15% Tax

I said even, but clearly I meant fair. Equal treatment of all people in all parties.

Fairness to all!

Yes it does to me.

If congress is there to serve the people, and the people feel we are on the wrong track, then we are not making progress.

Right or wrong, bettor or worse, is defined by the people. They have the only say on this.

If congress is there to serve the people, and the people feel we are on the wrong track, then we are not making progress.

Sure that’s one way of looking at it, If I may, I would encourage you to think it this way. People are not satisfied with the current, status-quo. They want further progress. We have potential to achieve much more, so how come we have not achieved it already, may be something we are doing wrong…

When you abstract it, it is simply desire to get better, make further progress.

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Goofy, you reply to a post I was told is “deleted … for politics”.

Good for you and all others that the rest of this thread is about collecting stamps :joy:

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Good for you and all others that the rest of this thread is about collecting stamps.

Absolutely!

When we were in Paris a couple of months ago, we must have passed half a dozen shops devoted to stamp collectors/collecting. I guess it’s still quite a thing there.

When I was a kid in the '50s-'60s, I’d order those bags of stamps advertised on the back of comic books and stick 'em in my stamp book. (I still remember: you mailed your order to Littleton, NH.)

I also collected S&H Green Stamps and them traded in for some toys or trinkets. Green Stamps should not be confused with Berkshire’s old Blue Chip Stamps business–the mention of which steers my post to being somewhat “on topic” here. Huzzah!

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Nostalgia is a big business because as people age they look back through a happy gauze at earlier times…

“When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.”

  • Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold
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“When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.”

That’s true in general, but not in some vital economic indicators. For example, Massachusetts’ average house price now is about 4 times that of 30 years ago, far outpacing the average wage. It’s far more difficult for wage earners to buy a house today than it’s 30 years ago.

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Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

How to win the internet.

US health care cost: 19.7% of GDP
France health care cost: 11.1% of GDP
Ratio 1.77

US adult obesity rate: 36.2%
France adult obesity rate: 21.6%
Ratio 1.68

Only one variable but a darned important one.

vol

How about:
Singapore healthcare cost to GDP 5.9%
Singapore obesity rate 8.9%
They must be doing something right.
Astore

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Singapore … They must be doing something right.
If you’ve ever been there you know they are doing a lot right.

But to compare a city to a country re Healthcare cost to GDP? What about this instead:

  • Thailand healthcare cost to GDP 3.8%
  • Thailand obesity rate 10.0%

And this is not because Thais don’t eat. Au contraire: If you are here you get the impression they eat continously 24h/day. It’s their favorite hobby.

Greetings from Bangkok.

P.S.: 30 years ago a “fat Thai” was unthinkable. Not so any more. Western culture rules the world.

Only one variable but a darned important one.

Btw: I have no idea why the ratio of Healthcare cost to GDP versus Obesity rates should say anything about the effectiveness of the Healthcare $ spent. Obesity rates are caused by other different factors, especially cultural ones (see my Thailand example “then and now” example), even by large special groups (New Zealand is a “leading” country for obese people because of it’s Maori & Pacific Islander population).

Jim’s original “Healthcare cost and Maternity death” ratio is a good one to judge the effectiveness of those $ spent. “Healthcare cost and Obesity” I think is not.

Jim’s original “Healthcare cost and Maternity death” ratio is a good one to judge the effectiveness of those $ spent. “Healthcare cost and Obesity” I think is not.

They are both terrible indicators actually. Well, obesity is not an indicator at all - how fat people are has next to nothing to do with health care effectiveness. If people are obese, they will NEED good health care, but good health care won’t stop them from getting obese.

Maternal mortality rates are not quite as bad, but they’re still bad. Mothers die in childbirth for a variety of reasons, including poor maternal health care, but the quality of maternal health care is usually not the issue, in developed countries like the USA. Sometimes it’s a lack of access to maternal care, like if 3-4% of your population has no access to prenatal care - because they are living there illegally, for instance. That will do wonders for increasing your maternal mortality rates, but it has more to do with immigration policies, border control and the economic state of your neighbours than the quality of health care.

Other factors are involved in maternal mortality rates: obesity, income inequality, age of childbirth, for instance, all increasing the rates in the USA through no fault of the health care system.

Making the link between health care spending and maternal mortality rates (or obesity) is an easy way to criticize US healthcare, but it misdirects the argument, since no amount of health care reform will fix those problems.

