Connect these dots
Act 1: Let’s cut taxes!
Act 2: Look at that terrible deficit!
Act 3: Let’s cut Medicare and Social Security!
Now playing at a circus near you:
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Wednesday that congressional Republicans will aim next year to reduce spending on both federal health care and anti-poverty programs, citing the need to reduce America’s deficit. “We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” Ryan said…
Ryan’s remarks add to the growing signs that top Republicans aim to cut government spending next year. Republicans are close to passing a tax bill nonpartisan analysts say would increase the deficit by at least $1 trillion over a decade. Trump recently called on Congress to move to cut welfare spending after the tax bill, and Senate Republicans have cited the need to reduce the national deficit while growing the economy.
“You also have to bring spending under control. And not discretionary spending. That isn’t the driver of our debt. The driver of our debt is the structure of Social Security and Medicare for future beneficiaries,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said last week.
Read more here.
California working
A video from the Labor Center at UC-Berkeley reports on the employment and growth results of progressive state policies in California:
Source: http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/california-is-working/
The human & economic costs of pollution
A new report identifies the #1 cause of death worldwide: pollution.
Environmental pollution — from filthy air to contaminated water — is killing more people every year than all war and violence in the world. More than smoking, hunger or natural disasters. More than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined.
One out of every six premature deaths in the world in 2015 — about 9 million — could be attributed to disease from toxic exposure, according to a major study released Thursday in the Lancet medical journal. The financial cost from pollution-related death, sickness and welfare is equally massive, the report says, costing some $4.6 trillion in annual losses — or about 6.2 percent of the global economy.
Read more here.
“The tapeworm of American economic competitiveness”
Today’s quiz:
- What rose from 5% of U.S. GDP in 1960 to 17% today?
- What fell from 4% of U.S. GDP in 1960 to 2% today?
Answers:
- Health care costs.
- Corporate taxes.
Extra credit question: Which one’s a drag on the competitiveness of the U.S. economy?
Here’s Warren Buffett’s answer:
“Medical costs are the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness,” Mr. Buffett said, using a metaphor he has employed in the past to describe the insidious and parasitic costs of our health care system….
Mr. Buffett is a Democrat, but his business partner, Charles T. Munger, is a Republican — and a rare one who has advocated a single-payer health care system. Under his plan, which Mr. Buffett agrees with, the United States would enact a sort of universal type of coverage for all citizens — perhaps along the lines of the Medicaid system — with an opt-out provision that would allow the wealthy to still get concierge medicine.
Read more here.
Death watch
A new study reveals rising mortality among whites in the United States:
Between 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate for U.S. whites aged 45 to 54 fell by 2 percent per year on average, which matched the average rate of decline in the six countries shown, and the average over all other industrialized countries. After 1998, other rich countries’ mortality rates continued to decline by 2 percent a year. In contrast, U.S. white non-Hispanic mortality rose by half a percent a year. No other rich country saw a similar turnaround.
That means “half a million people are dead who should not be dead,” Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics and co-author of the paper, told The Washington Post.
Read more here.
How health care works (or not) in the United States
Econ4’s Gerald Friedman spells out the ABC’s of the health care economy in the U.S. [Viewer discretion advised: The information in this video may tick you off.]
Source: justenoughinfo.org.
Inequality of opportunity
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz writes:
A rich country with millions of poor people. A country that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, but in which a child’s prospects are more dependent on the income and education of his or her parents than in other advanced countries. A country that believes in fair play, but in which the richest often pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than those less well off. A country in which children every day pledge allegiance to the flag, asserting that there is “justice for all,” but in which, increasingly, there is only justice for those who can afford it. These are the contradictions that the United States is gradually and painfully struggling to come to terms with as it begins to comprehend the enormity of the inequalities that mark its society.
Read more here.
More on Ebola and profit-guided health care
Unusually blunt words from World Health Organization Director Margaret Chan:
Ebola emerged nearly four decades ago. Why are clinicians still empty-handed, with no vaccines and no cure?
Because Ebola has historically been confined to poor African nations. The R&D incentive is virtually non-existent. A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay. WHO has been trying to make this issue visible for ages. Now people can see for themselves.
Why no Ebola vaccine?
When the availability of health care is guided by corporate profit and state security, poor Africans just don’t count:
Almost a decade ago, scientists from Canada and the United States reported that they had created a vaccine that was 100 percent effective in protecting monkeys against the Ebola virus. The results were published in a respected journal, and health officials called them exciting. The researchers said tests in people might start within two years, and a product could potentially be ready for licensing by 2010 or 2011.
It never happened. The vaccine sat on a shelf. Only now is it undergoing the most basic safety tests in humans — with nearly 5,000 people dead from Ebola and an epidemic raging out of control in West Africa.
Its development stalled in part because Ebola is rare, and until now, outbreaks had infected only a few hundred people at a time. But experts also acknowledge that the absence of follow-up on such a promising candidate reflects a broader failure to produce medicines and vaccines for diseases that afflict poor countries. Most drug companies have resisted spending the enormous sums needed to develop products useful mostly to countries with little ability to pay.
Read more here.
Health care: where profits warp incentives
Echoing our recent Econ4 statement, Eduardo Porter explains in the New York Times why our healthcare-for-profit system means that Americans pay too much and get too little:
From the high administrative costs incurred by health insurers to screen out sick patients to the array of expensive treatments prescribed by doctors who earn more money for every treatment they provide, our private health care industry provides perhaps the clearest illustration of how the profit motive can send incentives astray.
By many objective measures, the mostly private American system delivers worse value for money than every other in the developed world. We spend nearly 18 percent of the nation’s economic output on health care and still manage to leave tens of millions of Americans without adequate access to care.
Read his piece here.
