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  • Originally posted by bfng3569 View Post
    I'd like to not live were I live at times...

    This is the second time you've gone back to Hillary /obama.

    What's the point?

    We can go back and forth for ever with the past on both sides.
    So the Republicans can abuse bi-partisanship when it suits them, but when the Dems do it, it is time to yell bloody murder? You get back what you give. The daily twittery is not helping btw.
    "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" ~ Epicurus

    Comment


    • Originally posted by antimony View Post
      So the Republicans can abuse bi-partisanship when it suits them, but when the Dems do it, it is time to yell bloody murder? You get back what you give. The daily twittery is not helping btw.
      Amen to that.

      No more Mr Nice Guy.

      Scorched earth, all the way.
      Trust me?
      I'm an economist!

      Comment


      • bfng,

        This is the second time you've gone back to Hillary /obama.

        What's the point?

        We can go back and forth for ever with the past on both sides.
        the point is that politics doesn't operate in a vacuum. you used Schiff's words as evidence that "both sides are just as bad, Democratic edition". yet objectively speaking, that is incorrect- there was no blatant falsehoods, no grandiose assertion that the Truth Has Been Revealed, and exaggerations were kept to a relative minimum. in fact, i would encourage everyone to read the Schiff statement and judge for themselves:

        http://time.com/4706721/read-rep-ada...-the-election/

        i'm happy to state that Dems of course have indulged in skullduggery and low words/deeds. they're a political party, that's what political parties do. but it's simply not comparable with the Republican Party right now.
        There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

        Comment


        • Originally posted by DOR View Post
          In developed economies, consumption tends to be in the range of 60-70% of GDP. Unless you want to dig through the stats and pull up private consumption, divide it by population and then put it into a common currency, you'll need a source.



          Hence my comment about excluding microstates.


          2% of GDP is about $370 billion, or $1,150 per person.
          In other words, a little under $2,500 for every employed person in the US.
          OECD tracks Actual Individual Consumption (AIC), but adjusts it in a fashion similar to PPP, so you may or may not like the results.
          https://www.oecd.org/std/prices-ppp/...k-Dec-2013.pdf
          Most of the higher-income nations like Norway have higher price levels, which knocks them down the rankings. Whether Norway should be considered to have a price level 73% higher than America's is a bit questionable, but second-hand anecdotal evidence suggests those Nordic states are really expensive.

          Originally posted by citanon View Post
          The situation is actually the exact opposite of what you describe. The private sector has largely exited initial stages of the drug discovery effort. What they tend to do today is purchase it license innovation at the late clinical stage from smaller venture backed companies that come out of the academic world. Venture backing for those companies start at the clinical stage. Preclinical innovations tend to be made in academic institutions with nih backing. The reason this is the case is that at this stage the r&d activities are so failure prone and risky no private company can economically benefit from them.

          Any direct medical discovery that comes out of the academic world is only made possible by knowledge generated from many many other nih backed studies that contribute to basic knowledge.

          By some measures, medical discovery is the single hardest branch of science and engineering because it deals with the single most complex set of machineries that we encounter: the human body. It requires an enormous outlay of public resources and has an intrinsically high cost and failure rate because of the complexity. It is in fact harder than rocket science.

          If you think about your life, the reason why we spend so much on medicine is that at some point, it becomes the determining factor in your left/ and quality of remaining life. The gains in public health that we have made largely refer to your quality of life up to that last 10 or 20 percent, bit once you get there, you need the new advances.
          I am highlighting certain bold parts and don't see the disagreement. Why are we tossing around $30 billion a year to get people to move from 90 to 99, or 83 to 90? What's really the point when the government is actuarially broke? Especially when most old-age interventions are still expensive, especially when they involve any sort of in-patient care?

          Is that even the best use of scarce funds, assuming we want to spend $30 billion? Apparently not: other advanced nations spend less on R&D (and also less on all sorts of medical interventions and screening like MRIs or mammograms and a whole host of other things) and get comparable or superior results. With technology we currently have: anti-smoking efforts, anti-bacterial drug compliance, mold clean-up efforts, handing out inhalers for free...

