EFTA00830735.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bee: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.. 3/27/2016 Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2016 08:01:03 +0000 Attachments: Fleetwood_Mac_bio.docx; President_Obama_Speech_At_Gran_Teatro_In_Havana_- transcript_March_22,_2016.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(I).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(13).png; image(14).png; image(I5).png; image(16).png; image(17).png; image(18).png; image(19).png; image(20).png DEAR FRIEND Terrorism Didn't Just Start With ISIS or Al Qaeda Ask Native Americans or African Americans my Mother's Age EFTA00830735  Inline image 3 A history most Americans were never taught, so they can act as if it didn't happen. More than 400 years of domestic terrorism and it didn't stop with the lynching of Mary Turners of 14 year-old Emmitt Till on August 28, 1955. Smith's death was followed by a week-long mob-driven manhunt in which at least 13 people were killed. Among those whom the mob killed was another black man, Hayes Turner, who was seized from custody after his arrest on the morning of 18 May 1918 and lynched. Distraught, his eight-month pregnant wife Mary denied that her husband had been involved in Smith's killing, publicly opposed her husband's murder, and threatened to have members of the mob arrested. The mob then turned against her, determined to "teach her a lesson". Although she fled when she learned of the mob's intent, she was nevertheless captured at noon on 19 May. The mob of several hundred brought her to Folsom Bridge over the Little River, which separates Brooks and Lowndes counties. The mob then tied her ankles, hung her upside down from a tree, doused her in gasoline and motor oil and set her on fire. While Turner was still alive, a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife. Her unborn child fell on the ground, where it gave a cry before it was stomped on and crushed. Finally, Turner's body was riddled with hundreds of bullets. Mary Turner and her child were cut down and buried near the tree, with a whiskey bottle marking the grave. EFTA00830736 According to Philip Dray, "There, before a crowd that included women and children, Maw was stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground, gave a cry, and was stomped to death. The Constitution's coverage of the killing was subheaded-lined: `Fury of the People Is Unrestrained."' Inline image 2 Emmitt Till 14 year-old Emmitt Till was killed for allegedly having wolf-whistled at a white woman. Till had been badly beaten, one of his eyes was gouged out, and he was shot in the head before being thrown into the Tallahatchie River, his body weighed down with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His mother insisted on a public funeral with an open casket, to show people how badly Till's body had been disfigured. News photographs circulated around the country, and drew intense public reaction. People in the nation were horrified that a boy could have been killed for such an incident. The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were speedily acquitted. Inline image 1 September IS. 1963 • Birmingham. Alabama Addle Mae Collins. Denise McNair. Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were getting ready for church services when a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. killing all four of the school-age girls. The church had been a center for civil rights meetings and marches. Researchers said they determined that at least 4,000 to 5,000 black people were killed in "racial terror lynching" in the United States from the end of the Civil War to the end of the 1960s, including hundreds of women. This number doesn't include the dozens of men, women and children killed during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1940s, 5os and 6os or the thousands of senseless killings of people of color that even continues today. Let us not forget.... Researchers said they determined that at least 4,000 to 5,000 black people were killed in "racial terror lynching" in the United States from the end of the Civil War to the end of the 1960s, including hundreds of women. This number doesn't include the dozens of men, women and children killed during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1940s, 5os and 6os or the thousands of senseless killings of people of color that even continues today. Let us not forget.... EFTA00830737 This is not to disrespect those innocent civilians who recent where hurt and killed in Brussels and Paris, as well as those who senselessly have been casualties in terrorist attacks elsewhere around the world, but terrorism didn't start with ISIS, al Qaeda, The Red Brigade, IRA, FARC, Boko Aaram and Carlos The Jackal... nor did it start in America with are own homegrown Islamic terrorist.... Our country which consider itself "the home of thefree and the brave" has a rich history in terrorism starting with the first European explorers that continues today, which is why Black Live Matter so again.... Lets Never Forget.... ****** So True Inline image 1 Bravo President Obaina.... Supply-Side Promises Gone Wrong Kansas and Louisiana EFTA00830738  Inline image 3 Over the course of 12 debates, the Republican presidential candidates were never asked to address the budget problems in Kansas. In 2010, the tea-party wave put Sam Brownback into the Sunflower State's governor's mansion and Republican majorities in both houses of its legislature. Together, they implemented the conservative movement's blueprintfor Utopia: They passed massive tax breaks for the