Bolitics US Presidential Election 2012

[legov]

2012 Index of Economic Freedom (i.e. adherence to free market economics, according to the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation and [Rupert Murdoch's] Wall Street Journal.) begs to differ:

I'm not sure I trust that chart, given that it's Heritage Foundation and that we don't know the research methodology.

There is also good reason to doubt the veracity of the rankings, for example Australia has a hefty (and pretty unpopular, I think) mining tax as well as socialised healthcare (which can be seen as interference with the free-market healthcare industry).

Singapore has subsidised public hospitals and a government-controlled company (Temasek Holdings) that makes overseas investments on behalf of the government. On top of that, we have a litany of very exorbitant taxes, from cars to alcohol to cigarette ones. Also, the vast majority of our schools are public (although there's a huge private tuition industry - however, those are used as supplements to public education and are not meant to supplant them), and 85% of us live in public housing (although granted, "public housing" here is heavily subject to free-market forces as well - we are allowed to buy and sell "public" apartments, albeit with restrictions)

[LondonLax]

2012 Index of Economic Freedom (i.e. adherence to free market economics, according to the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation and [Rupert Murdoch's] Wall Street Journal.) begs to differ:

1. Hong Kong

2. Singapore

3. Australia

4. New Zealand

5. Switzerland

=== ^^^ FREE MARKET / MOSTLY FREE MARKET vvv ===

6. Canada

7. Chile

8. Mauritius

9. Ireland

10. USA

11. Denmark

12. Bahrain

13. Luxembourg

14. UK

15. Netherlands

16. Estonia

17. Finland

18. Taiwan

19. Macau

20. Cyprus

21. Sweden

22. Japan

23. Lithuania

24. St. Lucia

25. Qatar

26. Germany

27. Iceland

28. Austria

(tracing the historical ratings, the US began turning away from free market policies during Dubya's administration)

It wouldn't surprise me if Australia is higher than the US on that list, we seem to be a more open market than the USA. We have a lot less protectionism and run on free trade principles.

Things like our superannuation programs are privatised as well and the housing market is virtually all privately controlled. There is actually very limited 'council housing', nothing like the vast amounts of council housing in the UK, it is always mystifying to me when people over here complain there isn't enough council housing because clearly the system still works when there is a lot less of it.

The media is privately owned except for the ABC which is much smaller in scale than the BBC and more like PBS in the US.

Even the basic job seeker allowance for people out of work require applicants to do a certain number of hours of government work or community service or study a week in order to 'earn' it. I don't think even the US has a 'work for the dole' programme like that.

I'm sure there are other examples as well.

[LondonLax]

I'm not sure I trust that chart, given that it's Heritage Foundation and that we don't know the research methodology.

There is also good reason to doubt the veracity of the rankings, for example Australia has a hefty (and pretty unpopular, I think) mining tax as well as socialised healthcare (which can be seen as interference with the free-market healthcare industry).

Singapore has subsidised public hospitals and a government-controlled company (Temasek Holdings) that makes overseas investments on behalf of the government. On top of that, we have a litany of very exorbitant taxes, from cars to alcohol to cigarette ones. Also, the vast majority of our schools are public (although there's a huge private tuition industry - however, those are used as supplements to public education and are not meant to supplant them), and 85% of us live in public housing (although granted, "public housing" here is heavily subject to free-market forces as well - we are allowed to buy and sell "public" apartments, albeit with restrictions)

Australia has a healthcare safety net but nothing like the UK's NHS for example. The basic heath care is called medicare and the government will give you some cash back on treatment under it but it still costs money to use, it's not free. Most people use private heath care if they have a reasonable income.

[legov]

Australia has a healthcare safety net but nothing like the UK's NHS for example. The basic heath care is called medicare and the government will give you some cash back on treatment under it but it still costs money to use, it's not free. Most people use private heath care if they have a reasonable income.

Isn't it compulsory for Australian residents to have health insurance?

Also, given that tax rates are much higher in Australia than in the US, if one considers taxes as an antithesis to free market capitalism, then it would seem odd that Australia is ranked higher on the scale.

[BillyShears]

Apparently the French have the best healthcare system in the world.

[AVFCforever1991]

The Cuban Healthcare isn't to bad either..

[LondonLax]

Isn't it compulsory for Australian residents to have health insurance?

Also, given that tax rates are much higher in Australia than in the US, if one considers taxes as an antithesis to free market capitalism, then it would seem odd that Australia is ranked higher on the scale.

There is a government provided option for heath cover called Medicare. The government takes a levy on peoples income to pay for it and it gives people some cash back when they go for treatment, making health care more affordable. You can get out of the levy by going private and the government will offer a rebate to help poorer people get private cover so it is the encouraged way to go.

With taxes, I don't know the full tax rates for both countries. I think maybe Australia has lower taxes on lower incomes than the US but higher tax on high incomes? Australia also has a 10% VAT (or GST as it's called) on all sales (except basic foods) which the USA doesn't have.