          I'm a tech skeptic and think we're stuck in the Great Stagnation: I'm inherently allergic to massive spending in Science (TM) because we think it's going to power through all of our problems. This isn't the Industrial Revolution anymore.

          Originally posted by astralis View Post
          GVChamp,

          in addition to citanon's comments above:



          only we're not even talking marginal improvements on health for more money spent; we're talking significantly more money with outright crappier outcomes.

          IE we spend approximately 9K/year per capita on healthcare-- almost 50% more than #2 Switzerland. it'd be one argument to say that despite this, we're #6 or #7 in terms of life expectancy. yet US life expectancy is consistently lower than that of such countries like Slovenia and Costa Rica. we're #31 or so.

          sure, demographics/statistics are not directly comparable, but this type of cost/benefit ratio is ridiculous.



          this is akin to simply not fueling up a half-leaky gas tank and expecting the car to run. i prefer to fix the gas tank.
          In regards to your last line: R&D is not fixing the gas tank, it's ignoring the gas-tank and building a bigger engine.

          Keep in mind, I'm not saying we get a good deal for our medical spending: I think we get a crappy deal on medical spending, along with a lot of other things we buy (road spending, train spending, education spending). I'm also not saying we don't overspend.

          I'm saying:
          1. The "we spend twice as much as expected" argument is possibly misleading and overstated.
          2. There's no reason to expect that switching health-care systems is going to lead to lower spending. "Everyone else does it" is Cargo Cult thinking.
          3. I highly doubt Obama-care gets us anywhere closer to a more efficient health-care system.

          I'd be a lot more willing to question 3 if I thought the Democrats were serious budget hawks or actual skeptics. Obama came across more as a deluded technocrat, for all his talk of "evidence-based medicine." Rahm Emmanuel comes across more as hard-nosed and realistic (even if he, like all people, is subject to occasional flights of fancy).

          Even still, I don't think these sectors are at all reformable. Here's a good test: if health care were disrupt-able, Elon Musk would be in that sector right now. Zuckerberg completely gave up on reforming schools. Gates doesn't see any high-value medical interventions to be done in the Western world, and thinks all serious interventions are things like malaria nets: his American investment is ensuring that we don't have a digital divide, and trying to make sure even poor kids have access to computers/internet/information age technology.

          If anyone saw $1,000 bills on the ground, they'd be picking them up. The closest is Kaiser. Uber and AirBnB are fighting regulated sectors tooth-and-nail because they see dollars on the ground.

          Here's a start: Mrs. GVChamp oversees a medical department at a local hospital. They do their vancomycin doses off an excel spreadsheet. How's 'bout that gets fixed before we talk about the grand project to bring everyone healthcare? Or the nurses and techs who can't do basic math, so all their work needs to be double-checked. Hope you never need to go to a hospital to get an IV bag, because there's a good chance the person who prepped it cannot do basic arithmetic (especially if you are in the South!)

          Of course I would simply fire them all, but apparently "scorched earth" is not the preferred tactic...
          Last edited by GVChamp; 21 Mar 17,, 15:33.
          "The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck

          Comment


          • GVChamp,

            I'm a tech skeptic and think we're stuck in the Great Stagnation: I'm inherently allergic to massive spending in Science (TM) because we think it's going to power through all of our problems. This isn't the Industrial Revolution anymore.
            it's true that current tech advances cannot compare with the Industrial Revolution or even the Computer Revolution, but the next wave -does- promise to be revolutionary at least to the Computer Revolution scale. AI, bioengineering, material science, etc. driverless cars by itself will completely change the American economy.

            There's no reason to expect that switching health-care systems is going to lead to lower spending. "Everyone else does it" is Cargo Cult thinking.
            Cult Thinking is one thing if there's no evidence to back it up. but when the rest of the developed world has lower medical costs than the US and a more comprehensive coverage system, this isn't some unproven, kook idea.

            I highly doubt Obama-care gets us anywhere closer to a more efficient health-care system.
            yet the evidence indicates that there has been a slowdown in healthcare spending. of course, not all of it attributable to the ACA, but it's there.

