What do those statistics have to do with health care? Infant mortality is calculated so much differently in each country, it's difficult to make any comparison at all, and life span is about life style, not quality of health care systems. Try checking, for instance, cancer survival rates, medical treatment for heart attack victims and survivability, trauma survival after emergency care, and mobility restoration after stroke. That's how you measure the quality of health care, not by when people die, by how the treatment they get works after they require it.

There are certainly cost and access problems with health care in the United States, but Obamacare really doesn't do anything to fix those problems, and it exacerbates many of them. This is just one example of that.

Maybe he should have had all the meetings in the open, and broadcast on CSPAN, like he promised to do during the campaign, instead of negotiating the entire thing behind closed doors with the corporate executives and buying votes with pork and bribes.

OK. So let's just dismember the standing army, and see if anything happens.

I'm game for the experiment.

Are you?

Every company you interact with is recording and selling everything that can get their hands on.

Do you remember when companies made their profits by selling you products that you wanted, instead of just using their retail operations as a front end to upskirt your personal data and sell that to...whomever?

Our economy has become the equivalent of a luxury hotel that makes its real profits by selling copies of your credit card swipes to hackers.

Used to be, when a company sold products, their customers were the people who bought those products. Today, when a company sells products, their real customers are oily characters standing out back, waiting to buy copies of your credit cards. The products they sell, whether stuff on Amazon or Android games, or bandwidth are just a front for their actual, much sleazier, business.

Funny, I've never lived in a rural area that had apartments available for rent.

And what would you propose that the country do about all the resources produced in rural areas when the infrastructure to produce them domestically does not exist, as would be the case in your example? While many (perhaps most) subsidies are abusive, the creation of a national road system, electrical grid, and telecommunications grid have made certain things possible that otherwise would not have been.

Those damn urbanites should be self-reliant with their food, electricity generation, and production of raw materials in that case. The rural areas of the country shouldn't have to subsidize urbanites with non-monetary services. </sarcasm>

That's not true. Unprepared food is taxed in Idaho. I'm not aware of other states doing so, but I know that one for sure.

In addition, at least in the Washington example the poor pay no sales tax on food, which makes up a great deal of most poor families' monthly budgets.

In that case, when one owns another, can they be charged with slavery? It might go a long way toward allowing corps to sidestep responsibility through subsidiaries and shell companies.

many poor people pay for telecommunications services out of their own pockets.

That's becoming increasingly untrue. Anyone on food stamps now qualifies for subsidized or free telephone services under Federal programs.

Costs three times as much as the originally budgeted cost, is delivered five times past the deadline and doesn't do a tenth of what was promised.

I find it both very amusing and very aggravating that government at all levels has been wasting so much of the public's time and money on things like this, considering how INEFFECTIVE they have proven to be.

In most cities where they have been tried, traffic cameras have increased traffic accidents. There are some lawsuits going on in my area, which will probably result in them getting banned statewide. Not just because they are ineffective, but because enforcing anything via camera violates long-standing state law. (I know that sounds weird but it's true. The officer who catches you violating the law has to be the one issuing the citation. In the case of traffic cameras, the one doing the "catching" is an employee of the company that owns and operates the cameras. And the public won't tolerate them hiring more officers to do it. PLUS the issue that it is the car being "caught", not the driver.)

In London, with over 1,000,000 surveillance cameras in the city, after years of this it has been found that on average, the cameras have "helped" solve 1 crime per 1000 cameras. Not annually, total. And not serious crimes, just crimes. Like stealing candy bars, for example.

I could go on. They continue to waste their time, still thinking these things will work, in the face of years of solid evidence that they won't. It's just hilarious that they would spend $150,000 + each on traffic cameras, or probably upward of $2000 apiece on iris scanners, when both can be utterly defeated with a $2 can of spray paint or $0.10 worth of vaseline,

If someone ever tells me that Climate Change exists with their Android device in hand, now I can call them a hypocrite.

And if someone tells you that they don't like Nazis, while driving their Ford, you can call them a hypocrite, too.

Not to mention the priest who tells you to keep it in your pants.