Yeah, they say that in the summary but if you read the report (and I don't recommend it) they basically end up undoing all that somewhere in the last third of the report where they talk about intra-US rankings. For a quick summary you can look at box 1-2 on pages 40-41; there's more detail later in the paper if you're so inclined.

As for the outcomes over 75 thing, I can't find where I read it in the paper right now and I don't have time to track it down. We can agree to disagree on that one or if you want to point out in the paper where I'm wrong, I'll happily go re-read it.

In any case, it doesn't affect my main complaint: things are better, they're getting better overall, we're not getting better as fast as everyone else and if they really wanted to improve these metrics they'd go after the things that contribute the most: transportation and violence. Instead of following the data they'd rather grind their ideological axes.

Someone linked to the CRS article further up the page. Differences in counting infant mortality statistics are not significant. "congenital malformations, disorders related to low birthweight and short gestational age, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)" are the top three causes of infant death in the US.

Racial factors, by which I suppose they really mean socio-economic factors, and low birth weight or pre-term babies are supposed to be the cause of the difference.

Look for:

The U.S. Infant Mortality Rate: International Comparisons, Underlying Factors, and Federal Programs
Elayne J. Heisler
Analyst in Health Services April 4, 2012

"Everyplace with thigh gun controls has less murders."

I think you mean to compare the US to other countries. When you look within the US, more gun control has been associated with more violent crime, not less.

No, it's exactly wrong. The 'researchers' in this 'report' have already identified the causes in exhausting detail and even helpfully summed it up for you just above their bullshit conjecture: transportation (read driving) fatalities and violence make up the majority of the difference in people under 50. Accidental poisonings and infant mortality also seem to play a significant role but you have to read further in to get to that.

But the authors of the paper didn't like those conclusions because it didn't neatly fit their ideological preconceptions. So instead we get to read their pet social theories which they can then try to back fit the data to support. Sloppy, shoddy, and definitely not science.

Summary of Krugman's post: based on a graph I cherry picked from the internets budget deficits won't spiral out of control if our imaginary spending cuts and tax revenue fantasies come true. As a result we'll only have staggering levels of slowly increasing debt instead of staggering levels of radically increasing debt. Oh, and there might be some problem associated with old people and debt but that's not important.

So keep spending America! Nothing to see here!

The 'report' lays it out clearly: transportation and violence. If you want to improve the numbers for people under 50 start there. It's telling that after reaching that conclusion the authors immediately ignore it in favor of their own pet theories.

Thanks for the CRS report; I'd been looking for that this morning and couldn't remember enough to find it!

Well perhaps it's because you're conflating two issues:

1) Health care quality (including access to it) in the US, and
2) Whether or not the PPACA will do anything to improve it.

We can have a long fruitless debate over #1 but the majority of Americans agree that, however good or bad our health care system may be, the PPACA (a.k.a. Obamacare) isn't going to make it better. It is, in fact, going to make it worse, a lot worse, for very many people.

Obamacare is going to raise the cost of health care and reduce access for nearly everyone, even the people it was supposed to help (actually it already is having this effect). If we truly wanted better health outcomes and believed insurance was the way to accomplish that goal, it would have been cheaper, simpler, and better for nearly everyone involved for the federal government to simply hand uninsured people a big wad of cash and tell them to go buy insurance. But improving health care outcomes was never the objective of the PPACA: consolidating power in Washington, D.C. was the objective and in that they are having some modest success.

This report is crap. For those of you who haven't read it, let me save you some time and summarize it for you:

"Health outcomes in the US are getting better and Americans are living longer. However, we're not getting healthier or living longer-er than other similar developed countries. Therefore: DOOM!

Although our own data, in fact even our own summary, indicates that for people under 50 the majority of this disparity can be explained by transportation related deaths and violence, we prefer to emote and thus offer the following list of things we don't like as the actual reasons for not getting better fast enough:

- fat people
- guns
- lack universal public health care, and
- not enough condoms

Since they raise uncomfortable questions about the ideological conclusions which we've emoted, we've left unexplored and thus unexplained such interesting questions as:
- Why do these outcomes suddenly reverse after age 75?
- Why do we assert that socio-economics do not have an impact on this trend then go on to demonstrate vast disparities within US regions that show significant differences in socio-economic status?
- When you can walk into any corner convenience store anywhere in the US and buy a condom for about the same cost as a bottle of soda, why are we fixated on a lack of access to birth control?

In summary: DOOM. Also, be more like Europe (we love you! call us!). Finally, spend a LOT more money on public health care (full disclosure: that means us).

Link to the full 424 page paper is here.

Link to the (probably paywalled) WSJ article is here although the Yahoo version in the summary above appears to be exactly the same.

I can remember back in '93 going on one of my co-op assignments in college and discovering the company I worked for had not one but TWO brand spanking new SGI boxes sitting in cubicles and COMPLETELY UNUSED! I have no idea why they bought them or what they intended to do with them but you can bet _I_ found a use for them!

$650 PC (all new including 24" monitor; hooray for Black Friday), 5 years ago, upgraded RAM once and replaced the video card twice (once due to h/w failure, once for performance). Still running modern PC games, almost always on high or highest settings. Still going strong.

That said, I'm really interested in the Steambox. Next free weekend I get I think I may hack together an Ubuntu box and give the beta a try.

Here's a scenario for you which also happens to be a true story.

When I was a teenager we lived out in the country; 10-15 minutes from the nearest (very) small town. One summer my father had to take a job in a city about 3 hours away. Since it made no sense to spend 6 hours per day commuting he stayed in the city during the week and only came home on the weekends. This left me, as the oldest male child, to be the "man" of the house.

Now just down the road from us lived a young married couple. About once or twice a month the husband would get rip-roaring drunk and on most of those occasions he would then proceed to viciously beat his wife. For reasons that were never quite clear to me, she always decided to seek sanctuary at our house. Inevitably when this happened the husband would stumble up to our house in a frothing rage demanding his wife's return. And so it would fall to me, a short, scrawny, nerdy, 80 lbs soaking wet, 14 year old to deal with a raging drunk 6+ ft thug out to continue beating his wife and not particularly interested in who else might be in his way.

I don't think I had an easy night's sleep that entire summer but I was thankful that I had the option to defend my family and this tragically abused young woman with lethal force if it became necessary. Fortunately it never came to that. Fortunately he never came on to our property with a weapon that I could see. But he knew I had one and he believed I would use it and that was all that was necessary to send him back to his house to sleep off his drunk until the next time.

You want to talk about love? I love my family and I didn't want to see them harmed by this criminal. Even though I didn't particularly like her, I was also showing love for this abused girl; she had a place of sanctuary.

The alternative which extreme gun-control advocates would foist upon everyone in the country was to remain defenseless against this individual. We were, at best, 15 minutes from a law enforcement officer arriving and that would have only been if they happened to be in town and waiting by the phone for our call. In reality it likely would have taken twice that long for the police to arrive. She could have pressed charges against her husband and have him locked up, but she wouldn't and didn't. If my father tried to have him locked up for trespassing, she would go bail him out.

The sad thing is you're correct: normal people shouldn't have to worry about this sort of thing. Unfortunately, it is all too often the case that the real world fails to match up with our ideals.

This. I wish we had it built into the Constitution that Congress was banned from passing (or even debating) any legislation for 60 days after any national tragedy.

I'm a fan of the XDm line but I don't own one because I also wanted a manual safety/decocker similar to the H&K USPs or the Beretta 92's.