where she is coming from. Of course, it could also be that she is trying to come up with any silly answer she can think of in order to justify the denialists.
Marion says:
<1>I've had a lot of Old Year's Revelations
One is that it takes less scientific knowledge and ingenuity to comprehend the scientific consensus on a topic than it does to continue coming up with ever more elaborate denialist and crank schemes that will stay plausible long enough to cloud the waters.
We can rely on hundreds of thousands of scientists, and seek help, they basically cannot.
Marion is of course talking about people who don't believe in start signs, not climate science..
Like you, marion my new years resolution is to focus more on what People magazine says about my star sign.
"Ha! Ben, that US income tax figure is ONLY for the income tax. Not only doesn't it include the employer share of FICA, it doesn't even include YOUR share!"
That may be, to be honest, I'm not fully aware of all the ins and outs of tax stuff. On the other hand, I'd make probably at most $80k in Canada with my degree (Ph.D. Aeronautical Engineering), and easily as high as $100k in the US. What with the dollars being essentially on par, and with the cost of living being higher in Canuckland, it's still a win for me in America. And then there's the gun laws...
As for the cost of living, lets have a look. I'd like to get a new Ford F150. In Canada, an F150 that I like runs $36.5k (crew cab, 4x4), while in the USA, that will cost me $33k. $2.5k is nothing to sneer at.
Forgot to add sales tax. So in Canada, I'd pay 15% sales tax IIRC, which gives a final value to that truck of $42k, while my King County sales tax runs at 8.8% for a final cost of $36k. $6k buys a lot of gas for my truck.
Which brings up another point. Gasoline in Vancouver, BC costs about $1.10 per liter, or $4.16 per gallon. In Seattle, the same gallon of fuel costs $3.00. USA wins again.
Will the new left wing australian government dare to close down the coal mine industry? They will have a tougher task than right-wing Margaret Thatcher in the UK....
Hans,
The Australian government has no intention of shutting down the local industry and has said so publicly repeatedly.
Nor is there any need to do so.
Australian black coal is amongst the cheapest and least-carbon intensive fossil fuels around - probably second only to natural gas.
In a carbon-constrained world, energy production will shift from carbon-intensive sources to less carbon-intensive fuels.
A 70-80% reduction in carbon emissions from the energy sector can be achieved with a much lesser reduction in electricity output by phasing out the most carbon-intensive power plants first.
Ian, which are the most carbon intensive sources of power?
The US pays more with Universal Health Care because, in the early years of the 20th century, US business lobbied against it, apparently believing that it would reduce their power in labor negotiation. It turned out that it was a very bad idea, that is bad for both the US citizenry and business (which can find itself unable to lower labor costs in responce to changing market conditions easily due to huge health care liabilities eg US steel), and like so many other articles of faith in US right wing politics, they are unable to admit that its clearly a bad idea, given the poor value the US receives in return for its high health care spending.
Is there more to it than that, apart from justification of the whole US system on the basis that its better if you always remain rich?
Gouldie thinks the 20 trillion dollars needed to covert the globe over simply comes from rich tax payers.
Here's a reason why to avoid universal health care: command economies consistently underperform free markets.
Why is there this continued love affair with statism among the nominally liberal? Is the fear of living life with no one to fall back on but your own planning for crises and anyone who would *voluntarily* choose to help you so terrible that the best solution you can envision to the risks of life is not only to abrogate your personal responsibility for your health but also to demand it of anyone with the misfortune to live near the reach of your policing forces? Why is freedom such an incredible downer for command siders? Why is surrendering your natural autonomy over your own productive labor to the state such an attractive choice?
Re: the Canadian love of taxes: I wonder why I see so many Canadians coming across the border to make purchases then? Actually taking the time to speak to as many Canadians emigres/seasonal residents as will bother to discuss it with me, they don't seem to find the Canadian system quite so rosy. The most common exclamation I get from them is how wonderfully inexpensive the cost of living is here.
"Ian, which are the most carbon intensive sources of power?"
Ben: oil shales (because you have to burn most of the oil you extract to power the extraction process);
orimulsion: a sludge of asphalt mixed with water; now banned in most of the developed world; I think the Venzuelans still use some domestically.
Lignits: also known as brown coal. Essentially coal that hasn't completely formed yet. It's water content is much higher than black coal and consequently its energy content is lower and it burns less efficiently.
Black coal - there's a whole range of slightly different forms of black coal with varying energy content. Some developed countries still subsidise deep underground coal mines. These have higher effective carbon emissions than open-cut and shallow underground coal mines because 10% or more of the energy content of some underground-mined coal is used in the mining process itself.
Natural gas: burns much more efficient than coal.
There are also huge differences in the thermal efficiency of coal-fired power plants. The best new plants turn 50% of the thermal energy from burning coal into electricity, many older plants are only 35% efficient.
"Is the fear of living life with no one to fall back on but your own planning for crises and anyone who would voluntarily choose to help you so terrible that the best solution you can envision to the risks of life is not only to abrogate your personal responsibility for your health but also to demand it of anyone with the misfortune to live near the reach of your policing forces?"
1. moral hazard - people free ride on the community by failing to provide for their own health care (and their children) then fall back on private charity.
2. The US system is emphatically not a free market system. The US pays a higher proportion of health costs than do the governments of most other developed countries. The difference is that in the US system, the government has no say in how the money is spent. Health markets are unusual in that consumers have markedly less information than suppliers (doctors, drug companies) have limited capacity to get the knowledge and often can;t afford to take the risk of deferring treatment while seeking advice.
In contrast to the US, the Australian government requires rigorous cost-benefit analysis of the treatments and drugs which it subsidised. If the government decides not to subsidise a treatment you are free to buy it on the open market - but the taxpayer isn't picking up the tab.
Arguably the Australian system, in which private health care providers, public hospitals and non-for-profits tender competitively for government funds is closer to a free market than the US system.
Canada is not as wealthy a country as the United States, which makes it even more remarkable that she can give her citizens universal health care at a tax burden that's commensurate with that in the United States.
Ben's original claim was that the federal tax burden in Canada is about 3x higher than ours here in the US. I do believe I exploded that quite thoroughly, showing that Ben was only computing about 1/3 of his taxes. The federal income + social services tax burden in the two countries, using Ben's income and family situation an example, appears to be about the same.
The major difference is that Canadian taxes get you medical care, which would cost Ben and his family roughly $6K-$12K depending on whether they choose the tin-plated or gold-plated variety. This assumes, of course, that neither Ben nor any of his family members have any prior medical conditions that exclude them from lower-cost insurance (or worse, any insurance whatsoever).
He apparently has an employer-paid plan (which he erroneously assumes costs $0) and if the employer is large, prior conditions wouldn't exclude him, but for anyone self-employed or working for a small company or for other reasons not covered, get cancer once and you're fucked for life.
It's a major issue for my gf (a cancer survivor) and I, and this issue alone may lead us to live in Europe.
Ben:
1. I appreciate your honesty
2. You've moved the goalposts. First it was Canada sucks because taxes are high, and Canada's health care system sucks because the $14K extra in taxes you pay for health care is more than health insurance costs in the US. Oh, oops, you actually pay about the same percentage in income + social services taxes here as you would there, but Canada still sucks because it's poorer, which has nothing to do with the original factually incorrect point you tried to make ... charming.
3. You claim to have a PhD in aerospace engineering. You seem to be terribly ignorant of anything outside your field, yet you seem absolutely certain that the facts (unknown to you) support your political biases.
Engineering isn't science, but it's close enough that you should know that *hoping* a material object will fly because your faith in (god, pixies, fairy dust, whatever) is more important than knowledge ain't going to make it fly. You can't make a machine that flies if you have no knowledge of aerodynamics (formal or practical through experience).
Likewise, your approach to political issues is ass-backwards. You don't like "socialism" therefore Canadian taxes are 3x higher than US taxes. You don't like government regulations, therefore global warming is false. You don't like "socialism", therefore this explains why Canada is relatively poorer than the US (nevermind the low density of population and harsher weather that has made infrastructure per capita far more expensive than down here, and a large number of other physical differences in the country).
On and on.
You should really broaden your horizons. If you're smart enough to get a PhD in a technical field, you're smart enough to avoid the boneheaded mistakes you flaunt here on such a regular basis.
I do congratulate you for not being a buffoon like JC, an ignoramous like Kevin, or educated but thoroughly dishonest slime like Lance.
Why do people like Kevin erect such strawmen based on the false dichotomy that the only two choices are the absolute free market (which exists nowhere) or absolute state control over one's productive labor (which outside of nazi slave labor camps, the soviet gulag, and southern chain gangs has perhaps never been the case in the western world)?
350 million people in the united states purchasing en masse would have a hell of a lot of bargaining power with the pharmas and health care providers. Done right, using that bargaining power will lower costs.
Ben's making another mistake here, which is to assume that his degree has some sort of intrinsic worth.
I'm old enough to remember the "will the last person leaving Seattle please turn off the lights" days.
I remember when engineers organized at Boeing because they were making less than janitors with equivalent length of service, in part because of the latter groups strong union, in part because the flood of aerospace engineers kept salaries low.
Because in the 1950s aerospace engineering was the 1990s CS degree, everyone wanting one. The difference being that growth in employement for software and computer engineering has continued to grow as the technology has gotten cheap enough to be rolled out to the consumer market (25 years ago I used to joke about the future 'computer-controlled blender', today, it's no joke).
On the other hand, complex aerospace gear isn't found in homes, and in the 1960s there was a huge glut of aerospace engineers. Not helped by the fact that airliners have a 20+ year lifespan, and once all major routes had been converted to jets by the airline companies in the 1960s, that huge market bubble poofed out of existence as quickly as it has poofed into existence.
One of my folks best friends, with an advanced degree in aerospace engineering and something like 15-20 years at McDoug, lost his job and due to age and the glut in the market was unable to find employment worthy of his degree. They nearly went broke until he gave up.
So, Ben, don't be so smug about the value of your job here vs. Canada. There was a time in our not-so-distant past when that degree for a recent college graduate mostly meant that you were overqualified to sling burgers at McDonald's. And the free-market libertarianism you so cherish wouldn't give you so much as a cardboard box to live in, if it were to happen again.
"So, Ben, don't be so smug about the value of your job here vs. Canada. There was a time in our not-so-distant past when that degree for a recent college graduate mostly meant that you were overqualified to sling burgers at McDonald's. And the free-market libertarianism you so cherish wouldn't give you so much as a cardboard box to live in...
Not helped by the fact that airliners have a 20+ year lifespan, and once all major routes had been converted to jets by the airline happen again."
I've yet to work on an aircraft. I'm a control systems specialist, and as such can and do work on anything from robots, to autopilots (mostly ships), to process plants etc. I know what my abilities are worth, and the jobs that I do pay much better in the US than in Canada. I also have a wide range of skills in all aspects of mechanical design, aerodynamics, programming and embedded systems. I doubt I'll end up flipping burgers, but I did do a nice stint about 14 years ago as a sandwich artist.
You'd find that those skills would pay very well in Germany and France, too, and in a currency that currently kicks the dollar's ass, and in France you'd have the benefit of "suffering" (as I'm sure you'd see it) under the #1 ranked health-care system in the world. Not to mention a 35-hour work week (yes, even for many professional, engineering jobs in mainstream high-tech), four full weeks of vacation and another couple of weeks holiday, and most like the entire week between xmas and new year's off as well.
But, remember, the US is #1 in all regards!
The major difference is that Canadian taxes get you medical care, which would cost Ben and his family roughly $6K-$12K depending on whether they choose the tin-plated or gold-plated variety
Hoggsie, fair suck of the sauce. Healthcare in the US is covered by employers. Hardly equals what you are saying,
Kevin posts:
[[Here's a reason why to avoid universal health care: command economies consistently underperform free markets.
Why is there this continued love affair with statism among the nominally liberal? ]]
Well, Kevin, let me give you an example. I have four chronic medical conditions, one of which (Crohn's Disease) will probably kill me eventually. My wife has chronic polycystic kidney disease (PKD); her kidneys will (not may, but will) fail in five years or less. She works less than part time and I am presently working a temp clerical job with no benefits. If you were me, which would you prefer:
A) A non-statist private market in health care and health insurance which you can't afford, or
B) A statist national health care system that's inefficient but covers everybody.
Let me know if you want any hints.
I don't know much, but even I can see that a command economy health care service is in fact more efficient than a "market". This is because of economies of scale due to the large size of the monopoly health market, which permits leverage in buying drugs, allows uniform training and standards and has enough space to allow for professionalism. THe UK health service right now is probably more ineffiient than it has been for decades, because the present regime have spent billions on creating an internal market, when in fact all people want is to be treated as well as possible near to home.
