For the Record

House call

"You have a very beautiful ceiling here", said the cheerful man with the thick black valise -- "are you artists?". My doctor had arrived, Trotsky-style wire rims on his shiny plump face. His outfit had been carefully assembled. The wide wale cords, argyle v-neck, tightly checked jacket, and camel flat cap in tans with accents of rose blended post-Habsburg delicacy with late-evening early autumn travelling professional practicality. 

He retrodicted the work on my meniscus (the bit player in a show where the ACL had been the hero) on the basis of the vast exoskeleton on my leg, and gave me leave to loosen it when awake; examined the level of swelling on my foot and calf, explained its source, and pronounced it unproblematic; suggested I continuously wiggle my toes to keep the pumps running; assured me that the freshly-noticed hideous bruise on my left hand was not the result of the hideous "it" spreading to novel sites but rather most likely of the IV (the pinprick in the middle contributed evidence); complimented Jess on the subtly flowing curve of the cushions raising my leg above my heart; and exchanged a bit of flattery (sartorial/interior); in the span of five minutes.

I am pleased to announce that I do not expect to suffer a battery of rotting diseases, resulting in multiple amputations; nor will I undergo a heart attack in the near future; nor will it be necessary to return to Birchmount and Finch to re-attach a graft which has pulled away. Instead, I will sleep with a limpid consciousness.

Rising income inequality in Canada

Read all about it:

It turns out that the growth in the share of income among the richest of Canadians is actually concentrated right at the top — among Canada's richest.

The share of personal income for the richest 5 percent of Canadians was stable from 1982 to 1992 — they took about 21 percent of Canada's total income pie.

But between 1992 and 2004, their share grew to 25.3 percent of the income pie.

That doesn't sound like much, but that's a 4.3 percentage point increase in the share of all income earned in Canada, in a statistic that usually doesn't change much.

And it turns out the higher the income scale you go, the more money the richest of Canadians made: More than 90 percent of the gain in income share among the richest 5 percent went to the richest 1 percent of Canadians. Half of that gain went to the richest 0.1 percent. And remarkably, 20 percent of the gain went to the richest of the rich, the millionaires sitting in the top 0.01 percent of Canada's income scale.

Now here's where the dots line up. The Statistics Canada study also looked at the effective tax rates paid by individual Canadians in each income group.

It found that the average effective tax rate declined by about one percentage point for 95 percent of Canadians between 1992 and 2004.

The average effective tax rate for the top 5 percent declined by about two percentage points.

But the effective tax rate for the richest of the rich dropped dramatically.

The top 0.01 percent, the millionaires sitting at the top of the heap, enjoyed an average effective tax rate drop of 11 percentage points.

What the Statistics Canada study tells us is that between 1992 and 2004, Canada's income tax system ceased to be progressive for the richest 5 percent of tax filers.

And what about the rest of us? For almost a decade, our provincial and federal governments have been talking tax cuts, but those cuts went into the pockets of the richest of the rich. And that tax break only bolstered the unprecedented growth in the share of income going to Canada's richest.

George Bush is an idiot

For the record, George Bush is an idiot.   Not just an idiot---the kind you feel sorry for---but a complete and unabashed idiot---the kind you rightly despise.

"My job is a decision-making job. And as a result, I make a lot of decisions," the president said.

He elaborated on that point later.

"I delegate to good people. I always tell Condi Rice, `I want to remind you, Madam Secretary, who has the Ph.D. and who was the C student. And I want to remind you who the adviser is and who the president is.'

I got a lot of Ph.D.-types and smart people around me who come into the Oval Office and say, `Mr. President, here's what's on my mind.' And I listen carefully to their advice. But having gathered the device (sic), I decide, you know, I say, `This is what we're going to do.' And it's `Yes, sir, Mr. President.' And then we get after it, implement policy."

Astonishing.   A complete, unabashed idiot of the magnitude of George Bush is---get this---president of the U.S.  Even ignoring all the destruction and devastation he and his fellow right-wingers have wrought on the U.S. and any country or people in their sights, the fact that---by whatever hook and crook---such a complete, unabashed idiot became president of the U.S. is itself enough to establish that the U.S. has entered its period of ultimate decline and fall.

And who are the compliciters saying "Yes, sir, Mr. President" to this complete, unabashed idiot?

Where did all the good people go?

Socialized health-care: what U.S.-ers are missing

We've spoken here before about our positive experiences with Canada's single-payer regional healthcare system.  The only complaint about the system that has been confirmed is that certain elective surgical procedures (e.g., ACL repair) require waiting times that all agree are too long; but even here concrete efforts are underway (see, e.g., here) to rectify the situation. 

