j_b

Nobody but people like you think that wiping out 100's of civilians with drones and/or torturing enemies is justifiable, so putting them in opposition as if torture was more benign is obviously only a cheap rhetorical trick on your part. Reducing all the torture that was ordered by the Bush administration to the waterboarding of proven guilty murderers in order to extract vital information is nothing but a simplistic slight of hand that doesn’t pass the most elementary examination. The rampant use of torture under Bush is nothing but terror that has 1) the purpose of sending a clear message to those who oppose the policies of the torturer and 2) has a profound effect on the political culture of the people that practice it. Making torture disappear out of public sight isn’t sufficient from an ethical point of view but it is vastly different than making it part of the culture of the nation. Warmongering propaganda already convinced the uncritical among us that dropping bombs and firing indiscriminately at anything that moves was justified, we certainly don’t want to add torture to the list of what is acceptable under the pretense that torturing bad guys is no worse than killing them outright.

Yeah, but your civilian body count is way too low (at least as far as we know ), so you are obviously not "morally and logically coherent".

Now that you mention these widely known advocates of democracy and human rights who were also in favor of torture, I just may have to reconsider

Except for backward speaking devilish creatures.

yes to what? he was careful to be as vague as possible.

Strawman argument. Most people who oppose torture also oppose the killing of innocents. It is rather remarkable that someone like JayB who wanted the war of agression on Iraq, knowing all along that many innocent people would die, now wants to pretend to think that killing innocents is wrong. But perhaps, JayB is going to provide us with insight on how he arrived at his new humanitarian ethics.

You can't discuss what Obama is likely to do without context: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/dec/10/usa.comment http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=1d768c70817ca8e4ca90180129f181ed http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-langguth3-2009may03,0,6987276.story

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=49664

Clearly the industry that can give a boost to the economy, but is it sport or art form?

The only ethical way to drill a bolt: [video:youtube]LS7mI3ZQr8M

Hard face climbing at Index is height-dependent (or at least significantly more so than crack climbing) so if you are short, it'll be correspondingly harder?

Something is Rotten at PBS by Russell Mokhiber Last year, former Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid made a great documentary for the PBS show Frontline titled Sick Around the World. Reid traveled to five countries that deliver health care for all - UK, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Taiwan - to learn about how they do it. Reid found that the one thing these five countries had in common - none allowed for-profit health insurance companies to sell basic medical coverage. Frontline then said to Reid - okay, we want you to go around the United States and make a companion documentary titled Sick Around America. So, Reid traveled around America, interviewing patients, doctors, and health insurance executives. The documentary that resulted - Sick Around America - aired Monday night on PBS. But even though Reid did the reporting for the film, he was cut out of the film when it aired this week. And the film didn't present Reid's bottom line for health care reform - don't let health insurance companies profit from selling basic health insurance. They can sell for-profit insurance for extras - breast enlargements, botox, hair transplants. But not for the basic health needs of the American people. Instead, the film that aired Monday pushed the view that Americans be required to purchase health insurance from for-profit companies. And the film had a deceptive segment that totally got wrong the lesson of Reid's previous documentary - Sick Around the World. During that segment, about halfway through Sick Around America, the moderator introduces Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, the lead health insurance lobby in the United States. Moderator: Other developed countries guarantee coverage for everyone. We asked Karen Ignagni why it can't work here. Karen Ignagni: Well, it would work if we did what other countries do, which is have a mandate that everybody participate. And if everybody is in, it's quite reasonable to ask our industry to do guarantee issue, to get everybody in. So, the answer to your question is we can, and the public here will have to agree to do what the public in other countries have done, which is a consensus that everybody should be in. Moderator: That's what other developed countries do. They make insurers cover everyone, and they make all citizens buy insurance. And the poor are subsidized. But the hard reality, as presented by Reid in Sick Around the World, is quite different than Ignagni and the moderator claim. Other countries do not require citizens buy health insurance from for-profit health insurance companies - the kind that Karen Ignagni represents. In some countries like Germany and Japan, citizens are required to buy health insurance, but from non-profit, heavily regulated insurance companies. And other countries, like the UK and Canada, don't require citizens to buy insurance. Instead, citizens are covered as a birthright - by a single government payer in Canada, or by a national health system in the UK. The producers of the Frontline piece had a point of view - they wanted to keep the for-profit health insurance companies in the game. TR Reid wants them out. "We spent months shooting that film," Reid explains. "I was the correspondent. We did our last interview on January 6. The producers went to Boston and made the documentary. About late February I saw it for the first time. And I told them I disagreed with it. They listened to me, but they didn't want to change it." Reid has a book coming out this summer titled The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care (Penguin Press, August 2009.) "I said to them - mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world," Reid said. "I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said - I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn't be. And we parted ways." "Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit," Reid said. "But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance." "I don't think they deliberately got it wrong, but they got it wrong," Reid said. Reid said that he now wants to make other documentaries, but not for Frontline. "Frontline will never touch me a again - they are done with me," Reid said. Reid says that "it's perfectly reasonable for people to disagree about health policy." "We disagreed, and we parted ways," Reid says. It might be perfectly reasonable for people to disagree about health policy. But it's not perfectly reasonable to mislead the American people on national television in the middle of a health care crises when Congress is shaping legislation that will mean life or death for the for-profit health insurance industry. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/03-7

