NDAA 2020: Congress Neglects Its Responsibility Once Again
Christopher A. PrebleThere ’s much to hate in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY2020, which passed out of conference committee late yesterday evening (storyhere,summary in .pdf here). I suspect my colleagues will unpack or attack some of the details, but I ’m generally annoyed by the top line – $738 billion – at a time whenthe annual federal budget deficit surpasses $1 trillion. The utter failure of elected officials in both parties to come to grips with our fiscal catastrophe, and align our overly ambitious strategy with our obvious resource constraints is frustrating in the extreme. If this NDAA...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 10, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Christopher A. Preble Source Type: blogs
War, what is it good for?
Some of my 2 1/2 long-time followers know that I maintained the Today in Iraq and Afghanistan blog for many years. I ' ve set it aside for a while, out of a general feeling of despair. But now I do want to say something about theWaPos ' s publication of the report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. SIGAR reports frequently featured in Today in Iraq and Afghanistan.IG Sopko has been speaking truth to power for many years, mostly exposing the utter failure of development projects. But now he has done a comprehensive assessment of the goals and accomplishments of the United States ' longest war. ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 10, 2019 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan: “The American People Have Constantly Been Lied To.”
John GlaserTheWashington Post has obtained a huge cache of internal government documents containing hundreds of interviews with U.S. officials on the war in Afghanistan. The documents reveal a broadly shared official view that America ’s longest war has been a failure, essentially from the start. Over the years, official assessments of the war were consistently positive, optimistic, hopeful, and confident in the progress being made on the ground. But behind closed doors, official assessments were starkly different.Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes:Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 9, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: John Glaser Source Type: blogs
Another Failure of the War on Drugs
Jeffrey Miron andErin PartinTheWashington Post has just published a deep dive into the war in Afghanistan, including the war on opium. These newly released documents expose in stark terms the dramatic failures of our century-long war on drugs. Of all the aspects of the Afghan quagmire, the war on opium has been among the most indefensibly foolish. Metaphorical wars against inanimate objects (drugs, alcohol, etc.) or vague ideas (crime, poverty, etc.) have an extensive history of failure. Continuing to pursue them is nonsensical at best, and deadly at worst.U.S. opium poppy eradication efforts have cost nearly $9 billion si...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 9, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey Miron, Erin Partin Source Type: blogs
Despite More Staff, CBP Says “No Resources” To Process Asylum Applicants At Ports
David BierCustoms and Border Protection (CBP) has taken a series of unprecedented actions to limit the ability of immigrants to request asylum in the United States. But among its earliest and most consequential decisions was to cap the number of migrants who it would process for asylum at ports of entry. This policy clearlyviolates federal law. More importantly, it forces asylum seekers to remain homeless in squalid and desperate conditions in dangerous Mexico border cities, leading many to cross illegally.The American Immigration Council and Al Otro Ladohave challenged the policy (the government calls it “metering”)...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 5, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: David Bier Source Type: blogs
The Lynne Chou O ’ Keefe Fallacy
By MATTHEW HOLT
Rob Coppedge and Bryony Winn wrote an interesting article in Xconomy yesterday. I told Rob (& the world) on Twitter yesterday that it was good but wrong. Why was it wrong? Well it encompasses something I’m going to call the Lynne Chou O’Keefe Fallacy. And yes, I’ll get to that in a minute. But first. What did Rob and Bryony say?
Having walked the halls and corridors and been deafened by the DJs at HLTH, Rob & Bryony determined why many digital health companies have failed (or will fail) and a few have succeeded. They’ve dubbed the winners “Digital Health Survivors...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 4, 2019 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Health Tech The Business of Health Care BCBS of North Carolina Cambia Health Solutions Define ventures Echo Health Ventures Matthew Holt Source Type: blogs
Walking on Trade Adjusted Eggshells
Logan KolasSince its inception in 1962, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) has been portrayed as a way to help workers affected by trade adjust to a changing economy, but its political objective may be more important than any policy purpose: The program was viewed by many politicians and scholars as a political tool to mute free trade opposition from those with enough political sway to block or slow trade liberalizing efforts. Only by pacifying their objections to trade liberalization would free trade be able to flourish. Unfortunately, if the goal of Trade Adjustment Assistance was to buy support for trade, it has failed t...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 2, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Logan Kolas Source Type: blogs
Even Bret Stephens has had enough
Foreword:It is a fact that Donald J. Trump is a criminal, a racist, a malignant narcissist, a pathological liar, delusional, authoritarian, a sadistic psychopath, and an existential threat to democracy and for that matter to human civilization. There is no possibility of intellectually respectable dispute about any of that. Therefore we do not allow any such discussion here just as we do not allow argumentation about the shape of the earth, whether vaccines cause autism, or whether human-caused carbon emissions are causing the climate to change. This space is reality-based. And if you don ' t believe all that about the Res...