But Barton, JC tells us that you and your wife's medical insurance is covered by your employer. Don't tell us that JC doesn't know WTF he's talking about!
JC, some employers do, some don't. But please do keep in mind that insurance is part of your total compensation package. As I pointed out above, I used to run a 65-person software company and I was certainly keenly aware of total compensation per employee, and comparative compensation analyses done for various locations (for cost-of-living adjustments made when you move someone from, say, Silicon Valley to the Silicon Rainforest) are based on total compensation, not "salary pretending benefits don't exist".
And an employee with kids has to be nuts not to recognize that $600-$1200/month in tax-free benefits is compensation, just like money in your pocket but not taxed, therefore better.
Oh, which means the federal and state governments ARE paying for health care, in the form of lost tax revenue. If you're in the 38% tax bracket, the feds are paying 38% of your health care premium.
What's particularly aggravating for the part-time worker who doesn't get health insurance, if they buy it, it's not 100% tax-deductible. So they get double-whammed for not having a professional job or union job that provides benefits (but, JC, you HATE unions, don't forget that!).
What's with JC and his fact-free vacuum-filled skullspace, eh?
Ben, even you are smart enough to realize that JC's an ignorant clown, I hope ...
dhoghoza: really, if you use Firefox, Greasemonkey+killfile work on this blog. One little click is all it takes from then on. Still nto as good as newsreader KILLFILE, but OK.
Thanks for your blogging over the year Tim.
I was particularly interested in the way you exposed the CEI Rachel Carson hate sites, and the general assault on Science represented by the 'denialists' who promote DDT as the only show in town when it comes to combating malaria.
I've noticed that their sites are loud and noisy - but despite the fact that they seem happy to use the images of dead African children to promote their politics - they don't actually ever seem to do anything practical to combat malaria.
The most effective method of combating malaria, both in terms of cost, and scientifically supported efficiency is the use of insecticide-treated bednets. There is a charity which has managed to get all the support, transport and distribution costs covered - so if you donate to them you are actually buying a bednet - and they'll tell you exactly where it is going.
Nets cost $5US or £2.50 each (not sure about Aussie dollars?) - and if they've got their stats right, 20 nets will save a life, not to mention a lot more misery in terms of a nasty debilitating disease.
I've taken the opportunity to buy a few for Christmas, and have the satisfaction that it was the antics of the hate-filled individuals who set up the Rachel Carson defamation website, that prompted me to do so.
You might consider joining me?? ;)
http://www.againstmalaria.com/en/findoutmore.aspx
> Nets cost $5US or £2.50 each (not sure about Aussie dollars?) - and if they've got their stats right, 20 nets will save a life, not to mention a lot more misery in terms of a nasty debilitating disease.
I find this kind of claims very dubious - too convenient, and implying everybody else is extremely incompetent (including the Africans themselves - why don't they spend $5 every few years to purchase a net?).
Is there any evidence provided for these claims?
re: #54 Dean
Having just returned from an area that caused us to take Malarone along...
This certainly looks worthy, but from the website, it was hard to answer the questions raised in:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-better-mosquito-net
[This comment should not be taken as discouragement for this, just an observation that sometimes good ideas don't work as well end-to-end as one expects.
Certainly, I've been a few places where $5 was serious money, and everything I've ever seen says that it's one of the most cost-effective solutions around.
WHO's 2005 report claimed malaria was 8% of all deaths of children under 5, or 853,000, of which 80% were sub-saharan Africa.
"Our over the top litigiousness doesn't seem to help. "
Our over the top litigiousness stems largely from our feeble healthcare system. When you've maxed out your yearly "benefits" and you still need $100,000 of treatment for your cancer, do you think you'll just sit back and die with a shrug of your shoulders; or will you start to sue everybody in sight in the hopes that somewhere you will tap into somebody's deep pockets to get that treatment paid for? If you're honest enough you will admit that that's what you're doing, otherwise you will ascribe your need for cash to keep you alive to some error of your doctor, or the hospital, or the insurance company's managed care to make yourself feel less guilty.
But you take away that motivation, as in Canada, because all your costs will be covered, and poof; there go the vast majority of malpractice suits. You can still sue the doctor/hospital/whatever for actual monetary damages; days lost from work, etc. But that's all such small change, in comparison, that either the providers just settle without a fight when they are pretty clearly in the wrong, or the patients don't bother to sue when they don't have an airtight case. As a result, malpractice law isn't exactly a major feature of the Canadian courts.
"And the notion of having a health care "plan" is somewhat ridiculous. I'm planning to work as a consultant when I graduate in the coming months, and the much better approach seems to be to pay out of pocket for doctor visits, and then get actual "insurance" to cover the things that would be a burden."
Absolutely. What we have here, is pretty much the opposite of insurance. You get the small and medium costs paid for, but if the expense is large enough, it doesn't get covered. If insurance against catastrophic expenses is a good thing, and if individuals' payment for minor medical expenses instead of third party payment would be the key to keeping those costs reasonable, then sort of by definition, what we are doing is baaaad, being the opposite.
"If you like paying what I consider outrageously high taxes, then I'm glad that you're happy. I'm happy too. Seems like a win-win to me."
And if you like paying > $5,000 for medical insurance (for each member of the family), plus another $2,000 in "hidden" costs, rather than half that in taxes for better and more comprehensive care; or, not paying and just crossing your fingers and figuring that if anybody in the family gets expensively sick you will just throw yourself on the public mercy knowing that the rest of the citizens will pay rather than let you or your wife die, then I'm glad you're happy.
Sounds like socialism to me, though, except in America where socialism is when somebody other than oneself gets something from the government; when one gets it oneself, it's one's just due.
"Married filing joint return
Can someone claim you as a dependent? No.
Child tax credit: select 2 children.
Income: $90k
$3000 for donations to charity
Result: $6,969. That's right from the IRS"
???
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040es.pdf
I'm nowhere near an expert, but:
line 1, adjusted gross income: 90,000
line 2 deductions, standard 10,700 + 3,000 charitable = 13,700
line 3, subtract, 76,300
line 4, 4 exemptions @ $3,400 = 13,600
line 5, subtract, 62,700
up to the tax table; filing jointly; 1,565 + 15% of the amount > 15,650
= 1,565 + 15% of 47,050
= 1,565 + 7,057.50
= $8,622.50
> $6,969
???
"The most common exclamation I get from them is how wonderfully inexpensive the cost of living is here."
That's right up there with "Why can't those Africans get their shit together, after all the help we've given them?"
"The United States, Canada, and the 'Market Mentality'"
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-1937%28197202%2914%3A1%3C3%3ATUSC…
"350 million people in the united states purchasing en masse would have a hell of a lot of bargaining power with the pharmas and health care providers. Done right, using that bargaining power will lower costs."
They do. It's Medicare, and it represents the lowest cost per capita of medical care in the US, for precisely that reason, and the goal towards which all insurance companies strive in bargaining with providers. And, ironically enough, it provides the health care for precisely that segment of the US population where the healthcare system does provide the best care in the world by all the standard measures; the very elderly. Repeat: the only portion of the US healthcare system which does stack up as best in the world is that portion which is "socialized medicine". And which, of course, is the portion which the ideologically disabled wish to dismantle.
See also the threefold mantra of the right regarding TV: "the crap Hollywood puts on TV is toxic for kids' minds; the only channel where you can safely sit your kid down in front of the tv without worries about objectionable content in a show or advertisement is Public Television; Public Television should not exist"
"On the other hand, complex aerospace gear isn't found in homes, and in the 1960s there was a huge glut of aerospace engineers. "
I recall an interview with the guy who designed the wheels on the Lunar Rover. Spent many years becoming the world's greatest expert on such things. Did a terrific job designing the wheels, which performed superbly. Had been unemployed since the last Lunar Rover was built until the time of the interview, which was like a decade later.
Well, actually, no that doesn't represent bargaining on the behalf of 350 million insured, but rather the percentage of our population that's >= 65 years in age.
But you're right about medicare's efficiency. My father told me years ago, after his heart attack + bypass experience, that he'd be dead if it weren't for medicare (and he's one who voted republican most of his life).
The efficiency available if we bargained for lifelong medical care for everyone in the country would be even better than we see with medicare, that's my point (not disagreeing with you, just saying bargaining for 350 million has even more leverage than medicare).
That, BTW, is a model that's similar to the excellent system in france, where doctors are private, but people are paid scheduled expenses for various ills. You're free to find care that the government payment will cover, or to buy more expensive care and pay the difference, much as is true with medicare here.
> 350 million
Any specific reason you keep using the 350 million figure? The U.S. population has just reached the 300 million mark.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/08statab/pop.pdf
Oh, well, foiled again. But - any particular reason to imagine we'll get any reasonable solution to health care before the population does reach 350 million? :(
The one major post in US health care is administration. It's estimated that nearly one third of all health care costs in the US goes to administration. Given the fact that the US pay more for health care than any other country in the world, 1/3 of the expenses to health care, is a hell of a lot of money.
I've written a number of posts about US/universal health care, where I compare the US numbers with other countries - you can find them here (I won't link to them individually, given the spam filters, but that link goes to the tag for those posts).
The oldest of those posts are the ones with the most number-crushing.
Let's just say that I am not impressed of what US citizens get for their money.
Let's just say that I am not impressed of what US citizens get for their money.
Well I am as I have lived under the US system and the Australian one. The US system is the best in the world by far.
It's like comparing a Rolls to a GM car.
z, just use the IRS's own calculator. You might be missing the child tax credit in your calc.
Something's wrong with your computation's, dhogaza. I used turbotax.com and turbotax.ca to compute my taxes if all I had was a business that made $90k (us or cdn respectively), a wife who does not work, and two kids. No deductions beyond those.
My total tax in Canada works out to $25k, while my US tax works out to $17k. I see that as a substantial difference, especially after you consider the higher cost of goods and sales tax in Canada (PST + GST = 12% in BC, WA Sales Tax is 8.8% where I live).
Recall also that Canadian Medical is not free. At my income level, I'd be paying $1200/year, cheap, but not free. In the US, I can get by just fine with insurance that costs $5000 per year with a $3k deductable.
So it looks like income taxes + medical are more or less equivilent, except my wating lines are likely to be smaller. But when you factor in that I'll be paying more for goods and services, higher sales taxes, and make probably 10% to 20% less income... on a purely monetary basis, I come out substantially ahead in the USA.
Then there are the less tangible things, things where personal preference dominates. The gun laws in Canada suck for me, are great for others. Hunting in Canada kicks butt, which would be a nice reason to live there. After that, there's not much difference, except that I highly dislike the parlimentary system of government.
It's true that administration is a big issue in the US, but it's certainly not THE major issue for the significantly higher spending here. Per-capita spending is three times higher in the US than it is in Canada; administrative costs, however, account for ~30% and ~16% respectively. The balance of the cost is due to other things, viz., market forces. Specifically, in the US early efforts to contain costs by HMOs resulted in health care providers consolidating, with the result that hospitals are simply more expensive in the US, doctors get paid more, and no one can really do anything about it.
I wrote a post about this, here:
http://rhinocrisy.org/2007/09/health-care-for-some-miniature-american-f…
Therein I link to this (first of a series) of articles in the New England Journal of Medicine examining why costs are so high:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/349/8/768
It's up to Americans to decide how they want their health care. Why so many non-Americans think it is their business I do not know.
Our publicly funded system in Canada can provide excellent care at times, but it is by no means guaranteed. For example, a friend's wife is on an "emergency list" right now for an MRI. Her specialist says she will get it by the end of January 2008.
For many procedures, there is no getting around the lengthy (and often life shortening) waiting lists for numerous procedures. As a Canadian, we have no choice . . . but to wait, and waiting lists are an effective method of rationing health care.
"Dying to keep our public health care system" is an old joke in Canada that is both humourous and true.
So you keep saying, but the numbers clearly show otherwise.
The US system is a very good system to live under, if you can afford it, but if you for some reason can't get insured, then it's absolutely horrible.
I think it is up to the Americans to decide for themselves, but based upon real numbers. That's what I've tried to inject into the debate.
"The US system is a very good system to live under, if you can afford it, but if you for some reason can't get insured, then it's absolutely horrible."
My experience is different. As a kid my nose was broken badly and required surgery. We had no insurance. My treatment was still excellent. The debt afterward sucked, though.