Meanwhile, wait times for elective surgeries are the least of the concerns of several of my friends and family back in the States.  Some have gone for years with no insurance (a few of the 47 million), unable to afford either premiums or needed treatment for ailments considerably worse than an ACL tear, but making too much to qualify for Medicaid; some have stayed in jobs they hated primarily in order to retain insurance covering a preexisting condition; one spent months on endless paperwork fighting against company goons whose primary job was evidently to find ways of denying rightful claims.  Relatedly, health insurance is no defense against debilitating medical debt:

A recent study by Harvard University researchers found that the average out-of-pocket medical debt for those who filed for bankruptcy was $12,000. The study noted that 68 percent of those who filed for bankruptcy had health insurance. In addition, the study found that 50 percent of all bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses (14). Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem.

In retrospect it was crazy to think that a for-profit system would result in efficient, humane, high-quality care.  But who knew that it would be as bad as it is?  And who knew that socialized single-payer systems would be as good as they are?  In any case, the evidence has long been in, and continues to be confirmed by countless stories (see, for example, this story and comment thread).  So why does the U.S. continue along the clearly worse path?  In this fascinating article Jill Quadagno discusses the history (1945-1996) of efforts to implement national health care in the U.S., and argues that U.S.ers have powerful stakeholder groups---notably, the AMA and private insurance organizations---to thank:

The United States is the only western industrialized nation that fails to provide universal coverage and the only nation where health care for the majority of the population is financed by for-profit, minimally regulated private insurance companies. These arrangements leave one-sixth of the population uninsured at any given time, and they leave others at risk of losing insurance as a result of normal life course events. Political theorists of the welfare state usually attribute the failure of national health insurance in the United States to broader forces of American political development, but they ignore the distinctive character of the health care financing arrangements that do exist. Medical sociologists emphasize the way that physicians parlayed their professional expertise into legal, institutional, and economic power but not the way this power was asserted in the political arena. This paper proposes a theory of stakeholder mobilization as the primary obstacle to national health insurance. The evidence supports the argument that powerful stakeholder groups, first the American Medical Association, then organizations of insurance companies and employer groups, have been able to defeat every effort to enact national health insurance across an entire century because they had superior resources and an organizational structure that closely mirrored the federated arrangements of the American state. The exception occurred when the AFL-CIO, with its national leadership, state federations and union locals, mobilized on behalf of Medicare.

Of course, it's not exactly news that powerful lobbies have been at work here.  But the details are new (to me) and very illuminating: how physicians desiring professional autonomy teamed up with hospitals and insurance companies just long enough to shoot themselves in the foot; how post-war anti-Communist/Socialist propaganda led unions---the natural pro-single-payer lobby---to give up the fight for national health care and instead focus on fringe benefits; how the focus on benefits in turn led to the AFL/CIO's successfully lobbying for Medicare (basically, so they wouldn't have to worry about negotiating benefits for retirees); and much more.

A friend was asking the other day why someone should favor Edwards over Clinton or Obama for the Democratic nomination.  That powerful medical stakeholder groups are the primary barrier to socialized national health care in the U.S. provides one very good reason; for Edwards is a former trial lawyer who was brilliantly capable in putting these very sorts of groups in their place (see here for some illustrations).  That said, while Edwards advocates universal health care his proposal is a hodge-podge of measures still taken within the for-profit framework... a far cry from the single-payer proposal Ted Kennedy introduced in 1971.  Too bad!

Canadians at it again

Not content to interfere with the internal affairs of the US, now they're messing with Italy:

 

The votes of 40,000 Canadian citizens who qualify as "Italians abroad," some of whom have never set foot in Italy and many of whom don't speak Italian, played a pivotal role in the defeat of billionaire Silvio Berlusconi in Italy's election yesterday, according to poll results released late last night.

 

For the first time in history, a country's political fate appears to have been determined by citizens of other countries, after Mr. Berlusconi introduced a scheme in 2002 that defines eligible Italian voters by blood lines rather than residency.

Canadian SSHRC application denied on partial grounds that "assumption of evolution" not justified

No, I'm not kidding:

A Canadian federal agency has denied funding to a science-education researcher partly because of its doubts about the theory of evolution.

Brian Alters, director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University in Montreal, had proposed a study of the effects of the popularization of intelligent design — the idea that an intelligent creator shaped life — on Canadian students, teachers, parents, administrators and policy-makers.

