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17 Dec 09

The Best Health Care In The World - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • In France, you
    are covered, period. It doesn’t depend on your job, it doesn’t
    depend on a health maintenance organization, and it doesn’t
    depend on whether you filled out the paperwork right. Those who
    (like me) oppose ObamaCare, need to understand (also like me,
    unfortunately) what it’s like to be serially rejected by
    insurance companies even though you’re perfectly healthy. It’s an
    enraging, anxiety-inducing, indelible experience, one that both
    softens the intellectual ground for increased government
    intervention and produces active resentment toward anyone who
    argues that the U.S. has “the best health care in the world.”
  • Clive Crook has further thoughts on why it is hard to apply the French system to America.
21 Nov 09

Matthew Yglesias » USA: A Land of Murder and Mayhem

  • murder
  • One moral of the story is that, as I think Mark Kleiman would tell you, one of the main benefits of having relatively few murders is that it’s easier to prevent future murders. In Washington the ratio of murder victims to investigative capacity is quite high and as a consequence it’s relatively easy to get away with murder. London can throw much more resources at any given case, which deters murder and, in turn, makes it easier to maintain the low-murder equilibrium.
17 Nov 09

Delaying an international climate treaty: not as bad as it looks | Grist

  • Joe Romm points out that the delay offers some needed breathing room. The sense that the world is waiting will increase pressure on the Senate to pass a bill (there’s pressure from Brazil and France already). Conversely, legislation from the U.S. would increase pressure on China and India to step up to the plate with targets and timetables.


    NRDC’s Jake Schmidt notes that the extra time will be beneficial if a) enough details are settled in Copenhagen and b) world leaders focus on ironing out a final agreement in the intervening months. That’s a big if.

  • By taking some of the pressure off Copenhagen, the two-steps agreement has avoided disaster and maintained momentum. It’s also given the Obama administration time to engage in more climate diplomacy.
05 Nov 09

Daily brief: U.N. evacuates more than half of international workers from Afghanistan | The AfPak Channel

  • In
    a landmark legal ruling, an Italian judge yesterday convicted 23
    Americans, most of them CIA agents, on charges related to the 2003
    rendition of a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan to Egypt, where
    Abu Omar claims he was tortured (New York Times, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Financial Times, ABC).
    The trial, which began back in 2007, is the first involving the CIA's
    alleged 'extraordinary rendition' program, and the CIA's Milan station
    chief at the time, Robert Lady, was sentenced to eight years in prison
    while the other 22 Americans convicted each received five years (BBC).

    During
    the three-year trial, the CIA refused to comment on the case or provide
    lawyers for the accused agents, who are not in custody and were tried
    in absentia (CNN, Telegraph, Los Angeles Times). A State Department spokesman said the U.S. was "disappointed" by the verdicts, which are likely to be appealed (New York Times, Bloomberg).
  • Militants
    blew up a girls' school in the northwestern Pakistani tribal district
    of Khyber earlier today, the second such attack in the last four days,
    demonstrating ongoing militant commitment to attacking education in the
    country (AFP, Dawn, Pajhwok). There were no reports of casualties in the attack (PTI).
    And Karachi police reportedly arrested a Taliban commander from
    Malakand, a northwestern district of Pakistan, earlier today (Dawn).
  • 5 more annotations...

Pakistanis may be working with Taliban and al Qaeda - By Tom Ricks | The Best Defense

  • A French official who conducted investigations in Pakistan
    adds more weight to charges that Pakistani intelligence officers are in bed
    with the Taliban and even with al Qaeda.
  • He is quoted as writing, "The central
    government has lost control of certain elements of the army and the ISI, an
    intelligence service that no longer has the trust of its foreign partners."
    French investigators in Pakistan also were physically intimidated, he charges.
02 Nov 09

French military effort in Afghanistan earning respect of U.S. troops | Stars and Stripes

  • French military effort in Afghanistan earning respect of U.S. troops
  • After several years of enduring Americans’ scorn
    for sitting out the Iraq campaign, the French military is going toe-to-toe with
    the Taliban, shedding blood and proving a worthy partner in Afghanistan, U.S.
    officers say.
  • 1 more annotations...
16 Oct 09

Did Italy pay off the Taliban? | FP Passport

  • suggesting that the Italian secret service had been secretly paying Taliban leaders to keep an area it was patrolling quiet. Worse, they reportedly didn't tell the French soldiers who took the area over, resulting in an ambush that killed ten French soldiers
24 Sep 09

Ezra Klein - Entrepreneurship and Health Care

  • These studies typically compare the mobility of workers who are at firms with insurance but do not have an alternative source of coverage (such as spousal insurance or COBRA continuation coverage) to those who do have an alternative source of coverage should they leave the firm. The studies find that mobility is much higher when workers do not have to fear losing coverage; job-to-job mobility is estimated to increase by as much as 25 percent when alternative group coverage is available. …
  • But the most convincing research, by Alison Wellington, mirrors the findings of other job mobility studies: Americans who have an alternative source of health insurance, such as a spouse’s coverage, are much more likely to be self-employed than those who don’t. Wellington estimates that universal health care would therefore likely increase the share of workers who are self-employed (currently about 10 percent of the workforce) by another 2 percent or more
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23 Aug 09

Free markets and government intervention | Economics | The American Scene

  • Free market conservatives often behave as if free markets are like a state of nature in which ham-fisted government arrives after the fact and wrecks everything when, in fact, it is the opposite.
  • Traders and entrepreneurs can only exist once you have a Leviathan to enforce things like private property, money and contracts — all things created and maintained by the State. The rules of the market are set by the State. And if the State doesn’t intervene — justly — in the markets, you cannot have a free market.
  • 5 more annotations...
12 Aug 09

Matt Steinglass - Accumulating Peripherals – That slope just ain’t very slippery - True/Slant

  • In Europe, just as in the US, you have public hospitals and private clinics and individual private-practice physicians. Most surgery and cancer therapy in France takes place in private clinics. Most hospitals in the Netherlands are private. And almost every country in continental Europe has private health insurance companies; in France, the overwhelming majority of citizens have private health insurance, while in the Netherlands literally everyone does.


    Maybe they contract out the billing services to insurance companies, which you may choose between (though you can’t choose covered services, etc).  Maybe there’s a safety valve in the form of a private system that the very affluent can buy into.  But for 95% of the population, the government dictates what treatments are covered, and usually, how much should be paid for them.

  • Megan must think France is a very affluent country indeed, because those “very affluent” who buy private supplementary health insurance in France comprise 92% of the population. In the Netherlands, since 2006, the percentage of people with private insurance shifted from “most” to “100%”.
  • 1 more annotations...
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