Would you rather be one of America's millions of uninsured? Americans wait is longer; the uninsured, far longer. You can vote for politicians that promises mending National Health; American's have industry lobbyist groups that crush any attempt at universal care. Don't wish for the American system: Under your Conservative government, you may just get it.
"z, just use the IRS's own calculator. You might be missing the child tax credit in your calc."
I couldn't find it... no matter, I'll take your word for it.
"The gun laws in Canada suck for me, are great for others. Hunting in Canada kicks butt, which would be a nice reason to live there."
Reminds me of a story I tell every couple of years about an op-ed in the Calgary Herald no less, wherein the author was sitting in a cafe overhearing the guys at the next table complain about how they couldn't bring their hunting rifles across the border. He was about to go tell them that Canada didn't want any part of their violent culture, when he realized that they were Canadians, complaining that they couldn't bring their hunting rifles into the US.
"The gun laws in Canada suck for me, are great for others. Hunting in Canada kicks butt, which would be a nice reason to live there."
Reminds me of a story I tell every couple of years about an op-ed in the Calgary Herald no less, wherein the author was sitting in a cafe overhearing the guys at the next table complain about how they couldn't bring their hunting rifles across the border. He was about to go tell them that Canada didn't want any part of their violent culture, when he realized that they were Canadians, complaining that they couldn't bring their hunting rifles into the US.
"For many procedures, there is no getting around the lengthy (and often life shortening) waiting lists for numerous procedures. As a Canadian, we have no choice . . . but to wait, and waiting lists are an effective method of rationing health care."
Again, my experience and the more detailed studies aren't really in agreement with that. I've waited literally months to get a leg looked at, which was so painful that I couldn't walk from my desk to my parked car without stopping. That was in the US. When I was working for a health insurer, no less. And, when it did get looked at, they tried to stick me with a bill of thousands of dollars for the MRI, since the doctor and the MRI place had managed to drop the ball regarding getting preapproval from the insurer; but, having access to the details of the contracts as I did, it was no big deal to keep bombarding the doctor, MRI, and insurance co. with "line 3 page 4 [or whatever]: In no event will the member be responsible for the costs of any procedure ordered as a referral by a provider on the preferred list" until they went away.
For what it's worth, the quality of the medicine I've seen for myself and my family, including wait times, etc., in Canada and in the US has been interchangable, except for the Canadian system giving up on the extreme elderly at end of life while the US system will still do heroic work to gain another week or month, or maybe more; but where anything more than a temporary stay is not possible. I will definitely admit that that is hard to swallow when it's your grandmother, even though when you look at it dispassionately it would probably be cruel, let alone futile, to put somebody whose quality of life is minimal through getting a feeding tube put in, etc. A friend of mine here in the US had to stop the doctors from doing a mastectomy on his 90+ year old alzheimer's diabetic one-legged grandmother. One reason for the rise of the hospice movement in the US.
I don't know; maybe that translates into better care for the extreme elderly who can be saved by heroic measures; I haven't seen any of them in either country to know. But at least the life expectancy stats are on the US side there; if you make it to over 70 years of age, the longer you live the longer your life expectancy starts to lead over the Canadians. (which the mathematically inclined will realize also points out how badly the US system has to fail in the younger years, given that the AVERAGE life expectancy in both countries is in the high 70s, where the US system is already working better.)
And, to balance the coin, the inavailablity of preventive care to a large percentage of the US public can't help but be a big problem, even for those who voluntarily choose to avoid checkups, screenings, colonoscopies, mammograms, etc., even if they can later get treated in the ER when they get colon cancer.
"Dying to keep our public health care system" is an old joke in Canada that is both humourous and true."
It's such a shame that Canadians don't get to vote, so they could rid themselves of this terrible burden forced upon them by their rulers.
"American's have industry lobbyist groups that crush any attempt at universal care"
The turnaround will come when the auto industry finally faces up to the fact that covering employees' and retirees' medical care tacks $1000 onto the price of every vehicle, and the only way they can compete worldwide as even the cutrate brand is to palm it off on the government. Of course, GM has just managed to palm their retirees' costs off onto the union, so it might not come for a while.
But the concept of legally requiring universal coverage not as a single payer plan, but purchased from one of many insurance companies, paid for either by employer or privately purchased, has definitely caught the fancy of the insurance companies, who face a declining number of employees getting insurance from their employer as union jobs, manufacturing jobs, etc. are converted to McDonalds jobs and as existing employers cut benefits, and realize that in the current market they are a dozen sharks competing in a tank with ever fewer number of fish. Those currently uninsured are starting to look like a pretty healthy meal.
Frankly, getting the unholy alliance of medical insurance and employment benefit untangled is a damn good first step, let's just do that while we decide what comes next. Being as it doesn't require "socialized medicine" it might at least be palatable.
How about this. Require everyone who can afford it to buy a $1M policy with a reasonable deductible. Those who can't afford it get it from the .gov in some form or other, and for any cost over $1M, the .gov kicks in?
The reason for the requirement is that even if some jerk goes without and says "it's my problem if I don't have it" and then needs it, they never really get turned away, and end up costing everyone else. Isn't this Schwarzenegger's plan?
"It's such a shame that Canadians don't get to vote, so they could rid themselves of this terrible burden forced upon them by their rulers."
The health care system in Canada is the single greatest example in North America of a sacred cow. Even more so than gun stuff in the US. It's quite remarkable, actually. Have you never been to Canada and heard the mantra "no two tier health care system!"?
Kevin wrote, Here's a reason why to avoid universal health care: command economies consistently underperform free markets.
But certain industries show market failure.
For health care, there are two actually distinct industries. The first is health insurance. It's clear from empirical data that the US system, which is more private than other industrialized nations', underperforms.
Then there's health care---i.e., medicine itself. Most liberal/lefties in the US focus on nationalizing health insurance, but not health care. But health care cannot operate efficiently in a free market environment, because there's no system of incentives to deliver good long-term health outcomes.
This was discussed at length in the article "The Best Care Anywhere" by Philip Longman.
If you can come up with a set of incentives for care delivery that maximize long-term outcomes for a given budget constraint, more power to you. But I don't know of any such system, and strongly doubt one can be devised.
"If you can come up with a set of incentives for care delivery that maximize long-term outcomes for a given budget constraint, more power to you. But I don't know of any such system, and strongly doubt one can be devised."
Well, maybe if some company started to use optimal long-term outcome as a business goal, and managed to achieve significantly better long term outcome than their competitors, they would likely gain a significant market share, no?
Eventually, such an approach could become the paradigm.
"The health care system in Canada is the single greatest example in North America of a sacred cow. "
The percentage of Canadian citizens who don't believe in the basic principle of single payer healthcare for all is approximately equivalent to the percentage of climatology researchers who don't believe in the reality of AGW. You may take howsoever thou wilst.
"If you can come up with a set of incentives for care delivery that maximize long-term outcomes for a given budget constraint, more power to you."
Well, here in CT where they deliver pretty good healthcare, the hospitals actually lose money on each patient; which leads to the oddity that during a flu epidemic, etc. when they're really busy and the insurance companies are showering them with money, they need emergency bailout loans from the state. This is not a situation that attracts free market investors. The hospital-for-profit industry, on the other hand, is always showing up with one scandal after another, since it's abundantly apparent that financial best practices in the medical care world require you to avoid all contact with sick people.
For example: in the 1980s and 1990s, National Medical Enterprises was a hot-on-Wall-Street for-profit hospital company. Turned out it was making so much money by literally "buying" patients for up to $2,000 each, from anyone; homeless shelters, bounty hunters, anybody; "patients" who needed no medical care, warehousing them in hospitals while telling them they were sick, and billing Medicare for expensive procedures on them until they maxed out. In 1994 they pled guilty to all this stuff, including importing "Medicare patients" from Canada, and even kidnapping, and as a result had to sell the hospitals where this plan was carried out, pay $1 billion in damages, and sign a bunch of agreements to do better. Over the next few years they expanded and acquired other companies and eventually became Tenet Healthcare. In 1999 the agreements expired and in 2002 Tenet was now exposed as giving all kinds of expensive surgery like cardiac operations to healthy people in order to scam Medicare. They settled for another billion dollars, this time without admission of guilt.
"'Tenet has honed everything down to the fine art of making money,' said Ralph Bard, a Tennessee surgeon who lost privileges at a Tenet hospital where he fretted about patient care. 'Tenet will do anything -- anything -- to make a profit.'" ("Hearts Harden as Tenet Faces the Senate", Melissa Davis, The Street.com, September 7, 2003, http://www.thestreet.com/pf/stocks/melissadavid/10113497.html)
For-profit hospitals violate the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act nearly twice as often as not-for-profit hospitals. ("Questionable Hospitals: 527 Hospitals That Violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act--A Detailed Look at 'Patient Dumping.'", Public Citizen's Health Research Group)
Aaaand.... this just in:
"My husband and I had a plan with a $3,000 deductible, and I took comfort knowing that the money was safe in our savings account. I also knew that emergency care and surgery were covered at 80 percent.
What that other 20 percent might amount to was my primary worry -- plus what all the á la carte items might cost. That was the hard lesson I had learned the year before, after giving birth, then struggling to decode the bills for various prenatal tests. The doctor might be covered for a test -- but my lab work was not. Or if the lab work was covered, the "facility fee" was extra.
It is the insurance shell game: You think you know what to expect and you are totally wrong. Surprise!
As it turned out, the appendectomy was a success, but there was plenty of fretting once the actual bills arrived. The first one landed about two weeks after the operation and they did not stop for months. Each statement a revision of the last, except when they were duplicates. Each commanded in large block letters: Payment is due upon receipt of this invoice.
Hoping to deal practically with this morass, my husband and I called the toll-free number listed on the statements. That is when we learned that we were now dealing with an external billing company, not the hospital. The customer service representative said we actually did not have to pay anything yet -- because at that point, none of the charges had been submitted to our insurance company.
...
But high dudgeon was not working now. Despite agitated discussions with the billing company to find out what we owed ("We don't know, we just send you the bills"), and the hospital ("Everything is being processed by your insurance company") and our insurer ("We are still waiting for the final bills from the hospital"), it took seven months before we got a final bill.
Even then, we were ready to dispute hidden charges. But -- another surprise -- everything seemed to add up. It was almost disappointing. We owed $2,879.15 -- $500 of which would finish paying our deductible. "That's all I'm showing that you owe, as of today," said a woman in the hospital accounting department.
As of today. Does it ever really end?
I have serious doubts. Just as this appendectomy matter was being resolved we got another statement, a ghost from procedures past. The hospital where I had my sonograms two years ago when I was pregnant sent a bill for more than $600. I am not sure why. I have to call them."
Yep, z, that sucks. They've got to figure out how to do this right. Quit with the bullshit, and just charge a fee for a proceedure, no matter how it turns out. That fee covers you (and is paid by your insurance) and any complications you might have.
When you buy a new car, if it turns out to be a lemon, the car company pays to fix it until the warranty runs out. With a medical proceedure, they should charge one price, make it simple, then cover you to the end. They would have to figure it out so that they were covered for the worst case scenarios of course. This can't be that difficult!
Anyway, the thing earlier about the sacred cow was not socialized medicine, it was Canada's particular flavor of socialized medicine with the mantra "no two tier health care system". :P
Anyway, the thing earlier about the sacred cow was not socialized medicine, it was Canada's particular flavor of socialized medicine with the mantra "no two tier health care system".
The worry is that the two tier system will end up draining resources from the public system and lowering the overall quality of care, and it's pretty strongly debated for a "sacred cow".
The reason that Canada-US comparisons are valid is that until 1971 Canada had a very similar system too the US, and very similar mortality rates. Essentially the US is the control in Canada's experiment.
The Canadian system delivers better healthcare, hands down, on the hard metrics:
Canadian infant mortality: 4.7
US infant mortality: 7.1
Canadian overall mortality: 6.5
US overall mortality: 8.4
All for significantly less money per capita.
As for taxes, according to StatCan, once you crunch *all* the taxes and pertinent payouts, the US rich pay a significant amount less than the Canadian rich, although nowhere near half, the middle class pay just about the same, and the Canadian poor pay less than the US poor.
Ben:
Ben, your original claim was that the tax in Canada was about 4x higher, not 0.5x higher. Methinks you were far more out than me.
Which was more or less my point, right? Though $3K deductible and the typical 80% coverage for major stuff will be a real killer if the four of you are in a horrible auto accident caused by an uninsured drunk driver, causing you to be unable to work for (say) a year ...
