25th Amendment Still Not the Right Response to a Mentally Ill Trump
By MIKE MAGEE
On May 16, 2017 New York Times conservative columnist, Russ Douthat, wrote “The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump.”
That column was the starting point for a Spring course I taught on the 25th Amendment at the President’s College in Hartford, CT. I will not summarize the entire course here, but would like to emphasize four points:
The American public was adequately warned (now 7 years ago) of the risk that Trump represented to our nation and our democracy.
Douthat’s piece triggered a journalistic debate which I summarize below with four slides drawn from my lectures.
...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 8, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy 25th Amendment Mike Magee Trump Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: WTF?
Psalm 40 is an otherwise anodyne song of thanksgiving, but it makes the startling assertion in Verse 6 that God does not require animal sacrifices or burnt offerings. Since this was purportedly written by David (it wasn ' t, but still) that would demolish the main premise of the Book of Samuel, the Torah, and the rationale for the Temple and the Levite priesthood. No doubt there are apologists who try to explain this. Psalm 41 is more of the paranoia and whining we say in Psalm 38. It seems likely it was written by the same person in the same circumstances.40 I waited patiently for theLord;he inclined to me and h...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 7, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm Chapter Two, continued: The Death Spiral
It ' s been a few days since the last post in this series, so I ' ll remind you that last time, we posed the question, " What would happen if insurers were simply required to cover people for pre-existing conditions? " Problem solved, right? No. Problem made worse. Imagine what would happen. All of a
sudden a whole lot of people with serious chronic diseases, who couldn ’t get
health insurance before, will buy it now. They’re expensive to cover, so the
premiums will go up for everybody. At that point some number of people who
don’t need it quite as badly will drop their coverage, leaving only sicker
people in th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 5, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Misery
In psalms 38 and 39, the singer -- purportedly David -- is suffering from some very unpleasant disease. Of course, back then they believed that diseases were punishments by God, and so the psalmist believes. Although the attribution of these psalms to David is fictitious, it would not be surprising if he had some sort of sexually transmitted disease, assuming he actually existed and 1/10th of the stories about him are true. Anyway . . . The reference in the introduction to psalm 39, "To the choirmaster: to Jeduthun " is to 1 Chronicles 16, in which David establishes the tradition of musical performance bef...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 3, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Regarding the previous post on oligarchy . . .
I published a comment on it but I want to address it here. Obviously manufacturers moved their operations overseas in search of cheap labor and lax or non-existent environmental and safety regulations so they could make their products more cheaply, and yes, that made many products cheaper for consumers. WalMart is particularly known for squeezing manufacturers to lower prices and hence encouraging this dynamic. Americans as consumers benefited, Americans as workers lost out. As it turns out, the net result was losses for people with less education, as those manufacturing jobs -- often unionized -- that enabled blue collar ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 1, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm continued: What's this pre-existing conditions deal?