Here is an interview of Uwe Reinhardt, a leading adviser on health care economics and professor of political economy at Princeton University, discussing administrative costs, which he claims are around 30%: http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/01/28/how-the-us-measures-up-to-canadas-health-care-system/

Here is a comprehensive comparison study of outcomes in the US and Canada that uses every direct comparison of the outcomes of U.S. and Canadian patients with identical illnesses ever published; therfore without cherry-picking. http://www.pnhp.org/news/2007/may/quality_of_healthcar.php

Like the data that bill cited above? Well, first there are problems with the sampling methodology used for the study since the response rate for this telephone survey was quite low especially in the US (50% in US versus 64% in Canada), which may disproportionately affect low income respondants. Second, other analysis of the same data come up with different conclusions: "This study found that Canadians at low levels of education or income were substantially healthier than their US counterparts. HUI3 scores were higher for higher income categories in both countries. This relationship between health and income has been well documented [36,37]. Others have reported that household income is a strong predictor of health status [38]. Important differences in health between the two countries were found at less than high school and high school education. This is consistent with previous work in which educational attainment was positively associated with health [39,40]. Both quantitative importance and statistical significance were found for income and education in this study. The strength of the JCUSH was the application of identical methodology and instruments. The findings in this study reveal health disparities between Canadians and Americans at lower levels of education and income, with Americans worse off. Differences between the two countries in social and economic inequality as well as in access to healthcare may account for the observed differences in the health of those with lower levels of education and/or income [41]. The social safety net that Canada provides compared to the US seems to have an impact on health for those with less education and income." http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/5/1/10 I didn't say there wasn't enough data to draw broad generalizations. I said that studies about outcome for specific and often cherry-picked conditions couldn't be extrapolated to draw sweeping conclusions, whereas braod indices such life expectancy, however imperfect they were, gave a better overall picture of health because they were less subject to bias and methods. A broad collection of health care specialists seem to think so too: Why Canadians Are Healthier By Judy Foreman 2/10/04 My fellow Americans: Want a health tip? Move toCanada. An impressive array of comparative data shows that Canadians live longer and healthier lives than we do. What’s more, they pay roughly half as much per capita as we do — $2,163 versus $4,887 in 2001 — for the privilege. Exactly why Canadians fare better is the subject of considerable academic debate. Some policy wonks say it’sCanada’s single-payer, universal health coverage system. Others point to Canadians’ different ethnic mix. Some think it’s because they use fewer illegal drugs and shoot each other less with guns, though they do smoke and drink with gusto. Still others think Canadians are healthier because their medical system is tilted more toward primary-care doctors and less toward specialists. And some believe it’s something more fundamental—a smaller gap between rich and poor. Perhaps it’s all of the above. But there is no arguing the basics. “By all measures, Canadians’ health is better,” said Dr. Barbara Starfield, a university distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Canadians “do better on a whole variety of health outcomes,” she said, “including life expectancy at various ages — 1, 15, 20, 45, 65, 80, you name it.” According to a World Health Organization report published last year, life expectancy at birth in Canada is 79.8 years versus 77.3 in the United States (Japan’s is 81.9.). Canada now ranks fifth in life expectancy at birth (after Japan, Sweden, Hong Kong and Iceland), while theUnited States ranks 26th, according to the United Nations Human Development Report. “There isn’t a single measure in which the US excels in the health arena,” said Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, a senior lecturer in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We spend half of the world’s health care bill and we are less healthy than all the other rich countries. “Fifty-five years ago, we were one of the healthiest countries in the world. What changed? We have increased the gap between rich and poor. Nothing determines the health of a population [more] than the gap between rich and poor.” Infant-mortality rates also show striking differences between theUnited States and Canada, according to Dr. Clyde Hertzman, associate director of the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at the University of British Columbiain Vancouver. To counter the argument that racial differences play a major role, Hertzman compared infant mortality for all Canadians with that for white Americans between 1970 and 1998. The white US infant mortality rate was roughly six deaths per 1,000 babies, compared to slightly more than five for Canadians. Maternal mortality shows a substantial gap as well. According to data published last year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international think-tank, there were 3.4 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births among Canadians compared to a 9.8 among all Americans. And more than half of Canadians with severe mental disorders received treatment, compared to little more than a third of Americans, according to the May-June 2003 issue of Health Affairs. Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, general internist at Cambridge Hospital and staunch advocate of a single-payer system, said she believes “the summary of the evidence has to be that national health insurance has improved the health of Canadians and is responsible for some of the longer life expectancy.” On the other hand, there are some causes of death that wouldn’t be much affected by having the government pick up the health care tab—like homicide. And theUnited States, Bezruckha said, has “the highest homicide rate of all the rich countries.” “Other things might be differences in seat-belt usage,” said Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health. “We are also disproportionate consumers of illegal drugs, much more than Canada, so it’s cultural. The health of Americans would be better if we had universal health care, but there are some things that a single-payer system wouldn’t fix, but which would leave one country looking healthier in the statistics.” In some respects, the health care system is “the tail on the dog,” said Dr. Arnie Epstein, chairman of the department of health policy and medicine at the Harvard School of Public Health. “It’s other aspects of the social fabric of different countries that seem to have a major impact on how long people live.” Like ethnicity, In the United States, African-Americans and Latinos “face problems of housing, stress and low income which have nothing to do with a single-payer system,” Blendon said.Canada has a large number of Asian immigrants, he said, but they, like Asian immigrants in the United States, tend to do well on health care measures. The bottom line is that Canada is doing something right, even if “the reasons are not totally understood,” said Kominski of UCLA. http://www.pnhp.org/news/2004/february/why_canadians_are_he.php