            Here's a good test: if health care were disrupt-able, Elon Musk would be in that sector right now. Zuckerberg completely gave up on reforming schools. Gates doesn't see any high-value medical interventions to be done in the Western world, and thinks all serious interventions are things like malaria nets: his American investment is ensuring that we don't have a digital divide, and trying to make sure even poor kids have access to computers/internet/information age technology.
            there's multiple factors that preclude healthcare from being "disrupt-able", to include major existing strangleholds by Big Pharma and the existing insurance providers. moreover, because of the political-ideological-economic aspect of healthcare, there's extremely low demand for ANY type of disruption, as we saw with Clinton's attempt at change, with the ACA, and now with the AHCA. there ARE $1000 bills on the ground-- they're getting picked up already, and thus you immediately engender enormous opposition if you try to get in on the cash cow.

            but just because the sector is not open to Uber-style disruption doesn't mean it's not -reformable-.

            They do their vancomycin doses off an excel spreadsheet. How's 'bout that gets fixed before we talk about the grand project to bring everyone healthcare?
            and hell, before the ACA how slow were hospitals in adopting electronic medical records at all? for that matter, hospitals continue to try to keep their medical service/drug price secret, even though concurrent with the ACA the Obama Administration released hospital price data to force down an insane system that was filled with price-fixing and collusion.

            basically, the complaints that you list here are all best solved by some form of government law or regulation or certification. as you noted, these aren't areas where private disruption will work. in fact, the ACA mechanisms here are usually acknowledged as too weak, precisely because the administration watered them down trying to get companies to sign off on the ACA, or at least not publicly oppose it.
            There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

            Comment


            • Originally posted by astralis View Post
              bfng,



              the point is that politics doesn't operate in a vacuum. you used Schiff's words as evidence that "both sides are just as bad, Democratic edition". yet objectively speaking, that is incorrect- there was no blatant falsehoods, no grandiose assertion that the Truth Has Been Revealed, and exaggerations were kept to a relative minimum. in fact, i would encourage everyone to read the Schiff statement and judge for themselves:

              http://time.com/4706721/read-rep-ada...-the-election/

              i'm happy to state that Dems of course have indulged in skullduggery and low words/deeds. they're a political party, that's what political parties do. but it's simply not comparable with the Republican Party right now.
              i watched the Schiff statement, and that was my reaction.

              and I included both, before even hearing Dowdy or the repub's knowing that they would be just as partisian.

              Comment


              • Originally posted by antimony View Post
                So the Republicans can abuse bi-partisanship when it suits them, but when the Dems do it, it is time to yell bloody murder? You get back what you give. The daily twittery is not helping btw.
                I didn't realize we are all testifying to congress out here or that I had a twitter problem.

                Comment


                • Originally posted by DOR View Post
                  Amen to that.

                  No more Mr Nice Guy.

                  Scorched earth, all the way.
                  No, that is not what I said. More importantly, that is foolish. The Dem goal should be to turn all seats blue, not scorch the earth.
                  "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" ~ Epicurus

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by bfng3569 View Post
                    I didn't realize we are all testifying to congress out here or that I had a twitter problem.
                    The Hon'ble President has it
                    "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" ~ Epicurus

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by antimony View Post
                      The Hon'ble President has it
                      No shit.

                      What's that have to do with the hearings and the discussion here at wab?

                      Comment


                      • another day, another Trump associate with ties with the Russians. well, to be accurate, -even more ties- with the Russians.

                        ====

                        AP Exclusive: Manafort had plan to benefit Putin government

                        WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, secretly worked for a Russian billionaire to advance the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin a decade ago and proposed an ambitious political strategy to undermine anti-Russian opposition across former Soviet republics, The Associated Press has learned. The work appears to contradict assertions by the Trump administration and Manafort himself that he never worked for Russian interests.

                        Manafort proposed in a confidential strategy plan as early as June 2005 that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government, even as U.S.-Russia relations under Republican President George W. Bush grew worse. Manafort pitched the plans to Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally with whom Manafort eventually signed a $10 million annual contract beginning in 2006, according to interviews with several people familiar with payments to Manafort and business records obtained by the AP. Manafort and Deripaska maintained a business relationship until at least 2009, according to one person familiar with the work.