"Though $3K deductible and the typical 80% coverage for major stuff will be a real killer if the four of you are in a horrible auto accident caused by an uninsured drunk driver, causing you to be unable to work for (say) a year ..."
Oh, that's not so much a problem any more, since they revamped the bankruptcy laws a few years back. Unless you mean a problem for the sick person who runs into huge debt trying to keep alive, of course; they're screwed for life. But their creditors can now be assured, thanks to the tireless good works of the republican congress, that should the unfortunate victim survive and someday get two pennies to rub together, the creditors will get both.
If you look at OECD figures you can find that while Canada has higher income taxes than the US, social security contributions are lower, so that overall the difference between total tax wedges is not all that great. In fact in 2006, for a single person at 167% of the average wage - which would be below the $90,000 figure used by Ben - the total tax take is 33.3% in Canada and 33.5% in the US.
See http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/44/0/1942482.xls
also the average wage is around $41,700 in Canada but $32,500 in the US (in their own currencies)
However, the US is more generous to single-income families than Canada, so in Ben's case there would be more of a difference, but single earner families are now a minority in both countries.
Heh ... good point ... :(
So, to summarize for Ben's benefit ...
1. Taxes are about the same
2. Health care is cheaper and more comprehensive
3. Average income is roughly equivalent (I'll give the US$
the benefit of the doubt given its historical value vs. the looney
4. In Canada, Ben can't take his gun to the hospital and use it to avoid the long waiting lines he believes exist ...
I don't believe they exist, I've seen them first hand.
The US and Canadian dollar are essentially on par, but the cost of goods in Canada is significantly higher. The average wage in Canada may be higher than in the US, but the wage I can earn in Canada is significantly lower than I can earn in the US. That, and sales taxes are currently 12% in BC, while they are 8% in Washington State.
Also, note above that I figured the $3k deductible in when deciding that the two systems were more or less equivalent.
Also note that I threw some bones to Canada. It is a nice country. Has excellent hunting, the people are pretty great. But, their parlimentary system sucks, and their gun laws are too restrictive for me. Health care is OK, wages are OK, I like the snow, and the women are quite attractive, as I should know, since I married one.
ben,
I can't help but notice it's all about your own puny self.
What a mensch you are!
"The US and Canadian dollar are essentially on par, but the cost of goods in Canada is significantly higher. "
That may be your perception Ben but up until the last year or so, virtually every study showed the US dollar grossly overvalued compared ot purchasing power parity. (Meaning that while a year ago the loonie was worth around 90 US cents, you could be about as much for a loonie as for a greenback.)
google burgernomics.
Well, it may be true in general, I don't know. But it certainly ain't true for cars. Not by a couple thousand bucks a piece.
"I can't help but notice it's all about your own puny self."
Yeah, so? There are two countries. I've lived in both and can choose in which to live. So can many others. Some choose one way, some choose the other. I made my choice. I think it is interesting.
Surely even you are able to understand that factors other than the tax structure and form of government, such as the low population density, difficulty of building infrastructure so far north, etc will impact the economy and the kind of industries that will be developed?
Citing salaries in a specialized field like aerospace engineering, the cost of automobiles, etc as being part of the basis for your opposition to universal health care is ...
"strange".
I'll try using that word rather than risk offending you with a more accurate term.
But it certainly ain't true for cars. Not by a couple thousand bucks a piece.
The automobile manufacturers are doing that (artificially inflating the prices), and it is heading to court.
"Citing salaries in a specialized field like aerospace engineering, the cost of automobiles, etc as being part of the basis for your opposition to universal health care is ..."
I didn't, so it's not strange. I only cited those as reasons for not wanting to live there, that and their health care system. I can't take "no two tier health care system," I just can't. Remember, it's all about me.
"The automobile manufacturers are doing that (artificially inflating the prices), and it is heading to court."
I think dhogaza is closerto the mark, Graculus. Probably has a lot more to do with cost of doing business in Canada.
How about private sector prevention? Not a bad idea. We Americans are nothing, if not a bunch of over-indulgent fat-bodies.
Re #54 John Mashey,
- Mosquito Bed nets.
If you read the SciAm article to the end John, you'll see that the criticisms of mosquito net design specifically exclude the new insecticide -impregnated nets that are used in this project.
Their efficacy has been established by the WHO - and while at their current levels of use they can't be expected to eradicate malaria - they have a direct protective effect on the individuals that use them. Hey if enough people in the developed world coughed up a few quid (or bucks) - maybe we could have a real impact on the transmission of the disease itself.
Even official US agencies think a million lives could be saved:
"Bednets Reduce Malaria
* More than one million lives could be saved annually if insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs) were routinely used by the populations at greatest risk of malaria.
* Several models for delivery of ITNs have been developed, and the choice among them depends on how capable the commercial sector is to provide bednets.
* A new technology for dipping nets may soon turn people's conventional bednets into long-lasting bednets.
Insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs) are a highly effective way for individuals, families, and communities to protect themselves from malaria. Consistently sleeping under an ITN can decrease severe malaria by 45%, reduce premature births by 42%, and cut all-cause child mortality by 17% to 63%. When ITN coverage ratesreach 80% or more in a community, those residents not sleeping under an ITN also obtain a protective benefit."
http://www.maqweb.org/techbriefs/tb17bednets.shtml
So the link again if anyone cares to put their hand in their pocket:
http://www.againstmalaria.com/en/findoutmore.aspx
Like those average higher wages, which are a bad thing, right?
Um, except when it's YOU making the higher wage, as you've made clear.
Thanks for being honest about your innate selfishness, BTW. Some of us take a broader look at the world and our role in it.
"Thanks for being honest about your innate selfishness, BTW. Some of us take a broader look at the world and our role in it."
When you have a student loan debt of $150k (mostly in Canada, btw) and have been poor all your life, you tend to be that way, at least I do. I might become a liberal as soon as I get my first limousine.
If we liberals were in charge you might get to go to school for free, because as a PhD in engineering over your life you're likely to pay far more in taxes than it would cost us to send you to school (call me a cold-blooded liberal if you will).
Assuming you calculate them properly and don't underpay as severely as some of your earlier posts might indicate (due to honest errors).
nice. Again, no thanks.
"If we liberals were in charge you might get to go to school for free, because as a PhD in engineering over your life you're likely to pay far more in taxes than it would cost us to send you to school"
And there's the rub. If you liberals were in charge, I'd get a "free" PhD, but then pay more in additional taxes than it would cost "you" to send me to school. And all so the world could have more PhD's who focused on the Bitch-fem theory of feminism, for example, which does the world so much good.
ben,
The NHS, post Thatcher, the gray faceless one, and Tony 'throw money at the doctors' Blair, is probably the worst example of universal health care. Cuba is good. Scandinavia is better. France is best. You can have a health-worker come into your home and cook and clean while you're laid up. French food, too.
"Cuba is good."
You would have a difficult time convincing me that:
A. this is true
B. you'd rather be living in Cuba at the time that you found yourself in need of serious and complicated medical treatment.
Since this is an open thread, there is a fairly fair if skeptical overview of the Lancet studies here: http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/index.htm
The part I find most interesting is the claim that the UNDP survey in 2004 found a lot lower death rate than the Lancet I survey, with a rather larger sample set at that (24,000 deaths +/- 5000 vs 98,000 +/- 90,000). Admittedly, that figure does fall within the confidence margins. Still, it does give some support to the idea that for some reason the Robert's team's methodology has lead to an overestimate. If this factor of 4 was also present in Lancet II, then a more accurate death measure would be ~160,000. Anyone care to comment?
Neil Munro emailed me, asking for my comments on it, so I will do a post?
Does anyone know of the National Journal has a document describing the ethical standards, if any, it requires of its journalists?
Yes, that's the point, it's a good investment for both parties. Sweat equity on your part, a financial investment on the state's part.
You pay more taxes, you make more money after taxes, everyone should be happy, right?
After all, in today's environment, you make more money, pay more taxes, AND pay tuition, though for most folks that's only undergraduate tuition, since decent PhD programs in decently funded fields are able to fund their students.
California rose to the top of the charts in the technology world back in the day when she had very low undergraduate tuition rates and top-ranked state-run universities.
Will it last when that generation (mine and those a bit younger) moves on and requires?
ben,
I wouldn't waste my time trying to convince you of anything. You are too arrogant, self-centered and small minded to have any realistic expectations of that.
What you could do is go to Cuba and see for yourself.
Oops! You can't. It's against US law.
Well, you could see "Sicko".
Though you are changing the goalposts from the question of affordability to one of outcomes (a sure sign that a party is fronting a losing argument. It's called running away), Cuba's infant mortality is better than the US and life expectancy is equivalent.
Pretty good for a small poor country that has suffered a continuing multi-decade assault on its economy by a neighboring superpower.
"After all, in today's environment, you make more money, pay more taxes, AND pay tuition, though for most folks that's only undergraduate tuition, since decent PhD programs in decently funded fields are able to fund their students."
Yes, I've been fully funded through my entire graduate career. Just doesn't pay well enough for a family. And my undergrad took a couple years extra.
"Cuba's infant mortality is better than the US and life expectancy is equivalent."
Is infant mortality measured in the same way? Do they live longer because of lifestyle rather than "health care" (i.e. not as fat as Americans because they can't afford to over-indulge)? It makes a difference you know.
And do they imprison librarians for having political books in their collections? Oh yeah, they do! Nice, I want to live there!
"Does anyone know of the National Journal has a document describing the ethical standards, if any, it requires of its journalists?"
Could it be any worse than CBS News and Dan Rather?
Beh,
You're a real hoot. Dan Rather? Is this the extent of your critique of corporate mainstream journalism in the US?
Here's starters for you: the whole of it stinks. Biased as hell. Subservient to embedded power. But don't despair: it ain't much different on this side of the pond, either.
Pepe Escobar's comments on a MediaBite interview sum it up perfectly:
http://www.mediabite.org/article_Embedded-with-power---Part-1_14543664…
http://www.mediabite.org/article_Embedded-with-power-%E2%80%93-Part-2_3…
"i.e. that important contextual information is often 'tacked' on loosely to the end of pieces."
That is especially true when the MSM reports anything about firearms, and more or less true when they report about ANYTHING, reporting on Democrats, Republicans, or toothpaste.
Also, I agree that the MSM does not report fairly nor accuratly on Iraq. I rely on sources like Michael Yon who report on location. Note that Yon does not get paid by any MSM entity, corporation, nor the government.
Ben,
Cuba isn't the only country with a significantly lower per capita GDP than the US and equivalent life expectancy - the US ranks roughly with the lower tier of developed countries such as Greece, Portugal and Malta.
Life expectancy in Australia, Canada, the UK and other countries with similar levels of per capita GDP (at purchasing power parity) are about 5% higher than in the US.
This article focuses on a comparison of the US drug industry's spending on R&D and advertising but the figures it provides shed light on the claim that higher R&D research by the US drug industry is a major contributor to US health costs.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.htm
"The researchers' estimate is based on the systematic collection of data directly from the industry and doctors during 2004, which shows the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of US domestic sales of US$235.4 billion."
In other words, total US drug R&D spending is around $30 billion.
Total US healthcare spending is around $2 trillion.
So even if the US spent NOTHING on drug R&D, it'd reduce health care costs by around 1.5%.
David Kane, since Munro is evading my questions, perhaps you can shed some light on the how Neil Munro, a strong advocate of war on Iraq, was chosen to write this piece? Did he contact you first or was it the other way round?
And since Munro goes on at such length about "ideological bias", would you care to disclose your own? Were you in favour of the war against Iraq?
Thanks to Tim for providing a forum for this discussion and apologies for starting a conversation in the wrong thread. To answer Tim's questions:
1) I have no idea how Munro came to write this piece and did not know that he was a "strong advocate" of the war. Perhaps you could link to some of his pro-war writings?
2) He e-mailed (and then called me). I did not reach out to him first but I was happy to answer his questions, as I am for anyone else.
3) Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "ideological," but since I am all about transparency, here goes. I am a registered independent in Massachusetts with a strong prior for classical liberalism and limited government. But I am also a radical anti-Federalist (using the historical meaning of that term) and believe strongly (in the US context) in letting states do as their residents please. I am also an former Marine Officer. My foreign policy positions are generally "hawkish," but the US Senator who I am most inspired by in these contexts in Democrat Jim Webb. Hope that is helpful!
4) If I had been in the US Senate, I would have voted (along with Hillary Clinton) to authorize the war in Iraq. I can fairly be termed "pro-war" (although not strongly) and certainly pro-surge and pro-Petraeus. If I had known in 2003 what I know now about (the missing) WMD and the casualty totals (on all sides), I think that I would have been anti-war. I think that this position is not too dissimilar to dsquared's. (It is tough to play the counter-factual game with one's own opinions.) Given where we are in 2007, the current policy seems about right.