wealthy and repealed all income taxes on more than 100,000 businesses. They tightened welfare requirements, privatized the delivery of Medicaid, cut $200 million from the education budget, eliminated four state agencies and 2,000 government employees. In 2012, Brownback helped replace the few remaining moderate Republicans in the legislature with conservative true believers. The following January, after signing the largest tax cut in Kansas history, Brownback told the Wall Street Journal, "Myfocus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, 'See, we've got a different way, and it works." As you've probably guessed, that model collapsed. Like the budget plans of every Republican presidential candidate, Brownback's "real live experiment" proceeded from the hypothesis that tax cuts for the wealthy are such a boon to economic growth, they actually end up paying for themselves (so long as you kick the undeserving poor out of their welfare hammocks). The Koch-backed Kansas Policy Institute predicted that Brownback's 2013 tax plan would generate $323 million in new revenue. During its first full year in operation, the plan produced a $688 million loss. Meanwhile, Kansas's job growth actually trailed that of its neighboring states. With that nearly $700 million deficit, the state had bought itself a 1.1 percent increase in jobs, just below Missouri's 1.5 percent and Colorado's 3.3. Those numbers have hardly improved in the intervening years. In 2015, job growth in Kansas was a mere 0.1 percent, even as the nation's economy grew 1.9 percent. Brownback pledged to bring 100,000 new jobs to the state in his second term; as of January, he has brought 700. What's more, personal income growth slowed dramatically since the tax cuts went into effect. Between 2010 and 2012, Kansas saw income growth of 6.1 percent, good for 12th in the nation; from 2013 to 2015, that rate was 3.6 percent, good for 41st. Meanwhile, revenue shortfalls have devastated the state's public sector along with its most vulnerable citizens. Since Brownback's inauguration, 1,414 Kansans with disabilities have been thrown off Medicaid. In 2015, six school districts in the state were forced to end their years early for lack of funding. Cuts to health and human services are expected to cause 65 preventable deaths this year in Sedgwick County alone. In February, tax receipts came in $53 million below estimates; Brownback immediately cut $17 million from the state's university system. This data is not lost on the people of EFTA00830739 Kansas — as of November, Brownback's approval rating was 26 percent, the lowest of any governor in the United States. Louisiana has replicated these results. When Bobby Jindal moved into the governor's mansion in 2008, he inherited a $1 billion surplus. When he moved out last year, Louisiana faced a $1.6 billion projected deficit. Part of that budgetary collapse can be put on the past year's plummeting oil prices. The rest should be placed on Jindal passing the largest tax cut in the state's history and then refusing to reverse course when the state's biggest industry started tanking. Jindal's giveaway to the wealthiest citizens in the country's second-poorest state cost Louisiana roughly $800 million every year. To make up that gap, Jindal slashed social services, raided the state's rainy-day funds, and papered over the rest with reckless borrowing. Today, the state is scrambling to resolve a $940 million budget gap for this fiscal year, with a $2 billion shortfall projected for 2017. Today, Louisiana can no longer afford to provide public defenders for all its criminal defendants. Its Department of Children and Family Services may soon be unable to investigate every reported instance of child abuse. Education funding is down 44 percent since Jindal took office. The state's hospitals are likely to see at least $64 million in funding cuts this year. What has happened to these states should be a national story; because we are one election away from it being our national story. Ted Cruz claims his tax plan will cost less than $1 trillion in lost revenue over the next ten years. Leaving aside the low bar the Texas senator sets for himself — my giveaway to the one percent will cost a bit less than the Iraq War! — Cruz only stays beneath $1 trillion when you employ the kind of "dynamic scoring" that has consistently underestimated the costs of tax cuts in Kansas. Under a conventional analysis, the bill runs well over $3 trillion, with 44 percent of that lost money accruing to the one percent. John Kasich's tax plan includes cutting the top marginal rate by more than ten percent along with a similar cut to the rates on capital gains and business taxes. Even considering Kasich's appetite for Social Security cuts, his plan must rely on the same supply-side voodoo that Kansas has so thoroughly discredited. As for the most likely GOP nominee, even with dynamic scoring, his tax cuts would cost $to trillion over the next ten years, with 4o percent of that gargantuan sum filling the pockets of Trump's economic peers. Inline image 2 Governor Sam Thrnvnback If any of these men are elected president, they will almost certainly take office with a House and Senate eager to scale up the "red-state model." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said of Brownback's Kansas, "This is exactly the sort of thing we (Republicans) want to do here, in EFTA00830740 Washington, but can't, at leastfor now." Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's celebrated budgets all depend on the same magical growth that has somehow escaped the Sunflower State. This campaign cycle has inspired an unusual amount of soul-searching in Republican circles. The rise of Trump has forced many conservatives to reckon with the moral odiousness of Nixon's Southern Strategy — a blueprint for GOP electoral success that relied on coded appeals to white racial animus. Unfortunately, the fall of Kansas has failed to inspire a similar reckoning with the policies that those ugly advertisements were designed to sell. The GOP front-runner's praise of mob violence and religious discrimination has spurred much righteous outrage from the National Review. Kansas's shortened school-years have spurred none. When Donald Trump makes a gaffe, reporters confront Republican leaders and demand a response. When the GOP's economic platform decimates two U.S. states, a similar confrontation is in order. If you think yes, then you should demand that Donald Trump, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz explain why their tax policies won't fail America in the same way they've failed the people of Kansas and Louisiana. Extracts front a March It 2016 snide by Eric Levin in The Intelkenter Seth Meyers takes a look a Closer Look at Kansas Tax Cuts Inline image 1 Late Night with Seth Meyers: https://youtu.be/xliMwipXoiA Bill Maher: Trump Is The White Kanye West,' and America's Self- Esteem Movement Is to Blame EFTA00830741  Inline image 5 On Friday night's 'Real Time with Bill Maher,' the host unloaded on modem-day parenting for creating the 'spoiled five-year-old throwing a tantrum' that is Donald Trump. Web Link: https://youtu.be/xSSExfcD2cM In mid-January, in an interview with The Daily Beast, political satirist Bill Maher branded Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) "scarier than Donald Thump," explaining that whereas Cruz is "high intelligence in the service of evil," the bombastic real estate heir/reality TV star "also says some things that a liberal can love." Not anymore. You see, that was January, before Trump required considerable public pressure to distance himself from former KKK leader David Duke, his shady campaign manager allegedly assaulted a female journalist (for a pro-Trump propaganda site, no less), and his rallies turned into disturbing White Lives Matter summits, where aggrieved, racist whites get so worked up by Trump's xenophobic blame it on them rhetoric — and his encouragement of violence as a means to silence those opposed to him — that they regularly abuse black protesters exercising their First Amendment rights. Oh, and he took it upon himself to defend the size of his penis during a nationally televised presidential debate. "Republicans are coming around to the idea that their only savior of Donald Trump is Ted Cruz," said Maher on Friday night's edition of Real Time. "It's like that horror movie where the guy runs up to the policeman thinking he's saved, and the policeman is one of the zombies. Hey, life is about shitty choices, and r I have to decide between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, count me in for Ted Cruz." "Donald Trump this week literally said the words, 'All I know is what's on the Internet,'" added a bewildered Maher. "This guy's going to change America's symbolfrom the bald eagle to a turtle fucking a shoe!" During his "New Rules" segment closing out the HBO program, Maher blamed the rise of Trump, a Vietnam draft-dodger who was born with the most shimmering of silver spoons in his mouth, on EFTA00830742 American parents' -coddling of children. "New Rule: Stop trying to pin the rise of Trump on easy targets like racism, and put the blame where it belongs: the self-esteem movement," Maher proclaimed. "What Donald Trump really reminds me of is a spoiled five-year-old throwing a tantrum," he continued. "Trump is the grown-up version of every pain-in-the-ass kid who ever sat behind you on a plane, kicking the back of your seat." Maher sought to rationalize Trump's perplexing rise by pointing to various studies showing that U.S. children score "low in math and science, but off the charts in self-esteem." It's an argument that was made during Davis Guggenheim's discredited 2010 documentary Waiting for `Superman,' which cited a 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study stating that the U.S. ranked 25th in math and 21st in science among 3o developed countries, as well as a 2003 PISA study concluding that U.S. kids ranked No.1 in confidence. Of course, these studies are now over a decade old, but yes, American students are by and large overconfident and not performing nearly as well as they should in math and science. In fact, according to the 2012 PISA study, the U.S. ranked 35th out of 64 countries in math and 27th in science. Ouch. And point taken. According to Maher, America ranks "number one in confidence in math skills, even though they suck at it. Yes, we're number one in thinking we're number one. And when the numbers don't validate that confidence, we know who the culprit is: the numbers. So we change them." The host then cited the outrageous grade inflation at Yale, where in 2012, 62 percent of all grades at Yale College were an A or A-minus, compared with ro percent in 1963 and 40 percent in 1974. This, Maher says, breeds huge hubris: "Have you noticed that according to Donald Trump, nobody ever does anything better than Donald Trump? He's the white Kanye West!" (Ed. Note: This comparison is wildly unfair to West, a self-made black man who grew up on the South Side of Chicago.) So, if America truly wants to be "great again," Maher thinks it can start by getting tougher on its kids. No more Post-its on lunch bags reminding your child to have a good