                        "We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success," Manafort wrote in the 2005 memo to Deripaska. The effort, Manafort wrote, "will be offering a great service that can re-focus, both internally and externally, the policies of the Putin government."

                        Manafort's plans were laid out in documents obtained by the AP that included strategy memoranda and records showing international wire transfers for millions of dollars. How much work Manafort performed under the contract was unclear.

                        The disclosure comes as Trump campaign advisers are the subject of an FBI probe and two congressional investigations. Investigators are reviewing whether the Trump campaign and its associates coordinated with Moscow to meddle in the 2016 campaign. Manafort has dismissed the investigations as politically motivated and misguided, and said he never worked for Russian interests. The documents obtained by AP show Manafort's ties to Russia were closer than previously revealed.

                        In a statement to the AP, Manafort confirmed that he worked for Deripaska in various countries but said the work was being unfairly cast as "inappropriate or nefarious" as part of a "smear campaign."

                        "I worked with Oleg Deripaska almost a decade ago representing him on business and personal matters in countries where he had investments," Manafort said. "My work for Mr. Deripaska did not involve representing Russia's political interests."

                        Deripaska became one of Russia's wealthiest men under Putin, buying assets abroad in ways widely perceived to benefit the Kremlin's interests. U.S. diplomatic cables from 2006 described Deripaska as "among the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis" and "a more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin's trips abroad." In response to questions about Manafort's consulting firm, a spokesman for Deripaska in 2008 — at least three years after they began working together — said Deripaska had never hired the firm. Another Deripaska spokesman in Moscow last week declined to answer AP's questions.

                        Manafort worked as Trump's unpaid campaign chairman last year from March until August. Trump asked Manafort to resign after AP revealed that Manafort had orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation until 2014 on behalf of Ukraine's ruling pro-Russian political party .

                        The newly obtained business records link Manafort more directly to Putin's interests in the region. According to those records and people with direct knowledge of Manafort's work for Deripaska, Manafort made plans to open an office in Moscow, and at least some of Manafort's work in Ukraine was directed by Deripaska, not local political interests there. The Moscow office never opened.

                        Manafort has been a leading focus of the U.S. intelligence investigation of Trump's associates and Russia, according to a U.S. official. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the investigation were confidential. Meanwhile, federal criminal prosecutors became interested in Manafort's activities years ago as part of a broad investigation to recover stolen Ukraine assets after the ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych there in early 2014. No U.S. criminal charges have ever been filed in the case.

                        FBI Director James Comey, in confirming to Congress the federal intelligence investigation this week, declined to say whether Manafort was a target. Manafort's name was mentioned 28 times during the hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, mostly about his work in Ukraine. No one mentioned Deripaska.

                        White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Monday that Manafort "played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time" in the campaign, even though as Trump's presidential campaign chairman he led it during the crucial run-up to the Republican National Convention.

                        Manafort and his associates remain in Trump's orbit. Manafort told a colleague this year that he continues to speak with Trump by telephone. Manafort's former business partner in eastern Europe, Rick Gates, has been seen inside the White House on a number of occasions. Gates has since helped plan Trump's inauguration and now runs a nonprofit organization, America First Policies, to back the White House agenda.

                        Gates, whose name does not appear in the documents, told the AP that he joined Manafort's firm in 2006 and was aware Manafort had a relationship with Deripaska, but he was not aware of the work described in the memos. Gates said his work was focused on domestic U.S. lobbying and political consulting in Ukraine at the time. He said he stopped working for Manafort's firm in March 2016 when he joined Trump's presidential campaign.

                        Manafort told Deripaska in 2005 that he was pushing policies as part of his work in Ukraine "at the highest levels of the U.S. government — the White House, Capitol Hill and the State Department," according to the documents. He also said he had hired a "leading international law firm with close ties to President Bush to support our client's interests," but he did not identify the firm. Manafort also said he was employing unidentified legal experts for the effort at leading universities and think tanks, including Duke University, New York University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

                        Manafort did not disclose details about the lobbying work to the Justice Department during the period the contract was in place.