But, despite writing hundreds of thousands of words on all sorts of issues here, I almost never comment on the war since it is not my area of expertise and I don't have strong feelings on the topic.
Hope that was helpful!
[Here's a link](http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-munro110601.shtml) to Munro's gung ho advocacy of the war. Sample:
>The painful images of starving Iraqi children will be replaced by alluring Baghdad city lights, smiling wages-earners and Palestinian job seekers.
This does not seem to have come to pass.
"This does not seem to have come to pass."
Not yet anyway. Maybe you should read Bill Whittle's latest? Especially look at that picture and watch the two videos.
"Life expectancy in Australia, Canada, the UK and other countries with similar levels of per capita GDP (at purchasing power parity) are about 5% higher than in the US."
Is that because they have better health care, or because we're a bunch of over-indulgent American lard-butts?
And while we're at it in an open thread, look, More Guns, Less Crime!
I know it doesn't prove causation, but it certainly does take the wind out of the the notion of more guns = more blood in the streets. I also know that Tim never did claim, that I'm aware of, that More guns = more crime, only that John Lott is a Tit, which has yet to be refuted.
David Kane writes, "If I had been in the US Senate, I would have voted (along with Hillary Clinton) to authorize the war in Iraq". Then he claims if he had known about the lack of WMD he would have been against it.
What a joke! How many times must it be said that the intelligence was based around the policy of regime change. For years before the US aggressed, people like the chief UNSCOM Inspector Scott Ritter were saying that the country had been fundamentally disarmed by 1998, and that any of the so-called remaining biological weapons were harmless sludge because they have limited shelf lives. But the corporate media, in its drumbeat for a war that was sure to reward the disaster capitalist economy (the same media owned by many of those benfitting from the carnage) steadfastly refused to publish comments from the dissenters.
As I intimate above, what the so-called war supporters were actually supporting was outright aggression. Why don't they just come out and say it? War implies mutual hostilities between two factions in conflict; I'm fed up with the war party claiming that Iraq was a war when in fact it was aggression, pure and simple. The same kind of aggression that was condemned at the Nuremberg trials by chief prosecutor Robert Jackson as the 'supreme international crime'.
What is the 2007 policy? The so-called surge? This reminds me of Thomas Jefferson's famous words when discussing the American-Indian wars: "In a war they shall kill some of us; we shall destroy ALL of them". This seems to be the US/UK strategy in dealing with those opposed to the US occupation in Iraq (in fact, it is a recurring theme in history for all brokers of unrestricted power). Destroy all of 'them', and there won't be any dissent left. In the case of Iraq, this will allow the occupiers to roll ahead by ensuring that Iraq's economy rewards what Naomi Klein correctly refers to as the disaster capitalist complex: the corporations with different divisions in destruction and reconstruction. That this isn't patently obvious to everyone is what I find truly scary. It shows you how well of a job the western corporate media are doing in disseminating outright propaganda.
Ben,
Murder rates have fallen all over the US over the past six years. IIRC they fell MORE in states with some of the strictest gun laws such as New York.
"Is that because they have better health care, or because we're a bunch of over-indulgent American lard-butts?"
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/09/BAGGU5GSR41…
"Three South Korean professors sat in a small office at the American Sports Institute in Mill Valley recently to talk about fat children. South Korean children have gotten so fat in the past few years, you'd think they were Americans.
"Along with a Westernized diet, South Korea is No. 1 or No.2 in the world in terms of Internet use,'' said Seongho Lee of Chungang University in Seoul. "More than 90 percent of students spend more than four hours a day on the computer.''
He said physical education in the schools has lost out to studying for high-stakes tests. Discipline of mind and body has lost out to conspicuous consumption. "Death from heart disease has skyrocketed so that now it's about the same as cancer,'' said Lee, who with his colleagues was seeking U.S. educational models to combat the problem.
Despite the magazine covers and front-page stories, America can no longer claim obesity as its own personal disease.
The World Health Organization has reported that more than half the populations in Spain, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Denmark, Italy and Russia are overweight. In Germany alone, the annual cost of obesity has been estimated at $10 billion. Obesity is showing up in Papua New Guinea and Guatemala and China and South Korea and South Africa and Egypt."
http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/media/en/gsfs_obesity.pdf
"The prevalence of overweight and obesity is commonly
assessed by using body mass index (BMI), defined as the
weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in
metres (kg/m2). A BMI over 25 kg/m2 is defined as
overweight, and a BMI of over 30 kg/m2 as obese.These
markers provide common benchmarks for assessment, but
the risks of disease in all populations can increase
progressively from lower BMI levels.
Adult mean BMI levels of 22-23 kg/m2 are found in Africa
and Asia, while levels of 25-27 kg/m2 are prevalent across
North America, Europe, and in some Latin American,
North African and Pacific Island countries. BMI increases
amongst middle-aged elderly people, who are at the
greatest risk of health complications. In countries
undergoing nutrition transition, overnutrition often
co-exists with undernutrition. People with a BMI below
18.5 kg/m2 tend to be underweight."
Obesity is increasing worldwide and it's growing faster outside the US than inside - probably because the US has reached some sort of maximum which other states are catching up to.
As other countries approach US levels of obesity, then life expectancy in those countries should be dropping towards US levels - but life expectancy in both developed and developing countries is increasing faster than in the US. (If you want to check that go to the UNDP website and check the figures in successive Human Development Reports).
luminous defends Cuba:
[[Pretty good for a small poor country that has suffered a continuing multi-decade assault on its economy by a neighboring superpower.]]
Not to mention the Soviets dropping their billion-dollar-a-year subsidy. And, of course, a state run economy, with all the gross inefficiency, surpluses and shortages, and general mismanagement that that implies.
I can comment on the US and the UK healthcare systems. I'm a dual citizen. I grew up in the US, and most of my immediate family still live there, but I and other relatives currently live in the UK. Because of immediate health care issues amongst various sets of relatives, including my aging mother, my dealings with both healthcare systems are fairly up-to-the-minute.
The UK system is far from ideal. Since 1991 there have been concerted efforts made to turn it into a "two-tier" system, which succeeded in leeching a lot of doctors' time away from the NHS, and over the last decade, more and more "accountability" paperwork has been added in so that more and more resources are devoted to administration rather than actual healthcare delivery, just as in the US. Additionally, the current government has made those who are responsible for most of the budgeting decisions into a separate division, largely unaccountable to anyone save the PM and inevitable vocal outrage, but not to the reporting system. Those who are responsible for the actual delivery of healthcare, according to the reporting system, are those who have no power to make real budgeting decisions.
Add to that an aging population with higher expectations and more medical treatments available than there ever were in the past, and you get an inefficient, overstrained system.
My husband's grandfather was diagnosed with testicular cancer, but because of a lack of local resources had to wait nearly 7 months before therapy was started, during which time the cancer metastasized. It is currently being controlled with injections which inhibitit angiogenesis in the tumors, but that is hardly ideal.
My mother-in-law has poorly controlled diabetes, with recurrent skin lesions and foot ulcers, and my father-in-law has ludicrously high blood pressure and has had a serious heart attack, requiring two stents. I cannot fault the care which they have received on any point. It has been immediate, well followed up, and up to very high standards.
Of course, then there is the US.
My mother has very severe osteoporosis, among other problems. She was given parathyroid hormone for a period of time before the doctor attempted to revert her to bisphosphonates. Her HMO refused to pay for the bisphosphonates, on the ground that she had already received treatment for the condition! That took nearly 10 months of arguing to sort out....during which time she fractured her shoulder, which has led to further problems. Further down the line, even before the Medicare/Medicaid drug costs "reform", she ended up paying nearly $500 a month out of pocket for medicines for prescription pain meds, blood pressure control, and amelioration for the effects of osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthrisitis. After this reform, it is roughly $500 a month on the best deal she can get. So there you go, it obviously helped.
My brother and sis-in-law are self-employed small business owners. Because my sis-in-law is asthmatic, with an enlarged heart from years of inhalant steroids, their healthcare premiums to pay for insurance for themselves would have been equal to about 2/3 of their monthly income. They chose to do without. Then my brother was rear-ended in a traffic accident, and his car was driven into the large truck in front of him, resulting in head trama and brain damage. The driver who hit him was insured, but his insurance company chose to contest the medical diagnoses and the entire case got tied up in litigation. Meanwhile, treatment and therapy for my brother racked up to about $400,000, for which he is personally liable in the absence of an insurance payout. However, because of the cognitive impairment from the accident he couldn't work, and their business lost a fair amount of their usual standard of income...but because sis-in-law was still bringing in above the minimum level of income, they don't qualify for Medicaid. Going by the numbers and the demographics of uninsured in the US, my brother and sis-in-law are not exactly unique. They kept the business and didn't go bankrupt because my parents helped arrange a lien on their house, which may still come back and bite them.
Even my father, who was well-insured with residual healthcare from his work, Medicare, and tertiary insurance which he paid for himself, found himself having to cover nearly $70,000 out of his own assets for physiotherapy and care after he had two strokes, not to mention the hours of family time which were spent wading through billing and paperwork, and thus not bringing in income and increasing everyone's burden of stress.
I developed endometriosis while I was in university in the US. After 8 months trying to convince the college doctors that it wasn't just "bad period pains" I finally got scheduled for a laparascopy (which revealed the extent of the problem), for which I only had to wait 6 weeks and for which I paid a $200 deductible. (University students really aren't anyone's high health priority, I think.) On the other hand, while here I was worried about a breast lump -- I was seen for screening 4 days after I spoke to my GP about it, and for which I paid nothing out of pocket...well, I do pay National Insurance tax, and that is standard. No more for using the service.
In the US I paid US income tax, Colorado income tax, FICA and Medicare tax, and a local sales tax of (at the time) 6.3%, all of which added up, I once worked out, to just over 36% of my income.
In the UK I pay income tax and National Insurance, which comes to roughly 24% of my income, plus VAT of 17.5% on goods other than books and food. Living costs are undoubtedly higher here...but on the other hand, I get 42 days holiday per year here, and the price of food itself has become much more equal in the two countries over the last decade.
Anecdote does not equal data -- but the studies of use and costs of healthcare, and healthcare outcomes, in the two countries DOES equal data, and my experiences are well in line with the reports.
And out of experience with the two systems, I'll take the UK, hands down. You can't pay me enough to want to live in the US again. -- Plus, I tend to think that most US citizens, in their complaints about how the state wants to "rob them" to pay for other people's health care under a socialised system, vastly underestimate how much the current system costs them already in the overuse of emergency rooms, the lost productivity in business and society, and the fact that they already subsidise emergency healthcare but in hidden ways, and it costs them more for less real result.
The US has an incredibly crappy, broken system, which lets down a good chunk of its normal, "average" citizens. The UK system sucks too, but it sucks way, way less.
"Murder rates have fallen all over the US over the past six years. IIRC they fell MORE in states with some of the strictest gun laws such as New York."
Except for DC, how about that?
"but life expectancy in both developed and developing countries is increasing faster than in the US."
Increasing faster is not the same thing as being higher. When life expectancy is low, it can increase faster than when it is already high. Furthermore, there may be additional detriment to life expectancy from having generations of people with unhealthy lifestyles.
And Jeff, Bill Clinton admits that that was the same intelligence he had as well.
Ah, the murderous equivalent of global temperatures have not fallen since 1998 and Our Ben is right there. The peak was 1991, and it has taken eight years of Republican misrule to reverse a long standing trend downward. A small one year uptick in 2007 and Benny is moving to the burbs, but wait, there are 100% fewer murders in 2008 than 2007!
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm
http://mpdc.dc.gov/mpdc/cwp/view,a,1239,q,561242,mpdcNav_GID,1523,mpdcN…,|.asp
"Increasing faster is not the same thing as being higher. When life expectancy is low, it can increase faster than when it is already high."
As I pointed out, this is happening in the developed world as well as the developing. Check out the UNDP website - in 1970 US life expectancy was virtually on par with the OECD average and about two years ahead of Cuba's, Now Cuba's virtually tied and the OECD average is now two years higher than in the US (and in that period the OECD added relatively poor countries like South Korea and Mexico which would tend to drag down the average).
On current trends, Cuban life expectancy will exceed that of the US in the next few years.
Now you can approach that the way Americans have always approached problems and do whatever it takes to fix it or you keep telling yourself America's clearly superior and ignore any evidence to the contrary. Which approach do you think ended slavery and segregation; won World War II and put a man on the moon?