Since I interrupted this series, I will remind you that previously, we discussed the problem of adverse selection -- that people who are unhealthy are more likely to buy health insurance in a hypothetical Free Market. ™ But sellers of health insurance must find ways of predicting
and limiting their losses. The problem of adverse selection would not exist if
we had a universal system, as all other wealthy countries and some
not-so-wealthy do. Everybody would pay into the system, preferably according to
their mea ns. That way people who are healthy today subsidize the costs for
people who are not. If that strikes you as un...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 1, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The Just World Fallacy
The " just world fallacy " or illusion is a cognitive bias that assumes the consequences of actions are morally determined -- that people ultimately get what they deserve based on the rightness of their actions. Psalms 36 and 37 are among many that express this fallacy as fact. Indeed, the just world fallacy is central to most religions -- God rewards the righteous and faithful, and punishes the wicked and impious. Of course this is not true. Note verse 11 of Psalm 37, which the RSV translates as " The meek shall possess the land. " KJV translates this as " The meek shall inherit the earth, " and I suspect that ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 31, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Digression -- an important economic fact
I commend to your attentionJeffrey A. Winters in The American Interest, with the essential truth about our present historical moment, that gets obscured in the deliberate distractions thrown up by politicians and journalists who would rather make us think and talk about something else. Pull quote:Despite polls consistently showing that large majorities favor
increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, policy has been moving for
decades in the opposite direction. Reduced taxes on the ultra-rich and
the corporations and banks they dominate have shifted fiscal burdens
downward even as they have strained the government ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 30, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Unmasking the profit-driven influence on American health care decisions
The practice of medicine has been significantly enhanced by advancing technology. However, even with four years of medical school and an MD degree, this only provides the foundation for what is needed to be a good doctor. A critically important skill is the ability to make sound medical decisions. This is why there is a
Read more…
Unmasking the profit-driven influence on American health care decisions originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - December 30, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: Gene Uzawa Dorio, MD Tags: Physician Radiology Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm Chapter Two, continued: " Insurance "
Health insurance – again I’m using
the term because everybody else does, not because I think it’s accurate – can
work in many ways. One of the most important broad dimensions is how the
benefit gets delivered. ·Indemnity
plans are the most like fire insurance. They pay money when the beneficiary
incurs medical expenses. (The money could be paid to the beneficiary, or
directly to the provider. That doesn ’t much matter.)·Service
benefit plans have negotiated arrangements with providers to pay them a
certain amount for a given service, when it is provided.·Service
delivery plans actually provide the s...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 28, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: I am your retribution
Psalm 35 is one of many in which the petitioner calls on God to harm or destroy his enemies.SAB has provided a helpful list:Ask the angel of the Lord to persecute them by making their paths dark and slippery.
Let their way be dark and slippery: and let the angel of the LORD
persecute them. ... Let destruction come upon him at unawares.Psalm 35:6-8
Ask God to kill them and send them quickly to hell.Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell.Psalm 55:15
Ask him to break their teeth (in their mouths) and then cut them in pieces.Break their teeth, O God...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 27, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm Chapter Two, continued: Medical externalities
I ' ve had a request to say more about inflation. That ' s a bit off topic for the time being, but I ' ll get to it.Medicine is also unlike most other goods and services in the
extent to which it has important positive externalities – that is, benefits for
people outside of the transaction, who are not the providers or consumers. (Of
course it has negative externalities as well, including carbon emissions and
notably, a huge quantity of plastic waste.) A straightforward positive
externality is infectious disease control. Prev enting or curing infectious diseases
prevents them from being transmitted to others. This ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 26, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: What's in a name?
Psalm 34 requires some explanation, and it ' s a bit complicated. The name Abimelech appears in the Book of Judges, set long before the putative time of David. However, the word means " father of the king, " and presumably must refer to Achish, king of Gath, and the story told in 1 Samuel 21. As you probably won ' t recall, because we read it a long time ago, David learned via his lover Jonathan that king Saul intended to kill him, so he fled to Nob. As a further complication, he met a priest there named Ahimelek, so it is conceivable that this confused the scribe. David lied to Ahimelek and said that Saul had sent him on ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 24, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm Chapter Two: Medical Economics
You hear all the time politicians and pundits saying that we should let the Free Market ™ work in health care, that Free Market™ solutions are the best. But it should be
obvious that Medicine exists in a world even less like Economics 101 than most
industries. To begin with, while our basic needs for food, clothing and shelter
are predictable and roughly similar for everyone, our n eed for medical services
is largely unpredictable, and it varies radically from person to person and
time to time. Some people go for decades without really needing any at all,
although there are some preventive measures or screening tests t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 23, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm: Lesson four
I will interrupt myself here to note that yes, there are people who are pursuing economics as an empirical science, and they have indeed demonstrated that the so-called neo-classical economic theory as taught to first-year college students is not a description of the real world. My point in this presentation is that many people, including journalists and politicians, believe that it is. This pernicious falsehood horribly contaminates public discourse. So yes, it does require debunking. There are a couple of additional problems with the concept of the free market that don ’t stem directly from the faulty assumptions....
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 22, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