Source: Stayin' Alive - November 25, 2019 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Medicaid Improper Payments are Much Worse Than Reported
Aaron Yelowitz andBrian BlaseEarlier this week, Centers for Medicare& Medicaid Services (CMS)raised its estimate of Medicaid ’s improper payments from $36 billion (9.8 percent of federal Medicaid expenditures) to $57 billion (14.9 percent of federal Medicaid expenditures). Actually, the situation is far worse than these estimates suggest. As we discussed in a Wall Street Journalop-ed after the numbers were released, Medicaid ’s improper payments now almost certainly exceed $75 billion – or more than 20 percent of federal Medicaid expenditures.This year ’s report shows not only a significant increase in CMS’s esti...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 20, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Aaron Yelowitz, Brian Blase Source Type: blogs
The Worst Crime
Not obstructing justice, not holding up military aid to Ukraine to force the country to gin up a smear of the Biden family, not profiting from the office, not condoning the murder of a Saudi journalist, not even inciting racist violence or anything else but this:Denying the reality of anthropogenic climate change and doing everything possible to reverse Obama era action to combat it.More than 11,000 climate scientists from all over the world have signed on to this article in Bioscience, a peer-reviewed publication of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. Yeah yeah, I know, all 11,000 of them are in on the hoax for...
Source: Stayin' Alive - November 5, 2019 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
HHS Moves To Lift LGBT-Bias Funding Strings
Walter OlsonOn Friday, the Department of Health and Human Servicesproposed to rescind some regulations issued in the final days of the Obama administration that required recipients of HHS program funds to observe nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.The move, which now enters a public comment period, is beingcovered in thepress as an issue of religious accommodation: should church-affiliated agencies be allowed to participate in federally funded adoption and foster care placements even if they decline to serve same-sex couples as clients? And that is indeed one of the hotly contested iss...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 4, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Walter Olson Source Type: blogs
Bipartisan Bill Increases Legal Migration & Legalizes Farmworkers
David BierA bipartisan group of about 50 House members, equally divided between both parties, introduced legislation today that expands both permanent and temporary migration for agriculture, while legalizing illegal farmworkers. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act will be the most significant effort to reform legal immigration since the 2013 comprehensive reform bill in the Senate, and it will likely pass the House on a broad bipartisan vote before Thanksgiving. This legislation will significantly reduce the illegal market in farm labor and provide reliable a legal supply for workers for farms going forward.The legislati...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 30, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: David Bier Source Type: blogs
Section 8 Landlording Shouldn ’t Be Mandatory
Walter OlsonLast year I wrote:In principle, the federal housing-voucher program known as Section 8 ought to win points as a market-oriented alternative to the old command-and-control approach of planning and constructing public housing projects. While allowing recipients wider choice about where to live, it has also enabled private landlords to decide whether to participate and, if so, what mix of voucher-holding and conventionally paying tenants makes the most sense for a location ….For landlords, participation in the program has long carried with it some significant burdens of inspection, certification, and reporting p...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 29, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Walter Olson Source Type: blogs
Body Positivity: The Lizzo Effect
Unless you have been living in a cave, chances are you have heard of bold, brazen and bodacious hip hop artist Lizzo (a.k.a. Melissa Jefferson), who hails from Detroit, Michigan. Her musical journey took her to Houston to study classical flute and then to Minneapolis where Prince gave her a boost by having her record on one of his albums. She has skyrocketed to the top of the charts and inspires people to live with passion.
In a recent interview on the NPR show Fresh Air, Terry Gross discussed the artist’s lean toward body positivity. As a woman of size, Lizzo quite emphatically talks about how she grew to be comfortable...
Source: World of Psychology - October 27, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Edie Weinstein, MSW, LSW Tags: Eating Disorders Exercise & Fitness Health-related Personal body acceptance Body dysmorphia body positivity Source Type: blogs
Regarding the Tragedy in Northern Syria and the Need to Revisit U.S. Security Commitments
Christopher A. Preble andDoug BandowPresident Trump ' s decision to give a de facto green light to a Turkish invasion of northern Syria continues to engender understandable criticism. Lost amidst this furor are several relevant facts: the modest U.S. military presence was inadequate to achieve any of the very ambitious objectives that the missions ' supporters imagined it could. Aswe wrote elsewhere, these troops were not going to " force Assad to yield, ensure free elections, limit Russian influence, oust Iranian forces, prevent an Islamic State revival, or protect the Kurds. "A separate point concerns the conflicts and c...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 23, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Christopher A. Preble, Doug Bandow Source Type: blogs