                        Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, people who lobby in the U.S. on behalf of foreign political leaders or political parties must provide detailed reports about their actions to the department. Willfully failing to register is a felony and can result in up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, though the government rarely files criminal charges.

                        Deripaska owns Basic Element Co., which employs 200,000 people worldwide in the agriculture, aviation, construction, energy, financial services, insurance and manufacturing industries, and he runs one of the world's largest aluminum companies. Forbes estimated his net worth at $5.2 billion. How much Deripaska paid Manafort in total is not clear, but people familiar with the relationship said money transfers to Manafort amounted to tens of millions of dollars and continued through at least 2009. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the secret payments publicly.

                        In strategy memos, Manafort proposed that Deripaska and Putin would benefit from lobbying Western governments, especially the U.S., to allow oligarchs to keep possession of formerly state-owned assets in Ukraine. He proposed building "long term relationships" with Western journalists and a variety of measures to improve recruitment, communications and financial planning by pro-Russian parties in the region.

                        Manafort proposed extending his existing work in eastern Europe to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Georgia, where he pledged to bolster the legitimacy of governments friendly to Putin and undercut anti-Russian figures through political campaigns, nonprofit front groups and media operations.

                        For the $10 million contract, Manafort did not use his public-facing consulting firm, Davis Manafort. Instead, he used a company, LOAV Ltd., that he had registered in Delaware in 1992. He listed LOAV as having the same address of his lobbying and consulting firms in Alexandria, Virginia. In other records, LOAV's address was listed as Manafort's home, also in Alexandria. Manafort sold the home in July 2015 for $1.4 million. He now owns an apartment in Trump Tower in New York, as well as other properties in Florida and New York.

                        One strategy memo to Deripaska was written by Manafort and Rick Davis, his business partner at the time. In written responses to the AP, Davis said he did not know that his firm had proposed a plan to covertly promote the interests of the Russian government.

                        Davis said he believes Manafort used his name without his permission on the strategy memo. "My name was on every piece of stationery used by the company and in every memo prior to 2006. It does not mean I had anything to do with the memo described," Davis said. He took a leave of absence from the firm in late 2006 to work on John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.

                        Manafort's work with Deripaska continued for years, though they had a falling out laid bare in 2014 in a Cayman Islands bankruptcy court. The billionaire gave Manafort nearly $19 million to invest in a Ukrainian TV company called Black Sea Cable, according to legal filings by Deripaska's representatives. It said that after taking the money, Manafort and his associates stopped responding to Deripaska's queries about how the funds had been used.

                        Early in the 2016 presidential campaign, Deripaska's representatives openly accused Manafort of fraud and pledged to recover the money from him. After Trump earned the nomination, Deripaska's representatives said they would no longer discuss the case.

                        ___

                        Associated Press writers Jack Gillum, Eric Tucker, Julie Pace, Ted Bridis, Stephen Braun and Julie Bykowicz contributed to this report in Washington; Nataliya Vasilyeva contributed from Moscow and Kiev, Ukraine; and Jake Pearson contributed from New York.
                        There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by astralis View Post
                          GVChamp,



                          it's true that current tech advances cannot compare with the Industrial Revolution or even the Computer Revolution, but the next wave -does- promise to be revolutionary at least to the Computer Revolution scale. AI, bioengineering, material science, etc. driverless cars by itself will completely change the American economy.



                          Cult Thinking is one thing if there's no evidence to back it up. but when the rest of the developed world has lower medical costs than the US and a more comprehensive coverage system, this isn't some unproven, kook idea.



                          yet the evidence indicates that there has been a slowdown in healthcare spending. of course, not all of it attributable to the ACA, but it's there.



                          there's multiple factors that preclude healthcare from being "disrupt-able", to include major existing strangleholds by Big Pharma and the existing insurance providers. moreover, because of the political-ideological-economic aspect of healthcare, there's extremely low demand for ANY type of disruption, as we saw with Clinton's attempt at change, with the ACA, and now with the AHCA. there ARE $1000 bills on the ground-- they're getting picked up already, and thus you immediately engender enormous opposition if you try to get in on the cash cow.

