Federal spending
A commenter asked about historic federal spending. The meaningful comparison is spending as a percentage of GDP, so here it is. As you can see it spiked during WWII, obviously, then came down and tended to ascend slowly until 1982, when it leveled off, then it fell from 1990 to 1998, during the administration of Bill Clinton. It rose sharply during the administration of George W. Bush, and then fell again under Barack Obama after a brief spike due to the financial crisis. It then rose sharply under Donald Trump, and has come back down just as sharply under Joe Biden. Right now it is higher than it has been since the e...
Source: Stayin' Alive - October 4, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The last bumper sticker: The Sacred Text
Okay, we ' ve finally come to the end of this tedious exercise. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history. Again, I ' m not sure what the political point is supposed to be here. As far as I know the only people who want to repeal the Constitution are conservative Republicans, notably the followers of Donald J. Trump. But as a liberal of the non-neo variety, I do take issue with the statement.For some reason Americans are inclined to see the Constitution as equivalent to holy scripture. It ' s the infallible word...
Source: Stayin' Alive - September 11, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The One Question FOX News Moderators Should Ask Tonight
This article was published a week after the Republican Party Primary debate
BY MIKE MAGEE
This evening, the Republican Party will sponsor their first Primary Debate. It will be historic in featuring the absence of their lead contender for the 2024 Presidential campaign, a candidate who appears committed to the destruction of their own political party
Events over the past year clearly have confirmed that we are a “work in progress” even as we stubbornly affirm our good intentions to create a society committed to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
With the Dobbs’ decision, our Supreme C...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 30, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Non-Health Dobbs Mike Magee Republican Primary Source Type: blogs
God bothering
I thought our commenter ' s list of reasons, via Vivek Ramaswany, why people would want to vote Republican was interesting, and possibly largely correct -- or at least it reflects the surface of how Republican candidates and pundits talk, although I think it probably doesn ' t represent all of the underlying reasons. Anyway, it gives me an agenda, so I ' m going to take the assertions one by one, starting with this one:God is real. While there is no doubt that religion, or professed religion, is a motivator for Republican voters, there obviously has to be a lot more to it than just the assertion that God is real. Joe Biden...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 24, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
A couple of thoughts
I presume my Friday post was put behind the wall of protection because it contained a naughty word, but I must say I ' ve used naughty words before without that happening. This seems to be a sign of the times. Previously I had mused about the cult of Trumpism, and I got a comment to the effect that people turned to Trump because they had lost faith in government after being lied to repeatedly over the years. Since Trump never says a single word that isn ' t a lie, that seemed like a strange argument so I asked for examples and the ones I got were so ridiculous I couldn ' t publish them. They even included examples of ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 20, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Five alarms
The U.S. corporate media have extensively covered the Maui wildfire, they have mentioned the fires in the Northwest Territories and particularly Yellowknife, but there are immense fires burning all around the northern hemisphere that they barely mention. That they areignoring the fires in British Columbia seems particularly strange, since the province borders the U.S. and areas of large population are threatened. There is also amassive fire on Tenerife, andfires on the Spanish mainland.The earth has changed, and the change is building on itself and accelerating. We can ' t stop it but we absolutely must slow it down,...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 18, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
THCB 20th Birthday classics: A Brief History of Price Controls by Annoyed Republican Administrations
By UWE REINHARDT
One of the greatest pleasures of running THCB has been to get to know and host the writings of some of my health policy heroes. This week I have already published work from Jeff Goldsmith, and Ian Morrison & Michael Millenson among others will be featured next week (as the party won’t quite stop). Perhaps one of the most amazing things was that the doyen of health economists, Uwe Reinhardt, offered to write some original pieces for THCB…prodded by former editor John Irvine. This is one of my favorites, riffing on a talk I heard him give in (I think) 1993 about how HCFA was like the Kreml...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 18, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Price controls Uwe Reinhardt Source Type: blogs
Academics Weigh In On How To Bring Down Trump
By MIKE MAGEE
This week, as a fourth indictment came due, a tragic Donald Trump headed back to social media, digging himself into a hole that will eventually lead to some personal hell. But before Donald Trump, there was William Frederick Kohler.
