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Friday, April 22, 2005
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People of Faith.
WASHINGTON, April 21 - As the Senate battle over judicial confirmations became increasingly entwined with religious themes, officials of several major Protestant denominations on Thursday accused the Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist, of violating the principles of his own Presbyterian church and urged him to drop out of a Sunday telecast that depicts Democrats as "against people of faith." [...]
Among those scheduled to speak in the conference call is the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, a top official of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., in which Dr. Frist is an active member.
You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don't have to be nice to them.
-- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, January 14, 1991
Psst -- Dr. Frist, before you go gung-ho towards establishing religious tests for government figures, you might want to check to see if yours is on the approved list. [Daily Kos]
10:00:46 PM 
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More Attacks On The Court.
The jihad marches on from the religious far right.
2 Evangelicals Want to Strip Courts' Funds
Evangelical Christian leaders, who have been working closely with senior Republican lawmakers to place conservative judges in the federal courts, have also been exploring ways to punish sitting jurists and even entire courts viewed as hostile to their cause.
An audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times features two of the nation's most influential evangelical leaders, at a private conference with supporters, laying out strategies to rein in judges, such as stripping funding from their courts in an effort to hinder their work. [Oliver Willis - Like Kryptonite To Stupid]
9:58:38 PM
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The Budget Clown Show Moves to the Republican Congressional Leadership....
Could the Post be making a joke? I mean, there is no doubt--no doubt at all--about the Republican Congressional leadership's willingness to tackle the deficit. It has no willingness to tackle the deficit at all. None. Zero. It has never had any. What "doubt" about this could there possibly be? washingtonpost.com: Congress's Willingness To Tackle Deficit in Doubt. By Jonathan Weisman: In the same week that the House voted to permanently repeal the estate tax, 44 House Republicans broke with their leaders to demand that as much as $20 billion in Medicaid savings be stricken from the budget. The twin moves raise new questions about Congress's willingness to tackle the budget deficit. And they came just as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are to convene their annual meetings this weekend. The Bush administration was to use the meetings to tell the world's finance ministers and central bankers that Washington is serious about its red ink.... President Bush and congressional Republicans have vowed to cut the deficit in half over the next four years, but new data indicate that little progress has been made. Halfway through fiscal 2005, the federal government recorded a deficit of $291 billion, the...
[Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]
7:15:14 PM
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Bolton in Trouble: Murkowski, Chafee, Hagel, Voinovich Reconsidering.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The nomination of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was cast in further doubt on Friday when a fourth Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said more time was needed to review his record.
A spokeswoman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said the senator felt the committee "did the right thing delaying the vote on Bolton in light of the recent information presented to the committee."
Asked if Bolton, an outspoken critic of the United Nations, had Murkowski's support, spokeswoman Kristin Pugh said, "I can't speculate on how she would vote." [...]
Republican Sens. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska also said they wanted more information on the accusations before they made up their minds.
Everyone seems to be in agreement that over the next few weeks, enough information about Bolton's behavior and (more importantly) intelligence manipulations is going to be confirmed as to make Bolton nearly radioactive. Still doesn't mean these Senators will vote against him, mind you -- but they've got the sense to want to see what does come forward before lashing their own professional integrity to it.
Incidentally, the best commentary I've seen anywhere on the Bolton nomination comes from Laura Rozen at War And Piece, in a simple smackdown to a blistering WSJ editorial against chairman Dick Lugar for being too "weak" in manhandling the Bolton nomination through committee:
You know what this is really all about? Far more than a partisan fight between Republicans and Democrats as the White House would have us believe, this is really all about a fight within the Republican party about whether all Republicans have to robotically be in lockstep with the White House on every issue, every nomination, or not. Are they allowed a smidgen of independence, ever? Now the WSJ is serving happily as the "fashion police" for the White House on how forcefully Republican Senators need to speak about a nominee Sen. Lugar has every substantive reason and right to consider unfit for that job. And for that matter, that he did almost all in his power to push through committee. He just didn't look happy enough about it for the White House. Is this a trial balloon, a threat, that Lugar could lose his committee chair, a la Arlen Specter, as Chris Nelson suggested earlier this week, if he doesn't manage somehow to push Bolton through? How truly incredibly stifling.