More precisely, the project, titled Detrimental effects of popularizing anti-evolution's "intelligent design theory" on Canadian students, teachers, parents, administrators and policymakers, aims to study how the rising popularity in the United States of Intelligent Design  (or as I prefer to think of it: Mysterious Interference) is eroding acceptance of evolutionary science in Canada.  UPDATE: From the proposal:

The purpose of this study is to measure the extent to which the recent large-scale popularization of Intelligent Design is detrimentally affecting Canadians’ teaching and learning of biological evolution at high school, university, and educational administration.  If, as suspected, this proposed study results in measurements data that indicate a significant disadvantageous interaction, we would then develop a proposal to other funding programs with the aim of researching, designing, and implementing pedagogical techniques to counteract the detrimental effects of Intelligent Design. 

Alters's project was rejected by a committee (largely composed of "expert" non-scientists), who pronounced as follows on the proposal:

The committee found that the candidates were qualified. However, it judged the proposal did not adequately substantiate the premise that the popularization of Intelligent Design Theory had detrimental effects on Canadian students,teachers, parents and policy makers. Nor did the committee consider that there was adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of Evolution, and not Intelligent Design theory, was correct. It was not convinced, therefore, that research based on these assumptions would yield objective results. In addition, the committee found that the research plans were insufficiently elaborated to allow for an informed evaluation of their merit. In view of its reservations the committee recommended that no award be made.

Wow.  One rarely sees, even in early undergraduate papers, such suicidal argumentation. Besides the "insufficiently elaborated" research plans, there are two stated reasons for rejection. The first appears to be that the proposal doesn't establish the conclusion of the not-yet-conducted study... presumably not reasonable grounds for rejection.

But supposing some evidence of such detrimental impact is needed, then wonderfully, the review provides it, via the second reason for rejection, concerning Alters's not having sufficiently justified the assumption that evolution rather than Intelligent Design is correct.

Thus the stated reasons for the project's rejection stand as good reasons for its acceptance!  Clearly Alters should resubmit, including the committee's review as part of his proposal.

SSHRC officials are being strangely cagey about this issue:

Janet Halliwell, the SSHRC's executive vice-president and a chemist by training, acknowledged that the "framing" of the committee's comments to Alters left the letter "open to misinterpretation."

Halliwell said confidentiality obligations made it difficult for her to discuss Alters's case in detail, but she argued that the professor had taken one line in the letter "out of context" and the rejection of his application should not indicate that SSHRC was expressing "doubts about the theory of evolution."

These remarks do not serve to comfort.  To say that SSHRC is not expressing "doubts" is not the same as saying that it endorses evolution as scientific fact.  Maybe SSHRC isn't expressing "doubts" about intelligent design either.  And indeed, Halliwell goes on:

However, Halliwell added there are phenomena that "may not be easily explained by current theories of evolution" and that the scientific world's understanding of life "is not static. There's an evolution in the theory of evolution."

What does the fact that there are phenomena that "may not be easily explained by current theories of evolution" have to do with whether---as the committee's review clearly states---applicants need to justify that evolution, as opposed to Mysterious Interference, is correct?  That's a big 'ol non-sequitur, Halliwell. 

Moreover, as David Guttman (who among other honors is a Canada Research Chair in Comparative Genomics and Director of the U of T Centre for the Analysis of Genome Evolution & Function) notes in a letter to Stan Shapson, the president of SSHRC (email Shapson here), there is no substance to Halliwell's claim that the remark about evolution is being "taken out of context":

Dear Dr. Shapson,

I was extremely distressed to learn of the alarming statement coming out of SSHRC concerning the relative scientific merit of evolutionary biology vs. intelligent design. Although I will not be so presumptuous as to claim to be qualified to evaluate Dr. Alters’ grant proposal, I am certainly qualified to evaluate the statements made by the grant review committee. The statement, “Nor did the committee consider that there was adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of Evolution, and not Intelligent Design theory, was correct” is simply egregious and outrageous. Obviously, the committee itself harbors a narrow-minded fundamentalist with a political agenda, or it has been swayed by a reviewer with such an agenda. Either way it is entirely unacceptable.

There is clearly a problem when a major federal granting agency demands that scientists prove the validity of evolution as part of their proposals. Evolution is the single most important unifying principle in biology. It is a well established fact, supported by thousands of peer reviewed studies. Any respectable scientist knows this. Either this SSHRC committee knows something that the rest of us don’t, or perhaps the quality of their work needs to be reevaluated.