day—the food inside does the trick. "Every time a parent takes the kid's side over the teacher's, you're creating the Donald Trumps of tomorrow," Maher said, before adding, "Trump is the logical result of 40 years of worshipping at the altar ofselfesteetn—where every kid gets a trophy wife." Marlow Stern — The Daily Beast — March 19, 2016 EFTA00830743  Please Tell Me He Didn't Say This Mitch McConnell to Fox News: NRA Must Approve Of New Supreme Court Justice Inline image Web Link: Intps://voutu.be/ix71Q1pIA E As much as I knew that there is a huge partisan divide my country (the USA), I couldn't believe the headline - Mitch McConnell to Fox News: NRA Must Approve OfNew Supreme Court Justice. In an interview with Fox News last Sunday this morning, McConnell told host Chris Wallace that a new Supreme Court justice must have the approval of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Mitch McConnell and the Republican leadership have done everything possible to make Barack Obama a failed President. Despite President Obama moving forward and nominating Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, the Kentucky Senator is sticking to his guns, literally in this case, and insisting on blocking Garland as the nominee. Wallace specifically asked McConnell if, should Hillary Clinton become president, he would consider the nomination of Merrick Garland. McConnell told Wallace: `I can't imagine that a Republican majority in the United States Senate would want to confirm, in a lame duck session, a nominee opposed by the National Rifle Association and the National Federation of Independent Businesses [NFIBJ.' He continued, saying that he doesn't think the Senate "would want to confirm a judge that would move the court dramatically to the left. That's not gonna happen." Here's why McConnell thinks these two right-wing organizations should have control over approving the Supreme Court nominees — The NFIB has fought hard against both the Affordable Care Act and raising the minimum wage. The NRA is well-known for its opposition to gun safety laws. The group, and therefore McConnell, oppose Garland's nomination because of two cases, Parker v. District of Columbia and National Rifle Association v. Reno, in which Garland's decisions did not fall strongly in favor of the NRA. Despite these two cases, Garland's gun record is still too small to make a truly informed opinion. It consists of Garland's single vote to rehear a case that one of his court's most conservative members also voted to rehear, along with a decision to allow the FBI to continue to EFTA00830744 perform audits on the background check system after lawmakers sympathetic to the NRA tried and failed to shut those audits down." McConnell is obviously grasping at straws trying to back up his position. He wants people to believe he is justified, but, in reality, he's just acting like a child, offering flawed logic and tantrums in the hopes of getting his way. And hopefully people will see through his childish behavior. But beyond the flawed logic and partisan behaver, the big ugly about this is that Senator McConnell openly says that he opposes even qualified candidates for the Supreme Court if they don't pass muster with two special interest groups. What about the greater good of the country? But to openly admit that the Leader of the U.S. Senate has abrogated his responsibility at the bequest of two special interest groups is outrageous.... What Obama should do is tell the Republicans that if they are willing to play thicken, should Hillary of Bernie win the election in November he will pull Garland's nomination so that his successor can chose the replacement who most likely will be more liberal And this is my rant of the week.... WEEK's READINGS There Has to be a Better Way Healthcare in America Inline image 2 Bernie Is Right: the U.S. Needs a Health Care System More Like Those in Europe EFTA00830745 Although almost most people agree that healthcare in America is substandard if not broken, it appears that we are paralyzed to make any meaningful changes, other than Republicans promising to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something "better". And giving the state of our dysfunctional Congress that promise would result in doing nothing. If Bernie Sanders' candidacy has accomplished one thing it has spotlighted the inequities between the haves and the have-nots in America. He has pointed out that even though the U.S. is the only major country on Earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all people as a right, we spend far more per capita than the UK, France and other advanced countries. The U.S. ranks last in the fund's overall evaluation of health care, despite having by far the largest per capita expenditures. Yet, even though he's right to think that we need a health care system more like those in Europe, his platform is under attack, not just from the right, but also from the left. Here is why his critics are wrong. Sanders says he wants a health care system like those of other wealthy countries -- one that provides better results at a lower cost than the one we have. Unfortunately, there is no generally accepted term that covers all such systems as a class. Sanders calls his plan "Medicarefor All," but that is misleading. Liberals tend to call Sanders' plan a "single-payer" system. That is correct, in that Medicarefor All would in fact be a system under which a single agency would directly pay health care providers with funds from the government budget. However, many of the best health care systems of other wealthy countries are not single-payer systems