In both the filibuster threats and the Bolton nomination, both on the floor of the Senate and during this weekend's Cirque du Spongebob or whatever the hell they're calling it, that's it in a nutshell. Ninety-five percent agreement with adminstration/conservative/religious policies is not enough, ninety-nine percent is not enough: you are either supportive of The Movement in every particular, without reservation or question, or you are a traitor.
Welcome to the Congress of the United States: now shut up and vote as we tell you to.
[Daily Kos]
7:12:07 PM
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Cheney Warns Dems on Judicial Filibusters.
Nedra Pickler | Washington, DC | April 22
AP - Vice President Dick Cheney said Friday he would vote in the Senate to stop filibusters of judicial nominees if given the chance. That means President Bush is breaking his word to stay out of the fight over Senate rules, Democratic leader Harry Reid responded.
[The Agonist]
3:57:01 PM
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PIERCING THE CORPORATE VEIL.
Is business war? It is in the world of post-industrial, post-state conflict. Battles between the corporate allies of nation-states and the transnational tribes and gangs of black globalization are at the core of this century's epochal war. Meet the Competition...
[Global Guerrillas]
3:55:35 PM
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More on Health of Nations.
Some other good blogospheric folks have taken a shine to the series and added on to it. Over at Electoral-Math, Nick has entries on the medical malpractice systems of Germany, France, and England. Meanwhile, Greg at the Talent Show...
[Ezra Klein]
3:39:28 PM
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Stormy Weather.
[A] bill introduced last week by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites . . . Barry Myers, AccuWeather's executive vice president, said the bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector.
Palm Beach Post
Feds' weather information could go dark
April 21, 2005
A bill introduced Monday by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) would prohibit the lungs of U.S. citizens from competing with companies such as Air Products Inc., which sell compressed oxygen to hospitals, clinics and other medical institutions. Under the proposed law, Americans would be required to purchase the air they breathe from a commercial vendor rather than inhaling it naturally from the earth's atmosphere.
"We believe this proposal will improve public health by ensuring the nation's lungs are exposed only to pure, 100% industrially manufactured oxygen," explained Mary Byers, executive vice president for Air Products, which just happens to be headquartered in Santorum's home state.
The bill would also force the earth to devote its full attention to absorbing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector, Byers added.
Weekly World News
Oxygen Makers Seek Ban on "Unfair" Competition
June 21, 2005
[Whiskey Bar]
3:38:22 PM
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On Religious Extremism.
However, on religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' and 'D.' Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism.'
-- Sen. Barry Goldwater (R)
3:37:28 PM
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NRO’s BuzzCharts: Clinton Years Were Highly Profitable
Jerry Bowyer has produced some incredibly bizarre spin with his BuzzCharts rants with the latest being an attack on something Paul Krugman recently wrote (surprise). These BuzzCharts might provide great examples of how to lie with statistics, but the latest chart seems to say something other than what Jerry wrote:
Although BuzzCharts does not believe that the entire Clinton economy was a bubble, the last year or two clearly were. The jobs explosion was not financed with new profit, as it was in the past. It was paid for with old savings. Dotcoms were spending down pension-plan money mediated through venture-capital firms, and they weren’t creating new profit through each employee hired. Corporate profits per payroll job in 1998 were $14,928.90. Corporate profits per payroll job in 2004 were $21,593.51. When I first glanced at his chart, two thoughts struck me: (a) how would this look in inflation adjusted terms; and (b) how much of the late 1990’s decline in his ratio was due to surging employment and how much of the rise after 2001 was from falling employment. But then I looked at his numbers and thought that the 1998 after-tax profits per payroll job were quite high. BEA reports that after-tax corporate profits were $469.96 billion for 1998 and BLS reports payroll employment that averaged 125.924 million for 1998. So Jerry’s number is four times what it should be. Did he take the quarterly flows (annualized) and sum them – rather than average them? Now back to my original query - just one comparison. Note how Jerry displays nominal profits per job being higher in 2003 than it was in 1997? If one adjusts for inflation, real profits per job were lower in 2003 than they were in 1997. Real profits did rise but only by 4.3%, while employment rose by 5.9%. Of course, the reason why employment rose by so little has more to do with the decline in employment after March 2001.