Let’s make it clear that this is not about the funding of Dr. Alters’ proposal.  This is about the position taken by your review panel in the evolution v. intelligent design debate. The justifications coming out of SSHRC for these statements are simply laughable. Janet Halliwell’s claim that the "framing" of the committee's comments left the letter "open to misinterpretation." is ridiculous. Nothing that I or other scientists are objecting to has been taken out of context. [Guttman then quotes the comments from the review panel in their entirety, as per above.]

Guttman goes on to note:

Clearly SSHRC has a serious problem to deal with. This story will reverberate in the international press for a long time to come and permanently tarnish the reputation of SSHRC. Unfortunately, it may also bring disrepute to all of Canadian Science.

No kidding.  Thankfully, McGill has protested the decision:

Jennifer Robinson, associate vice-principal for communications at McGill, says the university will ask the council to review its decision. "In our view it is a factual error," she says. "The theory of evolution is a well-established science, and intelligent design is a religious belief.

For the moment reason largely reigns in Canada.   But for how long?  The dogs of capitalism are already peeing on every corner up here.  Now here come the fundamentalists.   What I would give for some really intelligent design.

Oh great ...

[Cross-posted at the Leiter Reports]

... I just can't seem to shake these damn tories!

As you may have heard by now, the Conservative Party just "won" the national election in Canada. In more concrete terms, the CP now holds 124 of the seats in Canada's 308-seat House of Commons, up from 99. The old plurality party, the Liberals, dropped from 135 to 103. The balance of the seats are held by the Bloc Quebecois (51, down from 54), and the New Democratic Party (up from 19 to 29).

Conrad Black's soft right-wing national newspaper National Post -- which published on the op-ed page a few months back (sorry, no link) a big excerpt from a book arguing that Canada is well-behind the US in its spawning of a vast right-wing noise machine, and needs to get on the stick in following Lewis Powell's sage advice (yeah great idea guys) -- is gloating that the victory is "historic", and results from Conservative leader Stephen Harper's "coherent vision for the country" (so far as I can tell, this coherent vision consists of a very large number of policies, some less nannyish, others more nannyish than those favored by the Libs -- track road congestion anyone? how about a 16% tax credit for using transit, or investigate the decline in sockeye salmon, or preserve the National Film Board, or donate $140M to amateur sport? The picture is rapidly coming into focus, and the Post is right, it has the coherence of a photograph of the Parthenon). They also threaten us with the following: "Under the Liberals, it seemed the dream of smaller government grew more distant with every passing year. Thanks to Mr. Harper, it has returned."

Even more terrifying is this:

It's possible, though not likely, that the Conservatives will win an outright majority in Parliament. But even if they don't, and need to form a coalition government, they will have more of a chance to move an agenda than one would expect. As a political consultant explained to me in Washington a few months ago before heading north to work for the Conservatives, the leaders of the Tories' prospective coalition partner, the separatist Bloc Quebecois, are willing to give Harper several years of rule (but expect lots of Tory reforms to exempt Quebec). The Conservative victory will be a real one, and not just for Harper and his party but for Canada, for North America, and for the world.

Stephen Harper has American political consultants working for him? Eeek! Is Canada becoming "America junior", as warned of by a Liberal canvasser trolling for votes in my building's cafeteria, and darkly predicted by Leiter?

There is reason for concern. The Conservatives seem tax-revoltish, and seem to be interested in weakening the national health system by increasing the role of the private sector, and Harper has been exploitatively support-our-troopish about the 650 Canadians "keeping us safe" in Afghanistan.

Still, I'm not ready to freak out yet, for several reasons.

1. Canada has great election laws: TV stations are compelled to give out a designated number of minutes to political parties large and small (including the Marijuana Party, the Christian Heritage Party, the Marxist Leninist Party, the Absolutely Absurd Party, and the Ontario Party of Canada); campaign cash is limited by how much candidates and arties can spend in an election cycle, the number once again designated by a board of impartial wise old sages; a similar board draws electoral boundaries; paper ballots are individually hand-counted in a single, uniform fashion in every precinct of every election (sigh); and big decisions are made by a just machine programmed by fellas with compassion and vision.

