But with all due respect, ALL medical innovation in the last several decades has occurred in the US, where people and companies are free to profit from the fruits of their labor. Why would anyone put in the time, energy, and enormous sums of money involved in developing a new drug or therapy if they know going in that they're going to be forced at the point of a gun to provide that treatment to patients for less than it cost to develop them? The answer is that they wouldn't and they won't. And it isn't necessary to speculate or predict, because there are plenty of exemplars outside the US. There was a lot made of the disparity in for example breast cancer survival rates between the US and Great Britain. It's measurably, though not hugely, higher in the US, and much of that is because the British system is just slower. People get the same therapies in both places, and in some cases it is too late, and in GB that just happens a bit more frequently. What never really came up in that debate, however, is that those therapies would not be available in either place if the US didn't have the kind of system that fostered and protected innovation. Put another way, if this plan had been enacted 20 years ago, things like breast cancer and AIDS would still be death sentences today. And not just in the US, but everywhere that the current state of the art is employed. And it's not like we can easily maintain the status quo either. A certain amount of innovation is necessary just to keep from sliding backwards. Just as a couple of examples, new vaccines need to be developed constantly to keep up with constantly mutating strains of viruses that are currently under control. The same goes for bacteria and antibiotics, as over time bacterial strains become resistant to existing antibiotics. The new drugs in these classes that come out every few years aren't improving health, they're necessary just to stay where we are. This probably won't stand, because too much of it is unconstitutional. You're welcome to your own system of government in Belgium or anywhere else, but in the US we have decided as a people that the federal government's power is limited, and among other things they can't make you buy health insurance, they can't dictate to insurance companies what and who they must cover, and they certainly can't make insurance absorb a loss incurred by someone who hasn't bought the insurance. That last one is not governed only by the constitution, but also the dictionary, as it conflicts with the definition of what insurance is.

...like oil?

It's worse than that actually. From when a postcard leaves your mailbox until it arrives at the mailbox of the recipient, only the postal employees who handle it have legal access. If the recipient throws it away without destroying it, then it becomes publicly accessible. But mail in transit, even postcards, are protected by law from being accessed by any but specific people. Email on the other hand is placed on a wide open, publicly accessible, shared channel. Most people don't have the interest or wherewithal to sniff every packet that crosses the internet. But all people have the legal right to do so. IE if you are able to see it, then you are allowed to see it. Email then is like a postcard would be if you relied for delivery on pinning it to a public bulletin board somewhere that the recipient knew to go pick it up.

Did you look at some of the stuff they objected to? That they tagged as "conservative"? The Times objects to the teaching, for example, that we are a constitutional republic rather than a democracy - which is an objectively true fact. They object to teaching that the free enterprise economic system works best in the absence of limited government intervention - which is another objectively true fact. Someone else here objected to the rejection of a liberal's amendment trying to explain that the founders favored a separation of church and state, when it is objectively false that they did. Imagine if those bad bad conservatives tried to teach the objective fact that bans on prayer in schools (public or otherwise) are in direct violation of the constitution.

That was my original reaction. Based on the CNN Money article especially, they seem to be making the assumption that, in battery mode, the car would use not only no fuel, but no energy.

But they I saw the claim that the charge to take the car 40 miles would cost $0.40. That's a penny a mile, and at current gasoline prices of about $2.50 a gallon, translates neatly into about 250 MPGeq (miles per gallon-equivalent, on a cost basis).

I agree that MPGs aren't the best measure, because it makes comparison between different vehicle types more complicated. $/M is not workable because the cost of different energy sources is not constant, and would just add another dimension to the already highly variable efficiency rating.

They will have to come up with something better, MPG is just not going to be useful as EVs begin to penetrate the market. The best would be some form of distance per unit of energy, or energy required to travel a certain unit of distance. There would have to be some way to correct for any losses. One virtue of MPG is that this is built in. Take the miles you drive and divide by the number of gallons of gas you buy, and the resulting number automatically takes into account any losses due to heat, operating conditions, evaporation, or whatever. I is straightforward to convert a gallon of gas to the HP or KWh it contains (although I don't have the coefficient at hand, I'm sure it's easily found). For electric drive, it would be easy for the control system to determine how much power it's drawing from the battery, but there needs to be a way to correct for the fact that you will necessarily be putting more energy in than you will ultimately get out, either using some estimate of the battery's efficiency (probably not a good idea, since that will change over time), or maybe circuitry on the charger that will measure the total energy put into the battery (which adds complexity).

Right now, though, they needed some quick and dirty way to come up with some comparison between the Volt and its competitors, all of which measure their efficiency in MPGs. If they really can get 40 miles out of $0.40 worth of electricity, then at today's gas prices, yes, the 230MPG claim is credible. However I don't know how credible that particular claim might be.