3:36:28 PM
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JOURNAL: The Salvador Option.
As anticipated by this author, the DoD is now debating the broad use of loyalist paramilitaries in Iraq. Newsweek reports on this active debate. As the senior officer who leaked to Newsweek stated, "We have to find a way to...
[Global Guerrillas]
3:35:50 PM
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Did John Bolton commit perjury in his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations committee? Amb. Thomas Hubbard is coming forward to say Bolton "grossly exaggerated" the truth in regards to a speech Bolton claimed to the Senators Hubbard approved. On...
[War and Piece]
11:18:26 AM
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Open Thread.
Krugman's column today explains why we Americans get so little for our healthcare dollars. An important part of the answer is that much of our health care spending is devoted to passing the buck: trying to get someone else to...
[The Left Coaster]
11:02:53 AM
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Powell does not back Bolton.
Bush wants to stand behind the serial abuser Bolton for UN chief, but in a high-profile defection, Powell will not.
The associates said that in private telephone conversations Mr. Powell had made clear his concerns with Mr. Bolton on several fronts, including his harsh treatment of subordinates. The associates said that Mr. Powell had also praised Mr. Bolton's performance on some matters during his tenure as undersecretary of state, but they also said that Mr. Powell had stopped well short of the endorsements offered by President Bush and by Mr. Powell's own successor as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.
The accounts of Mr. Powell's private message about Mr. Bolton suggested a new gulf between the former secretary of state and the president, who spoke out forcefully today in defense of Mr. Bolton. In a speech here, Mr. Bush portrayed Democratic opposition to Mr. Bolton as being politically driven, and urged the Senate "to put politics aside and confirm John Bolton to the United Nations." [...]
Mr. Powell has not spoken publicly about the Bolton nomination. But his associates said he had told Senators Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, in response to questions, that he had been troubled by the way that Mr. Bolton had treated an intelligence analyst and others at the State Department who disagreed with him.
Mr. Chafee and Mr. Hagel are both Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and both have expressed concern about Mr. Bolton's temperament, credibility and treatment of intelligence analysts. The senators' concerns, along with those of Senator George Voinovich, an Ohio Republican, were among the factors that have forced the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to postpone until next month a vote on Mr. Bolton's nomination. Hagel and Chafee were set to vote for Bolton. It was Voinovich alone who stopped the proceedings cold in their tracks. This news could provide added cover for Voinovich, and even Hagel and Chafee.
[Daily Kos]
11:01:44 AM
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Students moved off campus after threats.
Students moved off campus after threatsLias Donovan | Deerfield, IL | April 22Chicago Sun-TImes - Students of color at a small Christian college in the north suburbs were moved from dormitories to an undisclosed hotel Thursday, as the FBI and other law enforcement began investigating a racist letter threatening violence on campus. It was the latest in a series of three handwritten letters sent over two weeks to students railing against African Americans and Latinos at the undergraduate Trinity College in Deerfield, said school spokesman Gary Cantwell.
[The Agonist]
7:08:24 AM
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Responding to a Revaluation Greenspan’s remarks
about a possible renminbi revaluation also make me wonder exactly what the Fed would do if and when China does revalue. Mark Thoma and David Altig (among others) have had some interesting things to say about this question recently. I want to do a more in-depth treatment if these issues in the future, but for starters here are some thoughts:
- One of the dangers of end of Chinese exchange rate intervention is that interest rates in the US would spike as a result. This means that the recent lack of control over long-term interest rates that the Fed has experienced (long term rates have refused to go higher even though the Fed would probably like them to) will continue, but in the opposite direction - long term interest rates will be higher (possibly much higher) than the Fed would like. This lack of control over long-term (and maybe even medium-term) interest rates will make it difficult for the Fed to actually exercise any control over the real economy, at least for a time. This will limit the effectiveness of the Fed's response, whatever it is.