"Furthermore, there may be additional detriment to life expectancy from having generations of people with unhealthy lifestyles."
So obesity is now a Lamarckian characteristic?
Oh and Ben the DC hyperlink links back to this page.
"On current trends, Cuban life expectancy will exceed that of the US in the next few years."
Are Cuban's a bunch of fat hedonists? I claim that that has more to do with their life expectancy than their miraculous health care system.
Lancet is now funded by Soros. Got a belly laugh
The Lancet's Political Hit
January 9, 2008
Three weeks before the 2006 elections, the British medical journal Lancet published a bombshell report estimating that casualties in Iraq had exceeded 650,000 since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. We know that number was wildly exaggerated. The news is that now we know why.
It turns out the Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers. It also turns out the timing was no accident. You can find the fascinating details in the current issue of National Journal magazine, thanks to reporters Neil Munro and Carl Cannon. And sadly, that may be the only place you'll find them. While the media were quick to hype the original Lancet report -- within a week of its release it had been featured on 25 news shows and in 188 newspaper and magazine articles -- something tells us this debunking won't get the same play.
The Lancet death toll was more than 10 times what had been estimated by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, and even by human rights groups. Asked about the study on the day it was released, President Bush said, "I don't consider it a credible report." Neither did the Pentagon and top British authorities. To put the 655,000 number in perspective, consider that fewer Americans died in the Civil War, our bloodiest conflict.
Skeptics at the time (including us) pointed to the Lancet study's manifold methodological flaws. The high body count was an extrapolation based on a sampling of households and locations that was far too small to render reliable results. What the National Journal adds is that the Lancet study was funded by billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute. Mr. Soros is a famous critic of the Iraq campaign and well-known partisan, having spent tens of millions trying to defeat Mr. Bush in 2004.
But "Soros is not the only person associated with the Lancet study who had one eye on the data and the other on the U.S. political calendar," write Messrs. Munro and Cannon. Two co-authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University, told the reporters that they opposed the war from the outset and sent their report to the Lancet on the condition that it be published before the election.
Mr. Roberts, who opposed removing Saddam from power, sought the Democratic nomination for New York's 24th Congressional District in 2006. Asked why he ran, Mr. Roberts replied, "It was a combination of Iraq and [Hurricane] Katrina."
Then there is Lancet Editor Richard Horton, "who agreed to rush the study into print, with an expedited peer review process and without seeing the surveyors' original data," report Mr. Munro and Mr. Cannon. He has also made no secret of his politics. "At a September 2006 rally in Manchester, England, Horton declared, 'This axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease,'" they write. See YouTube for more.
We also learn that the key person involved in collecting the Lancet data was Iraqi researcher Riyadh Lafta, who has failed to follow the customary scientific practice of making his data available for inspection by other researchers. Mr. Lafta had been an official in Saddam's ministry of health when the dictator was attempting to end international sanctions against Iraq. He wrote articles asserting that many Iraqis were dying from cancer and other diseases caused by spent U.S. uranium shells from the Gulf War. According to National Journal, the Lancet studies "of Iraqi war deaths rest on the data provided by Lafta, who operated with little American supervision and has rarely appeared in public or been interviewed about his role."
In other words, the Lancet study could hardly be more unreliable. Yet it was trumpeted by the political left because it fit a narrative that they wanted to believe. And it wasn't challenged by much of the press because it told them what they wanted to hear. The truth was irrelevant
JC, when you copy-paste from somewhere, it is generally accepted practice to give a source.
Thanks JC, for posting that really clueless editorial for our amusement. Where did it come from? I'm guessing some publication where the editors are known for their innumeracy.
Let's not be too hasty. The mystery editorial quoted by JC does suggest some benchmarks that might in fact be useful in calibrating our sense of (in)credulity. The population of the US in 1860 was roughly similar to that of Iraq in 2003. The number of military dead on both sides was comparable to the most-probable number of excess deaths in Iraq since the invasion. Now, we need to remember what is often forgotten -- that both Johns Hopkins studies estimated total excess deaths, not just those assignable to either armed faction. It would be impossible to apply an apples/oranges correction factor without knowledge of how civilian mortality during the Civil War was affected by deterioration in health facilities, breakdowns in law enforcement, thugs taking the war's opportunity to settle scores, etc. But it seems very likely that if we did know those things[1] that the overall toll of the Civil War would greatly exceed that of the bodies left on the battlefield.
Now consider how likely it is that[2] the savage unrest in Iraq between 2003 and the present has killed proportionately fewer than one-tenth the number of civilians than the number of military dead from the US Civil War? It would be comforting to believe, as do Kane, Munro et al., that the Lancet's numbers are preposterous. It is deeply saddening to realize that, in fact, the opposite is the case.
[1] I haven't looked into doing a directly analogous comparison of CMRs pre- and post the US Civil War. Very likely, someone already has. If not, it would be a very interesting project.
[2] Let's face it directly. This is what George Bush (30,000) and those who claim IBC has called the roll (~45,000) are claiming.
After all, the US health care system is soooooooo miraculous.
Sorry:
I thought I mentioned it was from the best newspaper in the world.... The Wall Street Journal...... from behind the pay wall.
What I find so funny is how they got a former Saddam official to help "conduct" the survey. Isn't that like asking Dr. Mengels to conduct medical testing.... Gawd almighty. LOL.
I guess at 700 excess deaths per day Iraq will run outta people by 2009. LOL
IRE
Don't be innumerate. Civil war deaths weren't a Lancet "estimate" . They were actual death counts from battle operations etc. No phantom bodies there , dude.
Isn't grabbing an entire copyrighted article from behind a paywall and republishing it - and announcing that you're doing so - in violation of the TOS?
And the French, Australian, and from what I've seen thus far even the Spanish health care systems suck way less than the UK one.
Ben, like most libertarians, has far more faith in his political bias than he does in the data.
And, BTW, I don't think anyone here is saying "I'd rather live in Cuba". Who would want to live in a country whose neighbor happens to be the world's only remaining superpower and whose goal is to destroy the government, bottom-up, by impoverishing its citizens?
But try this on for size ...
If Cuba, with its limited resources, can deliver such effective health care - far better than any of its Latin American neighbors, under much more difficult economic conditions - why would you settle for the US not doing significantly better?
Doesn't the fact that we're even DISCUSSING which is better (US 10% better? Cuba 10% better?), the fact that the two countries are even in the same league, lead you to ask some very serious questions about what's wrong in this country.
Because it shouldn't even be close. We're a rich country. We shouldn't have millions of citizens without access to non-emergency health care.
Dunno know Gouldiechops. You wanna squeal so I go to copyright jail?
Doggsie:
Cuba is a dictatorship. It has a per cap income of around $4000 making it one of the poorest countries in the western hem. To suggest or imply it's medical system is comparable to US standards is the most laughable thing I have read for a long time. Don't be such simpleton.
Here's the Cuban ambulance service speedily taking a sick man to the nearest hospital.
http://www.therealcuba.com/Noambulancia.JPG
enlarge the other pics as they are a treat.
http://www.therealcuba.com/Page10.htm
Gouldiechops will think they're great.
On current trends, Cuban life expectancy will exceed that of the US in the next few years.
Gouldiechops now thinks Cuba has the equivalent of the general accounting office auditing Cuban statistics. I guess if we went back in time Gouldie would have believed the propaganda films of Jews being well treated by the Nazis.
this is either Hubris or outright dishonesty from the left. Anything coming out of Cuba is suspect except Monte Cristos.
It's a dicatorship, gouldie. Nothing can ever be trusted that comes outa those hell holes. Give us a break.
Me:
>I'm guessing some publication where the editors are known for their innumeracy.
JC:
>The Wall Street Journal
Can I pick 'em or what?
The WSJ editorial page is p0rn for right-wingers.
http://www.medicc.org/index.php
Tim:
You need to spend more time reading widely and not just relying the NYTimes and the Guardian.
The WSJ is a great newspaper with terrific editorials and opeds.
Relying on Krug man is bound to get any reasonable person into trouble.
Lum B
Sorry if I'm unimpressed. When I go to see a doc I wanna know that the dude sitting behind the desk has a potential IQ in the top 1% of the population.
A retarded mongoose would able able to graduate Cuba's medical " schools" . they're not training docs. They are going so low down the IQ scale to graduate " docs " that they are little more than 1/2 trained nurses.
Don't be so gullible.
"The WSJ editorial page is p0rn for right-wingers."
Just like the NYT and left-wingers, eh? Why the lefties are so in love with a brutal dictator I'll never know.
I lie, I do know. Because they will sacrifice liberty for equality any chance they get. Even if it means we're all equally poorly off, better to be equal than to be free.
"The WSJ is a great newspaper with terrific editorials and opeds."
Translation:
"They pander to my prejudices and support my preconceived opinions, therefore I don't have to really think about anything."
Speaking for myself, I prefer factual accuracy over making me feel all warm and fuzzy about my own opinions, for deciding what I think a "great" newspaper is.
JC, the technique used to get the number was cluster sampling; the method is statistically acceptable and was explicit from the start. Some of the claims made in the oped piece, at least, are simply false.
However, for the sake of argument, let us assume for the moment that the study can and should be discarded entirely. The Iraq Body Count project, which records documented deaths only, and which explicitly states "Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence." (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/) -- report around 87,000 civilian deaths from violence since 2003. Does this smaller number mean it's all ok then?
And ben -- now you are simply descending to name calling and demonizing people who don't agree with you. Liberals will always sacrifice freedom for equality, even if everyone's badly off??? You have GOT to stop reading Ann Coulter as a source of your "understanding".
IBC only reports deaths that appear in english language media in Iraq. Right off that tells you it is an underestimate.
As to the health thing, things that extend life expectancy are rather simple, sanitation, safe water supply, vaccination, basic care for pregnant women and nutrition in the first year or so of life. What you need for these things is universal coverage and the Cuban system is set up to provide them.
The only place the US health care system excels is the place where it provides universal care for those above 65.
Jc,
Your expertise in medicine and Cuba is statistically zero.
http://www.medicc.org/latin-american-med-school.php
http://www.medicc.org/who-we-are.php
Oh, one more thing about the Lancet study -- that WSJ piece is well behind the times, now. The original data were not released for six months in order to try to protect the local Iraqi researchers from being identified, but the data was released after that. It is still available on request -- not to random members of the public, but to research groups or institutions which have a legitimate interest in this kind of sociological study, and which are not serving an overtly political function (that is, the University of Aberdeen can get the data, as could the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies, but neither the Cato Institute nor the UK's Fabian Society would be likely to, given that these have overtly political agendas, albeit in different directions).
Guidelines and contact information for requesting the original data for the study are here:
http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/research/iraq/index.html
"You have GOT to stop reading Ann Coulter as a source of your "understanding"."
I have never read Ann Coulter. True enough, I made a generalization, but be honest. Would you rather see a system with huge disparities, but where everyone was better off than they otherwise would be, or a system in which everyone was "equal," but worse off than they would otherwise have been? I prefer the latter.
Right, at 700 per day, and with a guess at the population of 20 million, that would be 20e6 people / 700 people/day / 365 days/year = 78 years.
These a foreign students, some of whom are US citizens now practicing in their home communities.
I didn't know mongooses were so smart.
"Would you rather see a system with huge disparities, but where everyone was better off than they otherwise would be, or a system in which everyone was "equal," but worse off than they would otherwise have been? I prefer the latter."
You DO????????
Er...I think you mean that you prefer the former.
As would I, but for three things:
1. It doesn't apply to this particular situation -- "where everyone was better off than they otherwise would be" is the debatable part, since there are at least 44 million Americans who are NOT better off than they otherwise would be. These 44 million people would demonstrably be better off under a system of universal health care. When your "everyone" fails to include 14.6% of your population, it isn't "everyone" at all.
2. Actually, in observable history, large disparities in the availability of those things needed to support life (such as, for example, lifesaving medicines, but not facelifts) contributes to a destabilised and fragmented society, which leads to economic and political fallout of its own. The most stable societies are the ones which provide enough care to ALL citizens to preserve life and control mortality to reasonable levels. This can't be ignored in the real world; otherwise you end up with rioting and political coups. It is in societal interest to keep disparities from driving the least affluent part of society to the point where they literally have nothing to lose.