                          but just because the sector is not open to Uber-style disruption doesn't mean it's not -reformable-.



                          and hell, before the ACA how slow were hospitals in adopting electronic medical records at all? for that matter, hospitals continue to try to keep their medical service/drug price secret, even though concurrent with the ACA the Obama Administration released hospital price data to force down an insane system that was filled with price-fixing and collusion.

                          basically, the complaints that you list here are all best solved by some form of government law or regulation or certification. as you noted, these aren't areas where private disruption will work. in fact, the ACA mechanisms here are usually acknowledged as too weak, precisely because the administration watered them down trying to get companies to sign off on the ACA, or at least not publicly oppose it.
                          I get your points, but I don't get how these are supposed to form an argument in favor of increasing healthcare expenditures. There's less evidence (to me) of dramatic change in healthcare, than dramatic change in computing or driverless cars or even space travel. So computing, driverless cars, and space travel, are all better places for investment than healthcare, where life expectancy and life quality changes will continue to be small despite huge investments of dollars.

                          I'm still skeptical driverless cars are going to change everything, because I'm a tech skeptic, but I have higher confidence investment in that is better than investment in health care spending. Yeah, maybe that's not something government should directly invest in, but we can at least escrow the payments so we can spend it on needed infrastructure whenever the Revolution hits.

                          Your comments on health-care show why it is so difficult to accomplish anything in health care, and why single-payer doesn't make a difference: it's a huge regulatory thicket and a huge thicket of competing interest groups. Recent health care spending decreases probably have less to do with Obama-Care, since the US has gone through many periods in the past where health-care spending hasn't exploded dramatically (and Obama-care obviously wasn't the reason why). More like "New Normal" economic spending, and greater utilization of rationing care with higher deductibles.

                          There are theoretically $1,000 bills, but we can't get there from here, and Obama-Care doesn't change that. To use your analogy, you want to change a Chevy into a BMW by slapping a BMW brand on the hood, and meanwhile the gas tank is still leaking.

                          I actually supported ACA at the time in the hopes that we'd get some more efficiency out of the system, and to some extent we are, but I'd prefer having CMS just crank down on the efficiencies rather than expanding health-care coverage.
                          "The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck

                          Comment


                          • On the new Manafort business and it's Ukrainian connection I would say that the Ukrainian Deputy of the Rada Serhiy Leshchenko is one of the better 'MPs' in the Rada and a former reporter currently a member of the Democratic Alliance Party along with Mustafa Nayeem (one of the prime movers of the first Maidan demonstrations) and others. To many they are the real reformers in the Rada. I cannot vouch for the sanctity of his documentation myself but it has been passed to NABU (the Anti Corruption Agency that recently arrested the head of the fiscal service).

                            Comment


                            • Lockheed CEO verifies Trump accelerated to price cut of F-35.

                              https://www.dodbuzz.com/2017/03/21/l...35-price-drop/

                              Comment


                              • GVChamp,

                                I get your points, but I don't get how these are supposed to form an argument in favor of increasing healthcare expenditures. There's less evidence (to me) of dramatic change in healthcare, than dramatic change in computing or driverless cars or even space travel. So computing, driverless cars, and space travel, are all better places for investment than healthcare, where life expectancy and life quality changes will continue to be small despite huge investments of dollars.
                                well, my viewpoint only, of course, but i'm generally more interested in the use of government power to reduce healthcare costs than the use of government power in a massive expansion of healthcare. (must be my remaining third-wayism.)

                                but in this case, having the government negotiate unified drug prices, for instance, would hugely reduce costs over the current mess. and it seems clear based on healthcare-spending examples elsewhere that it is fully possible to cover more people AND reduce healthcare costs at the same time. i don't see why this -has- to be one-or-another.

                                reducing US healthcare spending simply to the level of #2 Switzerland would free up hundreds of billions, preferably to be spent on infrastructure or technology etc that you mention above.
                                There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                                Comment

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