- The biggest danger, it seems to me, is a financial meltdown in the US as the result of the spike in interest rates. It is unclear to me exactly how vulnerable the balance sheets of firms like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and other large players in the bond market, are to a sharp rise in interest rates... but it strikes me as a serious possibility that some of them could be in trouble, which would have profound implications for both the US and international finacial systems. Thus the first responsibility of the Fed, I think, is to ensure that there is enough liquidity in the system to avoid a cash crunch among financial firms. I have in mind actions similar to those taken in 1998 as the LTCM affair was unfolding.
- After the initial financial shock has been absorbed, then the next most important job of the Fed retakes center stage - ensuring that inflationary expectations do not change. Since there is little doubt that inflation would indeed jump in the wake of a revaluation, the Fed therefore will face the delicate task of switching, perhaps quite rapidly, from a position of ensuring liquidity to a position of dampening incipient inflation. This, it strikes me, will be the hardest part of managing the landing for the US economy.
Will those actually running the Fed see things this way? If so, will they be up to this very formidable task? It will not be easy.
Kash - Kash [Angry Bear]
7:06:58 AM
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Morning webcrawl
. Must read: Naomi Klein says that earlier on, the US deliberately stymied Iraqi plans for a much-desired election because they realized that people would not vote for neocon plunder of their resources. That wasn't part of the plan, and delaying the election was pretty much the final straw that made insurgency seem a necessity. And more: On August 5 the White House created the office of the coordinator for reconstruction and stabilisation, headed by Carlos Pascual, the former ambassador to Ukraine. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate "post-conflict" plans for up to 25 countries that are not, as yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries "at the same time", each lasting "five to seven years".
The LAT this morning has quotes from a tape of the right-wing gabfest where DeLay and Dobson both discussed plans to use Congress to defund the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Iraq's murky corpse mystery suggests that there might be some ethnic cleansing going on in Iraq. It certainly looks like there are a lot of people for whom life in Iraq would be much better if Saddam had been left in power.
Don't miss Matt Taibbi's hilarious review of Thomas Friedman's new book, The World Is Flat: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.
And another weblog I hadn't seen before: Stone Court
[The Sideshow]
6:10:30 AM
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Greenspan on the Renminbi
I've broken this into two posts, since it was getting rather lengthy. First, let me point out some interesting remarks by Alan Greenspan yesterday. He was, at least to me, surprisingly blunt:
Fixing the renminbi to the dollar is beginning to significantly work to the detriment of Chinese economy. I think there is no question that two things are happening.
One is, in order to sustain the value of the renminbi to the value of the dollar, they've been purchasing very significant amounts of U.S. treasury issues.
In so doing, in order to prevent an inflationary money supply increase, they do what central bankers call sterilizing the purchase of foreign reserves... and they do this by selling bank issues, bank liabilities, denominated in their domestic currency, and so as they do that, that tends to prevent purchases of foreign reserves from expanding the money supply.
However, because there are interest rate caps in China, they're finding some difficulty in selling an adequate amount of domestic-currency-denominated debt to absorb the excess. And that is creating imbalances that suggests that sooner rather than later, they are going to have to, for stability purposes, move their currency.
Secondly, they'll also, by holding their exchange rate down, create a misallocation of resources in China in the sense they are subsidizing the capital stock associated with very large numbers of workers... [This] prevents standards of living from rising, because their intellectual technical capabilities are rising and if the exchange rate began to rise they would start to move capital into more efficient types of uses, which essentially would mean that output per hour would rise.
Holding their exchange rate where they are is preventing the growth in the terms that would be most valuable for China in the decades ahead. So as far as I'm concerned, it is very much in their interest to move.
And as you can imagine, we in U.S. government have been in conversations with them to indicate that, in our judgment and in our experience, they should be moving sooner rather than later. And there is debate going on within China on this issue. I have no way of projecting when they will move. That they will move, I am reasonably certain.