in that sense. As we will see, his proposal -- at least the brief version posted on his campaign web site -- differs from Medicare in some important ways. It also differs from many of the systems in other countries that he admires most. Their plans are surprisingly diverse. Some, like those of Germany and France, funnel payments through multiple independent insurance funds. Others, including those of the UK and Canada, are more decentralized than the "single payer" label suggests. None of them covers 100 percent of national health care expenditure. Conservatives describe the health care systems of Scandinavia, Germany, France and other wealthy countries as "socialized medicine," but that term doesn't uniformly fit, either. Socialized medicine suggests something like the U.S. Veterans Administration health care in the U.S. -- a system that not only features a single payer, but one in which doctors are salaried government employees and hospitals are government-owned. That description, too, fails to capture the diversity of foreign health care systems, where we find a kaleidoscopic mix of salaried and fee-for-service doctors; for-profit, private not-for-profit, and state-owned clinics and hospitals; and both unified and decentralized payment mechanisms. First let's turn to Sanders' critics, starting with those on the right and then moving to critics on the left. Conservative Myth #1: The U.S. already has the world's best health care system. EFTA00830746 Many conservatives think, or at least pretend to think, that the U.S. already has the best health care system in the world, or at least that it did before the advent of Obamacare. Senate leader Mitch McConnell and former House Speaker John Boehner are both on record as having said so. A survey from Harvard University, taken not long before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, found that 68 percent of Republicans (but only 32 percent of Democrats) thought the U.S. health care system was the world's best. To support that belief, conservatives often note that world leaders like former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Jordan's late King Hussein and the Shah of Iran have all sought health care in the U.S. Unfortunately, hard data do not support that optimistic view. One of the most detailed recent comparative studies of health care systems in wealthy countries comes from the Commonwealth Fund. The following figure shows it's ranking of eleven health care systems along with data on expenditures per capita (evaluated at purchasing power parity to avoid exchange rate distortions): a Inline image 3 The U.S. ranks last in the fund's overall evaluation of health care, despite having by far the largest per capita expenditures. The Commonwealth study is not the only one to have reached that conclusion. This earlier post discussed other rankings that agree. Conservative Myth #2: European health care saves costs only by severely rationing care. EFTA00830747 The second conservative myth is that Euro-style health care achieves lower costs only by employing a degree of rationing that would be unacceptable to Americans. Here, for example, is David Brooks, writing the New York Times: Sanders would create a centralized and streamlined system. His approach would also, as in Europe, reduce the rate of medical progress, increase the rationing of care, increase the wait timesfor patients, induce many doctors to retire, and centralize decision-making. In a recent televised debate, Presidential candidate Ted Cruz put it even more bluntly: Socialized medicine is a disaster. It does not work. If you look at the countries that have imposed socialized medicine, that have put the government in charge ofproviding medicine, what inevitably happens is rationing. Canada is Exhibit A for many who make the rationing argument. Consider, for example, this "explainer video" from Vox, titled "What is Single-Payer Health care?" After noting that such a system could save administrative costs, the narrator says, "But there's a catch." The catch is said to be longer waiting times and other limits on services, illustrated by a graphic showing that waiting times for health services are longer in Canada than in the U.S. Most wealthy European countries do better than either of their North American peers when it comes to rationing by waiting and still manage to spend less. Detailed data from the Commonwealth Fund report show how unfair the charge of rationing is, especially when based on a comparison with Canada. Of the eleven countries covered in the survey, the U.S. ranks last overall, and Canada is next to last. One of the main reasons for Canada's poor performance is its poor record on measures of rationing, where it has the lowest ratings of the countries surveyed. • 48 percent of Canadians reported an emergency room waiting time of over two hours (nth place) compared with 28 percent in the U.S. (7th place) and 14 percent in New Zealand (1st place). • 38 percent of Canadian doctors reported that patients had difficulty getting specialized tests like MRIs (loth place) compared to 23 percent in the U.S. (7th place) and 3 percent in Switzerland (1st place). • 18 percent of Canadian doctors reported a wait of four months of more for elective surgery (9th place) compared to 7 percent in the U.S. (6th place) and 1 percent in the Netherlands (1st place). To compare the U.S. with Canada in terms of rationing by waiting, then, is to make a sub-par system look better by comparing it with one that is truly terrible. Most wealthy European countries do better than either of their North American peers when it comes to rationing