You are completely wrong.

I've talked to doctors and patients who have experienced both the Canadian and US systems, and I've read the literature comparing outcomes for different procedures in the two systems. http://www.openmedicine.ca/art... I read Canadian medical studies every week or two.

If I had a heart attack in front of the University of Toronto medical school, I would be confident that my survival and other outcomes would be just as good as they would be in front of the New York University medical center in New York. At one time, the breast cancer outcomes were slightly better in the US than in Canada, because the US was aggressively diagnosing and treating (sometimes overdiagnosing and overtreating) breast cancer, but by now the Canadians have adopted everything useful that the US was doing. OTOH, the Canadian outcomes for childhood leukemia were slightly better. The Canadian outcomes for diabetes were much better, with better control, fewer amputations, etc.

Gordon Guyatt, a professor at McMaster University, basically invented evidence-based medicine, which is the practice of making medical decisions based on the statistically valid scientific evidence, rather than prescribing drugs because the drug companies are giving you a free trip to Hawaii if you meet their quota.

It is true that American doctors are more aggressive about treatment, and will give you a quick appointment if they have slots available and you have good insurance. OTOH American doctors are more likely to treat patients unnecessarily. An American pulmonologist is more likely to see a spot on your x-ray and give you a lung biopsy. Lung biopsies have a fatality rate of about 1/1,000, and most of them are unnecessary. But in Canada, when you have a life-threatening condition and need a CAT scan immediately, they put you on top of the list and give you a CAT scan the same day.

OTOH if you don't have health insurance in the US, your access to health care in many states is nonexistent, and hospitals in Texas for example will kick cancer patients out in the street if they can't pay. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... There were several studies published in American medical journals in which researchers called doctors' offices, described the symptoms of a life-threatening condition, told them that they were on Medicare or Medicaid, and asked for an appointment. Depending on the studies, about half the doctors refused Medicare and three-quarters refused Medicaid.

The evidence is overwhelming that Canadian health care equals the US system in quality and service, and costs about half as much. Of course if you decide things on the basis of ideology http://www.newyorker.com/news/... rather than evidence you may not be convinced.

Then executives would be unmotivated. Instead of making things, they would just sit around the house watching TV and sniffing cocaine.

These theoretical economic arguments are very interesting.

However, they don't predict the actual empirical facts. There are European countries with minimum and average wages much higher than ours, and they don't have those problems. If a business is profitable and efficient, it can afford to pay $15 or even $30 an hour. If it's not profitable and efficient, we don't need them. Let them go out of business and be replaced by a more efficient operator who can make better use of that capital.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/fr...
How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much
Frederick E. Allen
12/21/2011
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.

http://www.remappingdebate.org...
A tale of two systems
By Kevin C. Brown
Remapping Debate
Dec. 21, 2011
American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive....
But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states.

If your business isn't profitable enough that it can deal with an unexpected increase of $20K, then it won't last through all the other unexpected expenses that businesses have to ride through. What if you sell coffee and a fungus drives the price of coffee up? What if your town shuts down for a week because of a tornado? What if your truck gets wrecked?

As an example, take printing. Printing used to be a skilled job. In New York City, we had a High School of Printing, and everyone who graduated could get a well-paid job with lots of opportunities for anyone who was skilled, resourceful and willing to work hard. Then in the 1970s and 1980s there were changes to the economic structure of the industry. Big, high-volume presses on the west coast had huge efficiencies of scale. Small print shops disappeared. Computer printers replaced smaller jobs. The newspaper and magazine business collapsed. Direct mail collapsed. Printers couldn't get work any more. They retired early. New York City closed the High School of Printing. Yes, the jobs were automated away.

New York had lots of industries like that. (And that's the entire New York region, including New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc.)

Medicine is not a great source of employment on the lower level. Medical assistants are low-paid clerks (often minimum wage). Medical billing is low-paid work. Home care attendants, the fastest-growing segment, is a minimum wage job.

Medical secretaries are disappearing. Legal secretaries are disappearing. Those used to be well-paid skilled jobs.

There are structural changes in the economy since the 1980s. A big part of that is international competition. American workers can't compete with Chinese workers making $20 a day. US unemployment is higher, it's harder to get work, and the work pays less. Middle-class Americans are making about as much now as they were making in 1980. All of the increases in productivity and wealth have gone to the upper-income levels. Vocational school used to guarantee you a good job. It doesn't any more.

Cherry-picking quotations over the last 100 years of labor relations by black conservative Thomas Sowell in the New York Post is not "well documented".

One of the main reasons for the black middle class is union wages. Unions reflect American society, and there are a few racist, exclusionary unions, but the big unions, like the UAW, SEIU, teachers' unions, garment workers, etc., were some of the institutions with the greatest racial equality in America. They argued that they didn't want their white workers to compete with low-paid black workers; they wanted to bring low-paid black workers into the unions and bring their wages up.

You can walk into the housing projects in New York City built by unions and see people of all races living side by side.

They wouldn't, but a well-managed business should be profitable enough to pay its workers $15/h. If American businesses can't afford to pay their workers at least $15/h, then the American economic system is a failure. If we had a free international market in employment, workers would be leaving for higher-wage European countries.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/fr...
Frederick E. Allen
12/21/2011
How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much

In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.

How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.”

There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”

Mund points out that this goes against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany.
At Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, the nonunionized new employees get $14.50 an hour, which rises to $19.50 after three years.

http://www.remappingdebate.org...
A tale of two systems
By Kevin C. Brown
Remapping Debate
Dec. 21, 2011

American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive....