First, a question: why is China still holding on to its dollar peg if it's not in its own interest? I actually agree with Greenspan (and many others) that it is in China's long-term best interests to revalue the yuan, but doesn't this beg the question of why China isn't doing it? I haven't come to any better answer to that question other than that the PBOC must figure that the substantial costs to dropping the dollar peg outweigh the substantial costs to keeping it. They won't revalue until that calculus changes. Figuring out what will tip the balance on this cost-benefit analysis is the $64,000 question.
In my next post I want to tackle another relevant question.
Kash - Kash
[Angry Bear]
6:08:58 AM
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The World’s Largest Switzerland
Just between you, me, and the gatepost nothing would cheer me more than to have our country give up all claims to imperial greatness. If there is an "Imperial America" I wish it would set about the decline to which all empires are prone. I believe we would all be happier and the other nations of the world would heave a collective sigh of relief.
The Greek Empire declined, the Roman Empire declined, and the British Empire declined. I don’t notice that the citizens of Greece, Italy, or Great Britain are moping about moaning the loss of their empires. They seem reasonably happy, baring the normal disturbances and upsets of daily life that they would be heir to anyway.
Or take the French. Their empire is dead, their colonies gone, and the average Frenchman seems perfectly content. I suspect this might be due to the fact that the French, in their hearts, still believe they are an imperial world power.
The Swiss have never had an empire, they have simply satisfied themselves by being the watchmakers and bankers to the rest of us.
I believe we would all be happier, and the world would heave that sigh of relief if the United States stopped blundering about in other people’s vineyards like an elephant in must. We would all be healthier, wealthier, and wiser if we just decided that our national goal was to be the world’s largest Switzerland.
I don’t want to suggest an old-fashioned isolationism. Quite the contrary, we could take the billions we now spend killing ourselves and others and spend it for the general good.
We might actually deliver on the promises of aid that Bush makes but never keeps.We could take care of our own children and other folks’ children. We could do what George Tenant suggested we should do: lead by example. We would all be better off. [Ojo Caliente]
5:55:46 AM
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Surprising developments on Denver 3 case.
I got word that the Secret Service has opened a criminal investigation into the fools involved in kicking out three people from one of Bush's sham social security "town hall meetings".
The security officials who kicked out the three acted and were dressed like secret service officers, and there's reason to believe they passed themselves off as such. That's a crime.
The big question -- who trained these security people, and all early fingers point to the White House. For the story to date, this column is a good summary.
Karen Bauer, Alex Young and Leslie Weise were removed from the event because they dared to arrive in a car with a bumper sticker that said, "No More Blood for Oil." They also admit to wearing Democratic underwear.
The identity of the bouncer, dressed to look like a Secret Service agent, has remained a stubborn secret despite demands from congressmen, senators and lawyers for the three ejected audience members.
Last week in an interview with Fox News reporter Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, White House spokesman Trent Duffy came perilously close to saying the guy was a federal employee.
He said that White House advance teams handled logistics for these events. "From what I was told, it was fairly obvious to them that they had plans to disrupt the event. ... It was a judgment call," he said.
Wait a minute, did he just admit it was White House policy?
At Wednesday's press gaggle, White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked to clarify.
He denied that the bouncer was paid staff. "My understanding is it was a volunteer and that that volunteer was concerned that these people were coming to the event to disrupt the event, and that's why he asked them to leave," he said.
When asked if the volunteer was acting on the instruction of the White House, McClellan responded, "Not that I'm aware of."
Hmmm. So who might be aware?
I asked two other White House spokesmen that question Wednesday. They declined to answer.
Dan Recht, attorney for the so-called Denver Three, says interest in the story of ideological cleansing at an official government-sponsored event just keeps gathering steam.
Reporters call every day, begging to be the first to know when the bouncer's name is released.
Pressure is mounting. News on this should break tomorrow (Friday).
[Daily Kos]
5:42:04 AM
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Health Care in The U.S. And The World, Part III: What do we get for our money?