[legov]

Very interesting article on liberals who are dissatisfied with Obama

[mjmooney]

Fail: Anti-Obama teen wants to move to Australia because we have 'Christian, male president'

Kristen Neel praised Australia's "Christian, male president" on Twitter, before copping a barrage of responses and eventually deleting her account. Picture via Twitter

BARACK Obama's "four more years'' victory tweet may have become the most retweeted message of all time, but last night one American teenager's misguided views on Australia were lighting up the twittersphere down under.

Clearly disappointed with the election result, 18-year-old Georgia republican Kristen Neel joined the throngs of American Twitter users claiming they were moving to Australia to escape Obama's presidency.

Unfortunately, she got a few facts wrong.

"I'm moving to Australia, because their president is a Christian and actually supports what he says,'' she tweeted.

Kristen Neel praised Australia's "Christian, male president" on Twitter, before copping a barrage of responses and eventually deleting her account. Picture via Twitter

Neel's tweet quickly went viral as bemused Aussies retweeted it more than 1400 times, many pointing out that Australia actually has an atheist, female Prime Minister.

"Our Prime Minister is a woman, an atheist who lives with a man she hasn't married. I don't think you'd like it here,''tweeted Ian Cuthbertson, TV editor at The Australian.

"I think you meant Antarctica. Move there,'' tweeted @post_rock0.

"Congratulations on being the dumbest person in the world,'' tweeted @Patrickavenell.

Neel's Twitter account has since been disabled.

Neel was just one of dozens of Americans who tweeted that they were moving to Australiain the wake of Obama's win.

Link

[peterms]

Apparently the French have the best healthcare system in the world.

I can't say. But I do know that the French treat health like any other job, which reportedly results in people doing the job because they find it interesting and adequately paid, rather than because they wish to be able to take ownership of privatised sections of what we have publicly funded, and purchase caribbean islands for their holidays. So their doctors are on something closer to average wages, but astonishingly seem no less competent than our own doctors. How odd.

Oh, and you can take mushrooms in to a French chemist and be told if they are safe to eat. Because they've been, like, trained.

[Dr_Pangloss]

That economic freedom list is **** hilarious, the Heritage Foundation are a collection of some very, very stupid people. Anything they produce should not be taken seriously.

[legov]

Yeah Mike, that's the one I was referring to when I posted the pic about Australian "socialism."

[mjmooney]

I have no personal experience of the French healthcare system, but I have at least three friends who do, and they all have nothing but praise for the quality of care.

[BillyShears]

The Doctors are not as well paid as they are here, plus it is a part privatised system. If you earn over a certain limit then you pay 30%, which you insure against. Also, allegedly, if you call an emergency ambulance a Doctor answers the phone and decides if you need an ambulance or not.

[leviramsey]

Reason's Matt Welch on French healthcare

By now I’m accustomed to being the only person in any given room with my particular set of cockamamie politics. But even within the more familiar confines of the libertarian movement, I am an awkward outlier on the topic of the day (and the topic of this issue of reason): health care.

To put it plainly, when free marketers warn that Democratic health care initiatives will make us more “like France,” a big part of me says, “I wish.” It’s not that I think it’s either feasible or advisable for the United States to adopt a single-payer, government-dominated system. But it’s instructive to confront the comparative advantages of one socialist system abroad to sharpen the arguments for more capitalism at home.

For a dozen years now I’ve led a dual life, spending more than 90 percent of my time and money in the U.S. while receiving 90 percent of my health care in my wife’s native France. On a personal level the comparison is no contest: I’ll take the French experience any day. ObamaCare opponents often warn that a new system will lead to long waiting times, mountains of paperwork, and less choice among doctors. Yet on all three of those counts the French system is significantly better, not worse, than what the U.S. has now.

Need a prescription for muscle relaxers, an anti-fungal cream, or a steroid inhaler for temporary lung trouble? In the U.S. you have to fight to get on the appointment schedule of a doctor within your health insurance network (I’ll conservatively put the average wait time at five days), then have him or her scrawl something unintelligible on a slip of paper, which you take to a drugstore to exchange for your medicine. You might pay the doc $40, but then his office sends you a separate bill for the visit, and for an examination, and those bills also go to your insurance company, which sends you an adjustment sheet weeks after the doctor’s office has sent its third payment notice. By the time it’s all sorted out, you’ve probably paid a few hundred dollars to three different entities, without having a clue about how or why any of the prices were set.

In France, by contrast, you walk to the corner pharmacist, get either a prescription or over-the-counter medication right away, shell out a dozen or so euros, and you’re done. If you need a doctor, it’s not hard to get an appointment within a day or three, you make payments for everything (including X-rays) on the spot, and the amounts are routinely less than the co-payments for U.S. doctor visits. I’ve had back X-rays, detailed ear examinations, even minor oral surgery, and never have I paid more than maybe €300 for any one procedure.