I just told you that you could cite individual studies but none could be used to draw sweeping conclusions about the respective worth of different systems. Moreover, I sincerely doubt these studies account adequately for the huge discrepancy in access to health care in the US. When more than 1/10 of your population has no health insurance none of the statistics concerning outcome or wait time should look good unless you forget about those who do not get care.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/27-14

I'd very much enjoy an entirely separate thread dedicated to evaluating the methodology that the WHO used to develop its rankings. Having said that, I'm familiar enough with the WHO study to assert that it doesn't actually tell you much that's useful about how effectively the health care delivery systems in country A and country B do at dealing with things that doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics, etc can *actually* so something about. If you define prevention carefully, it makes sense to include it in this category - but throwing every behavior that increases mortality into the mix doesn't make much sense if your aim is to make a logically and methodologically sound comparison of how good the healthcare systems in country A and country B are relative to whatever criteria is under consideration. I don't think anyone here has the time to conduct such an analysis, if it could be done well enough to deliver a better indicator of how a system serves the need of the population than an index such as life expectancy or child mortality that may be imperfect but are less fraught with errors in sampling methodologies and bias in what is a valid comparison. Studies looking at outcomes for specific conditions have been done and some find that the canadian system is more successful on many levels, others are inconclusive, others find that the US system does better in some areas but in general it is very diffcult to draw sweeping conclusions from an exercise like the one you suggest. The corporate media continues its blackout of single-payer healthcare news so few know that Bernie Sanders, senator from Vermont, introduced a single payer health care bill yesterday: http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/03/26-15

If you are going to make a relevant comparison of the precise contribution that a healthcare system makes to longevity, you first have to make sure that you are measuring outcomes that are actually affected by what happens in clinics and hospitals, no? Not only, because healthcare is also in large part about prevention and because what happens in hospitals is only valid for those who make it to the hospital. Although life expectancy isn't a precise gauge of healthcare system performance, it does give a better indication of how a given system serves it population than a detailed study of outcomes for a specific illness. Here is the last existing ranking of population health and healthcare system performance by the World Health Organization, Canada ranked at #30 and the US ranked at #37: http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html

I agree but, realistically, harder drugs that make up a significant fraction of the traffic will not be legalized, while weapon sales (90% of seized weapons come from the US) constitute a large part of the economic picture contributing to the problem.

Yes, which seems to imply that policy reforms (besides more policing of the border) are needed to address the weapon supply aspect of the problem.

Aren't we also responsible for the weapons trade that enables these gangs to outgun the police?

More fear-mongering by the corporate media about "commie healthcare" while industry lobbyists and their toady politicians develop policy "reform" behind close doors. Canadians have among the longest life expectancy on the planet (3 years longer than americans on average) which certainly couldn't happen without a healthcare system benefitting the population.

Considering the deliberate lack of transparency we will never know how much of these "quadrillions" in derivative contracts can't be honored but we already know that nearly 9 trillions in emergency loans and guarantees were issued by the FED to "troubled" financial institutions in the last 5 month. This is likely only the tip of the iceberg since hedge funds aren't likely to give an inkling of the toxicity of their "assets" as long as there is hope of recooping on some of the loss. At this point attempts at minimizing the financial collapse and the various band-aid prescriptions on a rotting corpse are simply laughable.