In Part I of this series , I examined spending on healthcare across industrialized nations from 1970 to the present. Throughout the 1970s the U.S. spent a bit more about 2 percent of GDP more on healthcare than other industrialized nations. Then, around 1980, the share of GDP spent on healthcare surged dramatically in the U.S., while remaining fairly flat in other countries. As a result, we now spend a full five percent of GDP more on healthcare than the next highest industrialized nation in my sample. Moreover, the public component of total health spending in the U.S. is a bit under half that of other nations. Finally, out-of-pocket spending in the U.S. is between 50% higher (Norway, Australia) and 300% higher (UK, France) than in other countries.
Then, in Part II, I took a look at the inputs we purchase with that additional. As it turns out, we do not have more doctors per capita (though we likely do have more specialists per capita) -- France actually has the most doctors. Nor do we have more hospital beds or hospital discharges. And we rank fairly low in terms of spending on pharmaceuticals as a percentage of total healthcare spending. Because healthcare spending is so much higher in the U.S., it turns out that we do spend a bit more on drugs, as a percent of GDP, than other industrialized countries. Taking both factors into account, pharmaceutical spending has increased by about 1% of GDP, to a current total of 2% of GDP, and therefore represents at most one fifth of the additional money spent on health in the U.S. (5% of GDP).
The conclusion is that while we definitely spend more, we do not buy a substantially greater volume of inputs than other nations. The obvious explanation is that the prices of health inputs (doctors, hospital care, drugs,…) are higher in the U.S., but that is not the only possible explanation. It may be the case that inputs in the U.S. are higher quality, able to produce more or better health than other nations’ inputs. Or the U.S. population may be older and less healthy. Or the U.S. system may have higher non-clinical costs such as overhead and administrative costs. Or some combination of all these factors may be at work.
As the next two graphs show, it’s pretty clear that we purchase neither more health nor better health with our extra spending ( Kash showed this as well). While the general trends are in the right directions across all countries, the U.S. currently has a higher infant mortality rate and a lower life expectancy at birth than France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Sweden, and Australia. And so it has more or less been since at least 1970:
A final potential explanation for why we spend more on health yet have worse health outcomes is that Americans are intrinsically less healthy than citizens of other countries. For example, we may have more old people, smoke more, or have higher rates of obesity. An examination of these potentially confounding factors shows that we smoke the least and now have less people over 65 than any of the other nations I examined. Offsetting these factors, however, is the bad news that we are the most obese nation, with nearly 1/3 of the U.S. population having a BMI index over 30.
 On balance, it’s probably close to a wash: we’re somewhat younger, and healthier in the very important smoking dimension, but less healthy in the also important obesity dimension. As a result, it is unlikely that the higher costs of healthcare in the U.S. are attributable to an intrinsically less healthy population. Conclusion We spend a lot more money on health care, both in absolute terms and as a percent of GDP. Where does the money go?
- We don’t purchase noticeably more health inputs such as doctors and hospital stays.
- We don’t have better health outcomes. In fact, we have the worst infant mortality and life expectancy numbers of all the industrial nations I examined.
- And we’re neither more nor less intrinsically healthy than other countries.
While this is my no means a careful controlled study, nor even a regression analysis, application of Occam’s Razor and the process of elimination points to the two most likely explanations: high prices for healthcare inputs and significant inefficiencies in the transformation of those inputs into health outputs. AB - Angry Bear [Angry Bear]
5:39:54 AM
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Online Freedom of Speech Act. Ha ha, crazy bedfellows and all.
Reid's bill to exempt the Internet from campaign finance laws has a co-sponsor in the Senate -- Tom Coburn. So for the first, last and only time, we can talk about the Reid-Coburn Act.
The companion bill in the House is sponsored by Texas Republican Jeb Hensarling, and its co-sponsor is Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan. You all might remember Ryan for his now-famous House floor speech blasting the administration and its war effort. It's also fitting that he's the youngest member of the House.
[Daily Kos]
5:36:14 AM
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Health of Nations: Germany.
It's been a long day, I desperately need some coffee, and it's really hot in my room. So you wouldn't believe how excited I am to dive into yet another country's health care structure. Let's just say I love...
[Ezra Klein]
5:33:29 AM
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© Copyright
2005
Michael Mussington.
Last update:
5/1/2005; 4:29:09 AM.
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