by waiting and still manage to spend less. EFTA00830748 Instead of rationing by waiting, the American system practices rationing by cost. Relatively few private plans, whether employer-provided or individual, give free access to a full range of providers, drugs and services. Most middle-class insurance plans steer their members toward hospitals and doctors who are in a preferred provider network and drugs that are on the company's preferred list. The uninsured often find themselves rationed out of anything but emergency services by high prices. The burden of rationing by cost shows up clearly in the Commonwealth study: • 37 percent of Americans reported that they did not fill a prescription, skipped a test or treatment, or failed to visit a doctor when ill--the worst of all countries. In Canada, the figure was 13 percent, a respectable 4th • 28 percent of Americans reported that their insurance company denied payment or paid less than expected for treatments they received, the worst of all countries. In the top ranked countries, Norway and Sweden, the figure was 3 percent. What is more, the pressure toward rationing by cost is intensifying. A recent New York Times article describes the situation in these terms: Once emblematic of everything wrong with health insurance, the health maintenance organization is making a grudging, if somewhat successful, comeback. But its reputation for skimping on care has so tainted the plans that the insurers and companies resurrecting them have gone through innumerable steps to try to avoid using the term H.M.O.... Despite the stigma and many failed efforts, insurers say they are eager to push a revamped version that revives many of the same features that restrict choices as a way of lowering costs. In short, far from achieving their cost savings through rationing, European systems provide more timely care with fewer people skipping needed services for economic reasons. Liberal critics focus on cost Unlike conservatives, liberal critics, by and large, approve of Sanders' Medicare for All plan in principle. They instead focus their criticisms on its cost. The most widely publicized critique comes from Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University. As this discussion explains, Thorpe estimates that Sanders' plan would be almost twice as expensive as the candidate claims. Instead of leaving most middle class households better off, Thorpe claims the Sanders plan would make 71 percent of households worse off, when the taxes needed to fund it fully are set against savings in health care costs. I find Thorpe's analysis disingenuous. The problem is that he construes Sanders' plan in a naively literal way that makes it very different from the health care systems of Europe as they actually operate. EFTA00830749  European systems provide more timely care with fewer people skipping needed services for economic reasons. The first difference concerns just who pays for what under high quality, low-cost Euro-style systems. When many Americans think of European health care, they assume that the government pays for everything, providing a broad range of services at no charge to the consumer. That is not strictly true. The following chart, reproduced from a 2015 report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, shows that in other wealthy democratic countries, governments do pay a larger share of health care costs than in the U.S., but they do not by any means pay for everything. The government share of total health care expenditures ranges from nearly 90 percent in Sweden and the UK to around 75 percent in Switzerland, compared with a little under 5o percent in the U.S. Inline image 4 The reasons for the substantial private health care expenditures vary from one country to another. Most countries expect copayments for some, if not all, services and medications. In many, people purchase private insurance to cover services not provided in the government's basic package, for example, private hospital rooms. Some countries do not fully cover dental and vision services. (However, most Euro-style systems have special mechanisms in place to shield low-incomefamilies from some of these cost-saving measures.) One of the reasons that critics like Thorpe come up with such high cost estimates is that they take at face value the version of the Sanders plan that is found on his campaign Web site. That version promises to "cover the entire continuum of health care, from inpatient to outpatient care; preventive to emergency care; primary care to specialty care, including long-term and palliative care; vision, hearing and oral health care; mental health and substance abuse services; as well as prescription medications, medical equipment, supplies, diagnostics and treatments." I do not think we have to take that language literally in estimating the cost of translating Sanders' political aspirations into a specific program for implementation in the real world. The very fact that EFTA00830750 Sanders de-scribes his plan as "Medicarefor All" suggests that a final version is likely to include deductibles and co-payments similar to those in Medicare as it now exists for seniors. Nor would we need all of the features of the Web site version of the plan in order to meet Sanders' often-repeated goal of equaling the quality and cost performance of other countries. The hard part lies ahead It is easy to criticize a campaign slogan and to inflate the cost of ambitious aspirations. Liberal critics, who ostensibly share Sanders' aspirations, ought to put their energies into the hard part -- filling in the details that would allow the