2. As the National Post ruefully acknowledges, Harper's is "not a majority mandate, and Mr. Harper will consequently not be entirely his own master. He will need to build a rolling coalition, finding support from different opposition parties for different pieces of legislation." 135 seats is evidently far short of the 154 needed to pass any laws. The Xinhua Daily points out the ramifications of this in stark terms: "Unlike the Liberals, the Conservatives have no traditional allies in the parliament and will have to seek support from political rivals on an issue-by-issue basis". The NDP is a heavily social-democratic party (run by Jack Layton, the member from our "riding" or district -- yay Jack!), so no way will they participate in the dismantling of the social welfare state, and the Libs are furious at the Conservatives for allying with the NDP to undermine their government after a bare two years. So the only hope for the Conservatives is to ally with the Bloc Quebecois. How much can they get away with there? As I understand it, Quebec's strategy, put bluntly, is to threaten to secede unless the federal govt pays them off. So Quebec gets lots of federal money. This comes from oil-rich Alberta, the Conservative Party's stronghold. Albertans want to hold on to "their" money, and want a weaker federal government. Clearly a delicate balancing act will be required. This might be impossible, confirming Steve Gilliard's prediction:

Brian Mulroney served two terms, but other recent Tory PM's have served months. To wit, Joe Clark served nine months and Kim Campbell six months. When she was turned out, she even lost her riding.

If Harper is interested in pushing a conservative agenda and growing closer to the deeply unpopular Bush, with a minority government, he could count the months as well.

3. There may be a good case to be made that the NDP were the real winners of this election. The Conservatives got a mere 36% of the vote, for a mere 40% of the seats (the House of Commons is elected like the US House of Reps rather than proportionally). Leftish parties by contrast got 51% of the vote and hold 42% of the parliament (the BQ making up the remaining seats). The NDP helped to bring down the Libs by allying with the Conservatives over a no-confidence vote -- my sense is that the NDP are a genuine social democratic party, and were successful in moving the Libs to the left over the last two years of Lib minority government; they've had it with a governing party that's a bit too centrist and pro-business for most Canadians, and are eager to take the reins and fight it out with the Libs for control as soon as the Conservatives collapse (for more detail, read this).The NDP picked up 10 seats this election, taking all their additional five seats in BC from the Conservatives, and their additional five seats in Ontario from the Libs (the free weekly I read indicated a big priority was to force the feds to stop ignoring Toronto; my guess is this made the difference here, though I haven't seen detailed results.

4. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Canada does not seem (impressionistically, anyway) to be succumbing to the same sick cultural pathology as the US, as discovered here, analyzed here, and manifested here. So any attempt to engage in the sort of caudillo-style, elites-my-base politics familiar in the US is liable to be met with a powerful shockwave of revulsion.

U.S. cancer expert: severe illness imposes much greater burden in U.S. than Canada

One of the supposed advantages of privatized healthcare in the U.S. is that, assuming that one isn't unlucky enough to be one of the 45.8  million U.S.-ers without any healthcare whatsover), you can get treated efficiently and well for what ails you.  Like so many false dogmas of free-market capitalism, this claim seems to follow practically a priori from the more basic capitalist dogma that competition results in greater efficiency or better services.  Of course, that's a laugh: witness Enron, Halliburton, Diebold, the corporate media, etc.

(What's that you say?  The inefficiency and inferior products of these sorts of corporate monstrosities is an indication that the markets aren't genuinely free? That's another bit of dogma that's close to question-begging -- for how could it be definitive of free markets (or free market capitalism) that these result in better or more efficiently produced or distributed goods and services than other economic systems?  That's an empirical claim, dude.  Anyway, even if in Free Market Nirvana this would be the case (which I doubt) the sad fact is that in The Real World what happens when the winners of a few local competitions amass a bit more capital (or are a bit more competitively ruthless) than their fellow capitalists, the winners very quickly make it the case (via the usual runs of money-driven influence) that in the future they won't have to actually compete all that much, after all.   BTW, it has always struck me as ironic that free-marketers love to motivate their view by citing, in a vague way, the supposedly insuperable pragmatic difficulties of implementing a more egalitarian economic system (guess they never heard of Cuba).  But heaven forbid they should acknowledge the obvious fact -- upon which most of the tragedies of history and the present can be blamed, by the way -- that those who gain more capital (via competition, theft, or honest toil) nearly always use their capital to game the system so that they won't be likely to lose it in the future.)

Anyway, as yet another case where we can run a modus tollens on the idea that free markets lead to improved goods and services, it turns out that the dogma about U.S. healthcare goods and services is just another lie being sold in the increasingly non-free market of ideas to gullible U.S.-ers.   Reader J. N. sends along this article in which a noted U.S. cancer expert who moved from Edmonton, Alberta to Houston, Texas compares the two systems of healthcare, especially as relevant to detection and treatment of cancer and other life-threatening illnesses:

EDMONTON (CP) - World-renowned cancer specialist Eduardo Bruera is homesick for Canada's health-care system.    