3. It's not the question you first purported to address. Your precise accusation was that liberals "always" think it "better to be equal than to be free." Sorry, but that is in fact straight out of the Ann Coulter playbook on How To Encourage Contempt For The Other Half Of The Country, and it's also pure, straight up bullshit. I'm calling you on it. I would also remind you that it is hardly the "Liberals" of the US, the UK, or any other country who are encouraging the use of uncontrolled and unmonitored surveillance of private citizens, pushing national ID cards and databases, or writing rules to restrict who can be married to whom, so careful where you fling that mud.
----
Oh, and as a side note, the CIA estimate for the July 2007 population of Iraq is around 27,499,600.
Hmmm, typekey chose to "helpfully" renumber my list for me. I shall have to remember it will do that.
"Er...I think you mean that you prefer the former."
Dang, you are right.
"It's not the question you first purported to address. Your precise accusation was that liberals "always" think it "better to be equal than to be free." Sorry, but that is in fact straight out of the Ann Coulter playbook on How To Encourage Contempt For The Other Half Of The Country, and it's also pure, straight up bullshit."
Maybe so, but I didn't learn it from Coulter. I learned it from watching a documentary on Cuba on PBS, in which a Cuban man stated that "yes, we're poor, but that's OK as long as long as nobody else has it any better than I do." Blech!
Then there's the liberals going on and on and on about the divide between the rich and the poor in America. Who the fuck cares? The poor aren't getting poorer, they have cable TV and two cars. It's just that the rich are getting vastly richer. So what? I'm not rich, and I probably never will be, and I don't give a rats ass how rich the rich get. My childhood was spent a lot poorer than most. We didn't have cable, and our only car was a beat-up 76 Toyota that barely ran. I lived with a single mom who made $4/hr and went to school full time. But at least she could do that. Cuba can go to hell.
Uh, so because a guy in Cuba said it, that means all liberals everywhere think it?
Wait, what...?
I just had a (slightly unpleasant) conversation with a co-worker this afternoon who is of the firm opinion that parents should have the absolute right to control their children's lives in every respect, up to and including the right to prevent them from recieving lifesaving care in the case of illness or accident or to keep them from recieving a basic education, or to lock them in the house in total isolation from society and human contact, although to be fair he fell short of saying they also had the right to beat the child to death if they felt like it. But because he said this, do you think this means that all Brits think it?
And as for "the poor aren't getting poorer, they all have cable TV and two cars" etc. -- try visiting the real world sometime. It's quite educational. I can assure you, what you just said doesn't actually resemble it significantly.
For that matter, a single mom these days wouldn't have the option to go to school full time without some of that social support which you appear to despise, or work for that matter, since there would be few places which would allow her to bring in a child to work, she couldn't leave you on your own, but child care costs a heck of a lot more than minimum wage provides. So if said single mother doesn't have family who can watch her child, how precisely would she be better off today?
"For that matter, a single mom these days wouldn't have the option to go to school full time without some of that social support which you appear to despise, or work for that matter, since there would be few places which would allow her to bring in a child to work, she couldn't leave you on your own, but child care costs a heck of a lot more than minimum wage provides."
I was fifth grade and older at the time, so yes, she could leave me and my sister alone. You know, I heard another good stat on PBS radio last night:
1. the median family annual income in America is $42k
2. if you take out families in which the head of household is over 21 years of age, and under, IIRC, something like 75, then the median income rises to $60k.
3. Further, if you consider families in group 2. above in which the parents are married, then the median income rises further yet to somewhere around $75k.
Lessons from this: Don't have kids until you can afford to, and it is preferable to have children when you are married. On the other hand if you're 22 years old, unmarried and have five kids, life will be tough.
Ben,
In my experience, this position has nothing to do with being liberal/communist/whatever. I've spent a little time in Haiti (and my father's spent years there) -- not a lefty nation, since most people aren't involved in the political process at all (people just squeaking by tend not to be very political). Normally the folks there are quite friendly, but one of the common societal dysfunctions is a tendency to very strongly resent neighbors who improve their lot, to the point of actively trying to bring them back down somehow (usually just in the form of gossiping terribly about them).
I don't really understand the attitude, but it seems to be connected to poverty, not politics.
ben, your estimate of the time to depopulate Iraq assumes that the 700 per day figure is net. In real life, there are births, deaths from other causes, and net migration that have to be taken into account. All they need is 700 births per day and the population is static over 78 years.
Defenders of the USSR made the same mistake when confronted with Antonov-Ovseyenko's or Solzhenitsyn's figures of 66-100 million dead -- "that would be a noticeable chunk of the USSR's population!" Yes, but over 70 years, with natural increase, it's quite possible.
ben writes:
[[The poor aren't getting poorer, they have cable TV and two cars. ]]
Not in the poor neighborhoods I'm familiar with. And not if they're homeless. You can't get the cable people to install a converter if you don't have a fixed address.
Ben: "Would you rather see a system with huge disparities, but where everyone was better off than they otherwise would be, or a system in which everyone was "equal," but worse off than they would otherwise have been? I prefer the latter."
I think you mean "the former" Ben. But it's a false dichotomy.
Canada, to take your favorite example, has a higher survival rate for most forms of cancer than does the US. So it delivers a more equal system; a better system (on at least some indicators) and a much, much cheaper system.
The reason Cuba keeps coming up in these discussions isn't because its a role model it's because even a shit-poor third world dictatorship is beating the US in this area.
I would have thought that as an American that would be a source of concern.
Cyprus, Malta, south Korea and Costa Rica all beat the US.
Hell Puerto Rico's average life expectancy is higher than for the US mainland.
How can any American look at a world league table that shows the US behind Chile and just barely ahead of Slovenia and not ask what the hell is wrong?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
"Right, at 700 per day, and with a guess at the population of 20 million, that would be 20e6 people / 700 people/day / 365 days/year = 78 years."
Assuming zero births and no net immigration or emigration.
So I got curious as to how Puerto Rico had a higher life expectancy than the rest of the US:
http://www.paho.org/english/SHA/prflpur.htm
"In recent years, health care costs in Puerto Rico have skyrocketed. Curbing this increase and ensuring that every Puerto Rican receives good and reasonably priced health care are at the core of current health reforms. The model now in effect also seeks to have the Department of Health delegate responsibility for the delivery of services to the private sector--the aim is to have a single health care system--while maintaining responsibility for ensuring that the population receives appropriate health services. The model emphasizes a preventive approach, including education and promotion of healthy lifestyles, in order to minimize long-term costs for hospitalization and treatment of catastrophic illness. The Government has made it a top priority to restructure the health regions and their levels of care, as a way to avoid duplication. The new model for health service delivery to the indigent seeks to improve the accessibility and quality of services in a framework of equity and social justice.
As of October 1997, 61 of Puerto Rico's 78 municipios in Puerto Rico (78%) had been brought into the health sector reform process, and health insurance coverage had been extended to more than 1 million indigent persons. It is expected that another 14 municipios will have been included by the end of fiscal year 1997-1998.
The government insurance plan covers services that are necessary to maintain good physical and mental health. Insurance cost and the deductible amounts are determined according to the beneficiaries' ability to pay. Beneficiaries are entitled to select a health care provider from a network of providers in their area of residence."
From ben:
1. the median family annual income in America is $42k.
2. if you take out families in which the head of household is over 21 years of age, and under, IIRC, something like 75, then the median income rises to $60k.
3. Further, if you consider families in group 2. above in which the parents are married, then the median income rises further yet to somewhere around $75k.
Wait...again...what...?
Are you sure you got that right? It makes absolutely no sense, especially in light of the statistics here:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/h10ar.html
There is a veritable plethora of income info at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/inchhdet.html , and it makes interesting reading -- not all of it uniformly rosy. I would like to take this opportunity to point out, additionally, that "median" simply means "there are as many people under this number as there are over this number." It gives a rough measure of distribution, but isn't a good way to tell how badly off your bottom 20% of the population is, say.
And, yah, having a lot of kids, young, single parent, hard life. No kidding. But this should mean that the person shouldn't expect to have access to basic healthcare unless they are independently wealthy? Or, what? Not quite sure what you're proposing, here.
Oh, bugger typekey and its bloody list renumbering...!
Sorry for the multiple posts, but I thought I'd throw a few little economic tidbits into the healthcare debate:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2006-09-26-health-premi…
http://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtml
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/45279.php
Rabbet
Here's a deal, next time you get really sick, i'll spring for a trip to Cuba for you and that way way you can tell us how wondeful the system is.
If you can't distinguish between a 3d rate medical system (Cuba) and the US I vey much donbt whether you can discuss more complex issues like global worming. Seriously
UMMM wonderful, warming......
Chris O.
Don't be a mithless rock. I was joking, pulling the dog's chain.
Gouldiechops:
Puerto Rico couldn't survive without massive US transfer payments. Get real.
Luna cat:
Are you a slow learner? Unless Cuba has a huge number of its population above or at 130 IQ they are graduating little more than nursing staff and calling them doctors. As I said, don't be so gullible.
jc, frankly, you suck even at remembering who to address things to.
Hmmm...reading over this last stack of jc posts, I think he brings up one valuable thing. Let's talk about "global worming". I'm all in favour of global worming; worms are fantastic for the soil. ;-p
So if said single mother doesn't have family who can watch her child, how precisely would she be better off today?
How about he single father doing his share. And there is always the abortion route. .....aside of the issue of having protective sex.
Er, darn it, I meant under 21 and over 65, take those groups out.
And yes, we all know what the median is. That is why it is a better measure than the mean.
"And, yah, having a lot of kids, young, single parent, hard life. No kidding. But this should mean that the person shouldn't expect to have access to basic healthcare unless they are independently wealthy? Or, what? Not quite sure what you're proposing, here."
How many children that one cannot afford should one be "allowed" to have? 10? 20? It's not the children's fault of course, so there is no question that they should be taken care of, but what can you do to the irresponsible adult in such a situation? Nothing?
Also, that is what I heard on NPR, as I stated. I don't know if it's true, but NPR seems like the sort of source that people here trust.
Do you wish that Americans weren't as well off as that?
The link here that you gave is very interesting:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/h10ar.html
but it only gives income for the head of household, while the NPR thing that I quoted was for the entire family, in which the head of household was in a certain age range, not the HOH alone. Those numbers in that link look like they could jive with the numbers I gave.
ben, you say that the link only gives the income for the head of the household. No, it doesn't -- it gives the aggregate household income, with households segregated by age of the head of household. For heaven's sake, look at the titles!
Regarding the number of kids that a woman should be "allowed" to have -- why, I don't know. I make no particular proposal about that, and it didn't even cross my mind, I have to admit. Why? But if your point is that the kids, who really have little choice in being born or not, should be taken care of, then you are already proposing a form of social welfare or state-sponsored health care. Don't get me wrong -- I think that child healthcare is an absolute requirement, for a variety of reasons. I just want to point out that a freemarket system would not take care of this.
And finally -- "Do you wish that Americans weren't as well off as that?"
I can only say...wha? I'm sorry, did you think I was disputing your figures out of jealousy or spite or something???? o_0;
No; I just don't think they're the right figures, is all.
Don't be a mithless rock. jc's gullibility was the joke.
ben sends his kids and cats out to work. The cats are better earners and they get the soft bed.
"ben, you say that the link only gives the income for the head of the household. No, it doesn't -- it gives the aggregate household income, with households segregated by age of the head of household. For heaven's sake, look at the titles!"
Meaning of course that households with heads in the 21-65 age group are likely to have higher aggregate incomes simply because on average they contain more working age members than either younger or older households.
After I posed about Puerto Rico, I noticed there is a confounding variable - Puerto Rico has a big excess female population - roughly 2.1 million women to 1.8 million men.
That's a result of male Puerto Ricans being more likely to move to the mainland US for work purposes.
Since women live longer than men, the imbalance in the population probably means the sex-adjusted mortality rates in the US are no worse than for Puerto Rico.
On the other hand referring to the PAHO database again, Puerto Rican health spending is 6% of GDP. The equivalent US figure is 13%. But it's nice to know that by spending only twice as much (in relaitve terms, more in actual dolalr terms) the US does just about as well as Puerto Rico.
so Ben what is it - those abstemptious non-hedonistic upright church-going Puerto Ricans aren't dying from the results of their sins like the degenerates in the US? Maybe its because they have a lower percentage of latinoes than the US? ("We have a much higher percentage of minorities" beign a favorite Nativist response to discussions of American health care outcomes.)
Say you think maybr its because they have universal government-funded health care coverage with an emphasis on preventative medicine.
Jc says:
"Are you a slow learner? Unless Cuba has a huge number of its population above or at 130 IQ they are graduating little more than nursing staff and calling them doctors. As I said, don't be so gullible."