U.S. to equal the cost performance of the best Euro-style health care systems without loss of quality. Including Medicare-style deductibles and co-payments would go a long way toward dosing the gap between Thorpe's estimates of the costs of Sanders' health care plan and the candidate's own estimates, but it would not entirely close it. There are many other problems to deal with. To date, Sanders has focused on two sources of potential cost savings. Administrative costs are one. Sanders' campaign website does not give an exact estimate of savings, but Sanders' policy director Warren Gunnels reportedly estimates that administrative savings from his plan would reduce total health care spending by 13 percent. Thorpe says it would save 4.7 percent. If we split the difference, the savings would be a little under 9 percent. But reducing per capita health care spending to the level of the Netherlands (the most expensive after the U.S. among the eleven covered in the Commonwealth study) would require U.S. spending to fall by 33 percent. To get to the level of the UK (the least expensive of the eleven) would require a 6o percent cut. So, even viewed optimistically, administrative savings are just a start. A single government payer would have more bargaining power. The second major saving claimed by the Sanders team comes from lowering the price of prescription drugs. Total prescription drug expenditures in 2014 came to an estimated $297 billion, a fraction less than 10 percent of total health care costs, on prescription drugs. Cutting that in half -- a truly heroic accomplishment -- would still save only another 5 percent of total health care costs. So, beyond prescription drugs and administrative costs, where would the additional 20 to 40 percent saving come from that would be needed to bring U.S. health care costs down to the level of the best performing Euro-style systems? There are only two possible sources: cuts in quantity of services or cuts in prices. EFTA00830751 Cutting quantifies is not as easy as it sounds. To be sure, there are some areas where the U.S. does seem to provide excessive services or procedures. For example, the U.S. rate for Caesarian sections is reportedly about 3o percent, more than double that of the Netherlands (13 percent) and nearly double that of Finland, Sweden and Norway (all close to 17 percent). On the whole, however, as health care economists like Princeton's Uwe Reinhart note, the quantity of health care services provided in the U.S. is actually lower than in other advanced countries. It does not seem realistically possible to cut service quantities further while extending health care coverage to the 13 percent of Americans who remain uninsured, even under the Affordable Care Act, and to do so without any loss in quality of care. Prices are the "elephant in the room," says Reinhart. Medical prices in the U.S. are reportedly 60 percent higher than in an average of 12 other high-income countries. For individual procedures, the differences are often greater. For example, an appendectomy that cost $7,962 in the US cost $2,943 in Germany and $3,739 in Finland. What is more, the prices of services like an MRI or colonoscopy, can vary by a factor of two, three or more even with in a city. Worst of all, says Reinhart, "Fees in the private health care sector have been jealously guarded trade secrets among insurers and providers of health care." That makes it impossible for consumers to shop around for the best price, as Forbes writer Kate Ashford found from personal experience when she tried to find the best deal on an MM. In practice, it can be difficult or impossible for consumers to shop for medical care the way they would for a set of snow tires. The present trend toward mergers and consolidations demonstrably pushes up prices. Liberal critics don't even pretend to address the problem of health care prices. The widely cited Thorpe study simply assumes that prices under the Sanders' plan would be an average of the prices now paid by private insurers and the modestly lower prices now paid by Medicare. The day after a Sanders inauguration, his health care team would have to set to work on tackling the elephant in the room. Unfortunately, there is no single solution to the problem of high U.S. health care prices. Instead, the problem would have to be approached one piece at a time. • Coordinated bargaining for lower prescription drug prices is just a start. • Lowering the prices charged by the most expensive hospitals to those charged by the most effective ones would help -- and no, they are not necessarily the same hospitals. A single government payer would have more bargaining power. Greater transparency in pricing would help, too. • So would greater competition among hospitals. The present trend toward mergers and consolidations demonstrably pushes up prices. EFTA00830752 Another reason for the higher cost of U.S. health care services are higher earnings of physicians. U.S. doctors earn considerably more than their European counterparts do, even when we adjust fees for differences in expenses and cost of living. But changing compensation practices for American doctors would not be easy without other, more far-reaching reforms. For example, making higher education tuition-free, as Sanders has proposed, following the policies of many European countries, would reduce the burden of student debt with which American doctors begin their careers. And less adversarial systems to deal with malpractice claims free European doctors from a major cost item while giving them less incentive to practice unproductive defensive medicine. The