And it’s not like the medical professionals in France are chopped liver. In the U.S., my wife had some lumps in her breast dismissed as harmless by a hurried, indifferent doctor at Kaiser Permanente. Eight months later, during our annual Christmas visit in Lyon, one of the best breast surgeons in the country detected that the lumps were growing and removed them.

We know that the horrific amount of third-party gobbledygook in America, the cost insensitivity, and the price randomness are all products of bad policies that market reforms could significantly improve. We know, too, that France’s low retail costs are subsidized by punitively high tax rates that will have to increase unless benefits are cut. If you are rich and sick (or a healthy doctor), you’re likely better off here. But as long as the U.S. remains this ungainly public-private hybrid, with ever-tighter mandates producing ever-fewer consumer choices, the average consumer’s health care experience will probably be more pleasing in France.

What’s more, none of these anecdotes scratches the surface of France’s chief advantage, and the main reason socialized medicine remains a perennial temptation in this country: 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.”

Since 1986 I’ve missed exactly three days of work due to illness. I don’t smoke, I don’t (usually) do drugs or drink to excess, and I eat a pretty healthy diet. I have some back pain now and then from a protruding disc, but nothing too serious. And from 1998 to 2001, when I was a freelancer in the world’s capital of freelancers (Los Angeles), I couldn’t get health insurance.

Kaiser rejected me because I had visited the doctor too many times in the 12 months preceding my application (I filled in the “3-5 times” circle, to reflect the three routine and inexpensive check-ups I’d had in France). Blue Cross rejected me too. There weren’t many other options. Months later, an insurance broker told me I’d ruined my chances by failing to file a written appeal. “You’re basically done in California,” he said. “A rejection is like an arrest—if you don’t contest it, you’re guilty, and it’s on your permanent record.”

It wasn’t as if I wanted or needed to consume much health care then. I was in my early 30s, and I wanted to make sure a catastrophic illness or injury wouldn’t bankrupt my family. When I finally found a freelance-journalist collective that allowed me and my wife to pay $212 a month to hedge against a car accident, it a) refused to cover pregnancies or childbirths at any price and hiked the monthly rate up to $357 after a year. One of the main attractions of moving from freelance status to a full-time job was the ability to affix a stable price on my health insurance.

This is the exact opposite of the direction in which we should be traveling in a global just-in-time economy, with its ideal of entrepreneurial workers breaking free of corporate command and zipping creatively from project to project. Don’t even get me started on the Kafkaesque ordeal of switching jobs without taking any time off, yet going uncovered by anything except COBRA for nearly two months even though both employers used the same health insurance provider. That incident alone cost me thousands of dollars I wouldn’t have paid if I had controlled my own insurance policy.

I’ve now reached the age where I will better appreciate the premium skill level of American doctors and their high-quality equipment and techniques. And in a very real way my family has voted with its feet when it comes to choosing between the two countries. One of France’s worst problems is the rigidity and expense that comes with an extensive welfare state.

But as you look at the health care solutions discussed in this issue, ask yourself an honest question: Are we better off today, in terms of health policy, than we would have been had we acknowledged more loudly 15 years ago that the status quo is quite awful for a large number of Americans? Would we have been better off focusing less on waiting times in Britain, and more on waiting times in the USA? It’s a question I plan to ask my doctor this Christmas. In French.

[TheAuthority]

A friend emailed me this - pretty good and just about sums it up.

Dear Red States,

We're ticked off at your Neanderthal attitudes and politics and we've decided we're leaving.

We in New York intend to form our own country and we're taking the other Blue States with us.

In case you aren't aware that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and the rest of the Northeast.

We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation and especially to the people of the new country of The Enlightened States of America (E.S.A).

To sum up briefly:

You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.

We get stem cell research and the best beaches.

We get Andrew Cuomo and Elizabeth Warren. You get Bobby Jindal and Todd Akin.

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Opry Land.

We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.

We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.

We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs.

You get Alabama.

We get two-thirds of the tax revenue. You get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

With the Blue States in hand we will have firm control of 80% of the country's fresh water, more than 90% of the pineapple and lettuce, 92% of the nation's fresh fruit, 95% of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90% of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the US low sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States you will have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans and their projected health care costs, 92% of all US mosquitoes, nearly 100% of the tornadoes, 90% of the hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

38% of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62% believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44% say that evolution is only a theory, 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61% of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals than we lefties.

We're taking the good weed too. You can have that crap they grow in Mexico.

Sincerely,

Citizen of the Enlightened States of America

[tonyh29]

The Cuban Healthcare isn't to bad either..

I've heard that said quite often .. and yet when I went they don't appear to even have access to basic stuff like paracetamol .. at the hotels the chamber maids will ask you if you have any

[AVFCforever1991]

I've heard that said quite often .. and yet when I went they don't appear to even have access to basic stuff like paracetamol .. at the hotels the chamber maids will ask you if you have any

Must be a myth then, or its changed since they have become less socialist.

[legov]

Hey, a New Yorker!

[Dr_Pangloss]

The US have a great system and it costs them more as a share of GDP than we spend on ours Real value for money.