The Continuing Decline Of Western Civilization

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Your healthcare sucks ass

I don't have to worry about it, cause I don't have any. But there is some distressing news for those of you who do pay ungodly amounts of money for your healthcare. Jonathan M. Gitlin over at ArsTechnica draws our eye to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Our over-all healthcare stats (poor access, 23/30 in life expectancy amoungst industrialized nations, 24/30 for infant mortality) aren't being offset that much by the poor healthcare the poor and non-white receive. Regard:

In the past, when looking at these statistics, it was easy to assume that the poor performance of the US relative to the rest of the OECD was due to the 15 percent of the country who lacked health insurance, dragging the rest of the country down with them. Others criticized the findings themselves, noting that "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Now an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association casts that assumption into doubt. Comparing the health of middle aged Americans and their counterparts in England, the authors make the startling discovery that across the board, the Americans are less healthy. It's a sad fact that minorities have worse health outcomes than non-hispanic whites, so the study only looks at that population group, but despite this the English still come out on top.

Worse yet, these findings held true regardless of socioeconomic status or education level. Poorer English patients might be expected to have better health than their US counterparts due to their National Health Service, but well-off Americans only fared as well as working class English. The differences can't easily be explained away by risk factors either, which are broadly similar between the two nations.

Best news ever: we pay more for healthcare than anyone else. Time for universal health care kiddos.

posted by tcdowc - 11:00 pm - 05.02.06

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He'll never work in this town again

Who was the idiot who arranged to have Stephen Colbert address the White House Correspondent's Dinner? Holy crap, I wish I had audio on this box. Full treanscript here, with links to video.

posted by tcdowc - 9:52 pm - 05.02.06

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Land of Opportunity to be renamed following corporate buy-out

Man I suck at updating.

Ezra Klein has the goods (h/t to ObWi as the kids say. Blogger is down right now so I can't give the specific article but it was written by the inestimable hilzoy I do believe) on a new study done by the Center For American Progress has made the following not extremely shocking find in a lengthy study of 'economic mobility and income volatality':

When asked if people get rewarded for their effort, 61 percent of Americans agreed, versus 49 percent of Canadians, 33 percent of the British, and 23 percent of the French (weirdly, the Philippines win this one, with 63 percent agreeing). But of all these societies (save the Philippines), America is one of the least mobile, which is to say the least dependent on hard work rather than social station. In Denmark, the relationship between your parent's income and yours is 15% percent or so. In Canada, it's 19% percent. In France, it's 41 percent. And in America, it's 47 percent. The only country more hidebound and hierarchal is Andy's native England (50 percent), also the country most closely approximating the American economic model.

As it is, if you're born in the lowest income quintile, you have a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent. If you're born rich, you've a 22 percent shot at remaining there. For the middle class, hard work and productivity have begun to count far less. In 2003 and 2004, years when the GDP saw strong growth, the median household was no more upwardly mobile than in 1990-91, during a deep recession. Think about that for a second: inequality has reached such a height that the average household is actually worse off during today's expansion than yesterday's recession.

There's been a serious increase in downward mobility, too, with only 13 percent of families seeing $20,000 (in real terms) loss during the 1990-91 recession, while nearly 17 percent experienced such a drop during the 2003-04 expansion. Households in the top 10 percent have, by contrast, seen a reduction in downward mobility during the same period. And while it used to be the case that you could combat stagnation through hard work, even that's dying out. Households where the adults worked more than 40 hours a week were able, during 1990-91 and 1997-98 able to translate their labor into upward mobility. Now, the correlation has disappeared.

Yes, that's right, hard work no longer pays off. Crunched number proof of our personnal experience.

posted by tcdowc - 8:35 pm - 05.02.06

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The DoD: We Heart Fags

They just can't get enough gayness. The DoD has been spying on gay protesters as part of their 'force protection' duties, 'cause the gays are so often terrorists. In one incident at NYU, a group of homosexual law students know as OUTlaws were the targets of an apparently serious survailence effort. They recieved a tip that "several homosexual and pro-gay groups" were having a rally and used the groups name aas a excuse to spy on them. Because it encourages law-breaking. Seriously, who is 'tipping off' the DoD about queers? And does the DoD really care, or was this just an excuse for some low-level force protection guy to get a free trip to NYC? The scary thing is, either scenario is equally possible.

posted by tcdowc - 11:56 pm - 04.26.06

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let them have cake

I've been reading through this thread over at Obsidian Wings, partially because it's some of the best actual discussion on the web, and I've come to the following query. We've been talking a lot about the stick in this whole Iranian mess. presumably the theory is that the Iranians are not to be trusted, they're crazy, etc. Which is silly, just because someone may be a violent demagogue or a religious fanatic doesn't necessarily mean that they are insane or can't reason. Anyway, the threats don't seem to work. In fact, they appear to actively work against us, pushing the Iranians further towards the idea that they must develop nuclear arms and bolstering the political machine of the current hard-line president. The query is this: we have a lot of carrots to offer here, and they might not cost us that much. Hell, a recognition of the Iranian regime as the actual rulers of Iran costs little more than face, but is worth a lot of the Iranians. We have the diplomatic ability to, well, buy them off, leading to a lower threat level, a measure of control over the degree of nuclear technology Iran develops, as well as undermining the hard-line political groups in Iranian politics. So why is no one talking seriously about this? We do this kind of thing with dictators before, even when they are involved with terrorist networks.

posted by tcdowc - 11:56 pm - 04.17.06

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next