Dr. Bruera left Edmonton's Cross Cancer Institute after 15 years in 1999 to become chairman of the department of palliative care at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. After working in both countries, Bruera, an oncologist, has a message for people who complain about medicare or who want to expand the use of private health insurance in Canada.

"The portability and the universality of health care in Canada are unbelievably good. I think Canadians are not aware of that," said Bruera, who was to compare care in the two countries in a speech Wednesday at the annual conference of the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association.

"Don't look at the United States. The public health-care system makes it possible for patients to access palliative care in Canada earlier and more effectively."

Additionally, Bruera observes that even those who are insured in the U.S. often face an overwhelming financial burden as a result of terminal illness:

Since moving to Texas, Bruera said he can't get over the spectre of crushing debt that even upper-middle-class Americans face when a family member is dying from an advanced illness.

Even premium private health insurance in the United States rarely covers all the costs, which can lead to bereaved survivors facing an almost never ending list of medical bills, he said.

Of every $100 spent by families on medical care at the M.D Anderson Centre, only $32 is paid for by private insurance, he said.

More than 41 million [JW: as above, should be 45.8 million] Americans don't have health insurance, he said.   Of those who are insured, one in three will lose all their financial assets during illness. 

"To me it is an enormous impact on quality of life. The burden of dying in the U.S. of cancer is much heavier than the burden . . . in Canada."

Unfortunately, Canadians don't realize how much better their system is:

Bruera's remarks come as the federal and provincial governments work to come to grips with a Supreme Court of Canada decision in a Quebec case earlier this year which approved some uses of private health insurance.

Since the ruling, provinces such as Alberta have been actively considering expanding the use of private health insurance.

[...]   

Premier Ralph Klein has said allowing private insurance firms to sell policies would benefit Albertans who want to shorten their waiting times for non-emergency medical procedures. 

However, the province has yet to define exactly what it means by "non-emergency." 

Bruera said he is "100 per cent sure" that private insurance would not improve palliative care. 

"In general, services such as palliative care, that is not highly profitable or high tech, are generally not insured very well in the U.S.," he said.

Statistics about U.S. healthcare tell the story.  Gross inefficiency at the national level:

• In 2003, the United States spent 15.3 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on health care. It is projected that the percentage will reach 18.7 percent in 10 years. (3)
• Although nearly 45 million Americans are uninsured, the United States spends more on health care than other industrialized nations, and those countries provide health insurance to all their citizens. (4)
• Health care spending accounted for 10.9 percent of the GDP in Switzerland, 10.7 percent in Germany, 9.7 percent in Canada and 9.5 percent in France, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (5)

Obscene, and obscenely rising, costs of insurance and out-of-pocket medical expenses:

• Health insurance premiums will rise to an average of more than $14,500 for family coverage in 2006. (6)
• According to the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust, premiums for employee-sponsored health insurance in the United States have been rising five times faster on average than workers' earnings since 2000. (2)
• Employee spending for health insurance coverage has increased 126 percent between 2000 and 2004. (7)
• Since 2001, the employees' share of health insurance costs has soared 63 percent for single coverage and 58 percent for family coverage. (7)

Devastating financial consequences of illness:

• Almost 50 percent of the American public says they are very worried about having to pay more for their health care or health insurance, while 42 percent report they are very worried about not being able to afford health care services. (10)
• A recent study by Harvard University researchers found that the average out-of-pocket medical debt for those who filed for bankruptcy is $12,000. The study noted that 68 percent of those who filed for bankruptcy had health insurance. In addition, the study found that 50 percent of all bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses (11). Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem.
• One half of workers in the lowest-compensation jobs and one-half of workers in mid-range-compensation jobs either had problems with medical bills in a 12-month period or were paying off accrued debt. One-quarter of workers in higher-compensated positions also reported problems with medical bills or were paying off accrued debt. (12)

US v Canadian Energy Use

This post is a bit in house. A while back , dinner party conversation turned to whether the US or Canada is more energy efficient. As I was surprised to learn, the US uses less energy both per capita and per dollar of GDP.

Socialized health care bankrupting the Canadian government?

Not:

The Canadian government announced its eighth straight year in the black on Wednesday, reporting a 2004-05 surplus of C$1.6 billion

Amazing what a country can do when the primary chunk of taxpayers' money isn't wasted on war.