He made his appearance on the American stage on February 28, 1995, an historian who had just completed his “Great Work” – The Guilt and Innocence of Hitler’s Germany. He was odd and dark and duplicitous. His life’s work was ready to go. All that was left was to write the introduction to his book. Instead his attention was diverted, as he followed his impulse to...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 18, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Mike Magee Trump Source Type: blogs
Journalistic norms
Here ' s Paul Campos commenting on a Peter Baker view from nowhere piece in the NYT. Key Baker quote: " Yet most Americans made up their minds about Mr. Trump long before prosecutors likeFani T. Willis orJack Smith weighed in, polls have shown.He
is, depending on the perspective, a serial lawbreaker finally being
brought to justice or a victim of persecution by partisans intent on
keeping him out of office. " I do have a few reflections of my own on the very weird place in which we find ourselves. First, given the presumption of innocence that is fundamental to the criminal justice system, journalists and the...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 15, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Naive Realism and the Legal Profession
By MIKE MAGEE
In 2002, psychologist Emily Pronin and her co-authors, in an article titled, You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight, laid out the concept of “Naive Realism.”
As she explained, “We insist that our ‘outsider perspective’ affords us insights about our peers that they are denied by their defensiveness, egocentricity, or other sources of bias. By contrast, we rarely entertain the notion that others are seeing us more clearly and objectively than we see ourselves. (We) talk when we would do well to listen…” Point well taken, but these (most would agree) are tryin...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 9, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Jan 6 Lawyers Mike Magee Trump Source Type: blogs
Republican Misbehavior Promoted Health Professional Activism
By MIKE MAGEE
If you wanted to create a motto for the summer of 2023 – one that would stand the test of time from the medical exam room of Ohio to the gilded bathroom of Mar-a-lago – it would have to be Jack Smith’s “Facts matter!” If that is true on a national scale, it is equally true in states across the nation where doctors increasingly are coming out from behind a self-imposed clinical curtain and going public.
As reported in ProPublica last week, “Doctors who previously never mixed work with politics are jumping into the abortion debate by lobbying state lawmakers, campaigning, forming polit...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 2, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Abortion Activism health care providers Mike Magee Physicians Trump Source Type: blogs
Trump's Higher Impunity Revisited
(Source: Health Care Renewal)
Source: Health Care Renewal - July 29, 2023 Category: Health Management Tags: Donald Trump health care corruption impunity threats to democracy Source Type: blogs
Hey, indeedy
Remember Jack Texeira, the Air National Guard member who was sharing top secret documents with his neo-Nazi friends on social media? His lawyers want him released pending trial, and they actually have a point, although it ' sprobably the opposite of the point they intended to make.In court papers, the defense attorneys argued that Teixeira has no
financial ability or incentive to flee, and claimed the government “greatly overexaggerates Mr. Teixeira’s risk to national security.”
Teixeira’s lawyers noted that prosecutors did not seek to detain Trump —
or his co-defendant, Walt Nauta — even though the fo...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 18, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
“Sons of Liberty” Flea Into King George’s (or Donald’s) Open Arms.
BY MIKE MAGEE
If there is a silver lining to the Trump assault on decency and civility, it is our majority response to this “stress test” of our Democracy, and the sturdiness (thus far) of our Founders’ vision.
It was, after all, a long shot when Alexander Hamilton, under the pen name Publius, published Federalist No. 1 on October 27, 1787, writing: “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflec...
Source: The Health Care Blog - June 29, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Donald Trump Mike Magee Roe v. Wade Source Type: blogs
The Charges against Donald Trump
Walter OlsonTheindictment itself is clear, well organized, and not too long. You should read the whole thing if you aim to be informed about this important moment in American history.A few observations:Trump didn ’t get charged with illegal possession over the 197 documents he gave back to the Archives voluntarily. That matches up with how Biden and Pencewere treated after retaining some documents. Give back when asked = no rap, at least for officials at this level. Trump is facing charges because he chose to lie to the feds and hide documents.A substantial portion of the indictment lays out the reasons to think that lyi...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 14, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Walter Olson Source Type: blogs