But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states. ... the UAW has made significant concessions on wages, especially through the creation of a permanent “Tier 2” level for all new employees. Whereas incumbent “Tier 1” workers earn about $28 an hour, all new UAW hires at the GM, Ford, and Chrysler earn around $15 per hour.

That's how corporate executives became rich.

I think the typical Slashdot reader can discuss politics better than the typical pundit I see on TV news. I can usually find comments that are more insightful and focused on the issues than I get from, say, Hillary Clinton. Or GWB.

As Socrates said, the artisans and tradesmen were the only ones who actually knew anything.

Well I find it interesting that for health care I had to pay private insurance companies $6,000 a year in premiums, while people getting government insurance in Canada pay an average of about half as much in taxes (scaled to their income), for the same quality and the same service.

I compared the private health insurance in the free market to get the best deal, and guess what? They're all the same. I have no choice. The Canadians have more of a choice than I do.

There are some things that the government can provide far more efficiently than the free market, if the free market can provide it at all. Health care is one of them. Education is another. Transportation is another. Low-income housing is another. Even Social Security is more secure than private retirement pensions.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/...
The Plot Against Trains
By Adam Gopnik
May 15, 2015

They would if they realized how much pornography there is in the great books of the Western world.

I knew this would happen. Now that all the great books of the Western world are free on the Internet, nobody reads them.

I was right. You were wrong.

How do you answer Krugman's question: "Why didn't you see the obvious back then?"

That's Judith Miller's version. This is one of those situations where credibility and accuracy counts, and don't trust her to get the story straight. She didn't before.

I read Miller's stories in the NYT during the debate over WMDs. She gave one source who verified the WMDs, but she didn't speak to him -- her handlers pointed to a guy some distance away, and told her what he said, but they wouldn't let her talk to him. She was quoting a claim second-hand.

Yes, they fed her cherry-picked information. The information from the UN inspection team, whose members I heard interviewed on NPR, was that the US gave them the location of WMD facilities, they conducted surprise inspections, and the WMDs weren't there. The Pentagon didn't tell Miller about that.

It's not the job of a reporter to uncritically repeat the claims of high-placed sources. The job of a reporter is to check their claims with people who disagree, and get both sides. I learned that in Freshman English.

Bottom line: I knew that there were no WMDs. Krugman knew. Lots of people knew. You didn't need any fancy intelligence sources to figure that out. All you had to do was listen to both sides and see whose arguments held up. Reporters were talking to independent military experts, and the experts overwhelmingly told them that the claims weren't true. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had military experts who said they weren't true. The aluminum tubes story was provably false. The yellowcake story was provably false. How many times do you have to see their stories proven false before you realize that they're not reliable?

Here's how Paul Krugman described it (more convincingly, to me). GWB wasn't mislead by the CIA. Cheney had convinced him to drive Saddam Hussein out of office before he heard any of the CIA assessments.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...
Blinkers and Lies
Paul Krugman
May 16, 2015

"The invasion wasn’t a mistake, it was a crime. We were lied into war."

(First, war in Iraq was not a good faith mistake. Bush and Cheney decided to use 9/11 as an excuse to go after a secular regime that had nothing to do with 9/11. They deliberately mislead the public, making a fake case about WMD.

Second, it was obvious at the time that the case for war was fake, and that post-war Iraq would be a failure.

The question for war supporters is, "Why didn't you see the obvious back then?"

Third, people who knew it was fake supported the war to establish their centrist credentials.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04...
Disabilities Act Prompts Flood of Suits Some Cite as Unfair
By MOSI SECRET
New York Times
APRIL 16, 2012

The lawyers are generally not acting on existing complaints from people with disabilities. Instead, they identify local businesses, like bagel shops and delis, that are not in compliance with the law, and then aggressively recruit plaintiffs from advocacy groups for people with disabilities.

The plaintiffs typically collect $500 for each suit, and each plaintiff can be used several times over. The lawyers, meanwhile, make several thousands of dollars, because the civil rights law entitles them to legal fees from the noncompliant businesses. ...

All of those suits were filed by Ben-Zion Bradley Weitz, a lawyer based in Florida, who has a regular group of people with disabilities from whom he selects plaintiffs. One of them, Todd Kreisler, a man in a wheelchair who lives on the East Side of Manhattan, sued 19 businesses over 16 months — a Chinese restaurant, a liquor store and a sandwich shop among them. ...

Mr. Weitz is leading the charge into New York’s courtrooms. Since October 2009, he has sued almost 200 businesses in the state, mostly in Federal District Court in Manhattan. He has eight years of experience filing these suits in Florida, where his practice does not seem to be lagging. Two weeks ago, he brought claims against four Tampa businesses — a strip mall, a convenience store, a bar and a print shop.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03...
Judge Rebukes 2 Lawyers Profiting From U.S. Disability Law
By MOSI SECRET
MARCH 29, 2013

Now a Brooklyn federal court judge has ruled squarely against two lawyers who bring most of such lawsuits in New York, writing in a cutting opinion on Thursday that their tactics lacked expertise, possibly violated the rules of professional conduct and were “disingenuous at best.” The judge, Sterling Johnson Jr., denied them legal fees and took the rare step of ordering them to stop filing such cases. ...

Though such arrangements have typically been shielded by confidentiality agreements, Judge Johnson revealed how much money the lawyers — Adam Shore and B. Bradley Weitz — claimed in fees, typically $425 per hour for a total of $15,000 per case even though the cases were so similar that he described them as boilerplate. The two lawyers had filed as many as 10 cases in a single day.