bottom line It is hard not to conclude that Sanders is right to think that America needs a health care system more like those in Europe. True, his Medicarefor All plan is still more aspirational than operational, but what do other candidates offer? Hillary Clinton proposes building on Obamacare, but there is nothing in the byzantine complexity of the Affordable Care Act that makes it easier to solve any of the cost and price problems we have discussed, and many things that make it harder. Republican candidates have a field day enumerating the problems of the ACA, but offer only the vaguest suggestions of what they would offer in its place. Doug Bandow - Buffington Post - March 7, 2016 Whatever the case, to kill Obamacare without replacing it immediately would be a disaster and Medicarefor All would require systemic changes, starting with the cost of educating our doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals, reining in the pharmaceutical industry and stopping much of the unnecessary litigation, with the understanding that affordable healthcare is basic right but it has limits and requires both additional taxes and sacrifices, if we really want to have the best healthcare in the world. ****** Bravo Again President Obama Inline image 2 EFTA00830753  U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuba's President Raul Castro U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a groundbreaking speech at the Gran Teatro de la Habana Alicia Alonso in the historic Habana Vieja, or Old Havana, neighborhood March 22, 2016 in Havana, Cuba. Described as a message to the Cuban people about his vision for the future of Cuba, Obama's speech was nationally televised to the ii million people on the communist-controlled island. President Obama spoke directly to the Cuban people in speech in Havana, outlining a path forward for the U.S. and the island nation. Attached, please find a copy of the transcript of President Obama's speech. And again — Bravo President Obama.... Your leadership is inspirational Inline image 1 ****** For You Immigrant Haters Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups EFTA00830754  Inline image 1 Dynamics CEO and founder Jyoti Bansal says he had to wait seven years to for his green card A new non-partisan study on entrepreneurship gives some credence to the tech industry's stance that American innovation benefits from robust immigration. The study from the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan think tank based in Arlington, Va., shows that immigrants started more than half of the current crop of U.S.-based startups valued at $1 billion or more. These 44 companies, the study says, are collectively valued at $168 billion and create an average of roughly 760 jobs per company in the U.S. The study also estimates that immigrants make up over 7096 of key management or product development positions at these companies. The foundation examined 87 U.S. companies valued at $1 billion or more as of Jan. 1, as tracked by the Journal's Billion Dollar Startup Club. The authors of the study used public data and information from the companies to create biographies of the founders. The three highest valued U.S. companies with immigrant founders include car-hailing service Uber Technologies Inc., data-software company Palantir Technologies Inc. and rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Inc. Stuart Anderson, the study's author and the foundation's executive director, says the findings show that the U.S. economy could benefit from the talents of foreign-born entrepreneurs even more so if it were easier for them to obtain visas. Tech leaders including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates have called for increasing the number of H-1B visas that let skilled foreign workers stay in the country. They argue that immigration greatly benefits the tech community, and that it is difficult for companies to hire foreign-born workers and for immigrant entrepreneurs to start businesses due to the visas' constraints. Critics argue that tech executives are simply looking for cheaper labor, and some politicians, as well as Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, aim to curb the work visa program. A bill introduced by Republican presidential candidate and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) in December that the lawmakers say aims to reform the visa program would require petitioners to hold an advanced university degree, have worked at least 10 years overseas and not get paid materially less than U.S. workers. EFTA00830755 Either way, the process to secure a visa is lengthy and cumbersome. The visas are capped at 85,000 per year — 65,000 are set aside for foreign workers applying for the first time and 2O,OOO are for foreign students graduating from American universities. In 2O15, the lottery to obtain a visa hit capacity within one week, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The USCIS said it received nearly 233,000 H-1B petitions during the filing period. Mr. Anderson said the law makes it difficult for entrepreneurs to qualify because it is meant for employers to petition on behalf of their employees. And the decision to start a company while waiting for a Hl-B visa to come through is risky. Mr. Anderson said in most instances, immigrant entrepreneurs are only able to get their businesses off the ground after first gaining permanent residence, then obtaining a green card. "How would you ever raise money for it?" Mr. Anderson said. "Who is going to invest in a company if the founder of the company may not be able to stay in the U.S.?" Jyoti Bansal sa