It's telling that Tesla expressed gratitude and paid the loans back early. Where the banks expressed any opinion at all it was closer to anger that we even questioned their right to a bailout or that we had any expectations whatsoever in return. Then to demonstrate their gratitude to the American people, they jacked up credit card rates, continued to not offer affordable loans, and stepped up theuir often illegal foreclosure preceedings (In other words, did everything that the bailouts were supposed to help avoid), then gave the money to the same executives who created the problem as a bonus for their "good" work.

Careful! If you keep spouting crap like that, you'll get buried in VC offers.

That's giving Alfred Nobel too much credit. He owned the world renowned arms manufacturer Bofors and actually changed the company more towards arms manufacture than before. It wasn't until a French paper erroneously printed his obituary where he as lambasted as a "merchant of death", that he became concerned with his legacy. (If I remember correctly his peace prize was added at a later date to his will, there was also a woman involved, isn't there always?).

So no, he was about as far from a long haired hippie as can be. He didn't mind if people killed each other as long as they bought their guns and explosives from him. While he didn't originally develop dynamite for the military market, when he realised that's where big money could be made he didn't waste any time working that market.

If prevention is cheaper, then why don't catestrophic coverage policies offer free checkups for the same price? Wouldn't it be cheaper?

So where are those charities you imagine? Plenty of people in the U.S. can't afford heqlthcare and I don't see anyone stepping up.

Meanwhile, since the U.S. spends double the money per capita as any country with socialized medicine for an inferior outcome, I agree, lets choose an efficient socialized medicine and cut our costs in half.

Actually, if a lawyer letter is incorrect on it's face or with a cursory look at the evidence, it should be grounds for sanctioning. They are supposed to keep crap like that out of the court system. And if they argue they never actually intended to take it to court, they admit to serious ethics violations. Lawyers also aren't supposed to use intimidation to win when they know they couldn't win in court.

Sure, as long as they can use something else that costs about the same, double the retail price and blame the FDA.

Few question that sanitation is probably the number one reason for the increased average lifespan in the developed world. However, there i a difference between simple sanitation (don't let the kids crawl in a river of human excrement) and obsessively blasting every bacterium with gallopns of triclosan.

All two of them.

What GP described was the way of things for most of human history including a significant part of the 20th century.

Unless you're worried about your drains getting an infection, I would say that so long as the germs are no longer on your hands, it hardly matters if they're dead or just down the drain.

That doesn't address the issue of breeding superbugs that cross over to human infections.

That too depends on the disease.

In most cases, I would say the vaccine is better than the disease. I question that for chicken pox on the grounds that vaccination as a child rather than contracting the disease leaves you more vulnerable as an adult.

In the case of Whooping cough, it's really only a serious danger to young children who seem to be adequately protected by the current cvaccine, so I'm not so sure a followup booster of any kind is necessary.

If infants are getting it and by school age they are vulnerable again, we're talking about annual rather than every decade.

Some of that is exactly because we have outrageously expensive healthcare and no real safety net. If something does go wrong, the only way to afford the care needed in the aftermath is a huge award or settlement.