Given that standard distribution of IQ 130 and above is the 98th percentile and ~0.6% of the Cuban population are doctors, then less than 1/3 of the population with IQs 130 and above could be all Cuban doctors.
I'd say, don't be such an idiot, Jc, but there is no cure for stupid.
Another fact to bounce around in your mostly empty cranium, Jc, is that the median IQ of medical doctors is ~120.
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx
illuminous b
Given that standard distribution of IQ 130 and above is the 98th percentile and ~0.6% of the Cuban population are doctors, then less than 1/3 of the population with IQs 130 and above could be all Cuban doctors.
and
Another fact to bounce around in your mostly empty cranium, Jc, is that the median IQ of medical doctors is ~120
cuba's median iq is 85, illuminous. So unless the distribution curve has an unusally wide tail, that dictatorship is graduating people who in normal circumstances ought to be conducting sanitary duties in hsopitals rather than treating patients.
I'll repeat it again. Cuba's medical schtick is a leftist scam fully disgested by other leftist idiots and apologists for a dictatorship.
Oh the link to national IQ comparisons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
good luck if you need a brainy oncologist to help you out.
lessee, Jc,
"For most of the 185 nations, no reliable studies are available. In those cases, the authors have used an estimated value by taking averages of the IQs of surrounding nations."
So, reasonably assuming that Cuba is not one of the 81 countries Lynn and Vanhanen had direct data for, and the countries surrounding Cuba in their study are the US and Jamaica, we have
(US)98 + (Jam)72 / 2 = (Cuba)85
A brief lesson in how to lie with statistics.
Let's hear it for Ben and JC for explaining how there are special one-off confounding factors that make a direct comparison between Puerto Rico or Cuba and the US health care systems unreliable.
I'm sure they can find other special one-off confounding factors for all the other 37 countries with higher life expectancy than the US.
Not that there's any special pleading going on here.
And not that it really matters - odds are a Democrat will win in November and inside 2-3 years the US will have soem form of universal health care. At which point we'll have real data to work with and US right wingers will start talking about how "Well of course everyone knows government single-buyer health care systems are more efficient but that's a special case and all other government spending is pointless and futile."
Of course if a Republican wins or Bill Frist and company manage to block reform in congress the US government will end up de facto nationalising most of the health system inside a decade anyway as firstly major corporate pension funds go bankrupt and need to be bailed out and then resultant declining base of private insurees starts to put private insurers out of busienss requiring further bail-outs.
Of course by that point JC will probably be explaining why its perfectly reasonable why US life expectancy is on par with that in Burkina Faso.
As for poverty in the US: the official measure of poverty isn't relative (as in the bottom 10% of the population)it's based on a measure of absolute poverty - people who need to spend more than one third of their income just to eat an adequate basic diet.
The measure is currently ca. $10,000 for one individual and ca. $20,000 for a family of four.
The number of Americans living in absolute poverty increased from 31 million (11.1%) in 20000 to 35 million (12.7%) in 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
Jc,
Seeing how the kinds of things that have demonstrated causal correlation to intelligence are things like prenatal health, early development, nutrition and familial/cultural/social educational encouragement and availability, and how real empirical evidence from reliable epidemiological studies has shown Cuba to be better in almost every category than the US, it is no less reasonable to infer that average intelligence could be actually higher in Cuba than the US. L&V's thesis actually rests on the idea that the poorer the country, the larger the population that lives in abject poverty and vulnerable to severe developmental liabilities. While Cuba is a poor county and hardly anyone has much disposable income, scarcely anyone lives in abject poverty, particularly children. Even during the post Soviet hardships, when adult calorie intake was down to 1500/day, maternal and children's health and nutrition was high priority.
You see, we soft-headed lefties have these silly weepy notions that children are the future and there is more to life than petty self interest. Our individual lives are but a brief strut across the stage of the world. Our idea of a good life is to leave it a bit better, a bit kinder, a bit wiser than when we came into it. Your idea seems to be to die surrounded by the biggest pile of toys, evah. Most never touched by human hands, but still in their factory wrappings.
You sure ain't no baby no more, Jc, but you sure ain't never grown up none.
Let's hear it for Ben and JC for explaining how there are special one-off confounding factors that make a direct comparison between Puerto Rico or Cuba and the US health care systems unreliable.
Are you saying this with a straight face, Gouldiechops? Have you no shame?
I've been trying to drum it into your hard head for ages that comparison of healthcare is a specialised field in economics. Yet, all you can offer is how universal healthcare is the panacea (and nothing comes close).
Have you forgotten how many times I have patiently explained to you? Yes I know, I have showed the patience of Job with you, haven't I?
Remember how I have to frequently explain to you that demand curves slope downward and why that amazing phenomena also applies to healthcare. Remember?
Illuminous
What are you trying to tell me? Stop changing the subject with strawmen. We're not talking about the relative efficacies of improving national IQ through better nutrition.
We're talking about how a dictatorship with a national IQ median of 85 is able to manage an overabundance of doctors without going down the IQ ladder and hitting the bottom of the barrel. Good explaining that one.
Gouldiechops
Please show how the absolute poverty stats treats the 11 million illegals in the US. The bottom quintile of legit working Americans is 20 million.
Since no one seems to have raised the point, I will -- IQ does not measure "intelligence." It measures the ability for someone of a particular culture to take a particular type of test. You can change your IQ by up to 30 or so points by studying that type of test and taking the IQ test again. Oh, and it's not a genetic trait, either.
Jc,
(US)98 + (Jam)72 / 2 = (Cuba)85
No strawmen here. Just phony statistics.
"odds are a Democrat will win in November and inside 2-3 years the US will have soem form of universal health care."
There's a bet I'd be willing to take. I also strongly doubt that the dems will maintain control of both houses of congress.
Barton.
Heaven forbid, but next time you're sick tell us if you choose a doc who did his post grad at Harvard or a mexican claptrap because he or she failed pre med testing.
----------------
Since no one seems to have raised the point, I will -- IQ does not measure "intelligence."
It measures the ability of a person to get through problem solving in a modern western context.
It measures the ability for someone of a particular culture to take a particular type of test. You can change your IQ by up to 30 or so points by studying that type of test and taking the IQ test again.
I'm not sure that's true.
Oh, and it's not a genetic trait, either
really? So who is more likely to produce an Einstein? A couple bordering on retardation or a coupla uni professors (no not soft sciences)
JC -- clearly I am someone who prefers Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" to Murray and Herrnstein's "The Bell Curve;" obviously you are the other way around.
The raising-IQ bit is quite true, by the way; that's what my mother did. She tested at 120, couldn't get into Mensa, studied, took the test again, and tested at 150. IQ isn't constant through a person's life or even from day to day. It's a much less useful measure than most people think.
"It's a much less useful measure than most people think."
I buy that. I might have phrased that as "much less useful than is commonly thought."
Ben, jc/JC/jC/jC/jc../jc... (etc, etc), et al seem most particularly enamoured of the economic superiority that they enjoy in the grand ol' US o' A. I wonder to what extent they truly understand exactly what fortune they have (or don't really have) and just how that fortune is bought...
I am a dual Aussie/Euro citizen, and I have spent time in many countries right around the world. And yet, in spite of over a decade of our late-lamented conservative government trying to rub the gloss off it, I am still firmly convinced that Australia remains the fabled 'Lucky Country', even if it has limped a little for the last 10 years or so. I am especially pleased that I live in a country that allowed me to forgo a well-paid career in biomedical science to follow my convictions and to work in ecology, at the expense of forfeiting approximately $400k of salary over ten years (ecology is definitely lower in the priority stakes of economists and politicians) whilst still living to a quality of life that makes me feel positively and guiltily lordly.
Perhaps it is because I live a relatively simple and uncluttered life, and one where I can truly appreciate the many offerings of our country that cannot be bought... I certainly cannot fathom the enthusiasm involved in shaving a few bucks off an excessively large vehicle by buying it on one side of a border rather than on the other.
But I digress. And I am unadvisedly ignoring the wise admonishments to not toss billy goats off the bridge. Even so...
Australians are fortunate to have a public broadcaster, funded on the smell of an oily rag ($0.08/beleaguered citizen/day), which nevertheless provides a wide variety of intelligent discourse (and entertainment) free to those same beleaguered citizens. Our national radio station is worth a look - last night Late Night Live repeated a Phillip Adams interview with (gasp) Chalmers Johnson which might sting the libertarians on this blog into a bit of a tizz. And because our national broadcaster is a generous and public-minded one, the transcript of the interview is free to anyone in the world. Even better, the mp3 is free to download for at least a week. have a look at the ABC's website and follow the trail - I won't give you more of a link than that because I'd hate to encourage laziness, because I think that an exploration of RN and other ABC sites wouldn't hurt, and because I think that even the trolls here should have the nouse... As I said, you'll have about a week to listen to or to download the audio of the interview.
Perhaps Chalmers is pushing the envelope a little, but I think history might record that it wasn't by much.
Will they eat the goat?
And where's that asbestos suit?
An addendum for Ben to consider - it seems that most of the rest of the developed world can 'do' the "American dream" better than Americans...
The transmitted radio reports touched upon this in greater detail, but the last line of the online text version says enough.
On this thread, concerning the suggestion of a "science boycott" of Israel, Barton said:
First thing: Even if you think Israel is being unfairly attacked, it hardly follows that this is due to antisemitism. If somebody spent all their time calling for sanctions and military action against, say, North Korea, and ignored other rogue states, would you immediately assume that they did it out of hatred of ethnic Koreans? The state of Israel has a number of distinguishing features besides the fact that a lot of Jews live there. For one thing, it's a very wealthy, Western-style liberal democracy, with a generally well-educated populace; there are good reasons to hold it to a higher human rights standard, and to think that it could be more effectively pressured in that direction.
Second thing: European forces bombed Serbia as part of the NATO intervention. European countries participated in multiple wars with Hussein's Iraq, and agreed to some of the most severe economic sanctions in history. Syria still hasn't signed an association agreement with the EU, unlike most of the other non-European Mediterranean countries, and its diplomatic relations with European countries have been spotty at best. Meanwhile, Israel has extremely strong ties to the EU--as strong as any country which is not actually a member--and was the first non-European country to be included in the EU's Framework Programme for Research and Technical Development.
You cannot possibly believe that Europe has been more friendly to Serbia, Syria or Iraq, than to Israel. A "science boycott" was proposed against Israel precisely because Europeans don't wish to take the harsher measures they have taken against other countries. Israel enjoys a very privileged position in Western foreign policy; a boycott would be meaningful only because those privileges exist in the first place.
Opinions have been expressed by several here about the evident vaulting economic superiority of the States over other countries, of the necessity for ever-lowered taxes, and promoting the apparent perception (certainly at the time, even tho', oops, we may have been an eensy bit wrong in hindsight - huh, what oil?) of the necessity to step in and sort out that vipers' nest of terr'ists and their bad toys.
These same folk don't seem to have even a gasp to spare for the astronomic cost of the adventure in the dessert, when the mere thought of the cost of universal health care is enough to bring on fits of apoplexy.
I wonder what their thoughts are as to the worth of The Excursion if it is broken down into, say, $/death, where 'death' is any of the numbers that fly around the discussion boards here. There are many other permutations of describing bang-for-buck, but you know, I can't find one that works for me.
Really, what is the benefit, and what price human life, no matter what the number is that one is most enamoured of...?
As an 'evil biologist' I am Darwinian in inclination, but as a human I understand the 'emergences' and the concomitant benefits that supposedly come from our so-called civilisation. It's interesting to observe how priorities in our society are divided along cultural/political lines - and it sets my Darwinianly-inclined mind to musing as to the underlying lizard-brain rationales.
Sign a petition for more reporting of science in the ABC evening news!
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/much-more-science-in-the-abc-evening-n…
(Even Americans and Europeans seem to be signing .... )
jc:
"A couple bordering on retardation or a coupla uni professors (no not soft sciences)"
Oh yeah, IQ is correlated with intelligence. How do you know if a person is intelligent? By measuring his IQ! Great 'logic'.
In the last paragraph of #209 I wondered about the biology of belief. And lo!, as soon as I logged off and retired to enjoy my latest issue of New Scientist I opened up to an article on exactly this.
It must have been the Hand of God.
Sadly, it reinforces the suspicion in the back of my mind that the trollish alleles floundering in the shallow end of our gene pool may be our undoing as a species.
I seem to have sausages for fingers. Here is a working URL for post #209.
And whilst I'm repairing links here's the working URL for post #207
Anything else that I've buggered up?! :-)