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Jim’s original “Healthcare cost and Maternity death” ratio is a good one to judge the effectiveness of those $ spent. “Healthcare cost and Obesity” I think is not.

Hey, folks, it was just an example—one of a hundred metrics that would show roughly the same things compared to other rich places:
Health care in the US is in aggregate very expensive, the average outcome is not correspondingly high, and the quality is unusually variable across the population.

As for maternal mortality, it comes from two main things: how sick the person was going in, and how good the care was before, during, and after birth.
It’s a pretty good all-in-one measure of how well overall health is ultimately being achieved.
But only to a modest degree can the general daily health of the population be addressed by a health care system.

Jim

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Singapore healthcare cost to GDP 5.9%
Singapore obesity rate 8.9%
They must be doing something right.

Singapore / Population: 5,947,208

Demographics of Singapore: Ethnic Chinese at 75.9% , ethnic Malays (15.0%) and ethnic Indians (7.5%), collectively making up virtually the entirety of its citizen population (98.4%).

Singapore is very different from the USA, France, etc.

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My theory is that the reason inflation runs rampant in both of those markets (healthcare & education) comes down to a basic disconnect between who is the receiver of the service and who is he payer.

Also, these two industries have not had the inflation-suppressing effects of off-shoring the labor supply.

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Maternal mortality rates are not quite as bad, but they’re still bad. Mothers die in childbirth for a variety of reasons, including poor maternal health care, but the quality of maternal health care is usually not the issue, in developed countries like the USA. Sometimes it’s a lack of access to maternal care, like if 3-4% of your population has no access to prenatal care - because they are living there illegally, for instance. That will do wonders for increasing your maternal mortality rates, but it has more to do with immigration policies, border control and the economic state of your neighbours than the quality of health care.

Other factors are involved in maternal mortality rates: obesity, income inequality, age of childbirth, for instance, all increasing the rates in the USA…

Maternal mortality is actually an excellent indicator. One, there is no gender difference. Two, the distribution of age is fairly similar in industrialized countries. Three, the care given is pretty much the same around the world (at least around the industrialized, Western world). It is true that maternal mortality rate is a function of healthcare access. So our very high maternal mortality reflects something that is fundamental broken about healthcare access. We should ask why France, with universal healthcare, spends only 11% of GDP while the US spends 19% of GDP without universal healthcare? Why a county that spends 19% of its GDP (and also consider that our absolute GDP is significantly larger than all other countries, our total spending in absolute terms will be even higher) would still let “income inequality” and “economic state” affecting the outcome of maternal care?

In short, access is an important component when judging the quality of care. A service can only be considered as “good” if I can get it. I would never give a restaurant 5-stars if I could never get a reservation.

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A service can only be considered as “good” if I can get it. I would never give a restaurant 5-stars if I could never get a reservation.

You demolish your own argument. A restaurant can perfectly well be 5 stars without you having access to it. In fact, high quality restaurants are often hard to get into, whereas McDonald’s (and Cuban health care) are topnotch for access. If you starve on the sidewalk outside a great restaurant, the problem is not with the quality of the food.

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A service can only be considered as “good” if I can get it. I would never give a restaurant 5-stars if I could never get a reservation.

You demolish your own argument.

How? The argument is simple. If I am not able to get a service, for me, that service doesn’t exist. Saying there is a great hospital but it only accepts people who are 7 feet tall means, it is not available for most people. So why would someone who is not 7 feet is going to give 5 star rating?

That 5 star rating for most people is meaningless. To use your own example, if I am dying of hunger, and I cannot get food from that great restaurant, what good it is to me. I may go for even banning anything other than McDonald.

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Other factors are involved in maternal mortality rates: obesity, income inequality, age of childbirth, for instance, all increasing the rates in the USA through no fault of the health care system.

Making the link between health care spending and maternal mortality rates (or obesity) is an easy way to criticize US healthcare, but it misdirects the argument, since no amount of health care reform will fix those problems.

From a qualitative perspective, my experience is that the US healthcare system is not as good as other countries where I have had healthcare. Rather than argue the finer points, perhaps better to recognize that there are opportunities for significant improvement in the healthcare system. Lots of other countries have illegal immigrants, obese people etc., etc. My only experience with the US being comparable to top other countries is Medicare.

Craig who has had healthcare in USA, Canada, Australia, France, Russia, Japan, UK, Thailand, Nigeria, Ghana (some were better than others!)

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